Maldonado-Lopez 1

Skye Maldonado-Lopez

Professor Tretcher

English 375

15 May 2018

Grammar Final: Examining Dreaming in Cuba excerpt

I’ve started dreaming in Spanish, which has never happened before. I wake up feeling
different,like something inside me is changing, something chemical and irreversible. There’s a
magic hereworking its way through my veins.There’s something about vegetation, too, that I
respond to instinctively—(the stunning bougainvillea, the flamboyants and jacarandas, the
orchids)growing from the trunks of the mysterious ceiba trees.And I love Havana, its noise and
decay and painted ladyness. I could happily sit on one of those wrought-iron balconies for days,
or keep my grandmother company on her porch, with its ringside view of the sea.

COLOR KEY: Green= main/ independent; yellow= subordinate/adjective clause; pink=

participle—adverbial; light blue= noun clause; grey= adverb clause; maroon =absolute; dark
blue= appositive

As readers, we rely on an author’s grammar to help paint a piece of a picture that content

cannot do alone. Grammar is a guide as to how an author wants their audience to read their work.

Maybe an author wants their audience to feel a sense of urgency, or a sense of time lagging or

even make the pace of their words match the words’ content; the author will use their grammar

to influence their readers and their interpretations.

I chose to analyze an excerpt from Cristina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuba. Dreaming

in Cuba follows a single family over three generations and their inabilities to see eye to eye

when it comes to political ideals. The root of their differing political stances? The Cuban

Revolution. The novel takes focus on the women of the del Pino family: Celia (mother), Lourdes

(daughter), and Pilar (granddaughter). Celia loves Cuba and embraces all that comes with it

(including its new leadership), Lourdes fled Cuba as a young adult in order to escape Cuba’s new

leadership, and Pilar ,who left Cuba with her mother when she was only two, sees Cuba as her
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home and carries a very similar outlook of Cuba as her grandmother. The passage I chose is

actually Pilar’s narration after she has finally returned to her home country of Cuba like she has

yearned to since she was a child.

With this scene Garcia seems to be making an almost dream-like sequence. For so long

Pilar wanted to experience Cuba as an adult and no longer have to use memory as her sole tie to

Cuba. Pilar describes all that enchants her about Cuba, jumping from sight to sight. To create this

staggered list of sights as a dream-like sequence, Garcia stretches main and independent clauses

apart by interjecting subordinate/adjective clauses, noun clauses, appositives, and absolutes. By

interrupting main/independent clauses Garcia is pulling away from the ordinary coherent and

linear form of writing to give a dream-essence to Pilar’s speech. Dreams are often broken up (as

Garcia does to her main/independent clauses) with maybe a random detail here or there (Garcia

inserts adverb and adjective clauses to further describe the main/independent clauses).

The sentence “ I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is changing,

something chemical and irreversible,” is a prime example of how Garcia takes a

main/independent, adds detail, then more detail on top of detail: “I wake up feeling different”

acts as the main clause then “like something inside me is changing” is an adverb clause that

describes the “feeling” Pilar is having, then “something chemical and irreversible” is an absolute

that modifies and further explains “changing.” Garcia creates a rush of detail, in turn creating a

sporadic tempo that Pilar feels which then is passed onto the reader and how they feel within and

interpret the scene.

An author’s choice of grammar use adds another layer to their work. Their word content

acts as the literature’s base then the writer’s grammar utilization enhances the imagery and

creates a rhythm in which an author wants their audience to read their work.
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Work Cited

Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuba. Ballantine Books, 1992.