The Novelist Esmeralda Santiago on Learning to Write After a Stroke

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K 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.
0:08.9	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:12.6	For decades, the author Esmerela Santiago has written both in memoir and fiction about 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
0:26.7	is staff writer Vincent Cunningham. As Meraldo Santiago, especially in her early memoirs of moving
0:35.2	from rural Puerto Rico to the hustle and bustle of New York is someone that I consider
0:40.5	one of our foremost chroniclers of what it means to grow up, one of the great crafters of
0:48.0	age narrative and can really move you through, you know, the growing consciousness of a person as their circumstances change
0:56.7	and sometimes surprising, sometimes terrifying ways.
1:01.7	Santiago's new book, Las Madres, is not a coming-of-age story.
1:05.2	It's about people later in life looking back.
1:08.4	Here's Esmeralda Santiago, talking with Vincent Cunningham.
1:12.6	Las Madres is about five women who have known each other all their lives and are friends and also some of them are related to one another.
1:22.4	And they decide to go to Puerto Rico for the birthday of the eldest of these women. And while they're there,
1:29.2	they are stranded by Hurricane Maria. And they have to deal with that situation. And in the
1:37.1	process, they learn a lot about themselves, about one another and about one another's histories.
1:43.4	My origin story with your work is when I was in high school, I could, you know, I studied
1:49.0	Spanish and I could speak, I need to relearn Spanish, right? But back then, the first book that
1:54.1	I ever tried to read totally in Spanish was Cassi Una Mujer. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I read it first
2:00.0	in Spanish. And I still wonder, I wonder how, you know,
2:04.9	coming from a multilingual background, like, you know, I love it when you talk about Spanglish,
2:09.8	like people that can so fluidly move between languages even in the course of a sentence or a
	...

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