17 pages • 34 minutes read
Margarita EngleTula ["Books are door shaped"]
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Fantastic and Magical
The motif of fantasy imagery runs throughout most of the poem. Books themselves are considered magical because they contain the “enchantment / of words” (Lines 18-19). Magic books appear in many contemporary and historical works, such as Prospero’s books in Shakespeare’s Tempest. Grimoires (alchemist’s and other magician’s books) are categorized as occult because they contain secret or hidden knowledge. Tula’s mother’s act of banning her from reading transforms what might have been her father’s normal books into occult texts.
In addition to books and supernatural creatures, Engle’s poem contains metaphoric language that draws upon well-known fantasy motifs, like labyrinths. Tula describes her loneliness and confusion as a “tangled maze” (Line 37). Labyrinths appear in many Hispanic American fantasy works, such as stories and poems by Jorge Luis Borges, as well as the movie Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro.
Glass and Invisibility
Tula’s mother locks books in a “clear glass cabinet” (Line 13). In the poem “Tula [On lonely nights I remember],” a companion piece in The Lightning Dreamer, Tula breaks this “glass bookcase” (Line 7). Engle’s reference to a glass ceiling (a barrier for women to achieve a certain level in their careers) in her 2013 book is a way to convey to modern audiences how Tula broke barriers for women in the 19th century. While Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda did publish and receive acclaim for her writing during her lifetime, she was not allowed to enroll in the Royal Academy in Madrid.
Like clear glass, a transparent medium, Tula turns inward and creates stories in her mind. Her imagination produces an “invisible book” (Line 39). Rather than locked in a cabinet, these stories are locked in her mind. Tying back to the fantasy motif, invisibility is also a common desire of alchemists and other creators of magic books (grimoires). Invisibility can also represent one aspect of how women experience sexism: Women’s accomplishments are often invisible or tough to see when compared with men’s comparable doings.
Time
Time is repeated in several stanzas in “Tula.” It is a part of the overarching fantasy motif in that the genre is known for looking back on “distant times” (Line 30)—often a medieval or pre-industrial world. Expanding outward, books in many genres allow readers to look “across [...] centuries” (Lines 4-5), including both modern historical fiction—which Engle’s poetry captures in lyric form—as well as reading books by authors who lived centuries ago.
The temporal transportation of books is also connected to a recent “ghost” (Line 32) of Tula’s—her father. Tula longs for a previous time within her own life, when her father allowed her to read. His death divides her life into a time with access to books and a time without access to them. Books are one way she can remember her father and later in The Lightning Dreamer, it is the memory of her father that leads to her breaking the bookcase her mother locked to liberate her father’s books and her own mind.
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By Margarita Engle
