Sherisse Alvarez
Workspace: Current Session
Sherisse Alvarez is a writer and editor living in New York City. She received an MFA from Hunter College and a BA from Hampshire College. Her work has appeared in Palimpsest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine, the anthologies Becoming, Revolutionary Voices, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a memoir that explores exile, loss, and desire. Excerpts, past projects, and a more detailed bio can be found on her website.
Excerpt from Parting, a memoir in progress:
It is water my grandmother is carrying when she hears the news. Her mother, Celina, has just died leaving behind ten children, five boys and five girls. Uterine tumors, each one usually smaller than a tangerine, are the cause of my great-grandmother’s death.
They live in Cuba, on a sugarcane farm in Matanzas. Their house is a fort built during the War of Independence. My grandmother awakens each morning to the plight of roosters. The sound echoes through the house where every so often the children observe doors and windows that move on their own, beds that creak as if bodies were in them.
Her father, Yaya, owns this farm. Yaya and his brother Papito grew up in an orphanage but had the good fortune of working for a man who gave them a small loan. This is how they started out. My grandmother, the eldest girl, has already begun working in the fields. She is nine but has already seen and heard many things and is already becoming a woman.
It is like this for some years, my grandmother helping to raise her younger siblings. When she marries she is twenty-four. Her father builds them a home in the city, a wedding gift he will give to each son and daughter, and in it she has two children: first a boy she names José Manuel and, later, my mother, a girl whom she names Alina.
The same summer my mother is born, soldiers attempting to overthrow Batista, descend from the mountains in the east. Fidel Castro is among them. Less than a year later, revolution is underway in Cuba and many things are changing.
In the beginning, no one knows it is communism. But, before long, land is being nationalized, concentration camps built. Firing squads are put in place. Because of Fidel candy falls from the sky and into the hands of school-aged boys and girls, their eyes closed.
When my grandmother leaves she will take her father, and daughter, and the clothes against their skin. Nothing more. She will leave behind the land, her things, a life no longer belonging to her. (A few black and white photographs with fringed edges will be smuggled, by one of the sisters perhaps. When I am older I will keep them close: my grandmother as a girl, my mother as a young beauty, a muted countryside.) It is the only way. To flee is the only way. But they’ll stay in America only for a while, my grandmother will think. They will return when this nightmare is over.
I see her clearly, my grandmother, the girl who only enjoys her mother’s beauty for a few years, who is not a child for long. The young woman who bears two children, has a husband whom, she discovers later, takes those children to visit his mistress. The young woman who has to put her son on a plane headed for a place she’s never seen, who cannot grieve because there is no room for that now, this is no place for tears, her beloved country, collapsing. Destierro, to be uprooted, to be unearthed.
