Summary
Yolanda's grandmother brought her a bright new drum from
a trip to New York City. Yolanda played her drum too loudly and
was scolded to play responsibly like an adult by her mother. Her
grandmother said that if Yolanda were a good girl, she would eventually get
to take a trip to the United States and see FAO Schwarz and snow.
She agreed to play in a well-behaved way in the yard rather than
inside the house. For weeks she drummed all day long, until she lost
one of the drumsticks. Then Yolanda's aunt sat on the second drumstick,
leaving her a drum but no sticks to drum with. She tried to use
pencils or wooden spoons, but they did not sound as good.
Yolanda liked to sneak into the coal shed, which their
maid, Pila, had claimed was haunted by spirits, ghosts and devils.
Pila had stolen from the family, and had been dismissed by the time
Yolanda got her drum. Yolanda was still scared of the coal shed,
and the stories she had told about how she lost one of her eyes.
Yolanda once went looking for devils in the shed, but only found
a bunch of newborn kittens. She was not sure what to do with kittens,
and hoped to ask a grownup for advice. Then she noticed a strange
man crossing the yard with a dog and a gun. Yolanda asked him for
advice, and the man insisted that a kitten must be old enough to
survive without its mother before it could be a good pet. He explained
that to take the kitten earlier would be a violation of its right
to life, because the kitten would die without its mother. Yolanda
decided she would name her favorite kitten Schwarz. When the man
with the dog began shooting his gun, the mother cat ran away. Yolanda
decided not to take his advice, since he was a hypocrite killing
birds who surely had babies too.
Yolanda took Schwarz away from the shed, and as she spotted the
mother cat, she remembered that Pila had lost an eye while being attacked
by a cat. Yolanda put the kitten into the drum and replaced the
lid, drumming to drown out the kitten's cries to its mother. She ran
past the cat and took the kitten inside. She got annoyed with the kitten's
plaintive meows and threw it outside again, injuring its leg. The
kitten had trouble finding its way back to the shed, and the mother
cat had disappeared. Later, the kitten also disappeared. Yolanda
had nightmares and visions of the mother cat that haunted her at
night. Yolanda briefly recounts the rest of her life, "collapsing all
time now so that it fits in what's left in the hollow of my story." She
now writes about her ghost stories and bad dreams, still haunted
by the "violation that lies at the center of my art."
Analysis
The kitten symbolizes the daughters of the Garcia family,
who were taken from their motherland while they were too young to
survive without it. Just as Schwarz was physically wounded during
the abrupt transition, they were emotionally and psychologically injured
during the process of having to adapt to a new cultural environment.
Schwarz's slow and unsuccessful progress back toward the place she
had been prematurely taken from mirrors Yolanda's journey, described
in the first chapter, back to her homeland. Yolanda's guilt that
she had violated the kitten's right to grow normally in the way
it ought to foreshadows the problems she and her sisters will face
as they grow up in a new country, carrying along the baggage of
the past.
The structure and timeline of the novel is reflected in
the last line of this chapter, when Yolanda explains that time has
been collapsed into the story. Time has been folded up, just as
the kitten was stuffed into the hollow of the drum. Yolanda was
first troubled by the idea of this violation in the Dominican Republic
with the kitten, but the haunting continues throughout her life.
This psychological distress unfolds into further traumas, which
can be traced back to her being uprooted from the Dominican Republic,
her culture, and her extended family at a very young age.
The mother cat that continually appears in her dreams
represents her home, the Dominican Republic, which reproaches her
for leaving but cannot be found again. The kitten is lost and cannot
return to the coal shed, just as Yolanda will feel lost as an adult,
and will be unable to find her roots when she returns home in the
first chapter. The conclusion of the novel circles back to the beginning,
showing the impossibility of regaining a place within Dominican
culture. Similarly, the beginning of Yolanda's life circles forward
toward the future, when the smaller troubles suffered as a young
child will be compounded and supplanted by the larger problems of
immigration and cultural transformation. Yolanda's sense of cultural
violation, stemming from her experience as a child immigrant, becomes
the focus of her creative endeavors and her mature understanding
of her cultural and personal identity. Her writing and poetry will
center on the haunting that begins with Schwarz and continues throughout her
adult life as she struggles to incorporate the past into her life. The
image of the drum represents this effort because Yolanda's story
has a hollow space where she keeps the painful memories, and it
is this emptiness that provides a resonance for her literary achievements.
