Seventeen Syllables
By Hisaye Yamamoto-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Jesus, Jesus, she called silently, not certain whether she was invoking the help of the son of the Carrascos or of God, until there returned sweetly the memory of Jesus' hand, how it had touched her and where."
Seventeen Syllables describes the unhappy life of a woman who the reader is led to believe has been struggling with depression for several years. Up until the end of the story, the content centralizes around the woman's love and obsession with poetry -- specifically, haikus. The family lives on a tomato farm and the daughter, Rosie, develops an emotional connection with Jesus Carrasco, a son of the family that helps them tend their farm.
As the story progresses, the husband and father of the family is seen becoming more and more hateful of his wife's obsession with haiku. He is slowly alienated from her life; when guests come over, his wife will take the literary-inclined guests to her study to discuss poetry, while he would be left entertaining the rest. The separation between the two of them seems to develop into a chasm of mutual disinterest.
Finally, at the end of the novel, when the father burns the prize that his wife earned in a poetry submission contest, the wife takes Rosie by the wrists and tells her that she was suicidal before meeting Rosie's father and that marrying him was her alternative to suicide. Upon telling her daughter this, she makes her daughter promise to never get married. Rosie promises, but looks off into the distance while doing so, and her mother senses her insincerity.
The last few pages of the story convey the entire message of the story; to me, the story illustrated the negative repercussions that being unhappy to one's spouse can have on the couple's offspring. Basically, the mother was depressed for her entire adult life. She was depressed before she married Rosie's father, and did not (and may not still) truly love him when she married him. Therefore, her depression continued to spiral in a negative trajectory. When she finally found something she was passionate about, her husband was jealous because she did not devout the same amount of time and attention to him as she did to the art of poetry; thus, causing the husband to displace his anger on her art.
When her husband finally snaps and burns her first place prize, the sign that it gives to Rosie is nothing less than an eccentric display of hopelessness in regards to love and happiness. Her father's actions and her mother's words illustrate to Rosie that love is terrible; that it ruins lives.
The story's message is that one's actions affect more than just oneself. Actions and words send a message beyond what one realizes at the time.
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