Jessica Zafra's The Age of Umbrage

Jessica Zafra’s The Age of Umbrage is exploring a time when everything is taken as an offense when you didn’t know any better, because, even if you believed you were smart, in reality, you were naïve, but you cared so much that you felt every arrow poisoned and aimed in your direction, even if those arrows existed only in your mind.

Offense is easily taken by the young, and this could be against one’s clique or isolation, status or upbringing, physicality or nerdiness, religion or lack of it. The young are often offended by old people telling them how they know nothing at all. There is that admonition to remain where they are, to not venture into paths they aren’t familiar with because that path could lead to disaster as their elders would attest it would. And who else but the most immediate family members could scare the young people away from pursuing their interests, or inclinations, or creative imaginations?

When the very young exhibit maturity, the very old are threatened. The young have no business knowing-it-all. Only the old have the right to be wise.

But it is not just the old, who offends, but also those who think they will be forever young, who believe that age should always be lived 'at the moment’ no matter how. They go by every trend within the circumference of expectations. They feel untouchable and are determined to show everybody how crossing them could lead to an incognito status. By their judgment is how ‘different’ is defined – to what extent can one be ‘different.’ They are fierce, authoritarian bullies.

A young person is also offended, even if she barely knows how to articulate the offense, by the corruption at home, school, and the community. She will try to cope as much as she can, via the gadgets and paraphernalia of her age, but there is no escaping the consequences of corruption, seeping into the stealthiest of homes, and eventually crushing dreams.

And then, there is that offense which the young do not expect at their age  –  death.

In Jessica Zafra’s Novel How ‘Offensive’ are the Events and Issues?

Umbrage – a word meaning “to feel offended, insulted or upset by”. How ‘offensive’ events and issues are, seem understated in Jessica Zafra’s novel. Satire dominates sentiment in the tone of this novel while a backdrop of the most unsettling political events of the 90s appends an inner turmoil. Guadalupe takes umbrage at everything the young are naturally confused about. Although she acts impermeable, encased in some uppity-class bubble, she is very much aware of her otherness. Her mom Asuncion had her when she was thirty-two, but Guadalupe’s coming-of-age seems to have begun since she was barely three, when she fluently started asking the most basic of questions: What is your name?

Guadalupe is named after one of the Virgin’s apparitions. The novel situates her being ‘in between.’ Home in Ms. Zafra’s narrative is an abstract location, desired and dreamed of, never owned or claimed. This is an unforgivable offense beyond Guadalupe’s control.

And as sharp as these are in the novel as in life, these upsetting threats to one’s moral and physical well-being are most often denied or ignored. The young have gotten immune to the cold-shoulder treatment of the elders.

Jessica Zafra takes umbrage at the nonchalance accorded to the youth. Spot on, her novel delves into the deep, dark recesses of being young and clueless.