Racism and Xenophobia
In describing the difficulties she had upon returning to the Philippines for the first time after leaving for America, the author engages in a bit of comically snarky metaphor building to describe the reactions to her being in possession of official American documentation of identity. The racism here, understand, is not American-directed toward, but arrives at the hands of her suspicious fellow Filipinos:
“how did I come to have an American passport? What kind of black magic is this?”
Favorite Colors
The descriptive possibilities inherent in conveying one’s favorite color represent a deep well of creative potential for those with gift for figurative language. This is especially true when multiple favorite colors are being expressed and defined:
“As a child, my favorite color was green, like the jungle, and then it was blue. Not a light blue, but a deep one, like the blue of the sea in the distance, just below the horizon. That blue is almost black.”
Signification and Meaning
Although ostensibly a text about the Asian-American immigrant experience, the real thematic focus of the book is on the subtext. And that subtext is an analysis of the processes of locating meaning in things while questioning the logic of assumptions about things having organic and inherent meanings.
“Name and story and tribe are the same thing. A name is a story and a story is the tribe’s identity. Malinao. It means `clear.’…Because my ancestors had such `clear thoughts’ they birth an island.
I cannot give birth to an island.”
Familiarity and Similes
The facility of the comparison offered by the use of a simile is heavily dependent upon the familiarity of the known thing that is being compared. The point of a simile, after all, is to make something not easily define…easier to define. Therefore, the less familiar the known quantity is to the thing it is being compared with, the less efficient the use of this type of metaphor. For instance, without knowing that tesserae refers to those little bits of broken objects used to create a mosaic, the following simile makes less sense:
“The stars are like tesserae. In the absence of artificial light, one can see stars and orient to them.”
Fortunately, in this case, the author is almost obsessed with tesserae and by the time the reader reaches this point, the familiarity is concrete.
Abstraction
Some metaphors are not really intended for the purpose of clarification. They exist to create a mood or atmosphere or instigate a generalized emotional response. Such is the case in this example:
“In the jungle there is a foreboding that surrounds a sentence. It lactates. It drowns.”
