17 pages • 34 minutes read
Margarita EngleTula ["Books are door shaped"]
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
The subtitle of The Lightning Dreamer is Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist. In the 19th century, Cuba was the largest slave colony in Hispanic America. This was partially due to the boom of the Cuban sugar and coffee markets.
Engle adopts the persona of abolitionist Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda for her “Tula” poems. The Lightning Dreamer is a poetic reimagining of Gómez de Avellaneda’s, or Tula’s, life in Cuba during the years 1827-1836. Gómez de Avellaneda was born in 1814, the daughter of a Spanish marine commander—Don Manuel Gómez de Avellaneda—who died when she was young, and Cuban native Doña Francisca de Arteaga. Gómez de Avellaneda’s grandfather owned a sugar plantation, and she refused to marry the man her family picked in order to inherit his fortune.
Gómez de Avellaneda’s mother remarried another Spanish officer (Arteaga) who, fearing a slave revolt, moved the family to Spain in 1836. Gómez de Avellaneda lived with her brother in Seville and Madrid. She began to have her work published in 1840 and over the course of her career, she published two volumes of poetry (collectively containing over 180 poems), 20 works of drama, six novels, and other various writings. She sometimes wrote under a pseudonym, la Pelegrina (the pilgrim), which allowed her to win an award because the judges at the Lyceum of Madrid thought she was a man.
Gómez de Avellaneda had many lovers and a child who died as an infant. She was married and widowed twice. She moved back to Cuba with her second husband and was celebrated as a successful female writer, which was very unusual for her time. After the death of her second husband, she returned to Spain. In 1873, Gómez de Avellaneda died in Madrid.
Literary Context
Gómez de Avellaneda’s abolitionist novel Sab inspired the poems in The Lightning Dreamer. In her “Historical Note,” Engle writes that she borrowed “many aspects from Sab and invent[ed] others” (169) for her persona poems. Beyond this novel, which predated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Avellaneda is considered one of the “major poets of the first wave of romanticism in Cuba,” according to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (201).
Engle translates a few excerpts of Gómez de Avellaneda’s poetry at the end of The Lightning Dreamer. One example is from “Las contradicciones”/“Contradictions”: “I am neither free, nor locked in prison” (176) writes Gómez de Avellaneda, which is echoed in Engle’s poem in the lines about “free” (Line 26) and “trapped” (Line 29) thoughts. Other than Engle’s excerpts, very few of Gómez de Avellaneda’s poems have been translated into English.
Gómez de Avellaneda was inspired by Cuban poet José María Heredia, who Engle also discusses and translates at the end of The Lightning Dreamer. According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Heredia believes nature “embodies the desire for independence and autochthony [nativeness]” (201). Both Heredia and Gómez de Avellaneda opposed slavery in their revolutionary works.
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By Margarita Engle
