A Lyrical Legacy of Mothers and Daughters in Gabriela Garcia’s Debut Novel "Of Women and Salt"
I looked forward to reading Gabriela Garcia’s Of Women and Salt, having enjoyed her short story “Mrs. Sorry” in Zyzzyva, which turns out to be an excerpt from this debut novel. Again I was struck by Garcia’s lyrical prose and portrayal of women in desperate situations. Each chapter in Of Women and Salt is narrated by one of seven main women from two different families and jumps back and forth across generations between 1866 and 2019 and points between. Garcia’s vivid descriptions evoke the smells, tastes, and sensations of the various locales: Miami, Cuba, Texas, Mexico. Salt seeps into the pages from the women’s sweat and tears and the brine of the sea, as they struggle to make a safe place for themselves.
The book opens in Miami with a brief incantation from modern day Carmen to her daughter Jeanette, who struggles with addiction, begging her to “tell me that you want to live.” The story then travels to Cuba in 1866 to introduce the matriarch of the family. María Isabel is a cigar roller in a factory in Camagüey, Cuba on the eve of a war for independence from Spain. Her story of awakening and loss is reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in its poeticism and the exploration of family legacy and the ravages of rebellion. But unlike Márquez’s masterpiece, this narrative never coalesces as it skips generations (Maria Isabel’s daughter Cecilia is born the night her father is executed, then she’s never mentioned again) and also skips to a different family. The story alternates between mothers and daughters, past and present, in disjointed spurts that don’t quite hold the journey or emotional arc together.
Along with María Isabel’s story, the strongest sections of the book revolve around Jeanette’s interactions with her neighbors in Miami—Gloria and her little girl Ana, undocumented immigrants from El Salvador. Gloria is taken in the night by ICE, while her daughter is at a babysitter’s house and Jeanette takes the girl in for a time. Gloria expresses the anxiety, confusion, and fear of detainment with raw honesty. There is a palpable ache in her concern for her absent child, whom she longs to see yet hopes never to see living in confinement. Gloria’s narrative adroitly points up the disturbing faults in US immigration and detainment processes. Gloria finds solace in books about birds and likens her daughter to a bird “flying through these gates to me, shedding handcuffs and perplexing Immigration officers as she expands her wings and flaps them viciously… . This is how I see her coming to me, arms spread, sun in her belly, royalty made of bone and feather and laughter.”
Ultimately, the multigenerational multi-timeline threads never gather together satisfactorily and readers are left wondering about the absent pieces of the albeit sumptuous tapestry—what are the missing stories of Cecilia and Carmen’s sister Elena? What occurred during a three-year gap in Jeanette’s storyline that leads to the conclusion?
What does come across clearly is the fierceness of a mother’s devotion and the risks women take to protect their progeny, even when their choices incur secrets and lies that will ultimately destroy the relationships with those daughters. Secrets, her own and her mother’s, break Jeanette. While sipping cortaditos, Carmen implores her daughter to help her fix their relationship; but Jeanette knows the gulf is impossible to bridge. “I wish to dissolve into my cup, I wish to dissolve on the tongue, to be sugar and not this bitter, watery substance in the shape of Girl.”
Garcia reminds us that along with the hardships and pain the women endure, they also possess resolve and strength. In the echoing words of Jeanette, “We are more than we think we are.”
Of Women and Salt
Gabriela Garcia
224 pages. 2021
About Diane Englert
Diane is a writer, accessibility consultant, and provider of audio description and open captioning services. Her writing appears in Ruminate Magazine, From the Depths, What Rough Beast, Hash Journal, We’ll Never Have Paris, and Nanoism, among others. She recently finished her first middle grade novel. Diane worked in theater as a director, producer, dramaturg, actor, and wrote libretto for several mini musicals that have all been produced. Diane loves coffee and her family, who say she makes The Best Banana Bread. Her bite is worse than her bark. Find her on Instagram @signeddiane.
