Mother Island Quotes

“I've been conditioned to be a thing of parts. Not wholly this or that, but parceled.”
― Jamie Figueroa, Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico

“We fall apart. I fail you. You fail me. I long for you again and have to relearn the most basic words, the most elementary phrases. You refuse to become me. Will this never work out? Will we never work out? I reject you. I reject myself. I crave you again. I embarrass myself trying. I find myself resenting the white woman who speak you better than I ever will. Who are praised, who have no scars from you, no lineage of baggage. Who show you off with no understanding of the pain inherent in their privilege.”
― Jamie Figueroa, Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico

“Feeling the hot sting and prick of shame covering my body-the shame of not being fluent and the shame of being different from them. Both were perpetual states of failure.”
― Jamie Figueroa, Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico

“Being myself, not what they wanted me to be, not what made them comfortable, not a pre-approved, ready-made replica, meant trouble.”
― Jamie Figueroa, Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico

“Which of us has suffered more?”
― Jamie Figueroa, Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico

“What I would've given for a different kind of mother, a different kind of mothering.”
― Jamie Figueroa, Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico

“I don't remember feeling lonely. I remember adapting to the torture of being isolated. At a certain point, I learned to take it with me everywhere I went.”
― Jamie Figueroa, Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico

“Whenever I invite Spanish into my mouth, my tongue thickens. My ears scramble what they hear... My tongue, my mouth, foreign when I mimicked her. The weight of wanting to speak what I could never get right. The heaviness of failure.”
― Jamie Figueroa, Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico

“I don't remember how many times I tried to learn Spanish to connect with my mother. The words in my textbooks were not the same as the ones she knew.”
― Jamie Figueroa, Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico