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A review by siria
Native Country of the Heart by Cherríe Moraga
4.0
A heartfelt book and an often painful read, Cherríe Moraga's Native Country of the Heart is a memoir both of the author's mother Elvira, of mother and daughter's relationship, and of the slow loss of Elvira to dementia. As the narrative moves back and forth between Moraga's pain and grief at her mother's present illness, and their often difficult relationship during Moraga's youth, Moraga also grapples with issues of identity, indigeneity, sexuality, and colonialism. While her mother was Mexican-American of indigenous descent, Moraga's father (whose last name she stopped using as a young woman) was a white man, and Moraga herself is a lesbian.
One of my own grandmothers died of Alzheimer's disease, a long and awful process of dying for her which was terrible to observe and which amplified existing familial fractures. I found reading the parts of the book which dealt with the last stage of Elvira's life both very familiar and impossibly painful. Moraga's prose powerfully captures Elvira's personality, though with a number of stylistic tics that I found irritating. (For example: italicising the prepositions in a sentence does not automatically make it more profound or meaningful.)
One of my own grandmothers died of Alzheimer's disease, a long and awful process of dying for her which was terrible to observe and which amplified existing familial fractures. I found reading the parts of the book which dealt with the last stage of Elvira's life both very familiar and impossibly painful. Moraga's prose powerfully captures Elvira's personality, though with a number of stylistic tics that I found irritating. (For example: italicising the prepositions in a sentence does not automatically make it more profound or meaningful.)