By Steve Pfarrer
LOVE WAR STORIES
By Ivelisse Rodriguez
Feminist Press/CUNY
ivelisserodriguez.com
Though born in Puerto Rico, Ivelisse Rodriguez grew up predominantly in Holyoke, and the Paper City serves not just as the backdrop of some of the stories of her collection, “Love War Stories,” but as a symbol of the diaspora of Puerto Rican women in the United States.
“Love War Stories,” which was one of five finalists for the 2019 Pen/Faulkner Award in Fiction — the winner, announced earlier this week, was the novel “Call Me Zebra” by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi — considers love a battleground. The young Puerto Rican women who narrate most of these tales are looking for true love. But their mothers offer a grim take on that idea: that men only break your heart.
“Never trust a man,” the mother of the title story tells the story’s narrator, Rosie. “A man only wants one thing and as soon as he gets it, he’ll be gone.” Rosie’s mother, and her friends’ mothers, still hope for the best for their daughters, but they also want them to be realistic. “Our mothers didn’t believe in love between men and women anymore … They just wanted our future husbands to stay. ‘Marry,’ they said, ‘but don’t believe.’ ”
Rodriguez studied English at Columbia University and later earned an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College and a Ph.D. in English/creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has taught at a number of places, most recently in North Carolina. In an interview last year with Centro, a center of Puerto Rican studies at Hunter College in New York, she said she started writing the stories in her collection 20 years ago.
In “Holyoke, Mass: An Ethnography,” Rodriguez contrasts the publication of an ethnographic portrait of the city, put together by someone “writing on a place he knew nothing about,” with the inside story of the city: its history of Irish, French Canadian, Polish and then Puerto Rican immigrants, and how the Puerto Ricans now struggle to find their way.
The story centers on Veronica, a pretty but tough high school girl whose classmates consider her the girl most likely next to get pregnant. But lately Veronica’s boyfriend, Ralfy, hasn’t been around, and Veronica’s been hearing rumors he’s cheating on her, maybe with Gail, a white girl. Veronica affects an “I don’t care” attitude about everything — school, the future, what her mother thinks of her — but it’s an act.
“Never is she unaware of the role she has to play, she never leaves home without her hardness, she practices how to fight when she’s alone, and constantly scrolls through all the other things she has to do in order to avoid even more fights. But she has this squishy little heart inside that sometimes presses on her so hard that she has to cry.”
“Love War Stories” also examines the tension Puerto Rican women can face when they move in the white world. The narrator of “La Hija de Chango” is a Latina from Spanish Harlem in New York who attends a private high school with a mostly white student body, and when she’s back home, her boyfriend’s cousin says accusingly, “You talk funny … Why do you sound like a white girl?”
“I hate, hate, when people tell me I sound like a white girl,” the narrator says. “This is the moment I always dread.”
And in “Summer of Nene,” Rodriguez tells the story of a young Latino teen in New York City, Jimmy, who has an affair with his male friend, Neme, that gets more complicated when Neme suffers a serious injury. Jimmy also feels something for Jessica, a girl from his school who’s got the hots for him. He’s not really sure what to think of love as he watches his mother fighting with her newest boyfriend: “I can almost mouth along and anticipate what their next words will be.”
But at least what he and Neme have, Jimmy thinks, “will never deteriorate like my mother’s relationships.”
TAKEN FROM MEMORY
Photos by Sheron Rupp
Kehrer Verlag
sheronrupp.net
Photographer Sheron Rupp, who was born in Ohio in 1943 and spent a summer in Arkansas as a young girl, has lived in the Valley for many years. But she’s never forgotten her roots, and in a new book of photographs, she offers portraits from earlier in her career of families and small rural communities in the Midwest and South (and also in New England and the Valley).
In the coffee table book “Taken From Memory,” Rupp’s photographs, dating primarily from the 1980s and early 1990s, capture candid moments of life in rural homes and tiny hamlets nestled in wooded hills: an elderly woman hanging stockings on a clothesline; a young girl embracing an older woman outside a nondescript building in Kentucky; three children and a goat at play in a sweeping meadow in Vermont; and a humorous portrait of an Amish girl in Ohio, her mouth twisted in a half-frown, as if she’s not sure what to make of the photographer.
Rupp, who earned an MFA in photography from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1982, has exhibited her work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and numerous other places, including in the Valley. She says in revisiting these earlier photographs, she was struck by how many stirred memories of her childhood, especially the summer she spent on her grandparents’ Arkansas farm.
“I remember that Arkansas summer as a poem wrought true,” she writes in an introduction. “It resonated with what I chose to photograph years later and made me wonder why I felt ‘at home’ with some of the folks in my pictures…. To me, these photographs have added affirmation or, at best, description, to the lives of people who are so hidden from the larger world.”
Sheron Rupp will talk about “Taken From Memory” and show photographs on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.