My apologies; I have had a hell of a few days, and though I wrote this on Saturday (Partly: part of it I wrote a week ago), I completely forgot to post it both Sunday and Monday.

So here it is, my Tuesday post: this is an analysis of the poem “I Was a Skinny Tomboy Kid” by Alma Luz Villanueva. I wrote this because my wife told me that I needed to do a better job of using my essays as models for my class; that when I wrote an essay for them, rather than my usual self-conscious method of reading it fast and then moving on, I needed to actually go through it, explain what I did, and get feedback from the students about what worked and what didn’t, and why. So I did that. My AP class had to write an analysis of this poem, and most of them didn’t do it, so I gave them this to show what it should look like. I think it helped.

I hope it gives you something worth reading. If nothing else, the poem is amazing; read that, and then go about your day, and you won’t have lost anything.

I Was a Skinny Tomboy Kid

[My apologies for the link; the poem is written a specific way on the page, and I can’t capture it in this post format. YOU MUST GO AND LOOK AT THE POEM THE WAY IT IS MEANT TO BE READ.]

Literary Analysis of Alma Luz Villanueva’s “I Was a Skinny Tomboy Kid”

When do we grow up? What makes it happen? When we say someone grew up too young, or too fast – what does that mean? Is it possible to grow up before you grow up? If that happens, is it bad? And then, once someone has grown up – is that it? Is childhood gone? Is innocence gone? Can we never be childlike, if not actually be a child, ever again?

In Alma Luz Villanueva’s narrative poem, “I Was a Skinny Tomboy Kid,” the speaker seems to grow up over the course of the piece; and it seems to be positive that she does so, not least because she realizes the truth about some important things in her life. But then at the end, she seems simultaneously to regress and progress, and so the overall message is unclear. But perhaps that is intentional: after all, how many of us know the actual clear, definitive answers to any of these questions about life?

The poem starts with the title line: since the word “tomboy” clearly associates with a female child – because who would call a boy a tomboy? Boys are just boys – and since the author is female, it’s tempting to assume that the piece is autobiographical and accurate. But whether the speaker is the author or not, she is fierce in that opening: her “fists [are] clenched into tight balls.” So she is angry, and defensive – maybe even offensive, maybe even looking for a fight. But at the same time, while she is a tomboy, which connotes overtly stereotypical masculine traits like aggression and risk-taking, she is also, in the title and the first lines, a skinny kid. Which connotes weakness, and fragility, and youth and innocence, because “skinny” seems to say a child who hasn’t grown a lot yet, who hasn’t yet reached her potential. This makes her fists seem much less intimidating: as does the use of the phrase “tight balls,” which don’t make her fists sound terribly frightening. And since she is a skinny kid, they’re probably not very frightening at all.

From that first image, we go into a different view of being a tomboy kid: because she isn’t fighting, she is avoiding people. “I knew all the roofs/And backyard fences,” we are told: places where other people would not be, would not see her. She goes on:

I liked traveling that way

            sometimes

      not touching

the sidewalks

            for blocks and blocks

it made

      me feel

victorious

somehow

over the streets.

So she is avoiding. She is hiding, trying not to be seen, trying not to touch the places where other people are. Only sometimes. And only, we are told, because she liked traveling that way: but the desire to feel victorious over the streets is telling. It implies that the streets are not something she could normally be victorious over, so she has to seek this way of doing it. And as another author pointed out, that pause between “feel” and “victorious somehow” pretty clearly shows some doubt or some question in that wording, doubt created both by the pause and by the uncertainty in “somehow.” So “victorious” maybe isn’t the right word, here. Maybe the streets aren’t her enemy? Maybe the streets can’t be conquered? What does it even mean to conquer the streets? Based on her description of achieving victory here, it seems to mean escaping them, rising above them – becoming more, grander. Learning to fly. Gaining freedom.

I liked to fly

         from roof

  to roof

      the gravel

falling

away

beneath my feet,

      I liked

          the edge

        of almost

not making it.

And the freedom

of riding

                  my bike

  to the ocean

and smelling it

    long before

I could see it,

We can see here one of Villanueva’s stylistic choices, in the line breaks and the formatting of the poem, with some lines jutting out beyond the others – particularly appropriate when describing the edges the speaker jumps off of, the edge of almost not making it. The gravel falling away, the words almost sliding across the page under our eyes as the gravel slid away under her feet. So here we see the risk-taking, which may be what the speaker does to be considered a tomboy – also climbing up on buildings and jumping across alleys is not a traditional “female” activity (Though it should be, because women usually have better balance than men): but now, separate from the issue of tomboyhood and so on, we have to ask the question: why does she do this? Why is she jumping from rooftop to rooftop? On some level she enjoys the freedom of flying, as she calls it; but then she clearly wants the risk, she liked the edge of almost not making it. Gravel falling away beneath her feet, which scares me just thinking about it. 

Why would someone want that? 

But the thought cuts off there, almost as if she shies away from it, changing the subject to something less shocking, less disturbing: she likes riding her bike to the ocean! How lovely! She likes smelling the ocean before she could see it – which may have some small meaning about the usual smells around her, the smells of city streets, which are generally awful and that’s why she revels first in smelling the ocean; this is emphasized by the fact that she can jump from roof to roof, and along or over backyard fences, for “blocks and blocks:” which shows the size of the urban area and how densely crowded the houses and buildings are there. But enough of the streets this speaker wants to defeat: now we’re going to the ocean.

Disguised as a boy, she thought. In an old army jacket. 

Why does she want to be disguised as a boy? Why did she think wearing an old army jacket would disguise her as a boy? Because women aren’t in the army? Don’t wear army jackets? She does continue the thought in the same stanza:

and I traveled disguised

as a boy

      (I thought)

          in an old army jacket

  carrying my

fishing tackle

    to the piers, and

        bumming bait

        and a couple of cokes

Fishing, bumming bait and a couple of cokes: these are all boy things, right? Sure, I don’t really understand why myself; I grew up as a boy and never carried fishing tackle down to the piers, never bummed bait or a couple of cokes – or caught crabs, as she goes on to say in the next stanza. But because the speaker says “I thought,” this is no longer about actual gender roles or expectations: this is about her perception of them. She thought wearing an old army jacket, carrying fishing tackle and so on, disguised her as a boy. So the more interesting question is not whether that disguise would work, what society would think of what she is wearing; it’s why she wanted to wear it. Why she thought it would work. 

The next stanza – though it isn’t clear that it is a new stanza; there is a large line break between “and a couple of cokes” and the next line, “and catching crabs,” but that is clearly continuing the same action, the same thought, and the new stanza doesn’t start with a capital as the last one doesn’t end with a period – goes on with this fishing expedition, with no particularly interesting images or ideas – until all of a sudden, after a dash, but without changing sentence or stanza, the speaker shifts from apparently fond memories of the seashore to this:

I didn’t like fish

       I just liked to fish—

and I vowed

                     to never

    grow up

    to be a woman

      and be helpless

  like my mother,

but then I didn’t realize

         the kind of guts

it often took

              for her to just keep

       standing 

where she was.

I’m sorry, what? How did we get from talking about fishing to talking about the speaker’s mother, and the speaker’s apparent contempt for her?

The answer is that we have been talking about this all along: it was just disguised in an old army jacket, with fishing tackle, jumping from roof to roof and almost falling. 

The speaker wants to not be female. “To never grow up to be a woman and be helpless like my mother.” That’s a sharp intrusion, a sudden juxtaposition, and a hard one to take in. The associations: growing up, being a woman, being helpless, like my mother; three of them are all neutral if not positive – but all changed entirely by the idea of helplessness. To this girl, her mother is helpless. Women are helpless. Perhaps adults are helpless, though it seems likely that her mother’s womanhood is the real culprit, not her maturity (On the other hand, the speaker is apparently not helpless yet, and the thing she wants to avoid is growing up, along with being a woman like her mother. So maybe it is age.). What kind of terrible situation makes this girl connect these ideas this way? To think that her mother’s helplessness – a word that describes both total vulnerability, and also complete isolation, because she is in need of help and has none – is inherent in womanhood? Is inevitable for her mother? 

My first thought is that her mother is abused. The victim of domestic violence. If this is what the poem implies, then I also suspect that this is a common situation in this girl’s world, because while she uses her mother as the example, she does associate this helplessness with womanhood, so perhaps she’s seen other women, perhaps all other women she has ever seen, in the same situation. But it is also possible that the trouble here is that her mother is trapped: perhaps by responsibility – perhaps by the girl herself, as the trap for the mother might be the fact of her motherhood – and can’t escape. Maybe that’s why the speaker escapes into freedom, and feels victorious by doing so. The rest of the stanza, while it changes the girl’s perception of her mother, doesn’t resolve this for us: it simply tells us that the girl later recognizes the kind of guts, the kind of strength and courage, that it took for her mother to “just keep standing where she was.” The courage to remain, standing and static, “where she was” might imply the mother is trapped; but the “just keep standing,” and the “kind of guts it took,” might imply the violence.  Either way, it makes us pity this poor woman, and understand, if not necessarily empathize, with the girl’s desire to escape – empathy being potentially held back because: why doesn’t she help her mother? Although the fact that she doesn’t, that she sees this situation as inherent in womanhood, and the fact that the poem opens (and closes) with the speaker’s fists, all maybe implies that the mother is the victim of violence, and there is simply nothing the daughter can do about it, being just a skinny kid. Other than to escape it, and spend quite a long time outside of her home, pretending to be a boy.

The last quarter of the poem brings in some new ideas. Partly because this depiction of the speaker’s mother shows her transition from childhood to adulthood:

I grew like a thin, stubborn weed

watering myself whatever way I could

believing in my own myth

transforming my reality

and creating a

legendary/self

She grew: she became an adult. She stayed skinny, though – though now it turns into “thin,” with a connection to “stubborn” and “weed,” which for me implies a certain strength, though it feels like a somewhat desperate strength; but I think that fits. It takes strength to be one’s own support, to water one’s self and produce one’s own growth; it takes resourcefulness for the kid to find “whatever way I could” to provide for herself. It also shows trauma: because it shows neglect, and the “whatever way I could” implies that the ways she did find were insufficient, or problematic. I have to wonder if something happened to this growing kid’s mother, that prevented her from watering the weed-kid, forcing the child to take care of herself: to grow up too fast. The last part of this section of lines (Not the end of the stanza, which goes on without a line break) shows the more positive view of that experience: the child grows up too fast, abandoned or neglected in some way – but that makes her powerful, in some ways. “Believing in my own myth” is a beautiful way to depict this: the idea of a child finding her own strength and her own way to support herself has a real pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps  paradoxical impossibility to it; and believing in one’s own myth has the same. Myths are false, of course, but they do provide something useful to people, in that they create a story, an explanation that makes sense of the universe and of the human condition, which is then useful to help us to move forward and not get stuck in existential despair. Faith creates strength and confidence, even if the faith is in nothing tangible or even real. It’s a house built on sand: but sometimes it can be enough for someone to grow strong and move on to a more solid foundation. As this kid did: she transformed her reality, and created a legendary/self. 

I’m not sure what to make of that slash; my first thought is that it creates two equal alternatives, like using “he/she” as a pronoun, meaning either option is equally likely and valid. Which means that this kid’s adult self is legendary, and I can’t see that as anything but positive. But that’s not right, because I can see it as something other than positive: legends also, like myths, are not real – though in my understanding, they are based on real life. There was a King Arthur, after all; he just didn’t pull the sword from the stone or preside over chivalrous knights seated at a round table. He united Angles and Saxons in the vacuum created by the departure of the Romans; and then his kingdom crumbled after his death, and was turned into something much more idyllic by romantic authors writing five or more centuries after him. So a legendary self might be a false self, an illusion: still just that myth, even if she believes it herself.

Reading on, I think that may be the answer: that the self she creates is legendary, both in that the facade she creates for herself is amazing and strong and capable, and also in that it is false. Because the next section of the poem says this:

every once in a while

late at night

      in the deep

       darkness of my sleep

  I wake

        with a tenseness

in my arms

       and I follow

it from my elbow to

      my wrist

and realize

       my fists are tightly clenched

and the streets come grinning

and I forget who I’m protecting

This is a clear and effective description, for me, of childhood trauma coming back to haunt the former skinny kid. The return to the clenched fists and the streets from the beginning of the poem show me the echo from her childhood; the fact that it comes at night, when she relaxes her control, and that it is associated with darkness, with tenseness, all makes me think she has never entirely recovered from what she went through as a child. But then: none of us really do, ever, “recover.” We assimilate the pain and the sadness, we perhaps find a way to accept it; but it never heals. It never goes away. This shows the hollowness, in a way, of the myth, the legend, of the adult who was once the skinny kid: I think she created a new self, which for me sounds like a victory; but I think inside that newly created skin, there is still that same little kid, trying to escape and unable to, trying to win and really just running away. There is a detachment in the description of her waking, feeling tension in her arms, and following it to the clenched fists: she doesn’t immediately realize that her fists are clenched, she has to discover them after following the feeling; that numbness and alienation from the actual fists seems like they are still her child’s fists, still representing the same anger and fear that she tried to fight in the past – and still, even now, small and ineffective, unintimidating: because look, the streets come grinning. They don’t fear her. They laugh at her attempt to fight back. Perhaps at her attempt to escape, because they come back, even now, even when she is presumably far away from where she grew up; they still come back, and when they do, she forgets where and who she is now (Now because these last lines are in the present tense for the first time in the poem).

I don’t know what to make of the last line in this section. “I forget who I’m protecting.” Who is she protecting, and why does she forget? If she is protecting herself, which seems likely – how could anyone forget that? And if not herself, who? Her child self? How does a present adult self protect a former child self? Is she protecting someone else entirely? Who, then, is she protecting them from? 

The last hints come in the final four lines of the poem; though to interpret those hints, we have to look back at the rest of the poem. The last lines are:

and I coil up

          in a self-mothering fashion

and tell myself

it’s o.k.

These have several possible meanings. This is intentional, of course, because there’s no doubt that part of the author’s purpose here is to create doubt, or rather to show the speaker’s doubt. One thing that is lost in the absence of strong, present parental figures is surety and confidence: it takes someone telling you that you are right before you can start believing you are right, and the first one whose word we take as gospel is always our parent. It’s a trope, sometimes even a joke – Milhouse, the nerdy best friend of Bart Simpson, confidently tells us that “My mom says I’m the handsomest guy at the school.” What a dork: but also, what a good mom. The doubt throughout this poem, and particularly at the end, is certainly representing the absence of that early guiding light, which leaves our speaker without any real way to know what is right and what is wrong, except to figure it out for herself: which in the case of something as abstract as morality, means she has to believe her own myth, find her own truth and believe it just because.

One way to read these final lines is positive: the kid has grown up, and in the absence of a mother figure, she has become her own mother figure, and now she can offer herself comfort. It’s another possible depiction of real strength and a successful adaptation; the same as in the legendary/self that transformed her own reality. And this isn’t wrong: the last words of the poem are “it’s o.k.” She is self-mothering as she is a legendary/self: she has become what she herself didn’t have, and that is both impressive and comforting, that in the absence of something we truly need, we can be enough for ourselves. 

But also, the idea that “it’s o.k.” is enough to dispel night terrors – and maybe it’s just me, but that line “the streets come grinning” is genuinely terrifying; the streets are, we all know, a place and source of danger, and grinning danger is the worst kind, both supremely confident that we can’t protect ourselves from it, and happy about what harm it is about to do to us – that’s not right. If the streets are coming for me in the deep darkness, I don’t want someone to tell me it’s o.k., I want someone to tell me they will protect me, and they have a shotgun. “It’s o.k.” is a weak sort of comfort. And the fact that the speaker has to be self-mothering, while it could be a sign of great strength, is also paradoxical: one cannot be one’s own mother, and so self-mothering seems as impossible as a weed watering itself, as a myth becoming real by believing in itself. That impossibility creates doubt as to the truth of this description. Is she mothering herself? Or is she just pretending? I think the phrase “I coil up” also shows this, because it sounds tense: not relaxed, not sweet and comforting, but desperate; and that makes that final statement sound like a lie. I also note she doesn’t simply state a truth that it is o.k.; she tells herself that, and then it is up to her to believe it. And it’s minor, but – “o.k.” is lower case. Unimportant. A whisper, not a confident shout. Put it all together, and it seems like this woman is not any better off than she was when she was a kid, and she was trying to escape but could not. She’s still the same kid: maybe a little taller – but still skinny.

However: all of this leaves out one unresolved question. Who is she protecting? Who did she forget she was protecting, when her past terrors resurface during her deep darknesses?

I don’t believe it is herself. The reaction when threatened, especially when threatened by a terrifying figure from one’s childhood, is to draw inward, to become more selfish, to protect one’s self instead of someone else. It’s a shameful response, maybe, but a wholly human one. I can’t see how she could forget to protect herself – in order to protect herself. I’ve tried to wrap my head around the idea that she was protecting her child self, but that doesn’t make sense either: what does it mean to protect one’s child self, once one has grown up? To preserve an illusory memory, to refuse to accept the ugly truth? It doesn’t fit. The only other person talked about in this is her mother: and if she was protecting her mother, and the streets came grinning and then she forgot and tried to defend herself – that doesn’t fit with the first part of the poem, when she leaves her mother behind while she runs off to be free. Now, maybe, there is some memory here of a time she did protect her mother, and stood up to a threat (maybe one from the streets) and the memory of that dangerous situation comes out in her dreams, and she forgets that she fought to defend her mother, and in her night terror, only thinks of herself. That’s not terrible.

Except “I forget who I’m protecting” is in the present tense. She’s protecting someone now, not in the past. 

And now this talking about her mother, and protecting, and the past to the present brings up another question: how did she finally learn that her mother was actually strong? The implication is that she has learned it in the years since her childhood, because the lines say 

but then I didn’t realize

         the kind of guts

it often took

              for her to just keep

       standing 

where she was.

Then she didn’t realize means now she does. So what is different about now? Is it just that she is an adult? A woman?

Or is it that she is a mother?

What if she realized her mother’s strength when she had to use the same strength herself? What if that’s when she realized that her mother needed to be strong for her, her mother’s child – and maybe her mother couldn’t do it, couldn’t provide the structure and the safety and the support that her child needed, leaving our speaker to grow as she could, on her own: but maybe the mother had to use all her strength just to shield the skinny kid from the danger the mother dealt with every day. Maybe the reason the skinny kid could be a tomboy was because her mother had the guts to keep standing where she was: between the skinny kid and the danger – maybe, again, the danger from the streets. And maybe the kid thought she was helpless, but really she was standing, strong, as a shield, sacrificing herself to defend her child. 

And maybe now the skinny kid, no longer a tomboy or a kid, is herself standing and trying to be strong for her own child: protecting her own child. And now, when she has to find her strength to be a mother, to be strong for her child, in nothing more than believing her own myth, because she never got the support from her mother that would have let her grow up with the strength to be strong when she became a mother, maybe now she understands that her mother had to do the same, find strength somewhere within herself, because her mother also didn’t strength from the generation before. Maybe the tomboy’s mother also swore not to grow up to be a woman and be helpless – until she became a mother to a skinny tomboy kid. And then somehow found the strength to protect her kid, who grew up, if not confident, at least safer; and then maybe that kid, grown up into a legendary/self, could find the strength to give her child both safety and confidence.

Even if sometimes, in the deep darkness of sleep, she wakes up scared – a relic left from her difficult childhood, which wasn’t all bad, really, since she got to ride her bike to the ocean and go fishing, got to fly from roof to roof for blocks, thanks to the freedom her mother won for her, even if she had enough pain and fear to not understand what a gift that freedom was – and she has to stand in for mother, now gone, and for a moment, mother herself.

Until she can get up and mother her child.