The Novelist Esmeralda Santiago on Learning to Write After a Stroke

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2023

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The author Esmeralda Santiago has been writing about Puerto Rico and questions of immigration and identity since the early nineties. But, in 2008, she suffered a stroke that left her unable to decipher words on a page. In the months that followed, she relied on some of the same strategies she’d used to teach herself English after moving to the United States as a young teen-ager—checking out children’s books from the library, for example, to learn basic vocabulary. Santiago’s latest book, “Las Madres,” includes a character named Luz who goes through a similar experience after a traumatic brain injury. “That sense stayed with me long after I was over that situation—that feeling between knowledge and ignorance,” she tells the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “For me, Luz is almost representative of Puerto Rico itself. We have this very long history that we don’t necessarily have access to. . . . Those of us who live outside of the island, we live the history but we don’t really know it.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.2	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Rennick.
0:13.2	For decades, the author Esmeralysan Tiago has written both in memoir and fiction about
0:18.2	Puerto Rico immigration and identity.
0:21.8	Santiago was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York as a kid, and one of her admirers
0:27.2	is Staff Rider Vincent Cunningham.
0:29.8	Esmeralysan Tiago, especially in her early memoirs of moving from rural Puerto Rico
0:37.2	to the hustle and bustle of New York, is someone that I consider one of our foremost chroniclers
0:44.5	of what it means to grow up, one of the great crafters of coming of age narrative and
0:49.3	can really move you through the growing consciousness of a person as their circumstances change
0:56.7	and sometimes surprising, sometimes terrifying ways.
1:01.6	Santiago's new book, Las Madras, is not a coming of age story, it's about people later
1:06.2	in life looking back.
1:08.5	Here's Esmeralysan Tiago talking with Vincent Cunningham.
1:12.8	Las Madras is about five women who have known each other all their lives and are friends
1:19.4	and also some of them are related to one another and they decide to go to Puerto Rico for
1:25.1	the birthday of the eldest of these women and while they're there, they are stranded
1:30.5	by Hurricane Maria and they have to deal with that situation and in the process, they learn
1:38.2	a lot about themselves, about one another and about one another's histories.
1:43.6	My origin story with your work is when I was in high school, I could, you know, I studied
1:49.2	Spanish and I could speak, I need to relearn Spanish, right?
1:52.4	But back then, the first book that I ever tried to read totally in Spanish was Cassie
	...

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