in review: Native Country of the Heart
Native Country of the Heart
by Cherríe Moraga
Publication Date: April 2, 2019
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
There is no accurate way to synthesize how I felt after completing Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir by Cherríe Moraga. I had to close the memoir upwards of 20 times to sit and reflect. Moraga portrays a sadness and longing felt in part for herself and her burgeoning queer identity, which she initially felt she had to suppress for survival, and a sadness and longing felt in part for her native ancestors and the native populations of the Americas.
Those who are familiar with Moraga will not be surprised by her championing of the marginalized through such a personal text. Many know Moraga from her previous written work (in collaboration with Gloria Anzaldua and with other QWOC/WOC), from her plays, or perhaps from her work in partnership with Celia Herrera Rodríguez to create a space for Xicana “thought, art, and social practice” at UC Santa Barbara. Those not familiar with Moraga’s past work in partnership with other WOC for POC/WOC liberation might misinterpret some mentions of slavery/genocide or other cultural groups (in the first and third sections of the memoir especially), but this reviewer will leave each reader to their own interpretations.
Native Country of the Heart is a firsthand account of trying to preserve one’s ancestral history when the pressures of elders or society tell you that you should forget one entire culture that led to your birth, for the alleged betterment of yourself. Moraga says that she fears “that our dreams can come true in ‘America,’ but at the cost of a profound senility of spirit,” and wonders: “If we forget ourselves, who will be left to remember us?” Moraga describes growing up feeling the deep isolation familiar to many closeted queer people: “The despairingly lonely out-of-body sensation of Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar…was a kind of approximation [of how I felt], but I was a MexicanAmerican and the daughter of a woman who had unwittingly instructed me on the complex desire of women.” The reader must be aware of their own and others’ positionality. Moraga sums up her Mexican-American and queer identities overlapping each other in the way of one causing the suppression of the other due to institutionalized oppression. Moraga writes:
“I didn’t want to be a lesbian. But equally, I didn’t want to live in the prison of what today academics call “heteronormativity.” Which brings me to the question of class privilege and Mexicanism. I don’t remember meeting a bona fide educated middle-class MexicanAmerican (with the exception of the nuns [from Moraga’s schools]) until long after I had graduated college. Ours was the first generation to benefit from affirmative action (brief as it was), but it takes more than a generation to secure class ascendancy.”
The specific overlap of Moraga’s sexual orientation and cultural histories are the cause for every moment of friction she feels throughout her life, and each moment is beautifully if not tragically expressed (not always brimming with jargon as in the quote above). The text is comprised by brief chapters, each a vignette or group of memories that coalesce to some sort of closure, so when isolated each chapter might feel wonderfully whole, an entire essay in itself. Together the chapters give a fully rounded history of Elvira Moraga (Moraga’s mother), Joseph (Moraga’s father), and Moraga herself, all while also touching on JoAnn and James (Moraga’s siblings), as well as Moraga and her partner’s children. There is no lack of vibrancy in any of the “characters’” lives, and the text, in plot alone, is utterly alluring. Likewise, though the reader will no doubt come away with a sense of how strong Moraga is and her matrilineal ancestors were, the utter heartbreak or aggravated tension present at many of Moraga’s life stages will bend the reader’s emotions backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards.
—Elizabeth Campos