The Island Within

In “The Island Within,” one overarching theme is the concept of home. In the first six lines of the poem, the speaker describes the previous night at Behar’s house, complete with descriptions of the cold, the winter snow, “the frigid air” (Line 3) and the “bare oaks” (Line 3). The inhospitable environment emphasizes the contrast between the outdoors and the interior of a home. In Line 6, the speaker focuses on Behar’s house, describing “the pink gables of your Victorian home” (Line 6). Blanco chooses to describe the house as “Victorian” (Line 6), a building style in imitation of homes built during the reign of Queen Victoria in Britain. The reason this word choice and description is important is because it serves as a contrast for the lines to come when the speaker describes Behar’s Cuban upbringing and memories. The speaker introduces the question of the real meaning of home as Behar, within this uncharacteristic house, “[practices] / mambo by the fireplace” (Lines 8-9). The theme of home expands as the speaker watches Behar dance, taking her body to Cuba, “but not [her] life” (Line 12), as the snow falls outside, “1,600 miles / away from Cuba” (Lines 13-14).

In the second stanza, the speaker’s mention of Behar’s memories of the Cuban street name “Calle Aguacate,” (Line 24) and her family’s colonial township, “Guanabacoa” (Line 24) also illuminates this concept of home. In “The Island Within,” home is defined not by where one lives, but by the origins of one’s family and past. For Behar, home is where the “[imagined] faces for names / chiseled on the graves of [her] family” (Lines 22-23) are present, and for the speaker, home  is “the sugarcane fields / [his] father once cut” (Lines 36-37) and the house where his grandmother sits “in the kitchen making arroz-con-leche–” (Line 41). The concept of home is tangled with the past as well as a place and a time that no longer exists. Home is “that unreachable island within the island / you still call home” (Lines 32-33).