Puerto Rico in History,
Imagined and Real
KATONAH, N.Y. — On a cold, clear January day in
2008 Esmeralda Santiago walked downstairs to her office in her hilltop home
here to immerse herself in writing the final pages of “Conquistadora,” her new
novel. She was a week away from the deadline for this epic about her beloved
Puerto Rico featuring a big cast of characters that includes the slave-driving,
sugar plantation queen of the title, one Ana Cubillas. But when Ms. Santiago
opened the computer document of her manuscript that day, the words looked
something like this: Agttt Higg Bowq Sm. Pvxef byiz alwb.
“I’m thinking I must have been really, really tired
when I wrote this,” Ms. Santiago recalled. Her next suspicion, based on her
symptoms, was that she had suffered a stroke. The self-diagnosis was confirmed
by a neurologist the next day. It ended up taking her about 18 months to
relearn to read and write again in English. She is still struggling in Spanish,
her first language.
This nightmarish detour was in some ways familiar,
as it reminded Ms. Santiago of what it was like to learn to read and write
English when she came to New York from Puerto Rico at 13, in 1961. “I went to
the library and went to the children’s book section, and I started exactly the
same process I did when I was learning English, connecting that word to that
object,” said Ms. Santiago, who writes in English. Her novel was published this
month by Alfred A. Knopf.
At 63, and with her long salt-and-pepper hair tied
up, Ms. Santiago has a nearly unlined face and laughs easily and often. An
open, fluid conversationalist, she was recently interviewed in her home, where she lives with her husband, the filmmaker
Frank Cantor, and where they raised their two children, who are now grown.
Her doctors are still not certain what caused the
stroke, Ms. Santiago said. Her self-imposed regime for recovery included
listening to audio books to soak in language. They included the works of Edith
Wharton; Larry McMurty’s “Lonesome Dove”; Henry James’s novels “Washington Square”
and “Portrait of a Lady”; and Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov.” In the
hospital a friend brought her a stack of magazines ranging from teen titles to
The New Yorker.
“I know more about Justin Bieber than anyone my
age,” she said with a laugh. After the stroke her goal was not just to get back
to her old self, she said, but also to get back to “Conquistadora,” the novel
that represents more than a decade’s worth of research into the history of
Puerto Rico and many years of thinking and writing about the various
wellsprings of identity. “Conquistadora”
was inspired in part by the realization that so much of her own family’s
history had been lost, she said, as is often the case for poor people. Ms.
Santiago’s mother worked as a seamstress and her father as a carpenter to
support their 11 children.
The Conquistadora of the book’s title comes from
the shiny side of the tracks. The dark-skinned, stubborn Ana flees the
constraints of aristocratic life in Seville for the sugar plantation — Hacienda
Los Gemelos — in Puerto Rico, with her husband and his brother, who are
identical twins. A beautiful best friend, slaves, a sexy plantation manager and
plenty of illicit love-making with both sexes end up figuring prominently in
the tale as they all struggle to tame the land. Ms. Santiago plans a second
book featuring many of the same characters.
“Conquistadora” mostly unfolds in the middle of the
19th century as Puerto Ricans began acquiring an identity beyond that of
colonial subjects of Spain. The incidents depicted — slave insurrections, a
cholera epidemic, hurricanes — are based on history that was largely unfamiliar
to her before the research trips to Seville and Puerto Rico, Ms. Santiago said.
“I wanted to write a big book with lots of
characters, and I wanted to explore what it meant and what it means to be
Puerto Rican,” she said. She also wanted readers to meet a woman like Ana, who
she says could have existed and still not have left behind much evidence of her
unusual life running a plantation.
On July 12 Ms. Santiago began a multicity book tour
(at least 10 stops) to meet the her fans, who send her an average of 125
e-mails a day. Both “When I Was Puerto Rican” and “Almost a Woman,” two of her
three memoirs, are staples on middle-school, high-school and college reading
lists. The students write saying that a reply from her will earn them an A on their
assignments, Ms. Santiago said, and she is happy to oblige. Her work includes a
previous novel, “América’s Dream” and two anthologies of writing by Latin
American authors of which she is a co-editor.
Ms. Santiago represents an important point in the
evolution of Latino authors in general and Puerto Rican authors in particular,
said Daniel Gallant, the executive director of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New
York. “Esmeralda found a way to channel the themes of activism and resilience
in her work,” he said. “She reconciled living in English and dreaming in
Spanish, living in New York and returning to Puerto Rico. That dual identity is
now itself a category.” Robin Desser, a vice president and senior editor at
Knopf, Ms. Santiago’s English-language publisher, said that because the author
is mostly known for her memoirs, “this feels like the start of a different
trajectory for her as a writer.”
The reviews have been laudatory. Gaiutra Badahur
wrote in The New York Times Book Review on July 17 that “Conquistadora”
squashes the caricatures of the fictional plantation mistress who is a despot,
demure or a bit mad. “The book’s strength is its Rubik’s Cube portrait of Ana,
an unconventional, ambitious woman whose attitudes toward children, slaves and
lovers perplex and engross,” Ms. Badahur wrote.
Some have called “Conquistadora” a Puerto Rican
“Gone With the Wind,” a comparison that Ms. Santiago found surprising but
perhaps inevitable. Both novels feature tough heroines with a love of the land
at a time of slavery as well as a fraught but intense love affair with a rakish
man.
Ms. Santiago said her sympathies were with those
slaves. She shed many tears as she wrote, she said, thinking of the countless
Puerto Rican men and women who came before her whose stories have been lost to
time.
“I love where I came from more as a result of all
that I learned,” Ms. Santiago said. “I felt about Puerto Rico the same way that
you feel for somebody you love who has suffered a lot.”
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