SPEAK TO ME OF HOME, by Jeanine Cummins
In January 2020, Jeanine Cummins’s novel “American Dirt,” about a Mexican mother and son who flee cartel violence in Acapulco for the United States, arrived to rapturous praise from the publishing world, became an Oprah’s Book Club pick and went on to sell over four million copies in 40 languages. It was a literary event that quickly became a cause célèbre.
Scathing critical response accused Cummins of stereotyping, cultural appropriation and racism in her thin depiction of the border and its inhabitants. The vitriol grew so intense that her publisher canceled her 40-city book tour.
Cummins’s new novel, “Speak to Me of Home,” is ostensibly about Puerto Rico. Gone are the propulsive writing, drug lords and chase scenes. In their place are quieter epiphanies: evocative, poetic passages about characters falling in love and the close bond between parents and children. But despite the publisher’s framing, the book is not, in fact, about Puerto Rico.
It’s about the internal lives of three generations of women in one Puerto Rican-Irish family, and their shared preoccupation with their own whiteness, from the 1960s to today. Born in San Juan, Rafaela marries a white naval officer from Missouri in 1968, and 10 years later he moves their young family to St. Louis. Their 7-year-old daughter, Ruth, tries to assimilate into her new life in the Midwest, forgetting most of her Spanish and smoothing the edges of the prejudice and xenophobia around her (including among her father’s family). Two decades later, Ruth’s own teenage daughter, Daisy, moves from Palisades, N.Y., to San Juan, where she’s longed to live since her childhood visits back to her mother’s birthplace. The narrative jumps in time and geography across these three women’s histories, until a devastating accident brings them together in 2023.
As I read I thought of the Puerto Rican poet Fernando Fortunato Vizcarrondo’s poem “¿Y Tu Agüela, Aonde Ejtá?” (“And Where Is Your Grandma?”), addressed from a Black Puerto Rican man to a light-skinned one, whom he accuses of keeping his dark-skinned grandmother hidden in the kitchen. Puerto Ricans are well aware that, regardless of what we look like now, our ancestors bear evidence of the mixed-race heritage of the majority of our people.
In contrast to Vizcarrondo’s poem, “Speak to Me of Home” conflates race with ethnicity, resting a significant part of the plot on the results of a stealthy DNA test. Ruth is mystified by her American-born children’s insistence on their Puerto Rican identity (her son, Charlie Hayes, changes his name to Carlos Hayes-Acuña in seventh grade, because “it’s cool to be Puerto Rican”), and even denies her own: “Do I need to remind you that I’m white, for God’s sake? Look at me!”
The novel views Puerto Rican culture from a distance, disconnected from the archipelago’s colonial history and lacking the nuance of lived experience. Carlos claims Bad Bunny “gets too much airplay,” without appreciating the artist’s importance in contemporary Puerto Rican life. This disconnect is perhaps strongest in the snobby Rafa, who resents the hostile gaze of her white Missouri neighbors even as she marginalizes the only other Puerto Rican family she encounters there: “That woman would not have been fit to sweep my father’s floors in San Juan.”
I simply couldn’t extend poetic license to the author’s sloppiness with detail, about Puerto Rico and otherwise — which, however petty, was enough to take me out of the story. A crucial plot point is the hurricane that begins the novel (in San Juan in June, when hurricanes are relatively rare in the Caribbean compared with, say, September); though Cummins’s characters seem unaware of the ubiquitous local distinctions between a vaguada, a tropical storm, a hurricane, a cyclone. A single slice of fried plantain is mistakenly referred to as a “tostone,” instead of a tostón. Facebook wasn’t available in 1999, when Rafa uses the platform to search for a long-lost friend. The verisimilitude of Cummins’s present-day Puerto Rico is superficial at best, and references — to alfajores, Yaucono coffee, pasteles and alcapurrias — seem to be plucked from Wikipedia to add authenticity.
Cummins’s story does involve a proverbial grandparent hidden in the kitchen, and the revelation comes across as an attempt to defend the author’s own Latinidad. But skin color does not define identity; depth of experience does. As we say in Puerto Rico, No es lo mismo decirlo que hacerlo. Saying it is not the same as doing it.
SPEAK TO ME OF HOME | By Jeanine Cummins | Holt | 366 pp. | $29.99
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