The Kiss

The Kiss
Nichole Martin
ENG: Introduction to Literature
Corey King
January 6, 2014










I am writing about “The Kiss” which is about a woman named Julia Alverez who was born in New York, but spent her childhood in the Dominican Republic where she returns regularly to connect to her experimental roots. Her reflections on the differences between American and Dominican political perspectives and the expectations of women in both of these cultures stand out in her writing. (Alverez, 1991)
Alverez explores conflict in her family values, tracing the alienation and bitterness that clouded up the lives the lives of a father and his strong willed daughter. Which she took control of her own sexuality violating her father’s rules and Dominican Republic cultural tradition? In what was creating unresolved differences that, years later, she attempts to reconcile through the reunion with her father and a kiss. Clugston, 2010)
They were passionate women, but their devotions were like roots; they were sunk into the past towards the old man. So far ever night in November the daughters turned back into their father’s girls in the cramped living room, surrounded by the dark oversized furniture from the old house they grew up in. The father opened his arms wide and welcomed them in his broken English: “This is your home, and never should forget it.” Inside, the mother fussed at them about their sloppy clothes, their long loose hair, their looking tired, too skinny, to made up, and so on. “Come on Papi, his daughters coaxed him, as if it was a modesty of his, to perish, and they had to talk him into staying alive. (Alverez, 1991)
The revolution in the cold country had failed. Most of his comrades had been killed or bought off. He had escaped to this country, and now it was every man for himself, so what he made was for his girls. The father never gave his daughters money when their husbands were around. “They might receive the wrong idea,” the father once...