By Joanne Omang. Wednesday, December 13, 2000; Page C08
THE SUGAR ISLAND
By Ivonne Lamazares
Houghton
Mifflin. 205 pp. $23
First off, this is not the story of Elian Gonzalez. True, it takes place in
Cuba and involves a young child whose mother is desperate to leave; there is a
raft and a perilous crossing to Miami. But fiction can't be as real as life, for
no one would believe it. No, this first novel, written well before the Elian
story broke, takes us instead on a different trip, the classic one of a budding
young woman trying to both love and escape from her extremely unreliable mother.
As the saying goes, nothing is new under the sun; only the technology
changes. And in this case the technology is Ivonne Lamazares' engaging way with
the English language. Tanya has a father of a sort, also unreliable, for Cuba
itself stands in for that absent man. La revolucion has at first seduced and
then betrayed Tanya's Mama, a situation neatly summed up in the first paragraph
of "The Sugar Island": "One day Mama said life was about to start
and ran off to the mountains to become a rebel guerrillera. No one knew exactly
where she had gone until she came back pregnant a year later on a burro."
If that doesn't intrigue you, you're watching too much television. Tanya's
little brother is soon born, and a few years later Mama makes her first attempt
to get the three of them to Miami, a word she whispers "with greedy, sticky
pleasure." But Tanya can't understand what Miami might have that pulls her
mother so strongly, and her reluctance to leave her friends and the only life
she knows sets up the central tension between them that fuels the rest of the
book.
Miami here represents all the dreams and goals our parents had that bored,
surprised or mystified us as young people, when we of course had infinitely more
urgent needs than anything our parents wanted for their own lives. Lamazares
captures perfectly the exasperation and jealousy and helplessness that confuse
anyone trying to love someone whose own heart's object is a misty abstraction,
or who lives only in the future. We watch Tanya looking vainly for something or
someone to want as much as her mother wants Miami. Tanya and Emanuel, her
brother, cling to each other as Mama's mercurial heart swings from inaccessible
depression to cheerful hyperactivity.
Tanya's friend Paula works the corrupt system with her stepfather, a
Santeria priest of a dark and ominous character, and needs Tanya's help for an
escape of a different kind, while old Melena, a concert pianist before the
revolution, loves Emanuel as the reincarnation of her dead son and her own lost
ambitions. "Every day this love gave Emanuel a sense of being worthy
because she was there, unmovable, bearing witness. I thought love like that was
magic and would never happen to me." And of course life's betrayals come to
all of them, dressed here in the steamy evenings of beer and black-market
cigarettes on the porch, the lineup of the Young Pioneer units at school, the
neighborhood snoops and snitches of the Committee for the Defense of the
Revolution, and the timeless threat of magic beads. "What scared Mama was
the power of her own vindictiveness. I knew something of this--how bad thoughts
brewed inside till one day they sifted upward like smoke and changed the color
of the air."
Lamazares, herself born and raised in Cuba, paces the story of Tanya and her
mother at a tropic torpor. But she also evokes the love-hate of Cubans for their
impoverished and defiant situation almost offhandedly, in background remarks: On
a rainy day, "Children were getting soaked splashing in the deep potholes."
Tanya's family lives "packed tight like canned Russian meat," and her
home town sports "Spanish street lamps that hadn't given off light for
years." When Mama again begs Tanya to go along on a rickety raft to Miami,
their voyage sets up a new set of betrayals and revelations and redemptions that
keep the book unsettling to the end.
But this is no political tract. The anti-Castro views that drove Lamazares'
own family to leave Cuba when she was 13 (legally, with exit visas) are not so
much voiced as assumed, serving mainly as backdrop to the compelling story of a
family every bit as real as Elian's, and much more comprehensible. We can only
look forward to more from Lamazares, a fine new literary voice who proves again,
even in these days of "reality-based" television, that a vivid
imagination is much more powerful than any news story in showing us life at the
level of the human heart.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
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