April 2, 2002
"In these stories, I am seeking information on how to tip the balance toward survival for all of us."
Remedies for an Ailing World
A book review of Remedios by Aurora Levins Morales
by Diane R. Schulz
In Remedios Aurora Levins Morales continues her analysis of Puerto Rican women's history informed by her own healing from childhood abuse as well as her lifelong commitment to political activism for the downtrodden and silenced majority of the Western hemisphere. As in her first book, Medicine Stories, reviewed in Awakened Woman's 2000 Summer issue <http://www.awakenedwoman.com/medicine_stories.htm>, Morales feels an urgent need to present the stories of women of color - their truth - not as an addition to the hegemonic history of the dominator which we are normally taught and often accept as truth, but as central to the evolution and establishment of our present society and culture. Morales is also a student of herbal medicine. Her knowledge of plants is another important element in Remedios, as individual healing plants are defined and interspersed into the stories at various junctures.
In the Preface, she says, "In these stories, I am seeking information on how to tip the balance toward survival for all of us. . . . the medicines I seek as I wander in these long-abandoned gardens (I found most of these women in footnotes and appendices, in single lines buried in books about men) are not only the home remedies . . . I am particularly looking for that special class of plants called adaptogens, plants that contain substances capable of altering our bodies' ability to resist attack, to withstand stress, to defeat toxins and tumors, substances that can enter into the core of nearly overwhelmed immune systems and bring energy and hope."
In her Introduction, entitled "Revision," she points out the by now obvious, though largely ignored, fact that women's unpaid work, in this case Puerto Rican women's work, needs to be revealed and acknowledged before we can begin the process of re-visioning society. By telling these women's stories, Morales also reveals their often fierce resistance to domination and erasure. Since Puerto Rico, and the author herself, are products of an admixture of many races and cultures, including European, African, Jewish and Native American, Morales picks up all these threads of history and successfully weaves them together.
Remedios is not at all a standard historical text although it follows an historical timeline, from pre-history up to the present. Rather the text is composed of nuggets, small shining beads gleaned from many sources, and strung together by the thread of time across continents and oceans. Even her bibliography, entitled La Botanica (Sources) is revisionist. She lists her sources or inspirations for each segment chronologically, beginning with "Bisabuelas" and "Abuelas," the great-grandmothers and the grandmothers, and continuing with a chapter on each century after 1492, the so-called "discovery" of America. I found it better to read the book in its entirety before looking up sources or consulting the glossary at the end of the book, but readers who have less familiarity with historical references, or less familiarity with Spanish, may wish to dip into these appendices while reading the text, as Morales does not use footnotes or citations.
Fittingly, the first plant she describes at the beginning of the first chapter, "Bisabuelas," is Gingko, an herb known for its properties of memory enhancement. "We have need for memory. For something that can reach back before the first symbols were scratched into tablets of clay, more pliable and enduring than paper. Something with the power of a dream or a smell that can bring back, from the tiniest traces, whole submerged lives. . . . Ginkgo waved leathery hands at the dinosaurs, long before grass. . . . Gingko offered shade to the first skittering mammals. Gingko remembers our mother."
In this chapter, the author imagines the emergence of our ancient clan mothers in Africa, then employs information from Marija Gimbutas' work on the Goddess cultures of the ancient Mediterranean for stories entitled, "The Deer Mother," and "Pig Mother." She also includes the emergence of the peoples and cultures of the Americas, showing that the same processes took place everywhere: the gradual decline of woman-centered clan societies in favor of male dominated warrior cultures and the building of temples dedicated to male gods.
Morales is not only an historian, an herbalist and a political feminist, but a poet. Far from the usual dryness of historic presentation, her writing evokes time and place through colors, sounds, smells, textures and emotional memory. In an early section entitled "4,000: Colors - West Africa" the author imagines the beginning of the art of dyeing.
"In West African villages women steal the rainbow from the backs of parrots and dye fibers into blazing colors. With carved wood and lengths of vine they stamp and tie and twist the cloth of life and give it back iridescent and dancing with stories. . . .Color settles down like a huge extravagant bird in the midst of the cooking fires and sets the people of the villages smiling and giggling and humming as they work."
In a later chapter, on the historical period 1700-1798, a segment on the de-forestation of the United States reads, in part:
"White pine and red pine, Douglas fir and spruce, the forests of the great north are cut down, stripped, and stacked. Ten thousand trees leave Boston harbor in one day, headed for the shipyards of Liverpool. . . .Soon no one will remember that these meadows were once tall groves of sap-scented shadow and rooted calm.
". . . The forests of America lie stacked like the corpses of civilians in a ruthless war, piled into mountains of wood to feed the ravenous commerce of the Atlantic. Do any of the sailors, themselves grist for the same harsh mill, look down in pity at the once-living logs that lie, a wound in the heart of the landscape, oozing their sap into the sunlit sky?"
Morales' personal family history is also interwoven into Remedios. She dedicates the book to her grandmother, mother and her daughter, knowing that her work would have been impossible without them. In the last chapter of the book, "Derrumbe: 1930-1954," the author remembers stories of New York where her Puerto Rican grandparents lived for forty years before returning to the island, and where her mother and father met, "I know the exact feel of the wooden park bench in Ithaca where they sat, just married, draft-age and the war newly broken out in Korea, pacifists and reds facing unknown consequences. I can smell the unfurling spring around them in the almost-warm air while they discuss the options and decide to go to Puerto Rico."
In a section entitled "1954: Transition", she employs the story of her physical birth, and the many other emotional and intellectual "births" she has experienced, as a metaphor for women's emergence as the real voices of history, or Herstory, as some call it.
"I am leaving the comfort and constriction of my mother's womb. This is the turbulent passageway of birth. Ancestors crowd around me, giving me advice, shouting last minute instructions about life on earth. I am being pressed, squeezed, strangled with the old things that once nourished me, shedding my skin of watery membrane, pushing through an endless place of panic toward something bright.
". . .My head is crowning. Can you see me coming? Are you with me?
"Our voices pour like waters breaking, gushing from our vientres. Like the tough and nourishing roots of dandelions shoving stalks upward through cracks in pavement, we push our stubborn heads through the small spaces of windows barely ajar. . . . We are pushing into history. . .we are deciding, (are you ready?) venga lo que venga, to be born."
I embrace Morales' call. Yes, we are deciding, for once and for all, to bear witness to the strength of women's work over the ages. We can't let anyone forget, even for a moment, that we have done this work, whether out of love, necessity or fear, and we will keep on doing it until our children can once again sleep peacefully on their Mother's breast, assured that She exists for them and they for Her.
