CENTRO Journal

volume xxxiii • number iii • fall 2021

INTERVIEW / ENTREVISTA

Memory and Revisionist Work in Daughters of the Stone: An Interview with Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa

keishla rivera-lopez

I flew to Puerto Rico on March 2019 as the graduate assistant for a Michigan State University study away “alternative spring break” trip for undergraduate students enrolled in Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa’s course on Puerto Rican history since 1898. These students belonged to a cohort of the Citizen Scholars Program at the Michigan State’s College of Arts and Letters that contained a project element which led them to do service work. This study away trip was spearheaded by Dr. Figueroa as part of the #ProyectoPalabrasPR, a radical literacy project in Puerto Rico, collaboration with Dr. Mayra Santos Febres’ Salón Literario and Festival de la Palabra.1 During the trip students were brought to different sites within the metropolitan area of Puerto Rico, including San Juan and Carolina, to learn how Puerto Ricans were still coping with and reconstructing their communities in the aftermath of the 2017 storm, Hurricane María—the most catastrophic storm to hit the island.

At a bomba and plena dance workshop, I ran into Mayra Santos-Febres and she asked me “what was I up to” in reference to my graduate studies. When I informed her that I was conducting a close reading and textual analysis of Llanos-Figueroa’s novel, she instantly put me in touch with her and insisted I meet her. After a few email exchanges, I called Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa from a Denny’s diner in Isla Verde waiting to meet her and talk about her novel. I explained to Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa that I was fascinated by the storytelling and the employment of it as a motif via the characters and the titular stone. Daughters of the Stone is original in its imaginary and captures Puerto Rico’s rich and diverse histories, which are often omitted or minimized in other texts that depict Puerto Rican history.

Llanos-Figueroa’s text follows a trans-generational account of an Afro-Puerto Rican family through the women’s stories and their journeys through motherhood. In doing so, Llanos-Figueroa centers Black women’s narratives across five generations and portrays them as characters with agency and voice. My goal here is to evoke how important and provocative Llanos-Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone is in the ways we think and conceptualize Puerto Rican memory and history, and thus define Puerto Rican culture and identity. In thinking about how many writers in the Puerto Rican literary canon miss the opportunity to provide a more just revisionist history in their fictive works, questions concerning the literary canon and misrepresentation arise. In what follows, I include my conversation with Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa in thematic relation to my analysis and breakdown of her novel, Daughters of the Stone, while also examining the motifs in the text that suggest Afro-Puerto Rican healing practices and storytelling offer an alternative archive.

A Contrapuntal Meditation on Daughters of the Stone

Keishla Rivera-Lopez (KRL): What stories/persons do you think are missing in Puerto Rican literature? Do you think the Puerto Rican literary canon has made enough progress or what type of work is still needed to be done?

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa (DLF): I absolutely do not think the canon is open to the diversity within the culture. Much lip service is given to our being a combination of three cultures—the Taino, the Spanish and the African. But I find no real intellectual curiosity, scholarly study, nor academic recognition of our accomplishments or contributions. Some interest was expressed beginning in the late 20th century and some studies have been done more recently, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Enslavement and African-descendancy are taboo subjects. Our contributions to our society have never been held in equal footing as European achievements.

As to the type of work that could be done, I believe serious historical inquiry and archeological studies would help remedy this vacuum. When I say serious, I mean not just depending on the written record of the enslavers, those who benefitted from the institution of slavery, but study of oral histories and other sources from the point of view of Afro-descendants. Some scholars have begun compiling oral history accounts for some time. Additionally, epigenetics, genealogy and the arts and literature of Afro-Puerto Ricans are other fields that would bring important information to the foreground. I noticed in my research that often scholars outside of the island ascribe more worth to our arts that our own scholars.

KRL: Where do you see your work in the Puerto Rican literary canon?

DLF: I think my work falls closest to the works of contemporary Afro-Boricua writers on the island: Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Mayra Santos Febres, and Yvonne Denis Rosario. Our styles are very different, but our themes are very similar. We are insistently grounded in our African roots and Afro-Boricua traditions. We need to give voice to those who have been rendered voiceless. We explore aspects of black womanhood that have been marginalized within the mainstream culture both in the U.S. and in PR.

KRL: What compelled you to write this story? Were there absence(s) in Puerto Rican literature, and maybe Caribbean or Latinx literature, that prompted you to write Daughters of the Stone? Did you feel represented in the literature(s)?

DLF: Not only did I not feel represented in the literatures of either Puerto Rico or the United States, I felt erased from the society as the only images of Puerto Ricans a) looked nothing like me b) were stereotypical and offensive. Those images bore no resemblance to the people in my life. I felt it was time to give a more inclusive face and more realistic words to the Puerto Rican portrayed in the media and on the page.

Afro-Boricuas: Puerto Rican Culture and Representation

In an effort to recover the Puerto Rican cultural traditions of the past and present, Llanos-Figueroa focuses on healing via Afro-diasporic religions as a mothering practice for Afro-Puerto Rican women, and thus a Puerto Rican practice. It is hard to ignore the labor of recovery work in this novel because the author, Llanos-Figueroa, and the protagonist, Carisa, rewrite Puerto Rican History.

KRL: Why was it important to include afro-diasporic religion as an important cultural tradition of the main characters? 

DLF: Traditional African religion has given people a core of strength that has allowed them to survive institutionalized brutality and systematic erasure of their true selves. It gives my characters the strength to persevere and progress. Oshun is a crucial figure in the novel, a powerful and pervasive presence in the lives of all the women throughout time and space and is a constant that helps them survive and endure.

KRL: Why did you write this novel?

DLF: I feel that Afro-Boricuas have been rendered voiceless and faceless in both American and Puerto Rican society. Our presence and contributions weren’t acknowledged until quite recently and it is still a struggle in which I have to constantly deal with people saying, “you don’t look Puerto Rican”. The prevailing myth, the stereotypical image doesn’t look like me. Erasure is a form of annihilation. Even after Hurricane María, many Americans didn’t even realize that we are American citizens as well, that we are woven into the fabric of U.S. society whether acknowledged or not. I felt that erasure had to be remedied.

KRL: Is there an aspect of recovery work in your novel due to the focus on Afro-Puerto Rican characters and their perspectives?

DLF: The word recovery doesn’t quite fit. To those outside our culture, we were invisible or purposely erased. We simply did not exist within the context of the dominant discourse. One was either “Spanish” or “Black”. The concept of Afro-descendancy within the Latino community was alien to those outside it and even within the Latino society, many of the elite closed their eyes to our contributions. The notion of an African diasporic consciousness was just not within the western imaginary. As for those of us within that reality, we never lost ourselves; therefore, there was no re-discovery. We were always there, simply not acknowledged by the dominant white culture—neither or contributions nor our very existence.

The principal plot that carries the novel is the trans-generational story of a family’s survival from slavery and the plantation system to the present told via mothers to their daughters. The conscious effort to trace Puerto Rico’s history over time demonstrates that recovery work and revisionist history are at the center of this novel. The rich familial story told by matriarchs necessitates a stone, the titular stone, and functions as a carrier of family histories by connecting daughters to their ancestors and ancestral lands. This may be considered a gesture towards afro-futurism which is a popular theme in afro-diasporic writing and captures a necessity of imagining afro-diasporic possibilities and futurities, since the moments ‘in’ the ancestral planes directly impact the given daughter’s decisions about the future. Here, memory is captured via the stone’s accessibility to the past and how it informs the present. I firmly believe Llanos-Figueroa writes a novel of the historical fiction genre which the Puerto Rican literary canon has needed for quite some time since its foundational history defined by white, elitist male writers. Since then, mostly upper-class and white Puerto Ricans have contributed to the meanings and conceptualizations of Puerto Rican culture and identity.

While this is a fictionalized text, Llanos-Figueroa frames Puerto Rican history as Black history through the depiction of the island’s economic growth and dependence on slavery and the plantation system. And, she alludes to the trauma, violence, and pain suffered by slaves while also suggesting how gendered violence led to pregnancies, children, and abuses unique to female slaves. This storytelling is essentially a way the women keep their stories alive and educate their children on their family’s (and the island’s) history. In a way the stone that is bequeathed to every daughter is an archive of family secrets, legacies, and a dispatch into an afro-futuristic past that allows the women to speak to their ancestors. It is through this stone that Mati is able to communicate with her mother and see her face, since Fela, the first mother, died after childbirth. While the oral history is a family tradition and an act of preserving memory and healing practices, it eventually transforms into a written tradition that Fela’s great-great-granddaughter, Carisa, struggles to write in part because of institutional and cultural bias. However, the tradition kept alive through five generations of women is an act of resistance and a testament to their survival.

Storytelling and Motherhood as Motifs for Resistance

The novel follows five generations of mothers: it begins with Fela who is captured in West Africa and forcibly taken to Puerto Rico as a slave, and it ends with Carisa—the daughter who is converting the family’s (and island’s) rich oral history tradition into the written word. Carisa’s family’s stories are met with rejection by her white professors at the University of Puerto Rico due to her manuscript’s usage of mythological imagery and magical realism, yet she is not defeated. Though the university professors represent institutional racism and elitism towards diverse voices and stories and thus function as a barrier for publishing stories about black women, Carisa prevails and continues to write. In fact, the Daughters of the Stone novel that we are reading can very well be Carisa’s finished manuscript.

KRL: How important is it to show the evolution of family history via storytelling practices that begin with an oral history tradition to the written word? Is Daughters of the Stone Carisa›s finished manuscript?

DLF: The novel could be construed as the product of Carisa’s search. Since she is the narrator, this would certainly be one interpretation. I trust my readers to make up their own minds. I can say that I have no plans to follow her to West Africa within the context of the narrative.

Motherhood and writing are both elements in the novel that signal Puerto Rican culture and politics and seek to answer the question of how women have been displaced by men. I argue that the complexities and realities Llanos-Figueroa pens in her book as an author is similar to the the struggle Carisa, a diasporic Afro-Puerto Rican woman, encounters and attempts to overcome in the novel. Carisa resists institutional racism symbolized by university professors in Puerto Rico and rejects the cultural and political discourses in the island that exclude her from the Puerto Rican imaginary because she is black and has an afro. Writing her family’s stories not only provides an account of Afro-Puerto Rican history and culture, but she rewrites Puerto Rican history and redefines Puerto Rican nationhood to include black history and women’s history through the focus on generational mothering practices.

I contextualize Llanos-Figueroa’s decision as author to include the novel-within-a-novel “tool” and theme of motherhood as a primary motif in her text. This is important because context is key and proves why and how the author’s feminist politics or agenda resonates with their characters who are writing texts, Carisa, and the overall integrity of their novels. The novel-within-a-novel plot is productive because it reveals to readers what the characters, and by extension the author, deems is important and vital to the rewriting of Puerto Rican history. Whose perspective matters and needs to be told? Considering the important question of what revisionist work is and whose otherwise excluded voices must be included (now), many authors fall short. Llanos-Figueroa, however, carefully pens a novel that follows five generations of Afro-Puerto Rican women since slavery to the present day in the diaspora, the island, and back to Africa. In “Flipping the Script” C. Christina Lam writes, “In response to the white-washing of Puerto Rico’s history, Llanos-Figueroa’s novel centers on the mother-daughter bond disrupted by slavery and the resulting inter-generational trauma spanning five generations to recover this silenced past” (Lam 2018, 1). More importantly, through the archiving of these women’s histories Llanos-Figueroa accomplishes two tasks: 1. She challenges which discourses of knowledge and knowledge production matter by positing Carisa as the storyteller of black women’s history and black cultural traditions in Puerto Rico’s history and, 2. She preserves the memory of these histories via a stone which functions as an archive and source of afro-diasporic religious powers that are quintessential to Afro-Puerto Rican motherhood.

KRL: Why is motherhood and mother-daughter relationships a focus of the novel?

DLF: I believe that culture is passed down primarily through the women, especially mothers, in our society. As such, they hold tremendous power and responsibility. Each daughter learns about and has to internalize that power for herself, in her own time and place, giving it a different face depending on her geographical, linguistic, historical and cultural experience. These adjustments create conflict that are, hopefully, mitigated by love and compassion between mother and daughter. The mothers pass on the stories. How they are received and passed on by their daughters to the next generation--now that’s the question. I think you can see this conflict in our lives today. I certainly saw it in my own life.

KRL: In the text Puerto Rican memory is entwined with motherhood and maternal practices, since mothers carry their familial histories, and national history, in a stone that eventually leads to the written word. How are these two ideas related in the greater discussion on Puerto Rican memory? Do you think there are other avenues that are important to consider?

DLF: For me, storytelling is so closely aligned with the traditional grillot of African tradition; the person who keeps the oral family history and passes it down. At least that’s the way it was in my family. The men were out in the fields all day, so it was the women who had the time and space to pass these on to the children.

I think the trajectory from the physicality of the stone to the written word follows the historical journey of the women. Fela, Mati and even Concha (to a much lesser degree) didn’t trust written language. After all, that was the mode by which they were enslaved—sales receipts, messages between their masters, the Bible (another document that justified their enslavement in the hands of the masters, including clergymen who were also slave owners). Everything about the written word was associated with the white elite, the enemy. But by the time we get to Elena and Carisa, educated women in the western sense of the word, the written word had taken on other dimensions. For Elena it provided a sort of freedom. Literacy meant the ability to rise within the society, awareness of what was and was to come, and therefore, the ability to prepare for it. For Carisa, the word had become her familiar, so much so that she raises it to the level of art. She is comfortable with it and uses it for her own purposes.

In terms of memory and the word, all people who are denied a written language develop a thriving oral history. In our ‘modern’ world, the people who own the written language, own the history. No matter how much or how wealthy the oral history, it is dismissed because of its very nature. Western society values the written history, the one written by the conquerors and dismisses memory and the oral tradition. I love the African proverb, you won’t know what happened on the hunt, until you talk to the lion.

KRL: How are the characters in the novel using storytelling as a mode for resistance or pathways for liberation?

DLF: There’s an African proverb that says that you don’t know what happened in the hunt until you talk to the lion. In our society, the narrative is controlled by the conquerors, usually European historians who wrote about what they saw as they conquered other people, certainly the peoples of African and the Americas. Storytelling, and the oral tradition, is a form of claiming and directing our own narrative. The protagonists in Daughters of the Stone protect and pass on their own narratives to their daughters as a form of self-identity and personal strength. Mati is adamant that Concha not go to school, not because she espoused ignorance but because she knew that schools were the instruments of their oppressors who had no respect or even awareness of the richness of the African traditions in their lives. When Concha rejects her mother’s way of knowing, she literally loses herself, loses her way in the world. Until she comes to terms with it, she cannot heal and go on to heal others.

Though Carisa is not a mother in the story, her role is critical to the development to the story because she is the archivist and author. In fact, the manuscript she attempts to write in the novel is materialized as Daughters of the Stone—the novel we read. If we want to think of Carisa in relation to motherhood, we can think of her birthing the novel and the written archive. In the “Postscript” the author reveals herself: “My name is Carisa Ortíz and I am the teller of stories. It is what I do. It is who I am. I have collected many stories. They have been given to me freely. And now, I give them to you. All I ask is that you listen with your heart and, if you have a mind to, that you pass them on” (Llanos-Figueroa 2009, 317). Additionally, at the end of the novel Carisa explains she is the collector of stories and suggests there are many stories that she stores, thus demarcating her the archivist of this (familial) history that represents Black history and women’s history as important ‘pieces’ of Puerto Rican history though not necessarily included in the archive, popular culture, or other spaces where national histories are shared like museums and universities.

Subverting the Novel: Resisting Institutional Investments in Whiteness

In the novel-within-a-novel subplot, Llanos-Figueroa highlights the struggle Carisa faces to write her story by first changing the oral history tradition into the written word. Carisa fights to tell her stories despite institutional disenfranchisement, embarrassment, and rejection from university professors. When Carisa tries to enroll in an advanced writing class, she approaches the table of Professor Stevens and he assumes she is looking for the “Composition 101” registration table upon first seeing her, a Black woman with an afro, though she is an advanced writer and the class was waived. He did not give her a chance to explain her credentials. He saw a Black body and believed she could not be in his class. He told her “I rarely accept freshmen into my classes anyway. Maybe this is a waste of your time and mine” and mocked her journal (Llanos-Figueroa 2009, 264).2 In this journal Carisa has written her family’s stories which are predominantly focused on the daughters of the stone, as the title suggests. One can infer that Carisa’s journal is a derivation of her mother’s writing practice; her mother, Elena, habitually wrote in a diary and documented her struggle and survival in New York City.

After a quick look through Carisa’s journal Professor Stevens offered her advice: “You need to start reading before you attempt to write. Read everything. Read the masters. Read everything in every genre. Study the canon. Steep yourself in the great themes of Western Thought” (Llanos-Figueroa 2009, 264). The professor’s racial bias is once again revealed especially since he only deems Western discourses and literature as worthy of attention and study. Professor Stevens is unable to recognize that other forms of knowledge as well as alternative ways of being and writing exist outside of his expertise. He disregards Carisa’s writing as mythic nonsense and she is disheartened:

“As to this” – he pointed to my journal – “this is a mass of superstitious nonsense, cliched ghosts and goblins. You must understand that I’m interested in high-quality literary work. This… is just not it. This type of marginal material has no place is belle letres […] You might have flare. There are some nicely turned phrases. Maybe one of the children’s fantasy magazines. Their editors are always looking for stories for their Halloween issues.”

I heard nothing more. I left his office, his words trailing behind me. I slipped my journal into my coat and hugged it all the way back to the dorm […] I felt it needed my protection and yet I felt so wounded and in need of protection myself. (Llanos-Figueroa 2009, 264-5)

The professor is used as a symbol of the institutional protection of and investment in whiteness at the university level which is representative of the nation. Furthermore, this moment represents the lack of diversity in the voices that are given institutional support to write or develop ideas concerning the nation. Yet, Carisa writes her story anyway and no longer seeks institutional validation or approval, and thus also rejects the Puerto Rican literary canon that is made up of writings by mostly elite, white men.

Through Carisa’s experience, Llanos-Figueroa is making the argument that these stories, which represent the history of Puerto Rico since the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, told by Black women subvert power dynamics and carve a pathway towards liberation. Llanos-Figueroa resists the silencing and erasure of Afro-Latinas in these narratives and the “denigration of African lineage on the island” and “reclaim[s] this identity from colonial narratives requires countering a coloniality of power and its mechanisms, as well as complicating the histories that coloniality bequeaths” (Hurtado 2). Writers and thinkers, most of whom were white men of the upper class, began defining Puerto Rican identity, culture, and nationhood in the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. For example, Antonio S. Pedreira’s Insularismo: An Insight into the Puerto Rican Character [1934] sought to define Puerto Rican identity and culture with Spanish and Eurocentric ancestry coupled with Taino roots, thus ignoring and eradicating any African heritage. Jorge Duany’s (2001) chapter “Making Indians out of Blacks” demonstrates how this anti-Black rhetoric that defined Puerto Rican nationalism and identity that prioritizes an ethnic identity more akin to Indigenous heritage still pervades in the present.3 Because Daughters of the Stone is a historical fiction that attempts to rewrite the nation’s history in a way that honors and respects the African diaspora and its roots in Puerto Rico, she rejects the power structures that seek to obliterate the Carisa’s of the world and uses writing as a liberatory tool.

Roberta Hurtado turns to Xhercis Mendez’s (2015) “Notes Toward a Decolonial Feminist Methodology” to explain how seeking validation and acknowledgement within the categories and value systems set by those in power who are responsible for systemic violence, erasure, will not liberate you. Instead, it furthers your dehumanization: “Attempting to gain acknowledgement as humans via the categories provided within a coloniality will only perpetuate the systemic dehumanization that founds such categories. Indeed, those who are oppressed by coloniality do not gain liberation from domination by achieving category-inclusion, but instead become more insidiously imbedded into its mechanisms of control” (Hurtado 2017, 3).

Returning Home: Ancestral Lands/Motherlands, Memory, and Identity

Moreover, Carisa continues to dismantle colonial and modern ideas of literature and bigger notions of knowledge and knowledge production by writing her family’s epistemologies and ‘ways of knowing’ through maternal and healing practices. Therefore, it is not surprising that Carisa finishes the manuscript after she visits Puerto Rico and Africa—her ancestral lands. Because she is a diasporic subject who accesses the memories of her mothers, including her great-great grandmother Fela, both Puerto Rico and Africa are deemed motherlands. Fela is taken from West Africa and forcibly brought to Puerto Rico against her will which is why three generations of mothers are born in Puerto Rico. Because Carisa is born in the United States, she is pulled to Puerto Rico to find the answers to her questions. Upon arriving in Puerto Rico and feeling alienated in the university and society, she learns from her mentor that she should return to Africa and includes this diasporic history and cultural exchange in the manuscript.

KRL: At the end of the novel Carisa “returns” to Africa to finish writing her manuscript and uncover her roots. Is there a lesson here in relation to ancestral lands, motherlands, belonging, memory, or identity? Should we all be learning from Carisa?

DLF: Within the narrative, Concha is vehemently against her mother passing on the stories to Elena. Her refusal to deal with the past leads to a rupture between herself and Mati, the keeper of stories. But once Mati is gone, Concha finds herself adrift, directionless. She is totally lost until Elena brings her the stone, the symbol of their past and their continuity. It is only when she is strong enough to embrace the past that Mati had always offered her that she begins to heal. That is the great lesson of the narrative. One can’t escape who we are or where we’ve come from. It is all an integral part of who we are. Until we come to that realization and embrace the past, we will find forging the future much more difficult.

I hope that my work encourages readers to find their own paths back to their beginnings as far as they can go. Not all will lead to Africa. The quest may lead to the American south or India or Asia or Europe. Not everyone will have the wherewithal to go back that far. But we can all mine the memories of the elders in our midst. We have a lot to learn from those who walked this earth before us. After all, it is because of their experiences that we are here. I think any time we build a strong foundation (seek out the past) we have a better chance of building a structure that will hold. You don’t have to agree with everything or even agree with what you find. But wouldn’t it be great just to know? Once you have the information, you can use it in whatever way is most beneficial. When you search just remember that what you find will not be all pleasantries and triumphs. There will be hurt and loss and tragedy. It is the nature of life. We can learn even more from the travails than from the victories.

Another consideration, sometimes elders don’t want to think about the negative aspects of their lives, or they think they will be protecting you from hurt. All families have skeletons in the closet, secrets that someone has felt is best left untold. That door may shut tightly against your inquiry. People are entitled to their privacy. But you can always work on it until they let you in to whatever degree they can. After all, by sharing their story, even a very painful one, they will be helping you. Perhaps their love for the questioner will supersede their fears of the past coming back to haunt them. Recently I read a quotation that I love. “Every time an elder dies, we lose a library.” I do believe that.

As the author, Carisa uses the prologue to introduce the novel as a collection of stories that belong to the women in her family because she is the archivist and author. These stories constructed her identity and span five generations of mothers, but they also represent a larger history of Afro-Puerto Rican women in the island: “These are the stories. My stories, their stories – just as they were told to my mother and her mother and hers. They were given to me for safekeeping, and now I give them to you […] These are the stories of a time lost to flesh and bones, a time that lives only in dreams and memory. No matter. Like a primeval wave, these stories have carried me, and deposited me on the morning of today. They are the stories of how I came to be who I am, where I am” (Llanos-Figueroa 2017, x). More importantly, because Fela is literally and figuratively silenced in the novel via a grotesque tongue removal, we need Carisa to document and share these stories as a way to subvert the lasting colonial power. Through the character of Carisa, the author who provides the manuscript, “[Llanos-Figueroa’s] novel Daughters of the Stone is a literary intervention to re-claim the Afro-Latinx subject and to give witness to the past” (Lam 2017, 1). And, Hurtado adds, Daughters of the Stone “explores the ways in which decolonial fiction storytelling can demystify, as well as challenge, erasure and/or denigration of Afro-Latina identity that manifests in colonial narratives” (2017, 1) in Daughters of the Stone. Carisa’s role is critical as the author and archivist because this book emerges as a project of memory and recovery work.

Lugones writes “the decolonial feminist’s task begins by her seeing the colonial difference, emphatically resisting her epistemological habit of erasing it” (Lugones 2010, 753). In Daughters of the Stone Llanos-Figueroa mobilizes the character of Carisa to ‘rewrite’ Puerto Rican history in a way that includes Black women’s history as inclusive of Puerto Rican history and also demonstrating how different ways of knowing (and being and writing) led to this book. This story encompasses discourses of thought and motherhood that negate and challenge hegemonic epistemologies of knowing, producing knowledge, and archiving. Lugones also states:

One does not resist the coloniality of gender alone. One resists it from within a way of understanding the world and living in it that is shared and that can understand one’s actions, thus providing recognition. Communities rather than individuals enable the doing; one does with someone else, not an individualist isolation. The passing from mouth to mouth, from hand to hand of lived practices, values, beliefs, ontologies, space-times, and cosmologies constitutes one. But it is important that these ways are not just different… These ways of being, valuing, and believing have persisted in the resistant response to coloniality. (2010, 754)

Alternatively, I offer that Carisa is an incarnation of how Llanos-Figueroa sees and understands herself and uses her body politics and feminist politics to challenge knowledge production, including literature, mothering practices, and alternatives to medicine for healing, and archivization. While Carisa’s writing, which is a stand-in for Llanos-Figueroa’s writing, was initially rejected as ‘mythic nonsense’ she writes anyway and puts her family’s stories on paper where they are no longer omitted or erased. Llanos-Figueroa’s novel is a representation of Afro-Puerto Rican (and Afro-Caribbean) feminist decolonial work.

About the author

Keishla Rivera-Lopez (keishla.rivera-lopez@millersville.edu) is a writer, poet, and scholar. She received a PhD in American Studies at the Graduate School-Newark at Rutgers University where she was awarded the 2019-2020 Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship. She was born and raised in Newark, NJ to Puerto Rican migrants and reflects on what it means to be a child of diaspora in her scholarship and writing. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English and Latinx Literatures and Cultures at Millersville University.

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa for sitting down with me to have conversations about her work and life. These phone-calls and meetings helped me better understand her work. I appreciated our dialogue in which Dahlma, too, was interested in my work and ideas. Mayra Santos Febres put me into contact with Dahlma—without her I would not be able to write this article. Thank you for expanding my network. Without Yomaira C. Figueroa, I would not have met Mayra and none of this work would be here today. Thank you for inviting me to Puerto Rico to be a part of #ProyectoPalabrasPR and helping my research become multi-layered. Lastly, thank you for providing feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

notes

1 To learn more about #ProyectoPalabrasPR reference their twitter account: <https://twitter.com/PalabrasPR>. Translation: Literary Salon and Festival of the Word.

2 In the novel Carisa is fairly protective of her journal and it is an extension of her. When the journal is discussed in a bad light, Carisa feels disrespected and hurt. After Professor Stevens mocks her journal, and thus her writing, Carisa “slip[s] [her] journal into [her] coat and hug[s] it” until she reaches her dorm and thought, “It would keep me warm in the autumn winds. Or maybe I could keep it warm and protected. I felt it needed my protection and yet I felt so wounded and in need of protection myself [...] I fell asleep swearing I would never let anyone touch my journal again” (Llanos-Figueroa 2009, 265).

3 Jose Luis Gonzalez’s foundational text, Puerto Rico: The Four-Storeyed Country and other Essays (1990), rejects the writings of Pedreira and other writers of this generation and traces a historical genealogy of Puerto Rico’s culture and identity in a way that includes African, European, and Indigenous roots but adds that the U.S. colonization of the island is the ‘4th story.’ Juan Flores (1993) examines Puerto Rican culture and identity in a way that includes all of Puerto Ricans’ cultural and racial roots while also incorporating the diaspora. Jorge Duany (2002) also interprets the various evolutions of Puerto Rican identity and includes the diasporic influence on the Puerto Rican identity and culture.

References

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