And now, I would like to turn to poetry.
And someone gave me what she called a last-minute request,
Ila from the Poetry Center.
And I'm going to read that poem for her because I don't have it
on my list, and I definitely don't want to forget it.
She asked me to read Quinceañera.
Terms of Survival, it's a dictionary for myself.
I wrote this book because I was losing my Spanish.
And I was misplacing words.
I could no longer talk intimately
about concepts that should have been very important to me.
And so I went back to Puerto Rico
and bugged my mother to tell me about things,
listen to her gossiping, which is a great way
to get back to the language, because especially
in the Latino cultures, when women talk--
I don't know about men.
But when women talk, they have all this nonverbal stuff
going on in codes.
And so you learn a lot about what words really
mean from watching them talk, not just listening.
And so I made a list of words I wanted to write about.
And then I wrote a book in which most of the titles
are in Spanish, and the poem that follows
is my own definition.
But it's not really a definition.
Sometimes it's a dramatization.
And I called it Terms of Survival,
because they were the terms that were important to my survival.
And it was an interesting thing, because the publisher
chose to put a glossary for non-native Spanish speakers
in the back, which I like, because it
fits with my idea of this book being a lexicon of terms.
So quinceañera was a term I wanted to write about.
And I don't need to explain it too much to you,
because you live in a society where you've heard this.
In the Latin cultures, there is a coming out for girls called
the quinceañera.
Most people think that it's a debut, or like the Sweet 16.
And it may have turned into that now,
but in my mother's generation, it actually
meant an announcement to the world
that this girl was now ready for marriage.
When my mother turned 15, they gave her the party.
But she also had to stop wearing children's clothes.
She had to give up her beloved volleyball, you know,
which because that was not ladylike.
She had to come in the house and learn how to cook and take
care of children.
And she hated it.
And I kept saying, when I turned 15, how come I get no respect,
you know?
How come I'm not treated like I'm marriageable, and all that.
And she says, you don't know what you're asking for.
If you want that, what that means
is you give up everything that is fun
and start getting ready for what you're going
to do the rest of your life.
And once I understood that--
I didn't understand it until I was like 35--
but I wrote this poem in the voice
of a girl of my mother's generation,
putting away her childhood.
It's called Quinceañera.
My dolls have been put away like dead children,
in a chest I will carry with me when I marry.
I reach under my skirt to feel a satin slip bought for this day.
It is soft as the inside of my thighs.
My hair has been nailed back with my mother's black hairpins
to my skull, her hand stretched, my eyes open,
as she twisted braids into a tight circle
at the nape of my neck.
I am to wash my own clothes and sheets from this day
on, as if the fluids of my body were poison,
as if the little trickle of blood
I believe travels from my heart to the world were shameful.
Is not the blood of saints and men in battle beautiful?
Do Christ's hands not bleed into your eyes from His cross?
At night, I hear myself growing, and wake
to find my hands drifting of their own
will to soothe skin stretched tight over my bones.
I am wound like the guts of a clock, waiting for each hour
to release me.
Thank you.
Oh, thanks.
[APPLAUSE]