Xiomara’s home life is wildly dysfunctional and, at times, extremely abusive—if Xiomara in particular doesn’t follow Mami’s rules to the letter, Mami hits her. Papi is around but, according to Xiomara, barely has a presence in their home. Meanwhile, both Xiomara and Twin feel compelled to hide their unhappiness in their repressive household. All of this stems from familial and cultural expectations that, for at least two generations, have made life difficult for everyone. In this way, The Poet X critiques parents’ unfair or inappropriate expectations of their children and illustrates how, if those expectations go unchallenged, they create situations ripe for violence and unhappiness.
Though Xiomara knows that her sense of being repressed has a lot to do with Catholicism and Dominican culture more broadly, she understands that she’s also being forced to atone for or remedy repressive situations from Mami’s past specifically. As a young woman in the Dominican Republic, Mami wanted to be a nun and dedicate her life to Jesus. However, Mami’s parents refused to allow her to take this path, and instead forced her to marry Papi so that she could move legally to the United States. Per Mami’s religious beliefs, Papi caused her to compromise her relationship with Jesus, but it’s also impossible per Catholic teachings for Mami to divorce Papi and recommit herself to a religious life. Because Mami was denied the opportunity to fully commit herself to the religious life, Mami makes it a priority for Xiomara to follow in her footsteps to the furthest extent possible. In other words, Xiomara doesn’t have a choice of whether or not she’d like to go to church; she has to go because Mami wants to see Xiomara achieve a life of devotion that she herself never did.
However, Xiomara doesn’t want to live the religious life her mother never got to live—Xiomara has far too many questions about God to be ready to commit herself to even confirmation, which often makes Xiomara the target of Mami’s verbal wrath or physical violence. In this way, The Poet X shows clearly how enforcing expectations violently is something that people learn and ultimately pass on to future generations—even if previous generations recognize the pain this causes, as Mami understands that her parents’ expectations for her meant that she didn’t get to live the life she wanted.
While Xiomara is well aware of the disconnect between what she wants for herself and what Mami wants for her, it’s shocking for her to discover that Twin—who, as far as Xiomara can tell, is perfect in that he’s extremely smart, devout, and male—also struggles to deal with the expectations placed on him. Like Xiomara, Twin looks forward to going to college so that he can escape their household. Though in many respects Twin has it better than Xiomara does simply by virtue of being male, the fact that he’s also counting down the days until he can leave makes it even clearer that the violence and dysfunction Xiomara experiences isn’t an isolated case—even someone like Twin, who appears to be following all the rules, still feels stifled. Twin feels this way in part because he hates seeing Mami abuse Xiomara, but his concerns are also unique to his situation: he’s gay and not out to his parents—or, for much of the novel, even to Xiomara. While Xiomara includes none of Twin’s feelings on the matter, she does explain to the reader that being male, Twin has different responsibilities according to Mami, and some of those responsibilities and expectations are tied to being attracted to girls, not boys.
Both Xiomara and Twin’s reactions and choices regarding how they deal with Mami’s expectations suggest that in addition to being violent and oppressive, it’s also ultimately futile for parents to cling as tightly to their ideas about who their children should be as Mami does. Importantly, both Xiomara and Twin pursue what they know they want, even though they also know very well that Mami would lash out violently were she to know that they were defying her. Xiomara still writes poetry that she knows would anger Mami and spends time with Aman, while Twin has a secret relationship with a boy named Cody. For them, family means secrecy more than anything else, and their home isn’t a safe space to be the people they truly are or want to be.
Mami’s transformation at the end of the novel to become more understanding of Xiomara is an arguably far-fetched outcome—abusers generally don’t stop abusing their victims or reevaluate their harmful ideas overnight. Nevertheless, it portrays a far healthier dynamic, and one that the novel suggests is worth striving for. By reevaluating her expectations of Xiomara, Mami is able to be happier herself and support Xiomara as well, and these more flexible expectations give Xiomara room to continue her process of self-discovery without fear of violent consequences.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family, Abuse, and Expectations ThemeTracker
Family, Abuse, and Expectations Quotes in The Poet X
The other girls call me conceited. Ho. Thot. Fast.
When your body takes up more room than your voice
you are always the target of well-aimed rumors,
which is why I let my knuckles talk for me.
Which is why I learned to shrug when my name was replaced
by insults.
I look at her scarred knuckles.
I know exactly how she was taught
faith.
Their gazes and words
are heavy with all the things
they want you to be.
It is ungrateful to feel like a burden.
It is ungrateful to resent my own birth.
I know that Twin and I are miracles.
Aren’t we reminded every single day?
“Good girls don’t wear tampones.
Are you still a virgin? Are you having relations?”
I didn’t know how to answer her, I could only cry.
She shook her head and told me to skip church that day.
Threw away the box of tampons, saying they were for cueros.
That she would buy me pads. Said eleven was too young.
That she would pray on my behalf.
I didn’t understand what she was saying.
But I stopped crying. I licked at my split lip.
I prayed for the bleeding to stop.
And I knew then what I’d known since my period came:
my body was trouble. I had to pray the trouble out
of the body God gave me. My body was a problem.
And I didn’t want any of these boys to be the ones to solve it.
I wanted to forget I had this body at all.
When I was little
Mami was my hero.
But then I grew breasts
and although she was always extra hard on me,
her attention became something else,
like she wanted to turn me
into the nun
she could never be.
He grins at me and shrugs. “I came here and practiced a lot.
My pops never wanted to put me in classes. Said it was too soft.”
And now his smile is a little sad.
And I think about all the things we could be
if we were never told our bodies were not built for them.
I don’t yell how the whole block whispers
when I walk down the street
about all the women
who made a cuero out of him.
But men are never called cueros.
I’ll be anything that makes sense
of this panic. I’ll loosen myself from this painful flesh.
See, a cuero is any skin. A cuero
is just a covering. A cuero is a loose thing.
Tied down by no one. Fluttering
and waving in the wind. Flying. Flying. Gone.
But even business deals are promises.
And we still married in a church.
And so I never walked away from him
although I tried my best to get back
to my first love.
And confirmation is the last step I can give you.
Because so many of the poems tonight
felt a little like our own stories.
Like we saw and were seen.
And how crazy would it be
if I did that for someone else?
I lay it across my wrist
and cinch the clasps closed.
Her daughter on one side,
myself on the other.
I have no more poems. My mind blanks.
A roar tears from my mouth.
“Burn it! Burn it.
This is where the poems are,” I say,
thumping a fist against my chest.
“Will you burn me? Will you burn me, too?
You would burn me, wouldn’t you, if you could?”
She puts a soft hand on my arm
and I look into the face of a woman
not much older than me,
a woman with a Spanish last name,
who loves books and poetry,
who I notice for the first time is pretty,
who has a soft voice and called my house
because she was worried
and the words are out before I know it:
