Books: “Of Women And Salt”

Scrolling through my bookstore’s picks, I came across this bold book cover with a black panther, by the author Garcia. Assuming it was a short story collection by one of my favourite authors Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I clicked ‘buy’.

After receiving the book, I discovered my mistake. Of Women and Salt, is not a lover’s prostration to women, as I had imagined Garcia Marquez would offer. This was Gabriela Garcia, a modern writer, born to immigrant parents from Cuba and Mexico, raised in Florida. Her book is of five generations of women, and their collective journey to be freer, happier, if only for their daughters.

A husband is shot dead during Cuba’s political unrest leaving behind a young wife and new-born daughter. Fast forward time and chapters: a descendant is hosting Thanksgiving in her suburban home in Florida. But this is far from the American dream that was promised; her husband has left, and her daughter is struggling to recover from an opioid addiction. Escaping the cracks that were starting to show during dinner, she goes across the street to investigate noises she heard during the day. She finds a panther, trapped in a cage in her neighbour’s living room.

It is too easy to say are the women of the family are the symbolic panthers – wild, exotic and trapped – by illiteracy, by dictators, by men, by drugs, and by immigration policies. But do not fall into the trap of the cover as I did. Circumstance is a cage. Heritage the panther. The women are another metaphor entirely – salt. Salt melts and becomes part of a whole. But it can be distilled and re-formed again. Start over again. Such is the strength of women.  

After reading her novel, I feel justified in my original flippant misunderstanding which turned out quite prophetic; there is more than the name which link Gabriela Garcia and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in my mind, in how they write, and their intuitive sense of time running in circles. Both write with stoic detachment to sadness. Marquez writes as if the narrative is unbroken, a stream of events, undisturbed by tears, as if recalled through a filter of time. Garcia too, writes of real horrors as it comes and goes, but it is the women that are the protagonists, not their circumstance. In Marquez’s One Hundred Years, the family matriarch is the lone witness of generations in which her family’s fate seems repeated. In Of Women and Salt, survival is burden is shared by the women in each generation. But so similar are the women in their grit and fragility, they fuse together as one defining woman, with only circumstance that change.

Gabriella Garcia will most likely always be mistaken for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even compared to the prolific writer. As I searched for book cover images for the post, I saw the same two books by the two authors – side by side as if the stories are connected. And I do believe they are. She is the new generation of Latin American writers, continuing the stories of the past, writing for the new ones yet to come.   

“But probably the first thought in every mother’s mind: So many ways I could fail at this. I was afraid to hold you, even. I was alone in the hospital and the nurse must have thought me tragic because she prayed a rosary over me. Out of politeness I didn’t ask her to stop. But I remember I thought, for the first time, My God. Nobody asked you either, Mary. Nobody asked if God could build a temple out of you, if you wanted to turn your life into an offering.”