Finding Home in Memory: Stories of Immigration, Diaspora, and Dis/location

Abstract

I chose poetic performance narratives for writing up stories shared with me. I follow J. Brunner’s (2002) proposal that, literary narrative [poetry], “subverts familiar expectations while respecting, even vivifying reality [thus poetic] narrative ‘subjunctivizes’ a subjunctivized world, though it may not be comfortable, is provocative.” (51). The poetic performance narratives create a provocative reading to seduce the reader into the “uncomfortable” Other’s world.  As R. Rosaldo understands, the highest task of writing, “is not to represent the event […] but to be the event itself” (2014:102). From the perspective of a resilient Latina woman—who in the USA is also an immigrant, academic, and non-native English-speaker—this decolonizing project is a celebration of struggles, difference, agency and multiplicity. As Bhabha (2005) indicates, the mestizo is a witness who has a different take on what s/he calls decoloniality.