Child Voice in Monsoon Mansion

While reading this book, I tried to keep in mind what craft elements were being utilized and when, what I found effective, what choices Cinelle Barnes made and why. There is most notably, the use of a child narrator to tell the chapters; the reader’s understanding of the events in Barnes world are limited to the understanding of the narrator at the age she was when the events occured. This, naturally, works to establish trust in the narrator as reliable and uncorrupt, and to form an emotional attachment to her quickly. There is the added benefit of allowing the narrator to explore the world in this story as a child would. Wars feel more inhumane, poverty more unjust, beauty more spectacular out of the mouth of a child and Barnes uses this to her story’s advantage. A child’s lack of understanding can be used to inform the reader of the absurdity of a situation or simply, of its danger. But a child narrator can also employ crude, aggressive descriptors of the world most adults have taken great pains to unlearn. The way the girl describes being shamed for having dark skin, the descriptors of the cock fight, the passing of her infant brother, are all painted carefully by someone with the guts to name what is and is no longer, what is immoral, what causes pain. Many times, she calls Tachio “the dead baby” and “dead cold” (23).  

Again, with young narrators, an author is afforded the ability to use a backdrop of tragedy and write scenes of play. In Monsoon Mansion, the setting is political unrest, it is financial instability, it is adults who abandon their roles as designated caregivers, and eventually the grueling realities of growing up without anything required for a safe and healthy upbringing. She learns to fetch water in buckets to have enough to boil and filter to drink and bathe in but will make friends and play house with Elma—as children in close proximity will ultimately do. She traumatically witnesses a cock fight in her own yard but can still describe the affection she has for the cat who gave birth in her closet, how warm she feels when her three-legged puppy accepts them too. Every moment of connection and joy feels more resilient, more revolutionary for a child who might easily give up after so much loss and so little stability. But we get to see her again and again simply being a kid. She swims, she makes up songs, eats ice cream, loses herself in books and imagination, she plays with Kuya’s Gameboy, wants to be a ninja turtle. Her childhood was sandwiched by the extreme pressures of affluent life with her family in the mansion, being a three-year old debutant, and then by the crushing weight of poverty—not having running water, sanitary pads when her period came, starving at school when other students could afford lunch. But in both scenarios, she makes friends, finds hobbies, entertains herself and finds opportunities to play that a child outside of such extreme circumstances might do just the same. It was a powerful choice to center a memoir around a child narrator and not interject adult knowledge the author has now, does not use hindsight and modern context for the events. Barnes allows them to unfold and trusts, as we do, the small hands of her younger self will catch them.