When I Was Esmeralda Santiago
by Adriana Lopez -- Críticas, 11/15/2005
Unlike many of her Latina fiction writing contemporaries, Esmeralda Santiago, 56, likes to tell it like it is, through nonfiction. In the tradition of memoirists Maya Angelou and Kathryn Harrison, who established themselves in the reader's minds by revealing their life's most naked moments, Santiago is making her mark. It's an act that most Latina writers, in the States or elsewhere, have traditionally shied away from. "[We Latinos are] a gregarious and social people but very private about our personal lives," says Santiago, speaking from a writing retreat in Maine last September. "We have an incredible respect for the family secret, and it's not as culturally acceptable to put our lives out there."
Despite the taboo, we have witnessed Santiago exposing and studying herself through various stages of her womanhood. In her memoirs, When I Was Puerto Rican (Vintage, 1994), Almost a Woman (Vintage, 1999), and The Turkish Lover (Da Capo, 2004), which has just been released in Spanish as El amante turco, she's tumbled and sprinted down the path of life, offering us her insight as she reflects on it all. Along for the ride is a multigenerational group of readers who also enjoy the works of Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Ana Castillo. They seek out Santiago's serial memoirs for her brutally honest storytelling.
Santiago's first wanted to start writing, as a teenager, out of a need to find her own identity in the States. She wanted to document a piece of long forgotten Puerto Rican history, to tell others about being born into poverty but going to Harvard, about growing up in Brooklyn, NY, with a single mother and 10 younger siblings, about her misguided love affair with an older man. All this delivered through a literary lens that's more cinema vérité than stoic documentary and more revealing than any thinly disguised autobiographical novel.
In El amante turco, Santiago full heartedly revisits what most brave souls couldn't: a failed and dependent seven-year love affair. At 20, Santiago met Ulvi Dulvan a charismatic but manipulative Turkish filmmaker, 17 years her elder. She ran away from her dominating mother towards an unhealthy and controlling infatuation, losing her innocence and eventually finding the courage to leave Dulvan on the third attempt.
Since its release in English in September 2004, The Turkish Lover has sold more than 21,000 copies, a figure that will likely increase with Da Capo's recent release of the paperback edition. The Spanish translation by Nina Torres-Vidal, a friend of Santiago's who also translated Almost a Woman, came out this October. Santillana USA printed 30,000 copies for distribution in the United States, Latin America, and Spain.
SOUL SEARCHING
| Books by Santiago |
The intensity in Santiago's soul searching, fused with a survivalist's humor, may be what draws in so many of her fans. It's as if readers could see themselves through her, as immigrants struggling with the English language, undergoing racism at school, escaping a parent's home, or falling in love with an oh-so-wrong but seemingly right man. Then there's Santiago's image—she's appeared on the covers of each of her memoirs. El amante shows her at 28, in a head shot as dramatic as a Vermeer portrait. This grown-up little girl with a life worn stare, black eyes, a dramatic brow, and a high and wise forehead, has turned Santiago into a household icon, a familiar relative, and a friend to many.
BEHIND THE SCENES
Post-Dulvan, Santiago has had a 28-year-long marriage with Frank Cantor, a filmmaker and the father of their two children Lucas and Ila, now in their 20s. The couple, living in New York's WestchesterCounty, recently collaborated on a documentary produced and directed by Cantor about Santiago's life as a writer, artist, and public figure. Writing a Life follows her from her childhood in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico, where she lived until she was 13, to her forced acculturation process in Brooklyn. Having studied documentary filmmaking and dabbled in screenwriting herself, Santiago appears in action behind the scenes creating the Masterpiece Theatre Production of her second memoir Almost a Woman. The film, which aired on PBS, won a Peabody Award in 2003.
Memoir has been Santiago's signature genre, but she has also written fiction and edited fellow writers. In 1997 she published El sueño de América (America's Dream), a novel about a domestic servant who leaves Puerto Rico to become a nanny in Westchester. She's also co-edited the anthologies Las Mamis: Favorite Latino Authors Remember their Mothers (Vintage, 2001) and Las Christmas: Favorite Latino Authors Share their Holiday Memories (Knopf, 1998). This Christmas, Scholastic will release Santiago's first foray into children's writingin both English and Spanish, Una muñeca para el Día de Reyes (A Doll for Navidades).
After the fall and winter months touring with El amante, Santiago says she'll go back to outlining memoir number four and returning to that historical novel that will probably "occupy the rest of my life, because I only work on it between other projects." Santiago stresses she doesn't want her body of memoir work to be known as a rags-to-riches story or "jíbara to Harvard story." Her life was too painful and nuanced for such simplification. She feels she was put on this earth to write these memoirs, however maddening the experience can be at times, to give a voice to those overlooked lives within the American dream, documenting them while validating her own to help others. She's put herself out there, and there are multitudes of readers who are proud of her for having the courage to do so.
Lopez, a regular contributor to Críticas, is Latina magazine's book columnist.
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