Queer x Trans Memoir: In Sight of an Embodied History

Native Country of the Heart

Cherrie Moraga’s memoir Native Country of the Heart is a contemplation on returning to hereditary roots just as much as it is a chronicle of Moraga’s life. The narrative is woven in an intricate braid with the deterioration of Moraga’s mother’s Alzheimer’s disease as its central weave. Moraga’s childhood memories of her mother Elvira, as well as her mother’s loss of memory in her older age, become twisted into Moraga’s own attempt to understand who she is: “Ostensibly in search of my mother’s history, it was my own buried remains I sought. But how do you dig up amnesia?” (180).

Moraga’s navigation of her queer identity plays a major role throughout the memoir as well. Her queerness serves as a vehicle for understanding her own history: “I hold one thickly braided cord as story—my queer self and my writer self, and each would bring me home to my Mexicanism” (8). Just as the narrative is woven in a braid, her queer identity is intricately woven into her racial and familial identity as well, each piece of herself mutually informing the other: “To know yourself as a member of a pueblo on the edge of a kind of extinction, and at the same time a lesbian lover and mother, where you truly do live your life in constant navigation through whatever part of your identity is being snuffed out that morning—in the classroom, at the community meeting, the gasoline station, the take-out counter—Mexican, mixed-blood, queer, female, almost-Indian” (9). She is constantly navigating spaces, and proportionally expressing certain amounts of each part of herself in each environment depending on the amount of safety she feels: a phenomenon extremely common amongst queer people. 

Memory is a constant preoccupation of the memoir. The progression of Elvira’s Alzheimer’s, resulting in the loss of much of her memory, uncoincidentally resembles Cherrie Moraga’s journey in working to remember who she is and her heritage. Moraga’s mothers’ condition of forgetting is juxtaposed with Moraga herself and her journey to remember. 

Through the deterioration of the mental state of her mother, the mythic nature of memory comes to the surface: “The illness would come to illuminate my mother’s spirit life, the ephemeral and the constant, in ways that the sleep of our mundane existence does not allow” (204). Even when her mother’s mind fails, her body still remembers. There is a spirit that is evocatively present there. Through witnessing her mother’s illness, she realizes that “when the body goes, memory resides in the molecules about us” (10). Similarly, even if the memory of her past heritage begins to fade, the essence and spiritual presence of that being remains. There is something very important that remains. 

Moraga warns of the danger of forgetting, as she brings up the terrifying possibility of full-fledged amnesia: “To disappear into AngloAmerica, our colonization is complete. We were not supposed to remember” (245). We were not supposed to remember. Moraga reminds us that memory is power: a vehicle of resistance. She observes how colonization “distanced us from the recognition of a living Indigenous presence in our histories, our families, and ourselves” (185). The journey of remembering her indigenous roots before colonization is centralized in the memoir. Moraga explains how “There is no religious justification for the Spanish mission system…but there is so much need for reckoning; for me and perhaps for Elvira, too. And in that reckoning, there is the need for return.” (245) This need to return manifests itself in the memoir. Moraga understands the urgent need to remember the indigeneity in her blood. Above all else, she seeks to remember and reconcile. Fittingly, the final sentence line of the memoir reads: “I return through these pages” (246). 

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