Scheherazade's Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing Book

By the mid 1990s, Judith Ortiz Cofer had won acclaim as a poet, a memoirist, and an author of literature for young adults. All three of these genres come together in 1998's The Year of Our Revolution, which tells the semi-autobiographical story, interspersed with poetry, of a teenager trying to embrace the free-wheeling folk/hippie movement of the 1960s despite the opposition of her conservative, Puerto Rican parents. Though it contains many more references to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other icons of US pop culture, the book revisits the themes the author had addressed in her previous work, particularly the cultural alienation that divides immigrant parents and children.

The book is comprised of six loosely connected stories and vignettes, excluding the poems, some of which had appeared in Silent Dancing. The first two stories, "Volar" and "Kennedy in the Barrio," are surprisingly short, lasting only a few pages each. Although it is brief, I found "Kennedy" one of the book's most intriguing entries, as it explains the grief and despair that flooded the Caribbean American neighborhoods of Paterson, New Jersey, in the hours following the president's death. Kennedy had been popular among these immigrants (and their children) because he shared their faith and because his election seemed to foretell a time when another Catholic--maybe even a child raised in the barrio--would hold the country's highest office. His assassination meant the dream of a Latina/o president, not to mention the immigrant characters' smaller dreams of personal safety and material comforts, would have to be deferred for a time, if not forgotten.

At the center of the stories is the character of Mary Ellen, who like so many of Ortiz Cofer's protagonists is a teenage portrait of the author herself (with slight differences). Mary Ellen lives with her parents in a tight apartment decorated, as the author puts it, in "Early Puerto Rican" with "a religious print in every room." Rather than attend the local school, she commutes to a Catholic school, where she takes classes with a "counter-culture nun" and befriends white, relatively privileged young people who would go on to accomplish such feats as overdosing on drugs at the original Woodstock. She dabbles awkwardly in love, first with a wounded Puerto Rican soldier returning from Vietnam and then with one of her fellow Catholic school students, Gerald.

Mary Ellen finally kisses Gerald in the title story, "The Year of Our Revolution," to the horror of her mother, María Elena, watching from the apartment above. "Revolution" is the second to last story in the book, and it signals a shift between the perspectives of the daughter and the mother. The last story, "The One Peso Prediction," is told mostly in María Elena's voice and reveals that despite her conservative exterior she, too, knows about rebelling against her parents' expectations for her. As a title for the book, The Year of Our Revolution is decidedly ambiguous. The stories take place in the late 1960s and feature plentiful references to revolutions, including the Cuban revolution of 1959, the unsuccessful Puerto Rican revolution against the United States, and the various cultural revolutions of the 1960s. However, in the end, the book seems most interested in the "revolution" taking place in the relationship between Mary Ellen and María Elenita, who realize, as their names suggest, that they share more in common than either one of them had known.

The Puffin edition that I read included two autobiographical stories, "First Love" and "Vida," that had also appeared in Silent Dancing, bringing the book to a total of 130 pages. (Without these additions, the page count is less than 100.) In my opinion, brevity is the book's biggest drawback. Mary Ellen, her parents, her grandparents, her friends, and that hippie nun are all intriguing characters who could stand further development, and the plot points and passages that repeat across the stories lend the book a kind of incompleteness that I am not sure the author intended. Anyway, even if the book is too fragmented to hold up as a consistent narrative, the individual stories are quite enjoyable, easily matching the best stories in her previous collection for young adults, An Island Like You.

The Year of Our Revolution by Judith Ortiz Cofer
Rating: ***
Bookshelves: ENGL 420
Status: Read in September
Review: Cofer uses a unique collection of narrative, short stories, and poetry to tell the story of teenage and parental rebellion during the 1960s. It is hard to keep track of the narrators in the first couple of stories in the book because they are told from different ages and perspectives. Mary Ellen is the narrator who tells most of the later stories, voicing her inner conflicts of trying to break free from her traditional Hispanic culture and explore freedom in American counterculture. Although her story takes place during the turbulent Sixties, the themes of rebellion, search for identity, and dealing with conflict between parents still ring true for teens today from all ethnic backgrounds. Her mature poems and stories would be best understood and appreciated by an upper-end YA audience.