Posted by mariela on April 06, 192003 at 14:20:55:
The story is an allegory of plurality of points of view. An animal is not just an animal, many varieties form part of what falls under the category of animals (as the Medium begins the play explaining). Like a rose is not just its parts and yet it is, a story is not just some facts, but all of them. This play uses three different parts of a rose to represent a community and its culture; a story and an image as being separate parts and as a whole. Carballido wants the reader to realize that the many parts of the retold story in the play cannot be taken individually. One must understand that they, collectively, form the story; the reality. One has to create reality by taking the different interpretations and placing them into one. We cannot believe one interpretation independent from the other; we cannot give power to those who tell one side or part of a story. We must realize, that like the rose, each part of a story is told to satisfy the need of that person who is telling it, to satisfy the reality they are living in. A rose, like a story, may mean many things to many people. A petal, one perspective of a story, is one meaning that is part of the whole, it is one way of seeing how something occurs. In sum, we complete reading the play reminded that reality is transmitted in many points of view, that a story can be told in many spaces and times; simultaneously. To truly understand a story one must not look at it not just as a rose, just a story, its sensationalism or admiring it s beauty, its outside, but must move from the distance into a deeper space to appreciate it as something more than it appears to be. To admire and understand reality, one must reach deeper and see the dimensionality or what makes beauty/story and what it is about.
I was fascinated with the possible symbolism of the rose in the play. Could they represent Community/Communism, Sex/Desire, and Children/Reality? The rose represented all of these! The symbolic story that stood out the most was that of the dump, the flowers found in the dump and then the desire to plant them in the cement filled tub. I placed my experience and myself in the story to try and understand what Carballido was trying to say through these 3 symbols. The dump represented New York, where I came to live, the place I came to and where I left my reality behind in order to create a new reality, a place to find things and better spend my time. The dump/NY is a place where you find many people looking, searching and finding. After some time I became productive and could find what was mine, what I could make mine, so I found and grew flowers. I was able to create something in the dump using my past and present reality. Once created I, as Toña, wanted to make this new reality grow, I wanted to plant it, have it grow roots. I wanted my flowers to have life. I wanted to make the traditional me and the new me, the Puerto Rican and New Yorker in me grow together. When it came time to find a place for it, I got stuck. Time and space derailed me. I was taken off track. This new me could not find a place to grow to be rooted in. I was meant to begin again or to grow another kind of flower, according to the system I was living in, because what I had grown did not have a place to grow further. Through this story maybe Carballido is trying to express the angst people and cultures go through in order to create a reality by bringing together who they were, their traditions (like oral storytelling used by the Medium) together with the new (written storytelling used by the newspapers). More so, the angst of bringing two realities together and having them fit in some other’s reality. There is always an audience for your reality, the trick is getting over the fact that you can’t have all audiences and that sometimes your audience is not the audience of your choice, which is when you have to take a closer look at your own reality (but this is just life maybe not the play’s message).