In "Homecoming" Julia Alvarez adopts a tone that is simultaneously serious and ironic, angry and loving.* She orients her tone in two directions: with respect to the reader and with respect to the personages she belittles or magnifies, scolds or caresses. The subtly potent voice of the narrator is Alvarez's, and the tensions that the poem exudes are a result of her being both a female and an immigrant.
"Homecoming" is the only poem in the collection that directly addresses her experiences in the Dominican Republic. The opening is laden with alliteration and consonance:
When my cousin Carmen married, the guards
at her father's finca took the guests' bracelets
and wedding rings and put them in an armored truck
for safekeeping while wealthy, dark-skinned men,
their plump, white women and spoiled children
bathed in a river whose bottom had been cleaned
for the occasion. (1-7)
The hard c-sounds, the fricative f-sounds, and the bilabial b-sounds contrast with the soft w-sounds. The repetition of those sounds, as well as the sibilant s, throughout the poem creates peppery tension. Furthermore, the Spanish diction, the near juxtaposition of hot and cold images, the mix of dialogue and description, the blend of disparate cultures: the tension Alvarez creates through the use of those techniques explodes at the poem's close:
Except the maids and the workmen,
sitting on stoops behind the sugar house,
ate with their fingers from their open palms
windows, shutters, walls, pillars, doors,
made from the cane they had cut from the fields.
(60-64)
The family did not involve the workers in the festivity, although the workers had helped to make the reception successful. The repetition of the hard c-sound in the ultimate line suggests that the family--especially "cousin Carmen"--had treated the workers harshly.
Alvarez balances opposite attitudes and evaluations to create irony. In lines 45-50 she states:
It would be years
before I took the courses that would change my mind
in schools paid for by sugar from the fields around us,
years before I could begin to comprehend
how one does not see the maids when they pass by
with trays of deviled eggs arranged on daisy wheels.
The enchantment of the celebration in her homeland caused her to ignore the workers' predicament. It was not until she went to school that she realized they had helped to build her family's home and, later, had helped to pay for her education. "Homecoming" is a fitting ode to those workers.
Alvarez attempts to bridge her past and present worlds and discovers her poetic self in "Homecoming." The poem sets the tone for the entire work, a collection every poet should read.
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*Julia Alvarez
, Homecoming: New and Collected Poems (New York: Plume, 1996) 3-4.
