"I Am Not My House"
Sandra Cisneros writes about being at home with change
If you’ve been troubled by the headlines every single day for seven years as I have, now that this year’s election is over you might be feeling a kind of decompression. Seven years of bouncing between extreme outrage and a flickering hope can take a lot of energy.
In the quiet of this holiday week, the stability of home seems at the heart of life.
But how many times does life upset our human urge for a home, and send us searching for yet another place to live in peace? And how can it possibly be so hard? Houses are everywhere.
Sometimes a book falls into your hands at the right time. A House of My Own: Stories from My Life by Sandra Cisneros is loosely organized around several of the houses she’s lived in. She wrote her well-known novel, The House on Mango Street, in more than one place.
Cisneros writes in A House of My Own,
I roamed about the earth and borrowed typewriters in Greece, France, the former Yugoslavia, Mexico, and throughout the United States. …
Sometimes I was living on a grant. Sometimes I was living in a borrowed house or guest room. Sometimes I convinced myself I was in love, but most of the time I lived alone in a space that wasn’t mine with bills that flared like small fires. That meant I passed through a lot of houses, loves, and typewriters, never quite finding the right one.
Sandra was born in 1954 in Chicago and grew up in the Humboldt Park neighborhood.
My family lived upstairs because noise travelled down. Stairways reeked of Pine-Sol from our Saturday scrubbing; no one but us thought to clean the public zones and we resented it. The basement was filled with rats. The meter reader and even the landlord were afraid to go down there.
Nothing to love, but it was home.
She grew up thinking everyone in the world lived like that. Then at age twenty-two Sandra went to school in Iowa and found that she was not like everyone else. She writes,
At one time or another, we’ve all been made to feel like the other. But once I could name my otherness as a woman, a working-class person, an American of Mexican descent, I wasn’t ashamed or silent. I could speak up and celebrate my otherness in a voice uniquely my own.
The world opened up for the young writer. She rented a house on the island of Hydra in Greece. “For the autumn of 1982 it was mine.”
The Hydra house was a simple summer cottage, whitewashed inside and out with lime. On the opposite shore lay the Peloponnesus with its hazy mountain range and a great indulgence of sky, splendid, eternal, serene. The sea was a different shade of blue each day.
Sandra would dash from her house down the 350 outdoor steps into town before the shops closed for lunch, to buy “olives scooped out of a barrel with oil and wrapped in a twist of wax paper”, eggs for breakfast, and cucumbers, yogurt and garlic to make tzatziki.
Real life in paradise doesn’t escape her notice. On Hydra, there are no more fish and the natural springs have dried up. Having to pay for imported drinking water is just one reason that local people struggle with the high cost of living. Cisneros’ house has “one lamp, cement sinks and floors, exposed plumbing, a rudimentary kitchen fueled by a tank of propane”.
The only vehicle on the island is a garbage truck, so suffering donkeys are driven to carry things everywhere. One has to step carefully in the streets.
She writes,
The greatest marvel of all was that I wrote every day, mid-day to sunset. I wrote pages first in longhand, then typed them, scribbled changes all over the typed pages, then re-typed them, over and over. I enjoyed this process because it allowed me to hear the text in my head.
And the flowers!
By 1997 Cisneros owned her first house. It was in the historic King William neighborhood of San Antonio, Texas, “a neighborhood so beautiful I didn’t think I belonged.”
A house, even borrowed but all your own, would mean a place to imagine and to be safe.
In making my house my own, I wanted something soothing, that would draw together earth and sky, and nourish it, inside and out. It would be jacaranda violet with turquoise trim. This house was my invented Mexico, painted and decorated according to my childhood memories.
She has it painted periwinkle, a tejano color.
And then the community “erupts in hysteria”.
The San Antonio Historic and Design Review Commission comes to tell her that they require what Cisneros calls “colores tristes”, sad colors such as Frontier Days brown and Plymouth Rock green. But she finds that neighbors who have memories of Mexico love the happy, energetic purple.
I was told my house was about “historical context”. My point is this: Whose history?
The problem is solved two years later. The Purple House has faded to “the soft color of a chambray work shirt” and is then deemed by the authorities to be historically accurate.
Later, Cisneros repaints her house rosa mexicano, a locally traditional color.
She has a yellow writing studio built behind the Casa Rosa, with a rooftop terrace. You can see it to right of the house, above. She writes,
I built my office with the idea of taking care of others — my mother, my fellow writers, a space for an assistant or houseguests.
One day in 2015 The Casa Rosa doesn’t bring her joy anymore, and Cisneros finds herself searching for her “last house”. She has changed and she knows it. “I am not my house,” she says. “I can walk away.”
What I long for now is as spiritual as a monastery, as private as a cloistered convent, a sanctuary all my own to share with animals and trees, a fortress for the creative self.
What I remember from this book is that in making each house her home, the author sees herself as a writer. Each time she packs up her typewriter, she feels gratitude for what she has had, and begins to create anew the place she needs for the next period of her life.
She is completely present to what each place has to offer. She allows herself to change.
Throughout the book Cisneros is compassionate for those less fortunate. She herself experiences discrimination because she appears to be indigenous. For example, upon entering a “gringo” restaurant in Mexico she’s falsely told that all the tables are reserved and is turned away.
She looks at the great divide between the homes in Mexico where she lives today, and imagines someone who is walking through a wealthy neighborhood.
What must it feel like to walk by these houses worth a million, two million, three, when one’s own home has no heat except firewood? Or imagine you don’t have a house, or your house is something not worth inhabiting?
This terrible social and economic divide has been on my mind the entire time I’ve been writing this post.
But now that I’ve finished reading A House of My Own, here’s how I want to remember Sandra Cisneros, the writer.
I see her turning away from The Purple House. She is looking south toward Mexico, just as she did with her family those many times long ago. Today she is wondering,
Where will I fit in, in Mexico as a U. S. Latina who wants to live in a convent without the nuns?
Indeed. I wish I could see her house now.
Beautiful story written beautifully by a beautiful lady ❤️
I was unaware of the writer, Sandra Cisneros. I will have her books on my 2023 reading list. Deda's post has certainly sparked my interest in this author.