20 pages • 40 minutes read
Alberto RíosWhen There Were Ghosts
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2014A 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
Smoke
Cigarette smoke is the way ghosts enter the poem. As the way that ghosts enter the world of the living, smoke symbolizes a bridge. The word “smoke” appears in Lines 3, 5, 16, and 21. It is also referred to as “wavering mist of the cigarettes” (Line 8). Smoke and mists are insubstantial, like ghosts, and these memories carry with them emotions and nostalgia, just like the smoke carried the images of the movies so many decades ago.
Stars
In the poem, stars first refer to movie stars, but the motif of stars develops the theme of Blended Identity when the speaker describes how the smoke distorts the images of “María Félix and Pedro Armendáriz” (Line 17) just enough that they begin to resemble his “aunt and one of my uncles” (Line 18). This allows the audience of the movie to feel like they are “the story and the stuff and the stars” (Line 23). The smoke highlights how characters are symbolic representations of moviegoers. Blended Identity, as the stars projected on screen and smoke, heightens the experience of going to the movies by offering a sense of inclusion and collectivity.
Using the term stars, in addition to actors, also makes the reader think about celestial bodies. “Looking up” (Line 11) in a movie theater is compared to looking at the night sky, and being “the stuff and the stars" (Line 23) grounds the idea of inclusivity to all of humanity through the common composition of our bodies and our universe. The word stars having dual meanings of movie stars and celestial bodies also highlights other dualities in the poem, such as the dual location of Nogales in America and Mexico.
Dance and Dream
The last line of the poem is “We ourselves were alive in the dance of the dream” (24). Dream can refer to a legislative act (the DREAM Act) as well as an unconscious creation of the mind. However, the specific phrase “alive in the dance of the dream” symbolizes how the moviegoer can use past creations to feel alive. Ghosts—the dead and the past—haunt the poem. However, nostalgia is a way to feel revived, or brought back to life.
Movies offer a comforting affirmation of life, even if they feature stars who are dead and/or are about the past. Dancing, unlike ghosts and smoke, is a physical and corporeal act and a way of feeling anchored in the current moment through movement. At the same time, dances are types of movement that often come from the past since dance techniques, steps, and choreography are handed down through generations. The art of embodying the past brings one into the present.
