Resistance and Resilience in the Face of Abuse and Colonization in Memoir ‘Women Surrounded by Water’ https://ift.tt/Wk1hOdz
Patricia Coral’s debut memoir, Women Surrounded by Water, is emphatically hybrid – not merely poetic or lyrical in voice, but filled with whole pages of poetry, with family photographs, white space and fragmentation.
“If we were in visual arts, I would say this is mixed media,” she told me. And yet, Coral miraculously escapes the hazards of hybridity. Women Surrounded by Water has all the groundedness and propulsion of great prose, even as it glitters with verse and image. “I was not initially trying to do anything hybrid, or anything experimental. I was not trying to make it ‘cool,’ you know what I mean?” she said. “The way these stories live in my head is the way I needed for them to live on the page.”
Women Surrounded by Water spans Coral’s childhood growing up in Puerto Rico, her marriage at 25 to a man descending into addiction, and her island’s devastation from Hurricane Maria. Coral places her own story alongside those of the women who came before her, who built their lives within the pressures and indignities of patriarchy and colonialism.
Patricia Coral is a bilingual Puerto Rican writer. She holds an MFA in creative writing from American University, where she received the Myra Sklarew Award and was Editor-in-Chief of Folio. Coral writes creative nonfiction and poetry, but frequently her words find their home in between. The former events director for Politics and Prose Bookstore, she has contributed to numerous literary magazines.
I sat down with her over coffee near her home in Washington, D.C.
Did you write this book in English?
Yes, I wrote it in English. It was a tough process, overall. When I moved to Houston in 2014, I had to start writing in English because I wanted to belong to the writing community. In Puerto Rico, we have a strong history of resistance to English, resisting the colonization. I felt I was betraying the Puerto Rican literary tradition on the island. On the positive side, it did help me put a little bit of distance between myself and the experiences that I lived, especially when writing about trauma. It has also been interesting to find a new – a different – voice in this other language.
You write, “I remember things I don’t want to remember. That I don’t want to write about. Consider them written in this space,” and then it’s followed by a blank text box. Can you talk about the decision to omit?
I kept ruminating and obsessing about the different scenes of my marriage. At that moment, I think I was not emotionally ready to be writing the story, but at the same time, I kept obsessing about memories that kept forming and forming and forming again. In my journal, I actually wrote that down, “consider them written in this space,” and I actually drew a box in the journal. I was not thinking about literature. It was almost like quitting the obsessions. It’s okay to find a stopping point, especially when writing about trauma. I think that box was my stop. When it was time for the book, one of the most important things for me was to keep that box.
I love that it’s a direct transcription from your writing for yourself. It’s not a device that you did for the reader.
It’s not a device. It’s not performative.
Do you feel that omission from the record, from the archive, is the same as erasure, or are those two different things?
The story is there. I don’t feel the story is erased. But we don’t have to put it all in order to tell the story. I think as writers it’s okay to omit things for ourselves. At the same time it’s okay to spare the reader from things they don’t need to see. I was also giving my ex-husband grace. There are experiences that are very much his and mine, memories that I think no one else needs to have access to, and I don’t have to relive.
You write, “you are a woman, and you are an island.” That’s a big claim. Can you talk more about it?
I think that’s potentially the line of the book that I still have to process. That’s the heart of this book. How do you learn freedom when you’ve never seen freedom, because you come from a colonized island? Colonization really has a big impact in your life and in your mind, because since you’re a kid, you’re just hearing this: “the island – Puerto Rico – won’t make it by itself.” And it’s very important for me to say that, in our head, Puerto Rico is a woman. Isla – island – is feminine in Spanish. So in our collective notion, we see the island as a woman, as a mother. When you grow up hearing that your own country cannot make it by itself, then what are your possibilities as a woman? You’re not even a country. You’re a woman. If that’s the fate of my island, then how does that create a path for yourself as an independent person when you’ve never seen independence? What is embedded in your head is this fear of freedom. It’s the fear of independence and it’s the fear of whether you’re capable of making it.
Women Surrounded by Wateris explicitly political. It addresses colonialism, occupation, patriarchy, autonomy, sovereignty, independence. It also came out days before the election, including Puerto Rican elections. You don’t have to speak to electoral politics if you don’t want to, but I want to give you space to do so if you wish.
I hold President Trump 100% responsible for the more than 4,000 Puerto Ricans who died [as a result of Hurricane Maria in 2017]. He delayed help to the island. He delayed resources. People died from preventable deaths. They didn’t die because of the hurricane. They died because of politics. So to see that he was reelected was very triggering to say the least, especially after the statement of the floating island of garbage. It really connected me to that moment in the book when I didn’t have any access to hearing from my family. Even after I heard from them, access was very limited, since cellphone towers were destroyed. Meanwhile, for days and weeks afterwards, I was just hearing his tweets and his voice about how we were not a real disaster, like how we were lucky that we’re not Katrina.
Because of our colonial situation, and because of the climate disaster that humans have been creating, I’m just praying I don’t have a hurricane in the next four years, and we don’t have to live through this again.
When the hurricane happened and it destroyed everything, Puerto Rico realized the U.S. won’t help us. We always were afraid of, “oh, you cannot make it by yourself,” but then people realized that without ourselves we would have died. People didn’t have electricity, but they still organized, and they said, “okay let’s go to the poorest areas and bring food and supplies.”
Like your brother in the book?
Exactly. I think if Puerto Ricans didn’t do that, we would have had like twice, three times the amount of deaths. That woke up something; that started eroding the colonized mindset. We have the power to survive.
That’s really striking – the similarities between this myth of “you need a marriage,” and then it’s like, well, the marriage is killing me.
I love that you see that. Even my island is in a toxic relationship of abuse.
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