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The Story Behind
the Story
Every year my family takes a trip back home to
reunite in the house my grandmother grew up in Los
Llanos, Dominican Republic. When I was younger, I
used those visits to ask my great aunts and uncles
about the old days, about how their lives were
affected by the dictatorship of Trujillo or by the
U.S. occupation in 1965.
“Who has time for all that thinking,” my Great Uncle
Pirulo responded. “I just hope we get some rain, or
else those plants over there aren’t going to make
it.” |
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His response, and others like it, surprised me. I
sat back and looked at the wooden house my
grandmother had grown up in, still holding on after
70 years. I looked at all the vegetation, the cane
fields. I thought about all the books I had read
about strike workers, the Haitian massacre in ’37,
the Mariposas who died tragically because of their
work against the Trujillo government. How could my
uncle not be affected? I wondered.
I blamed my great uncles’ apathy on the lack of
paved roads and electricity in el campo, the lack of
access to the goings-on of the outside, political
world. I assumed that my family felt isolated from
those who were living in the city. And then I
realized that everyone turns a blind eye to
something—the war in Iraq, the millions dying in the
Congo—and, much like my uncle cares about rain
because he uses his garden to put food on the table,
we often tend to our immediate surroundings, putting
out fires as we see them, and shutting out that
which we don’t think affects us directly.
And like most stories that start from questions we
want answers to, my story sprung from my imagination
of a movement of workers from Los Llanos working
together to bring down the dictatorship and develop
a cooperative. I turned Los Llanos into a small
refuge. I thought, What better place to imagine a
revolution in Dominican Republic! For years, I
dreamt up stories about the active involvement of
people in politics, gente del pueblo like my great
uncle. I wrote down the stories of my great uncles
the way I would have imagined them to have occurred.
But even more interesting to me was that I continued
to render stories from what I thought was puro
imaginación. The book I was working on, Let It Rain
Coffee, imagined a Los Llanos different than the one
my family described to me, full of political
activism and dissent.
Then I came across an article on the Internet about
the struggle of the people of Los Llanos against the
first U.S. occupation in 1919. Llaneros captured
American weapons, ambush-style. So bloody was this
attack on the U.S. forces by the people of Los
Llanos that the town was air-bombed and the Llaneros
were incarcerated. After reading this article, I
returned to Los Llanos to learn more about the 1919
occupation and the Llaneros’ involvement. Strangely
enough, the key to some of my questions was right
below my nose, tucked in the shade under a tree in a
small park in Los Llanos that I had visited a number
of times before. For the first time, I noticed my
grandmother’s maiden name, Sosa, etched into a
memorial plaque along with other names of people
who’d fought for their freedom.
All this to say: People ask me if my work is
autobiographical, and my immediate response is no.
But then I think about the memory of the body, the
memory we inherit from our mothers, grandmothers,
great grandmothers—those memories that our elders
never speak but that live within us. And yes, my
stories, and even more their unanswered questions,
have to do with what I know as well as with all the
things that I don’t know. With all of the things I
could only imagine in the wonderful world of
fiction.
Angie Cruz is the author of Soledad and, most
recently, Let It Rain Coffee. A founding member of
Women in Literature and Letters (WILL), she lives in
New York City. |
