Forbidden to Forget

“It is a dangerous thing to forget”, these are the words chosen by Judith Ortiz Cofer in 1987 to begin her poem “El Olvido”. Judith Ortiz Cofer is a Puerto Rican writer born in Hormigueros in 1952. Her father had a military career; this made her go back and forth between Puerto Rico and the United States. Therefore we can infer she has a mixed culture childhood, which later on is reflected in her writing. Ortiz Cofer is best known for her works of creative nonfiction; she began her writing career with poetry, which she feels “contains the essence of language.” (Poetry Foundation) It is said that Oritz Cofer’s work contains a mix of her cultural heritage and we can see this clearly in her poem, “El Olvido”. In her poem “El Olvido” Ortiz Cofer takes a usual problem and gives to it a touch of our Puerto Rican culture.

El Olvido

By Judith Ortiz Cofer

It is a dangerous thing
to forget the climate of your birthplace,
to choke out the voices of dead relatives
when in dreams they call you
by your secret name.
It is dangerous
to spurn the clothes you were born to wear
for the sake of fashion; dangerous
to use weapons and sharp instruments
you are not familiar with; dangerous
to disdain the plaster saints
before which your mother kneels
praying with embarrassing fervor
that you survive in the place you have chosen to live:
a bare, cold room with no pictures on the walls,
a forgetting place where she fears you will die
of loneliness and exposure.
Jesús, María, y José, she says,
el ovido is a dangerous thing. 

Let’s take “El Olvido” part by part. “It is a dangerous thing to forget” it is clear from the beginning what the theme of this poem is, forgetting, throughout the poem she expresses what is so dangerous to forget. “It is a dangerous thing to forget the climate of your birthplace”, dangerous it is to forget where we come from, where and how we were born. It is not just a matter of what country we were born, but from what mother and in what family were you born. Surely it influences the place of your birth, but the place where we were born and from who and how we were born should be equally important and should not be forgotten. “It is dangerous to spurn the clothes you were born to wear”. It is dangerous to change how you are because of stereotypes of society. I honestly believe it should be forbidden to change who we are and how we dress, talk, walk, eat, and dream because of fashion, society, and other sources of influences. “Dangerous to disdain the plaster saints before which your mother kneels praying with embarrassing fervor that you survive in the place you have chosen to live”, it is not forbidden to grow and move on, but you should not forget the things you left behind. We should not forget the hands that changed our diapers and healed our knees when we fell. Yes, it is our duty to prosper and walk away from our birth place in order to grow and become adults, but in that path forgetting how you got to where you are standing is not part of it. “Jesús, María, y José”, she says, “el ovido is a dangerous thing.” It is wise to forgive but not to forget, that is how I see it. We should forgive the harms the past brought to us, but we should never forget the past.

This poem spoke to me because as a college student I am in that transition, learning to grow without forgetting. I am learning to forgive and heal those bruises of the past without forgetting who I am, from where I am and especially how I got to where I am right now. I am Amanda Dee Moreno Hernández, daughter of Shylla Dee Hernández and Andres Mejia. I am a spoiled kid and a daddy’s little girl; still I am a young independent adult. Yes, I get lost in this so called life and it is remembering how I got there that I get back on track. I promise to not forget the tires I made my mother drop in order to make her smile in the future. I promise to multiply the laughs I had shared with my dad. I promise to forgive those that in the past made wounds to my heart. I promise to take what my mother and fathers thought me and teach it to those around me. I promise to remember and not to forget. Are you willing to remember instead of forgetting?