workspace - Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

May 2012
SHERISSE ALVAREZ
sherissealvarez.com
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.
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