Gloria Naylor: "The Women of Brewster Place"; Christina Garcia: "Dreaming in Cuban"; Aminatta Forna: "Ancestor Stones"

Since I seem to be a better reader than blog writer, I sometimes have to squeeze a few reviews into one - to make sure I don't omit any of the books and keep a truthful record of my reading experiences. The sequence of the novels in this "three-in-one" entry is both chronological - as it reflects the order in which I read them - and subjective: the order turns out to reflect my ranking of those works. Accidentally, despite evident uniqueness and originality, the three novels seem to have quite a lot in common. So, with Christmas shopping deals so overwhelming, this entry may be taken for a "mega pack" bargain;)

Gloria Naylor's 1982 debut brought to this African American writer recognition from both literary critics (the National Book Award) and the general public (the 1989 TV series produced by Oprah Winfrey, who also played the leading role in it). This beautifully written lyrical novel consists of seven stories of seven women living in a rather impoverished neighborhood, all sharing in the experience of - what is suggested by Langston Hughes's poem serving as the book's credo - a dream deferred. So, the very opening of the novel implies that its protagonists are - to put it bluntly - losers. Why else would they be living in such a God-forsaken street as Brewster Place? However, it seems that the place itself has its effect on the people. The lyrical opening of the book presents Brewster Place as follows: Brewster Place was the bastard child of several clandestine meetings between the alderman of the sixth district and the managing director of Unico Realty Company...The gray bricks of the buildings were the color of dull silver during Brewster Place's youth. Although the street wasn't paved - after a heavy rain it was necessary to wade in ankle-deep to get home - there was a sense of promise in the street and in the times. However, the development of the city and the growing traffic required that some auxiliary streets be walled off. Since there was no one to fight for Brewster Place, the authorities decided to make Brewster Place a dead-end street. And so, the narrator continues, Brewster Place became especially fond of its colored daughters as they milled like determined spirits among its decay, trying to make it a home.

Naylor presents a range of female figures who, were it not for her wonderful skill of shaping round characters with only a few strokes of the pen, would fall into very stereotypical categories which are often - and unjustly - applied as labels to economically disadvantaged African American women: there is a friendly "community mama", Mattie Michael, who sacrificed all her life and money for her prodigal son; there is Mattie's friend, Etta May Johnson, who seeks love and a reliable partner but gets only deceived by men taking advantage of her affectionate nature and turning her into a slut ("bitch" would probably be a term used more often for Black women); there is also Lucielia, who for the love of her unfaithful man resorts to getting an abortion and, ultimately, loses her only daughter; there is also her opposite, Cora Lee, who loves her children only when they are little babies so has a new one every year or so with anonymous men coming to her bed at night like shadows; finally, there are "the two" - a lesbian couple who have moved in Brewster Place to flee from persecution but find intolerance and death instead. There is also Kiswana Browne, an idealistic young activist, who has moved into this neighborhood to help build a community here and work for the upgrading of the living conditions in the area. This turns out to be a dream, as beautiful as it is unrealistic: though the final chapter, titled "The Block Party", contains a scene of the women working together to chip away at the imprisoning wall, it is only someone's dream, and the reader is well aware of it.

Despite the fact that the novel is so very sad and disappointingly short, it deserves to be called a marvel, not only for what it contains but also for what it avoids delving in: the characters of the men who are so intricately connected with the women's lives, although so very few of them are visibly present in the novel.

Cristina Garcia with her 1992 novel Dreaming in Cuban is said to be a pioneer of Cuban-American writing in English, she is therefore thought to represent ethnic or, more precisely, Latina writing. Born in Havana in 1958, she immigrated with her parents to the U.S. in 1960 to avoid the results of the Cuban revolution under Castro's leadership. As the title suggests, the novel is about dreamers, mainly women, although men are also present in it: El Lider himself, who triggered the Revolution and whose ideas are indiscriminately embraced by the oldest woman, Celia del Pino; "Querido" (beloved) Gustavo - the absent one time lover and mute addressee of Celia's letters; Jorge del Pino - Celia's husband, mostly absent in flashback passages because he is away on business, present only as a ghost in the contemporary narrative of his daughter, whom he accompanies and advises as a guardian angel; Ivanito - Celia's grandson, who finally decides to emigrate to America; occasionally present are also Celia's two sons-in-law.

Garcia herself characterized her highly autobiographical writing as follows: For me, each book further embroiders the themes and obsessions that drove me to write in the first place. The characters may be different, the settings and times and particulars may vary wildly but the bigger questions of where do we belong and how do we negotiate our identities between and among cultures is what keeps me going. Therefore Cuba features prominently in the novel - as acknowledged by the writer and the title - as a dream home (still under construction;) for Celia, who watches the sea for signs of invader ships; as a hated and therefore forsaken home for Celia's daughter Lourdes, who in search of a new American home travels north to the region in which it gets cold enough for her to settle down; and, finally, as a lost home for Lourdes's daughter Pilar, who yearns for her grandma and Cuba but, after a short visit there, comes back to New York because she is American after all.

However, one could easily call this novel "matrifocal" (I heard this -awful?- term applied to a novel by an African American writer for a bit different reason than the one I'm suggesting here) because it seems to also concentrate on motherhood, and it is, well, motherhood gone awry. Celia, who is still in love with the Spanish officer, marries Jorge, who leaves her at home with his mother while making his long business trips. No wonder she hates it: the mother-in-law is awful to her. When she gets pregnant, she promises herself she will leave the child with the family and run away if it is a son. But it's a daughter, so she stays. Why? To nurture or rather to torture the baby, whom she is holding by the leg saying she does not want to remember her name when she shows her to the father for the first time? No wonder Lourdes develops a very close relationship with the father and only reluctantly comes back to Cuba to visit her mother on deathbed. And no wonder Jorge temporarily places Celia in an asylum. Celia loves her second daughter, whom she names after her friend from the asylum - Felicia, quite ironically. Felicia herself is a bad mother: neglecting the daughters but suffocating her son with affection which she pours on him because she has too much of it, all redundant after her husband has left her. Finally, following her namesake, Felicia goes mad. It seems that deprived of mother's affection, Lourdes cannot communicate with her daughter Pilar, who, turning her life into a rebellion against her mother, abuses her mother's trust and paints a punk version of the Statue of Liberty on the front wall of her bakery. Pilar also feels a strong bond with her grandmother and idealizes Cuba, as if in spite of her mother.

Strange as it may seem, this picture of motherhood presented by the so called ethnic writer is not such a far cry from the commonplace vision of a mother-daughter conflict. However, despite this somewhat critical opinion of its handling of the topic of motherhood, I must admit that reading Garcia's novel was time well spent, as the book is original and beautiful in many other aspects;)

Finally, Aminatta Forna's 2006 novel Ancestor Stones takes its readers to an unnamed country in Africa (the writer lives in London and Sierra Leone, so the latter becomes a natural candidate here) together with its narrator who, having received a letter from her cousin in Africa, goes there to claim her heritage - a coffee plantation. This trip becomes an occasion for the narrator to give voice to her numerous aunts, whose stories told in the first person narrative voice (as if heard and then recorded by the narrator) present the family's life in that country, exotic both for the narrator and the reader. (Now that I've written that, it actually sounds so cliche, but that's the risk that the writer took when she decided to arrange the novel in this way.) Despite the fact that the stories are inherently interesting as they reveal aspects of African women's lives which are appalling (and sensational) to a reader brought up in western culture (polygamy, female circumcision and total reduction of wives' roles to the domestic sphere), the novel was a drag and nothing gave me more satisfaction than reaching its ultimate page and putting it back onto the shelf.

First, the title is so banal that one expects to see it on a shining cover of a cheap edition of a page-turner categorized as "literature for housewives" (inverted commas indicate the conventional label used for trashy melodramas not the group of readers), for which PLN10 sounds like an extortionate price (instead of the 40 that I paid), and so are the titles of the chapters. Although it needs to be mentioned to the writer's advantage that her sub-titling the first chapter with the phrase "women's gardens" was a brilliant gesture with which she acknowledged Alice Walker as the first writer to turn the task of recovering Black women's untold history into her vocation. On the other hand, writing a novel with a view to reclaiming the past may be a noble undertaking, but suggesting that the book gives voice to those who normally don't have the right to speak and express themselves is too threadbare to make an impression any more. Moreover, the arrangement of the stories, which so resembles the structure of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, forces the reader to constantly go back to revise the stories which she has already read in an effort to create individual narrators' coherent narratives out of what appears to be a bundle of mixed-up pieces. Mind you, this has nothing to do with Coover-like experimental novel, and the effect is so unlike Amy Tan's wonderful book.

There is another irritating quality about Forna's novel which was absent from the previous two books described here, namely the impression that the narrative lacks something that may be illusive but necessary, something that can be called authenticity. Abie (the main narrator) is only a tourist in Africa, and the narrative in which she retells the stories which purport to come from her African aunts sounds only like a tourist's account of the place which she may have visited but whose spirit she completely failed to catch.