The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Novelist Esmeralda Santiago on Learning to Write After a Stroke

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

The author Esmeralda Santiago has been writing about Puerto Rico and questions of immigration and identity since the early nineties. But, in 2008, she suffered a stroke that left her unable to decipher words on a page. In the months that followed, she relied on some of the same strategies she’d used to teach herself English after moving to the United States as a young teen-ager—checking out children’s books from the library, for example, to learn basic vocabulary. Santiago’s latest book, “Las Madres,” includes a character named Luz who goes through a similar experience after a traumatic brain injury. “That sense stayed with me long after I was over that situation—that feeling between knowledge and ignorance,” she tells the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “For me, Luz is almost representative of Puerto Rico itself. We have this very long history that we don’t necessarily have access to. . . . Those of us who live outside of the island, we live the history but we don’t really know it.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For decades, the author Esmeralda Santiago has written both in memoir and fiction about Puerto Rico, immigration, and identity. Santiago was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York as a kid, and one of her admirers is staff writer Vincent Cunningham. As Meraldo Santiago, especially in her early memoirs of moving from rural Puerto Rico to the hustle and bustle of New York, is someone that I consider one of our foremost chroniclers of what it means to grow up, one of the great crafters of coming of age narrative, and can really move you through the growing consciousness of a person as their circumstances change and sometimes surprise. sometimes terrifying ways. Santiago's new book, Las Madres, is not a coming-of-age story. It's about people later in life looking back.

Here's Esmeralda Santiago, talking with Vincent Cunningham. Las Madres is about five women who have known each other all their lives and are friends and also some of them are related to one another. And they decide to go to Puerto Rico for the birthday of the eldest of these women. and while they're there, they are stranded by Hurricane Maria, and they have to deal with that situation, and in the process, they learn a lot about themselves, about one another and about one another's histories.

My origin story with your work is, when I was in high school, I studied Spanish and I could speak Spanish. I need to relearn Spanish, right? But back then, the first book that I ever tried to read totally in Spanish was Cassi Una Mujer. Oh, wow. Yeah, and I read it first in Spanish, and I still wonder, I wonder how, you know, coming from a multilingual background, like, you know, I love it when you talk about Spanglish, like people that can so fluidly move between languages even in the course of a sentence or a syntactical unit. How do you think about your work in translation?

And is that an especially fraught practice for you knowing that you want to reach these two peoples, these two language groups? Right. Equally. Yes, I would love to be able to bridge that. My readers who enter into my books from Whenuera Puerto Ricania, and if they are Puerto Rican and speak Spanish, they tell me all the time that that book is much funnier in Spanish than it is in English because it is the vernacular of the people of the time also. So it's very particular to that historical time when I was being raised there.

I also deliberately put in these little coded messages for the Spanish speakers because I am writing in English. So I put these coded messages for the Spanish speakers that would get something that perhaps those who don't speak Spanish, they'll just slide by through them and it doesn't make very much sense to them or they don't care. you know, but people who understand it, get it. Is there one example of one of those, you mentioned coded messages that you can, that you could think of just to satisfy my own curiosity? Well, I mean, I think in the names, particularly,

they're little, you know, Marisol, which means sea and sun, and rios, which means rivers. So her name is Marisol Rios Fuentes, and her, you know, sea and sun rivers fountains. So those kinds of things Sounds like it comes from the sound of music or something Right, right You're about to break out into song, yes.

And at the beginning of your book, you do a sort of list of the names, almost like it more commonly happens at the beginning of a play. Like here are the personae that you're going to meet. And there's a great quote that you have up there, like as a sort of note to the reader. You say, The conquest of our hemisphere meant the erasure of our clan and familial names.

In this novel, I endeavor to name even minor characters to honor the historically nameless. And I thought about that. You know, it's like, I wonder what names have meant for you in your writing and in your life. Well, I think, you know, I'm born and raised as Emeralda Santiago, Santiago. I'm Santiago on both sides. It's something that I'm very aware of that at a certain point in my life, I don't know when it was. It might have been when I began to speak English. and I felt comfortable in it, is that I began to pronounce my name Esmeralda as Esmeralda.

I anglicized it to make it easier. Every once in a while, somebody will pronounce it in the Spanish. I'm like, oh, I'm so used to the other sound because I live in the United States, that it is like it's a different person. So that sense that I'm coming from Puerto Rico, just being on that plane, I became someone different, and then the same thing happens to Luce with her name. One of the, I don't think I'm spoiling anything in the book to say that early on, Luce has a traumatic brain event that changes her relationship to language and memory. a kind of re-learning has to occur for her. And something similar happened to you in your life.

You had a stroke and you had to re-teach yourself English, something that is one of the themes of your books already kind of became a fate for you. Were you thinking about that when you created Luce? How have you thought about that? I think language has been a preoccupation for me because until I was 13, I did not speak English. came to the United States.

I had to teach myself English, and so I did it by reading children's books and basically learning all the nouns, you know, apple, banana, car, things like that. And so when I had a stroke many years later, and I realized I have lost the ability to understand the written word.

I could write, but I could not understand what I had just written. So I had this process. This happened to me twice the first time coming to the United States, knowing that I recognized the letters. They had the same scripts that we have in Spanish, but I didn't understand it. It might have been, you know, any language, really. And so when I had the stroke and I had the same situation

because my brain had a problem, I'm like, how ironic. But then having gone through it, I knew that I could recover. My doctors kept saying, you know, the brain is elastic. It learns. It finds path, et cetera, et cetera. And so I said, okay, well, I'm just going back to the library to the children's book department and finding the alphabet books and all the nouns and then keep moving like that until 18 to 20, months later, then I knew, okay, it looks like I have managed to get over the hump.

But I remember that sense of knowing I know something, but I don't know it. And that sense stayed with me long after I was over that situation, that feeling between needing something that I knew I already had, but I didn't have a access to it. So for me, Luce is almost representative of Puerto Rico itself. We have this very long history that we don't necessarily have access to, and especially for Puerto Ricans who may not speak Spanish. I mean, of course, in Puerto Rico, people are taught this history and they know. But those of us who live outside of the island, we live the history, but we don't really know it. We have a reason to call ourselves Puerto Ricans, whether our parents or because we were

born there or our great-grandparents, for whatever reason we identify. But we may not all have all the history that really gives us a sense of why it is that we call ourselves Puerto Rican. and all those things that I grapple with in both my memoir and fiction, they pretty much are the same. There's this sense of characters are moving between Puerto Rico and the United States, constantly trying to, in Spanish, this word is Lidiar. It's like to handle both things. And even as I'm speaking to you, I'm like balancing my hands higher and lower.

You look like a statue of justice. Yes, you're doing the one hand. It's like we do this constantly for those of us who come from other cultures. And let's just not even say countries, because the next thing I was going to tell you is about Langston News. Who was coming from the South and came to Harlem, I guess. So, yes, maybe he was in a different country. But I think that's where it changed for me is he actually came to my high school when I, I think, I think I must have been a junior, I think.

And so I had been in the United States for two and a half years, and my English, reading English was at a much higher level than my speaking English because it was easier for me to read it than to pronounce it because people would laugh at me or make, you know, make it uncomfortable for me. But this man came to our high school and there was a full assembly, I remember. I just have never forgotten him. He was wearing like an ivory colored suit. It must have been in the summer. He was very elegant and gentle and kind.

I mean, he was aware that he was with all these high school student, you know, public school in New York City. He was aware where he was. And he was just so tender and great and talked about his life and his work. I had never heard of him until then. And I went straight to the library. and I borrowed all his books. And reading his work made me feel for the first time in the time since I have arrived in the United States.

Like, I'm part of this culture and this society. I just happened to be invisible in it. Right. Like, oh, thank you, Mr. Hughes. Yeah, I mean, this might be one of like a deep ancestors. key to why I love your work so much because, you know, Langston Hughes is my first favorite poet. And I always love, you know, theme for English B where he talks about, like, America, I'm a part of you, just like you're a part of me. Like, there is some, we're going to have to find this thorny

path toward coexistence in some way, you know. It made me wonder kind of what you would say about sort of the various forms of patriotism, nationalism that are at work now in Puerto Rico, that some people are fighting for statehood within the United States. Some people still say, you know, independence. There's so many different ways that people express that pride, whether it's patriotic, nationalistic, whatever. I just wonder how you have engaged with that activism. Right. Well, I tried to pay attention to all of it, but my paternal family were all nationalists.

Oh, is it today? Oh, my goodness. It's today. It's the anniversary of the United States invasion of Puerto Rico through Guanyika. And then my uncle, from a very early age, he was really against the fact that the United States basically took us and then claimed us and said, okay, you're ours now, and you'll have to speak English. we're like, no. So that was on my father's side, the struggle always was towards independence, nationalism, pride on the on the on the on the patria. And then on the other side, my mother's the one who brought us to the United States, who just thought this is the world is the most wonderful place is to be in the United States. So, so from from both of

them, I really get that sense of patriotism and sense of Puerto Rico. nest. And then from my mother, this understanding of we were peasant with no land, basically. And so for my mother, this was a huge step up in spite of the kinds of places that we were living. So I really understand both sides from that perspective, but the part of me is emotional. And emotional is a patriotism of the Padria and Nationhood that I'm, I'm not really sure that in Puerto Rico we have the leadership to pull off, frankly. I wish that I could say, oh, such, you know, there's no Pedro Alvisu Campos. He towers over our history, just like Martin Luther King towers over our, you know, culture here.

I long for that. I'm not sure that that's available quite yet, or I have not come across that person or those persons just yet. The novelist Esmeral de Santiago speaking with Vincent Cunningham of the New Yorker. More in a moment. I wondered about this mixture of kind of matriarchy, which is always very strong in your books, right? That there is a private world among women that keeps communities going, that propagates us into the future. But also it's a space for a kind of, whenever I read your books, I can hear my mother and her friends talking, you know, which is my introduction to language. I just wonder how you, what that's been.

in as a constant throughout your work and life? Well, I'm the eldest of 11 children, of which were six sisters. And then when my mother brought us to the United States, she left my father. And then we lived with my mother and her mother and surrounded by my grandmother's sisters and nieces. So I come from this universe surrounded by very strong, opinionated, articulate women who do not pull punches, as they say, as the expression goes. You know, they will tell you what they feel right then and there. And I like to play with that.

I like the fact that, you know, Graciela, for example, is a very, it's very open about her and comfortable in her sexuality and her desires and her wanting something. And when she wants it, she gets it. You know, there's no, there's no guilt around it. There's no excuses to be made about it. This is part of who I am. But, you know, I know that I am a very different Puerto Rican when I'm in a room of U.S. Americans who've never been to Puerto Rico who doesn't know where it is. You know, I'm a very different person than I am among people like me.

It's, this is part of the, of the game that we all have to play if we come from these other cultures and societies and language groups, you know, that we really do become a different person. Like, yeah, my hands are moving again. This is the Puerto Rican in me. I'm not Puerto Rican and I suffer from the same affliction. I'm, I'm picking. up all of your secondary messages. Yeah, there's, I mean, I think there's a language and gesture that we have. And I think that women have particularly, I wrote the screenplay for the film made of almost a

woman for Masterpiece Theater. And I remember my son happened to be on the set with me that day. We were observing one of the scenes. And the woman who plays my mother, Wanda de Jesus, is. interacting with a young actress who plays me as a teenager. And so Wanda Desus looks at this young actress in such a way that my son just grabbed my hand. And he's, oh, my God. That's you.

And I said, and I grabbed him back. I said, no, that's my mother. That is the look. That is the mommy look, you know. And so I think there is that that, that, that, that, that, that, we recognize because we've been around it about our mothers, our grandmothers, our theas, our aunties, our cousins, and to have completely different language than what U.S. Americans speak physically in their own communities and in their own lives and in their

own histories. That's wonderful. Thank you again so much. This has been such a lovely time. Thank you. Thank you for the great questions and for making me think. I learn a lot. The New Yorker's Vincent Cunningham speaking with author Esmeralda Santiago.

I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbes of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Breda Green, Adam Howard, Callalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gophen and Putabwele,

with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Decker. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.