Survival

The author uses her first person narrator's encounters with tragedy and loss in order to explore the individual's capacity for surviving great sorrow. When Sirena is 13 years old, she is living in an orphanage in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico after losing her parents and brother to drowning four years prior. Though this grief sits unresolved within Sirena's body and heart, she does not begin her account with memories of the tragedy. Rather, she opens her story with detailed descriptions of the home and region in which she has come to live. Despite the vivid imagery of this passage, it is tinged with Sirena's fear. While describing the "thin band of sand" that separates the "beach of death" from the "living beach," Sirena says that because she "couldn't fucking swim" she always "soaked in death" (165). The language employed in these lines reveals how deeply Sirena has been...