1. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Engle, Margarita. The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom. New York: Henry Holt, 2008. ISBN: 978-0805086744.
2. PLOT SUMMARY
Characters Rosa, Lieutenant Death, José, young Silvia, and other townspeople, and military representatives tell the highly emotional story of Cuba's three waves of war for independence that represent over five decades of violent struggle during the second half of the 19th century in this poetic historical masterpiece by Margarita Engle.
3. CRITICAL ANALYSIS
The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom uses free verse poetry to describe the struggles of the Cuban people during their long war for independence from the Spanish from 1850-1899. The historical fiction story is told by multiple narrators: Rosa, who is a former slave turned nurse/natural healer; Lieutenant Death, a former slave hunter whose life-long pursuit of Rosa consumes him; José, Rosa's husband and protector of her nomadic medical care efforts; and Silvia, a young preteen, who has lost her entire family to the wars, and has escaped the world's first concentration camp to train as a healer with Rosa. There are other insights from characters like writers, community members, and military personnel, but they are not as involved as the four mentioned above.
I listened to this book as an audio text via Overdrive from my public library. From start to finish, Engle's poetry rises and falls with the action. "I cannot save the poet from bullets," Rosa laments, as she looks over the flowers and natural herbs she collects and grows to try and help those who are sick, show signs of infection, or injured. But her flowers and herbs are up against a growing wave of cruelty and despair that is hard to confront. During the war with the Spanish, the first concentration camp in human history is created to detain Cuban peasants and slaves. Rosa identifies the camp as what it is — a prison, as there were no houses or tents, just lots of people herded into one place and kept behind fences with very little food or care.
Young Silvia who is taken to the camp at age 11, after the troops steal what they want from her house and burn it to the ground, is motivated to stay alive to fulfill her grandmother's suggestion that she find Rosa and join her cause, if anything should happen to her family.
As I listened to the audio I wonder will Lt. Death ever catch up with Rosa and what will happen if he is finally able to act on his decades of mounting hatred? When slavery ends in The Surrender Tree in 1886, many years after Rosa and Lt. Death meet for the first time, Lt. Death is confused to see light and dark men fighting as allies, even though they are all people from different regions and socio-economic divisions. Cuban landowners fighting next to their slaves from the Canary Islands, Africa, China, etc. He is despondent that the "art of slave hunting" is lost, and he feels devalued and frustrated by the change in the world. There's a definite reason Rosa calls him Lt. Death, even though she met him when he was only a boy. His survival had always depended on enslaving and making others afraid of him and perpetuating the racial and socio-economic inequalities in Cuba, and he is unapologetic for it.
In contrast, for her whole life as a healer, Rosa stays calm and committed to her values to assist everyone who is injured: Cubans, Spaniards, Americans, etc. She does not discriminate by what side a soldier fights on, the color of their skin, or their socio-economic place in society. Rosa's narration by Yesenia Cabrero is hard to listen to sometimes. It's like she reads too slowly. Her breaks in her lines don't flow as well as they could, but the other voice actors don't have the same difficulties. Their monologues roll of their tongues effortlessly in character. In the audio edition, each actor has to say the name of their character before they read, so the listener understands whose ideas follow. This is sometimes helpful and sometimes jarring to the flow of the text. It is important to know what's going on, but by a third of the way through the book, listeners, even younger audiences, are likely to know which actor represents each character and the identification seems unnecessary and obtrusive, where as in written text, a name at the beginning of a chapter is quickly processed and moved on from.
Engle's story represents many themes common to Hispanic Literature. The concept of strong family and community bonds, the oral tradition of passing stories on from generation to generation, and addressing specific historical and cultural aspects of Cuban and Spanish history are all themes repeated through the book. For example, José protects Rosa's work and moves the medical facilities from cave to hut and back to caves. He looks over her and watches for enemies. Rosa takes in Silvia and raises her after recognizing she has lost everything and everyone to the war. Silvia holds dear her memories of her grandmother and how much her grandmother trusted in Rosa, so Silvia chooses to follow Rosa's lead to make positive changes in her homeland by training as a healer.
Historically, Engle's spoken author's note says that Rosa's character is based on a real person in history—Rosa Bayamesa. Engle also recognizes that Rosa's existence in the war as a doctor is strange, from a political standpoint, not just because of her unwavering care for all people, but because most other medical personnel that were recognized during this time period weren't women -- and they certainly weren't former slaves. Rosa was the first woman to be named Captain of Military Health. (As a side note, Margarita Engle was the first Latina author to be awarded the Newbery Award in 2009.)
In addition, at the beginning of the book, slaves are escaping from their Cuban masters, but it doesn't take long for the relationships between the Cuban landowners and the Spanish invaders to deteriorate causing the landowners to free their slaves and to join up with the independent resistance fighting against the common enemy of foreign invasion. After witnessing this integration among her own countrymen, Rosa is confused when the Americans show up and light men and dark men work in segregated brigades, but, as they die, are buried together. The nonsensical reasons behind segregation repeat over and over in this book.
By the end, Silvia, who has grown to be a young adult and a volunteer nurse of Rosa's, lives up to Rosa's self-sacrificial creed as a caretaker: "The wounded are sacred. We never leave them. When every else flees the battlefield nurses are the ones who rush to carry the wounded to Rosa. I am learning how to stay far too busy for worries about dying."
4. AWARDS AND REVIEW EXCERPTS
Newbery Medal
Pura Belpré Award
Claudia Lewis Award
Jane Addams Children's Book Award
ALA Best Books for Young Adults
NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Book
From Booklist
"The switching perspectives personalize the dramatic political history, including the establishment of the world's first 'reconcentration camps' to hold prisoners, as well as the role of slave owners who freed their slaves and joined the resistance against Spain."
From Audiofile
"Written in free verse, the novel presents a challenge to the narrators, who have to respect the form of the poetry and the flow of the story."
5. CONNECTIONS
Most American students may not know that the idea for concentration camps came from Cuba's war with Spain. They will likely first associate concentration camps with the Holocaust in World War II. Researching the many "first" in war tactics came from the Cuban fight for independence, including how countries used encampment to detain prisoners either in the name of security (American Japanese internment camps) or in the name of genocide is an important part of understanding and identifying worldwide current and past humanitarian crises.
In addition, The Surrender Tree can be complemented with another one of Margarita Engle's books, The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano (ISBN 978-0312659288). With America's constantly changing relationship with Cuba over the last five years, knowing more about the history of the people to our south and their culture is critical in understanding how the two countries have related to one another as close neighbors with differing political views.
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