It’s easy to imagine Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart as a culmination. Published in 2019, the book explores Moraga’s story through that of her mother, beginning in 1920s Tijuana and encompassing the older woman’s struggle with Alzheimer’s. This means it is a choice, as memoir is always a choice: a choice of what to put in and what to leave out, of memory and its lapses, of how to shape the vagaries of a life (or lives) within the clarifying frame of art. In that regard, Native Country of the Heart is more continuation than conclusion, as the most rigorous memoirs are.
And Moraga’s book is nothing if not rigorous. “There came a time in my life,” she explains in a brief author’s note, “when I began to look backward.” This, of course, is where all memoir starts. Yet the generosity of Moraga’s perspective becomes apparent in the first sentence of her prologue, where she channels her mother and establishes the stakes.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
“Elvira Isabel Moraga was not the stuff of literature,” Moraga confides. “Few bemoan the memory loss of the unlettered. My mother—and her generation of MexicanAmerican women—was to disappear quietly, unmarked by the letter of memory, the memory of letter. But when our storytellers go, taking their unrecorded memory with them, we their descendants go too, I fear.”
Native Country of the Heart, then, aspires to function as a reclamation, a reconciliation. For a reader, this is thrilling. First, there’s the flow of the language, which shifts fluidly from the personal to the collective and back again. I particularly admire its contrarian authority, Moraga’s insistence that the lives of the unlettered matter, even as she encodes her mother into letters. In part, this insistence has to do with memory, which Elvira is losing; “memory loss,” thus, takes on a double meaning and an intimate resonance. Then there is her decision not to hyphenate “MexicanAmerican,” to blur it as a single word. We are not here to qualify or to explain, Moraga means to tell us, but to treat identity as a state of being, even—or especially—when the culture doesn’t recognize us as we are.
Such an idea sits at the center of Moraga’s project; as a queer feminist, writing from an intersectional perspective, she, too, might once have been dismissed as “unlettered” (as in unaccounted for in the world of letters), until she carved out her own territory. Her body of work, read via this filter, represents an ongoing act of will. It is the insistence on recording the unrecorded that creates the driving tension of this book. “How to explain the complexity of this?” Moraga ponders. “What it means to be—not just me but us.” The solution—or, at least, the only one that matters—is courage: “to move forward in the face of doubt.”•
NATIVE COUNTRY OF THE HEART, BY CHERRÍE MORAGA
