MOTHER ISLAND

A novelist turns to memoir to mine the spirit and substance of what a mother is.

Reeling from a divorce and underemployment, Figueroa, author of Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, found herself in Santa Fe, New Mexico, vulnerable and primed to more deeply reflect on and return to her roots. In her memoir, she excavates these roots from her childhood, cutting into them across generations and unearthing them on the island of Puerto Rico, the homeland of her Taíno ancestors. As a child, the author first understood herself as a member of a “feminine collective” that contained her mother and her two older sisters, even as they all rode the roller coaster of her mother’s history of trauma, her resulting emotional unpredictability and dependency, and her series of marriages to white men. Figueroa enchantingly shifts and sifts through her memories of a childhood spent between these marriages, and of the way her mother leaned into and out of her “exotic” beauty and its snarly, disorienting attention, power, shame, menace, and safety. Chronicling her journey through her work in the healing arts, the ending of her own marriage to a white man (“a hand-me-down version of one of my mother’s”), and the practice and profession of writing and teaching, she teases further discussion of Puerto Rico’s relationship to the mainland U.S. In the final third of the book, Figueroa returns more fully to this matter, along with its associated topics of race, internalized colonization, and assimilation. Throughout the text, the author sprinkles an artful balance of just-personal-enough details, magical imagery, and insightful analysis. Her exceptional command of her craft builds narrative tension while granting force to the way her personal history mirrors geopolitical devastation and imbuing her voice with the power of one no longer unclaimed by, but ready to lay claim to.

A searching and lyrical memoir packed with nuance and depth.