Buttons. Lost buttons. Found buttons. Misplaced buttons. Missing buttons. Random buttons. Extra buttons. Borrowed buttons. Stolen buttons. Gifted buttons. Favourite buttons. When you collect all these buttons and store them in a jar, you come to realise that each and every button is, in fact, a piece of that incomplete jigsaw puzzle called life. Unfinished because each time you think you’re about to solve the puzzle, a piece goes missing. Just like that. And then later, you find that piece under the bed, on the dinner table, tucked inside a pen-holder, next to the half-used bottle of shampoo on the bathroom rack, beside the TV remote atop the magazine, and so on, and so forth. The thing is, when you eventually find the final piece, you’ve already moved on from that puzzle, left unattended, forgotten, removed altogether. So, what do you do with this orphaned piece you’re united with long after the puzzle has been wrapped up and put back into the box with one less piece? You store it in a separate jar. With time, this jar fills up with similar abandoned pieces – like a jar of discarded buttons.
Discarded yet preserved.
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It’s been 40 years since the publication of The House on Mango Street (1984) by Sandra Cisneros. The writing is experimental, fresh, contemporary, even genre-defying. A prominent voice in Chicano (Mexican-American) literature, Cisneros expresses her struggle while juggling two cultures and identities, both geographically and spiritually. The sense of being constantly on the move, migrating from Mexico to the United States, makes her redefine the notion of belongingness and permanence. Where is home, after all?
The introduction to the novel reads like a short story. She talks about her dreams, bittersweet childhood memories, regrets and heartaches, “major” life decisions by way of being fearless and living alone, stretches of solitude and silence, “writerly” ways of looking at and living life, and much more. Cisneros opens that jar of buttons and weaves a story around each and every one – some real, some imaginary, but mostly real.
Her stories are vignettes, not necessarily interlinked or disparate either. For instance, she’ll pick up one button one day and sit you down to tell you about the time her mother came down from Chicago to visit her apartment. Esperanza, our protagonist, yearns for her mother to see how her daughter lives in an apartment which has a spiral staircase, big windows, and a kitchen with a heater. The kitchen is where she mostly wrote. Cisneros, not Esperanza. This is what makes her writing style so unique. You wouldn’t realise when Cisneros departs and Esperanza takes over or vice versa. The buttons plop and plunge and jump and dance to the rhythm of the writer’s movement of the pen. And that too, in perfect harmony.
Cisneros used to write fiction for comfort during her days at the Iowa Poetry Workshop. As a matter of confession, she tells her readers, she would write fiction on the side for pleasure. And when she did write poems as part of the workshop, it wouldn’t really be for earning credit points.
When you flip through the pages of The House on Mango Street, you’ll realise how futile it is to label or categorise her writing. That in itself is a revolutionary act, to defy labels, categories, and boxes. This could be a novel or not; are these snippets from life, maybe? What if these are actually poems disguised as prose?For me, it’s a puzzle. A puzzle that cannot be completed. Why? Because the author has cleverly and secretly hidden the pieces in a jar of buttons. It’s as if she is deliberately making a case for unrequited love, unquenched thirst, unfulfilled desire. You know how a chef never reveals the complete recipe of their signature dish? There will invariably be one ingredient that’s left out. How else would it be a signature dish? And then one day, you stumble upon what you’d been desperately seeking for so long. But the discovery almost seems like a cruel joke. You might think, what’s the point of finding it now when you no longer need it? Is the accidental discovery worthwhile?
It sure is.
Ipsh*ta Mitra is a researcher scholar in the discipline of Gender and Development Studies, and a freelance writer based in Delhi-NCR. She tweets @ipsh*ta77.
