I Am Her Memory: Working With Matrilineal Narratives in Memoir

When I asked my mother, “Should I ask Grandma about Cuba?” her response was, “I am her memory.”

Grandma was in her 90s and more than 60 years had elapsed since the family left Cuba, but my mother was not making a point about the passage of time; she was showing me a family tree made not of DNA or birthdays but one made of stories, shared experiences, and memory. As my mother’s only daughter, someday I too would be my mother’s memory. Perhaps that was already underway. 

I did not intend to use my grandmother’s and mother’s stories in my travel memoir A Little Piece of Cuba: A Journey to Become Cubana-Americana. This book is about the five days in Cuba that changed my life and my view of myself as a Cuban-American woman. But, as a young child learns from the world around them, I learned about Cuba from the words and actions of my mother and grandmother.

They made a mysterious foreign embargoed land accessible: My mother showed me Cuba’s place on a world map and told me that our family’s presence in Cuba that dated back hundreds of years, and my grandmother demonstrated what a day looked like in Cuba by introducing me to Cuban food, speaking a little Spanish around me, and teaching me about Cuban customs, hobbies, and pastimes. When I asked questions, they answered and added a little story or two. Their perspectives wove together, complemented, and informed one another, giving me a starting point for exploration and curiosity.

As I grew up, my mother’s stories evolved not because she had learned something new or because she had eureka moments of sudden remembering, but because my mother realized that she had become the custodian of a collection of my grandmother’s memories. My mother told me stories from Cuba and those first few years in the United States that my grandmother was a part of but never told me herself. My mother vividly recalled struggles faced as they adjusted to life in a new country. Those early challenges compelled my mother to safeguard her story, so that for years all I knew was, “We left Cuba one day and never went back. The End.”

She was not being vague or secretive; she was learning how to tell both her own narrative and her mother’s. She has embraced all aspects of her story from the harrowing tales of a child growing into adolescence while stuck between two worlds to lighthearted tales threaded with humor and joy. Her relationship with and her stories about Cuba will always be hers alone, and so will my grandmother’s. No story is ever complete and I have to acknowledge and respect that there are likely other custodians holding other parts of their stories. Still, I am glad that “The End” has been abandoned in favor of a flowing continuum and layering of stories from my grandmother to my mother to my mother’s version of my grandmother’s story and finally to me.

When I traveled to Cuba as an adult, I unknowingly packed a carry-on bag of matrilineal oral history that came to life as I experienced Cuba myself. As I walked Havana’s famous sea wall the Malecon, I recalled both my own memories of beach days with my mother and my grandmother’s stories of her beach visits when she was a young girl in Cuba. As I tucked into a plate of arroz con frijoles, fragrant with garlic, I remembered my mother’s innovative adjustment of the classic recipe for a slow cooker so that weeknight dinner cooked itself and how my grandmother guided me through a recipe for the classic Cuban dish arroz con pollo.

My memories and my matrilineal narratives came to life and re-invented themselves in my Cuba, and I leaned into them as artifacts, no less solid than a fossil in a museum or a document in an archive, overindulging in detail in early working drafts of the memoir. A few years had elapsed between my trip to Cuba and my first drafts of the memoir, yet I could rely on photographs from my trip to Cuba to jog my memories of Cuba and of my childhood and earlier years. As I spelunked the cave of my own memories from my past and my experiences of Cuba to form the book’s arc, my mother’s and my grandmother’s stories surfaced and joined mine as the scaffold for my own Cuban narrative.

Because family narratives are handed down in images, snippets, stories, food, and tiny acts that seem insignificant, it’s easy to dismiss them as unimportant or lacking in meaning for others. But many women exist from day to day in the small spaces where barriers between cultures, customs, and languages dissolve. When readers start to tell me a story about their grandmother and her recipes and stories from her country of origin, I see the universality in my experience. What I have found in sharing my story built from my matrilineal line is that women seek a custodian for their stories, someone who can dust off the artifacts, make meaning by bringing an experience from long ago into the present day, and mark the individual swirls of fingerprints left on this world.

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