Literature’s most memorable sponge cake started its life as toasted bread.
That is, early manuscripts of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s seminal À la Recherche du Temps Perdu series initially described the delicacy that triggered the world’s first “Proustian memory” as toasted honey bread. In a second draft, it became a biscotto. It wasn’t until the third draft of Swann’s Way that it became the tea-drenched madeleine now remembered around the world.
All of which is to say that what triggers our memory matters much less than the memory itself. Toasted honey bread, biscotto, or a madeleine—once we remember, what matters is not why we remember, but that we don’t forget again.
In this sense, Cherríe Moraga’s new literary memoir, Native Country of the Heart (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), understands its purpose instinctively. Yes, it’s a mother-daughter story. Yes, it’s the story of a time and a place. Most trenchantly, though, it’s a rumination on memory itself—how it fades and mutates and infiltrates our lives.
Much of Moraga’s work, in her long career as a writer and activist, has had to do with the workings of history and memory. In 1981, alongside Gloria Anzaldúa, Moraga co-edited the monumental anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. In 1983, with Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde, she started an activist, intersectional feminist press called Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. As a professor at U.C. Santa Barbara, she recently instituted the Las Maestras Center for Chicana and Indigenous Thought and Art Practice with her partner Celia Herrera Rodriguez.
The center states the following in its mission statement: “Our task, as we see it, is to help Latinx communities come to remember and acknowledge their origins through the act of art making and critical collective thought.”
In Native Country, Moraga’s “remembers and acknowledges” her origins in the most intimate way possible: she tells the story of herself and of “MexicanAmerican Geography” through her memories of her late mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga.
The first two lines of her memoir make the book’s subject – and its intention – unshakeably clear: “Elvira Isabel Moraga was not the stuff of literature. Few bemoan the loss of the unlettered.”
As such, Moraga’s decision to turn her mother’s life into a lasting document is itself a radical act, one that highlights the necessity of the writer’s perceptive memory. In remembering Elvira unflinchingly, Moraga writes history as it deserves to be told, from the point-of-view of those it usually forgets.
Her memoir, which spans most of her life thus far, is divided into four parts, each subsequent section shorter than the one before. These dwindling page counts have the ultimate effect of granting urgency to the narrative; you can feel Moraga’s memories fading as you read.
The book tells the story of Moraga’s and her mother’s lives, alternating between the two. Part I chronicles Elvira’s youth in 1920s Tijuana, as well as Moraga’s upbringing and her reckoning with Chicana lesbianism in the confines of Catholicism. Moraga writes about her mother’s childhood with the same immediacy with which she writes about her own, as if she was there to see it. This choice highlights Moraga’s deference to Elvira. While Part I’s telling of Moraga’s early life points to frequent strife with her mother, especially concerning the generational differences between them, Moraga’s re-telling of it, presenting Elvira’s youth in conjunction with her own, suggests that memory, like absence, makes the heart grow fonder.
The framing events of Part I are the furthest from the present. But Moraga’s rendition of these events dissolves temporal boundaries. Her descriptions of the San Gabriel Valley home in which she grew up, the Huntington Beach hotel owned by her grandmother, and her time at Immaculate Heart College are all filled with the kind of rich and lively detail that memory usually obscures.
This is explained, perhaps, by a throwaway observation Moraga makes while describing a neighbor whose company her mother didn’t particularly enjoy: “There was so much I came to understand later.” Moraga writes about her and Elvira’s intertwined lives not necessarily as she remembers them, but as she now understands them.
Part II finds Moraga grappling more and more with this distinction between remembrance and understanding. Early in the section, Moraga sweeps major events, like the birth of her son, aside: “Those are the large facts. The details of those breakups and reunions among lovers and children are written elsewhere, if only as scarred etchings along the banks of my memory.”
She’s had less time to process these more recent memories, but she now focuses on understanding what they might actually mean – and confronting the fact that she might lose them one day. Early on in Part II it’s revealed that Elvira was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2003.
Moraga observes that at the start of Elvira’s illness, “There were times in which I did not know whether my mother was truly ‘demented’ or just Mexican in a white world.” But she doesn’t need to understand quite yet. Instead, Moraga focuses on the tiny, tangible memories of that time: “What I remember is the fall from the curb in the shopping mall.”
Ultimately, though, Moraga’s act of remembrance carries a larger mission, and the idea that her own memory might fade only hastens the gravity of her quest to commemorate her mother. Who else could bemoan the loss of the unlettered Elvira but Moraga?
Eventually—and inevitably—Elvira’s memory does lapse. Part III vividly charts her descent into Alzheimer’s. From her increasingly fragile outbursts of forgetting to the night Moraga spends all alone in her mother’s home after sending her to hospice, it’s a painful read.
Still, the sorrow of Part III is necessary for the ultimate insight that Moraga’s memoir grants its reader. At one point, Moraga refers to herself as “Elvira’s daughter … who prays to have this not-dying over with, once and for all.” It’s the kind of glaring honesty that frames the entire book. Elvira’s fading memory and declining health may have once felt like a prolonged period of “not-dying,” but, in writing Native Country, Moraga ensures that Elvira is forever “not-dying” – because her loss is now the stuff of literature.