"One day Mamá said life was about to start and ran off to the mountains to become a rebel guerrillera. No one knew exactly where she had gone until she came back pregnant a year later on a burro." From that March day in 1958, shortly before her sixth birthday, Tanya del Carmen Casals Villalta embarks on an ever-challenging relationship with her passionate, idealistic, mercurial, unreliable mother, Mirella, that leads to a shared ultimate risk.
Using the voice of young Tanya, Ivonne Lamazares writes with authenticity, immediacy, and grace of her homeland, its people, and a dramatic mother-daughter relationship. The people of Cuba, as seen through Tanya's eyes–at the height of Castro's revolution, in the 1960s and early '70s–are in conflict with themselves and with their own stubborn hopes and ambitions. At odds with her mother and with the rapidly changing world around her, Tanya herself longs only for love and stability. When Mirella's first attempt at escape fails, however, the thirteen-year-old girl feels that she has betrayed and deserted her mother. Tanya and her younger brother, Emanuel, are sent to live with their father's great-aunt in Havana. When Mirella returns to them from "rehabilitation," everyone in the household enters a time of indignities, shortages, and disillusionment with neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and party compañeros watching everything they do. Still, Mirella never surrenders hope for a better life. Meanwhile, Tanya's greatest challenge is coping with the tangle of feelings her mother evokes–love, loyalty, fear, anger, contempt, pity, and admiration. When the two at last embark on their perilous flight to freedom, they carry with them their unresolved conflicts and a determination to improve their lives in a land where nothing is certain. As they adapt to life in their new country, Tanya and Mirella at last move toward a shared resolution of their troubles.
With poetic prose and a clear-eyed vision, Ivonne Lamazares tells a timeless tale of love and autonomy while capturing in stunning clarity the colors and atmosphere of a specific time and place. Mirella and Tanya, mother and daughter, are anchored in the now-vanished Cuba and Florida of thirty years ago and at the same time rise to an well-earned level of universal significance. "The Sugar Island is a wonderful amalgamation of culture, politics, and love," wrote the Philadelphia Weekly's reviewer; "it is a story that speaks to all aspects of life."
We hope the following questions will stimulate discussion for reading groups and provide a deeper understanding of The Sugar Island for every reader.
1. "The City will always pursue you," Lamazares quotes Constantine Cavafy in her first epigraph. In what ways do Mirella's and Tanya's city and country pursue them? How might this be true for everyone?
2. Tanya recalls her grandmother saying that "to survive one must make 'heart out of tripe.'" "But for me," Tanya considers, "it was the other way around. Heart was what got thrown away." What instances are there in the novel of heart being thrown away?
3. How do the beliefs and practices of santeria, Catholicism, and communism contribute to Tanya's and Mirella's views of themselves and the world? What beliefs and practices do they share or mutually reject?
4. At Melena's eighty-fifth birthday concert, Tanya realizes that the old woman has given Emanuel "a way of seeing himself, of reaching a depth of concentration unknown to me, to anyone in our family." How is this manifested in the novel? Does Tanya ever achieve a comparable way of seeing herself and a comparable depth of concentration?
5. "My idea of love," says Tanya, "was Mamá's way with us . . . I also knew the love between me and Paula . . . But the old lady's feeling for my brother was physical like the world." What kinds of love does Tanya experience and observe? What does she learn about each kind and about the needs and desires that each might provoke and satisfy?
6. Melena says to Tanya, "Some people are called upon to carry strange burdens. You're one of them." What strange burdens is Tanya called upon to carry, and what becomes of those burdens by the novel's end?
7. "You can't just break the rules and start fresh tomorrow," Andres insists to Tanya. What does breaking the rules mean to each of Lamazares's characters? How important to Mirella and Tanya are breaking rules and adhering to rules?
8. How does Lamazares present the various tyrannies of politics, religion, and personal relationships? In what ways do her characters attempt to rebel against those tyrannies, and with what consequences?
9. In what ways does Tanya and Mirella's relationship echo the relationship of each with Cuba? How does Tanya's personal life reflect the political environment of Cuba?
10. What kinds of seduction and betrayal occur in the novel? What are the causes and consequences of the various betrayals? Why do the various betrayers behave as they do?
11. At various times in the novel, Tanya feels that she has deserted Mirella, Melena, and Emanuel. Why does she feel this way in each instance? Why might Tanya, her mother, and others be especially sensitive to the issue of desertion? How does Lamazares present the related paired themes of flight and abandonment?
15. What is the significance of Mirella's observation that many people risk death itself to become who they are meant to be? What circumstances, ambitions, or hopes might cause someone to take that ultimate risk? "I did what I had to do," Mirella tells her daughter after their own shared ultimate risk. "I made your life count." In what ways might her claim be true or not?
One of the most original and exciting new writers on the American literary scene, Ivonne Lamazares was born and raised in Cuba. Her mother died when she was three, and she was cared for by her grandparents in Old Havana. She immigrated to the United States when she was fourteen, learned to ride a bicycle in 1992, and now lives in Winter Park, Florida, with her husband, the poet Steve Kronen, and their daughter. Lamazares was "discovered" at the Sewanee Writers' Conference by Russell Banks and Mary Morris, both of whom have become enthusiastic champions of her work. She has been the subject of articles in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and her stories have appeared in Blue Mesa Review and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is on the faculty of the University of Central Florida, where she teaches creative writing.
|
