English · Chapter 20
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) was a Puerto Rican poet, teacher and journalist, and one of the most admired voices of twentieth-century Latin American poetry. She wrote openly about womanhood, love, social justice and the independence of Puerto Rico at a time when women were expected to remain silent and obedient. "I Was My Own Route" is an English translation of her Spanish poem "Yo misma fui mi ruta", which appeared in her first collection, Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows, 1938). It is a free-verse feminist poem in which the speaker looks back at how she refused the life that men and tradition had designed for her and chose, instead, to make her own road.
The poem opens with a confession that returns later as a refrain: "I wanted to be like men wanted me to be." The speaker admits that, at first, she tried to fit the mould that society had prepared for a woman. But she immediately describes what such a life would have been: only "an attempt at life" and "a game of hide and seek with my being." Living according to male expectations would have meant hiding her true self and never really living at all. She then explains why she could not continue on that path: "But I was made of nows." She belongs to the present moment, and her feet, standing firmly on the earth, "would not accept walking backwards." Instead they moved "forward, forward," mocking the ashes of the dead past in order to reach "the kiss of new paths."
In the second movement she describes the cost of this choice. With every step forward on her own route, her back was torn by the "desperate flapping wings of the old guard." The old guard stands for tradition, patriarchy and the conservative elders who tried to drag her back. Their attack is desperate because they can feel that they are losing her.
The third movement records her liberation. The branch that tied her to the old tree of custom "was unpinned forever." With every whiplash from the old order, her gaze moved further and further away from the "distant familiar horizons" of her upbringing. Her face took on an expansion that came from within, an expression that revealed "a feeling of intimate liberation." This feeling, she says, rose from the balance between her life and the truth of the new paths she had chosen: she was at last living in agreement with herself.
In the fourth movement the speaker, with her course now set in the present, feels that she is "a blossom of all the soils of the earth," of soils without history and soils without a future, of the soil that belongs to all men and all epochs. She no longer belongs to one family, one tradition or one time; she belongs to humanity and to life itself. The single line "And I was all in me as was life in me" sums up her sense of wholeness.
The final movement repeats the opening lines but gives them a new ending. Because she was "made of nows," when the heralds announced her at the grand parade of the old guard, the desire to follow men twisted and died inside her, and "the homage was left waiting for me." The honour that society promised to an obedient woman was never collected, because she had already gone her own way.