Selina and Camila: Finding a Sense of Self
A gentle hand reaches out; arms cradle a new arrival to this complex world. This simple gesture will come to signify a bond between two, the bond of a mother’s love, the bond that can only be shared by mother and daughter. Life does not always follow the gentle streams and brooks of one’s choosing. Typically, life goes raging down the rivers of its own. Many people do not realize however, that there is always to be a clearing in the turbulent waters and a hand extended to pull one out. The hand always reaches again and again ready to pull one up from a storm. Although it sometimes might be difficult to see, there is always an avenue of escape, a crutch to lean on time and time again. Whether it is through the spirit of the dead or the pulse of the living, a mother’s love is always present.
Mothers and daughters have been written about, criticized, publicized, condemned, and praised for as long as the relationship has existed. These relationships can be complex, but also filled with compassion and love. They play an important role in determining who a daughter turns out to be as an adult. Each of the daughters in the novels “Brown Girl, Brownstones,” by Paule Marshall, and “In the Name of Salome,” by Julia Alvarez, faced the task of defining themselves and separating from their mother in quest for their own identity, similar to the task that most women find themselves having to face sometime during their lives.
Usually when a girl goes through adolescence, the relationship between her and her mother begin to change in many different ways, but can grow at the same time. Accompanied by raging hormones, mixed emotions and the often confused intellect of puberty, this development of independence is not always a smooth process. Consequenly, wars between a mother and daughter can often ravage a relationship as exemplified in the relationship between Selina and her mother, Silla, in the novel “Brown Girl, Brownstones.” As a young child, much of the way Selina viewed herself was a result of all the messages and opinions that her mother embedded into her mind. As a black female growing up during World War II, Selina was poised between the expectations of her Bajan culture and family, while consequently confronted with the challenge of trying to fit into the “white-man’s world.