MotherTongue by Demetria Martínez (review)

Reviews 169 blur of childhood and subjectivity, the personal and idiosyncratic minutiae that call back lost moments from which memory springs can resemble fiction as much as memoir. Ona Siporin’s collection has entered this territory of mosaic and memoir, winding memory around history in an act of recording that becom es the central, redemptive necessity of the collection. Using the natural world both to ground and associate im pressions, Siporin takes us from rural Iowa to the austere beauty of the canyons in Utah’s Wasatch Range. Geography serves not only as backdrop to visceral experience, but also triggers associations with the past. In these vignettes, most aired previously on Utah Public Radio, the natural world, with its insistent rhythms, transports Siporin from landscape to memory to meaning. Looking out her kitchen win­ dow at the scrub oak and rocky slopes of the Wasatch Range, for example, a more embedded memory surfaces of M azar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, where Siporin lived briefly before the Russian invasion. She m oves deftly from the private intimacy evoked by a silver pitcher given to her as a gift to piece together place, history, and loss. The more com plex associations happen in the juxtaposition of pieces rather than through dialectic, as in “I stood in the doorway of the synagogue kitchen,” which records the bomb blast in a B oise, Idaho, synagogue in 1984, follow ed by a short meditation on mule deer in which Siporin’s fam ily works for “perfect trust” with the deer. Because the pieces are as loosely connected as the erratic associations memory makes, the evocations of experiences or events are less w ell drawn and dim ensionalized than in full-blown personal essays or analytic meditations. Siporin calls these memories her “only weapon” against forgetting, and, as the title suggests, the necessity here is in gathering fragments together. JODI VARON Eastern Oregon State College M otherTongue. By Demetria Martinez. (Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press, 1994. 128 pages, $17.00/$10.00.) This fine first novel, winner of the 1994 Western States Book Award for Fiction, adds to the ongoing, richly creative production of Chicana literature that inhabits the borderlands of genre, language, and identity. Like Helena Maria Viramontes’ “The Cariboo C afe,” MotherTongue also searches for con­ nections across geopolitical borders through its dual focus on the 1980’s sanc­ tuary movement and the relationship between Mary, a naive nineteen-year-old Chicana in Albuquerque whose “Spanish is rusty,” and José Luis, a traumatized Salvadoran political refugee. Fusing M artinez’s twin vocations of poetry and journalism into a lyrical exploration of love, politics, remembrance, and storytelling, the novel deftly 170 Western American Literature intertwines reminders of recent U. S. support for “death squad democracy” with a narrative journey toward self-understanding. Self-defined as apolitical but hoping to be “rescued from my ordinary life,” Mary agrees to shelter José Luis, w hile he view s her as an escape from the guilt and ambivalence that shad­ ow him for leaving his country. Their subsequent love affair, his abrupt return to El Salvador, and his twenty-year “disappearance” from her life reveal both the tenuous creation of “bridges by which we transcended borders of culture, language, and history,” and their collapse amid the indelible imprints of differ­ ent national experiences. By showing us how storytelling can freely cross borders “without pass­ ports or permits,” Martinez leads us to the larger scope of her novel, suggested by its dedication “to the memory of the disappeared.” Echoing much contem ­ porary ethnic American fiction, M otherTongue meditates on the collective process of piecing together a story, whether personal or national, that is threat­ ened by erasure. As the central narrative voice, joined at times by José Luis and later by their son, Mary self-consciously re-members her story by gathering newspaper clippings, love letters, and journal entries. Interweaving past and present narration, the novel displays the wounding as w ell as healing proper­ ties of a story that ultimately must include “unspeakable” revelations about Mary’s childhood as w ell as José Luis’s experiences in El Salvador. Reminded that the “worst thing is not remembering,” Mary in turn...