In Native Country of the Heart, Cherríe Moraga pays homage to her Mexican mother while navigating her own coming-of-age story. The memoir introduces touchstone moments in Moraga’s life as she negotiates her sense of self as a lesbian and Chicana trying to reconnect with her Indigenous roots. It’s a book about accepting challenging family bonds and self-truths that seem impossible to embrace.
From the account’s early chapters, Moraga depicts her mother, Elvira, as a strong-willed character who rules the household and doesn’t shy away from corporal punishment. The narrative confronts the author’s relationship with her mother, focusing on the matriarch’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Conversations about Alzheimer’s or dementia typically center on erasure. An Alzheimer’s patient often experiences loss of memory, as well as loss of executive function and autonomy, while the family of the afflicted grieves what once was. However, in Native Country of the Heart, Moraga complicates the common notion that Alzheimer’s strictly equates to tragic loss or a type of vanishing. She presents the disease, rather, as a more nuanced state of being, one that sheds pretense and social norms while simultaneously robbing and expanding both her and her mother’s mental faculties.
The morning after Elvira celebrates a birthday in the eldercare home where she’s been living, the author realizes that her mother has no recollection of the event. Moraga tells the reader, “Suspecting Elvira hadn’t been all there the previous night, I asked her if she would like to see her presents. What? She didn’t remember getting presents. I brought out the pile of opened boxes, the tongues of white tissue hanging out from their mouths. She was elated at the sight of so many gifts.… That was a good day, a day I could pretend not remembering was really due to the wine and normal for an eighty-six-year-old and it isn’t called Alzheimer’s and it won’t get worse, because that day of not remembering made Elvira happy.” Moraga opts here to regard the disease as a gift, one that allows her mother to feel the joy of a birthday two days in a row.
Conversely, Moraga also permits herself to be swayed. She willingly clouds herself into believing, however briefly, that her mother was simply inebriated at the party. It’s a mental negotiation that allows Moraga to claim it was not Alzheimer’s that deleted the memory of the party from Elvira’s mind, but rather the magic of wine.
Not much later, Elvira asks her daughters, “How could I have had children with that man?” The man in question is Moraga’s father, whom Elvira had been married to for decades. While she considers it might be an effect of “accumulated plaque” on her mother’s brain, Moraga entertains the possibility that her mother experienced “a moment of pure illumination, springing from the mind that resides wholly in the heart of deeper knowing.” In her new mental state, Elvira questions her previous decision to start a family with a man she finds so glaringly unsuitable. The disease frees Elvira from the pretense that she must love her husband when, in fact, as Moraga admits, the marriage was emotionally empty and plagued by alcoholism.
As Elvira’s disease progresses, her mind becomes prismatic. Moraga states, “To look at Elvira, to really look, her interiority seemed to deepen by the day. She was speaking to the other side now. She seemed to not only remember but was able to foresee a future of otherworldly relations, unencumbered by the contraction of her brain and physical surroundings.” According to Moraga, the deterioration was as devastating for the family as it was liberating for Elvira herself. When the world of logic, sequence, and connections stops serving her, Elvira begins her leap into a realm of liquid time where other realities are possible and less punishing. Moraga acknowledges that while this experience was taking place, her mother was, in fact, growing away from her daughters and family.
Many readers are sure to question Moraga’s assertion that her “mother’s facultad was growing.” Certainly, such an insistence is consistent with other sleights of hand Moraga indulges in throughout the memoir, commentary that softens the grim reality of her mother’s fate. The author makes clear near the end that she did not want her mother to “die confused,” a reference to a Tibetan Buddhists’ prayer. Undoubtedly, Alzheimer’s disease was ravaging Elvira’s mind, but possibly, too, her untethering allowed her to metamorphose into a new state, one few people glimpse, much less understand.
Moraga’s prose is a sweet serum that primes the reader to entertain multiple realities. By acknowledging the invisible bridge Elvira was crossing, Moraga creates a safe haven for her mother, a place as fulfilling as the one she was leaving behind.•
Join us on September 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Moraga will sit down with host John Freeman and special guest Rigoberto González to discuss Native Country of the Heart. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
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On September 13 at 7 p.m., Bookshop Santa Cruz will host a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. —Bookshop Santa Cruz
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