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“Who are we, weakness? No, we are force.”
From early short stories like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to dystopian speculative fiction like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and literary fiction like Mieko Kawakami’s “Breasts and Eggs,” feminist literature continues to captivate the readers across generations and cultures. Gabriela Garcia expands this sub-genre with her debut novel, “Of Women and Salt.”
Garcia explores feminist literature with a touch of historical fiction. “Of Women and Salt” follows a family of Cuban women and a family of Salvadoran women through several generations fighting to find their own strength and power in male-dominated societies. Garcia purposely focuses solely on mothers and daughters, pushing the men of the novel to the side. In a 2021 NPR interview, Garcia explained her decision to focus the story solely on the women: “I wanted to write about what it’s like to grow up in a violent, patriarchal society while not censuring those men. And so, the book is only in the voices and perspectives of the women, and the men sort of exist at the periphery. And a lot of them are violent in various different ways. So, I wanted all of it to sort of just center on the women and how they survive in this society.”
Garcia deviates from what readers traditionally expect from feminist literature (which typically follows one to three women’s journeys) by giving readers a short novel packed with stories from two families: one consisting of the Cuban women María Isabel, Carmen and Jeanette, and the other consisting of a Salvadoran mother-daughter pair Gloria and Ana, totaling five leading women. From María Isabel’s experiences in 1860s Cuba as one of few female cigar rollers to an immigrant’s experience coming back to the United States after deportation in 2019, readers follow as each woman attempts to find and hold on to their own power, tracing their resilience through a common theme of “force.”
In a cigar rolling plant in 1866, María Isabel — tired after witnessing gruesome war and bloodshed at the hands of violent men and simultaneously losing her mother — listens as the lectern reads from “Les Misérables.” She is the first to latch on to the idea of being “force” from a letter from Victor Hugo to Emilia Casanova de Villaverde regarding the work being done by women in the cigar rolling facilities: “Who are we? Weakness? No, we are force.” With “fuerza” written in her own copies of her books, this sentiment gets passed down to her daughter, and the subsequent daughters of each generation, finding its place in each woman’s life under different circumstances.
Great-great-granddaughter to María Isabel, Carmen has left Cuba and has endured abuse from her late husband, but she searches for her remaining strength, her “force,” for her daughter Jeanette, a recovering addict. She writes to Jeanette in 2018 claiming, “You were always eroding. I thought, I need to be force.”
At just fifteen, Jeanette is already looking to grow up, to be one of the “harder girls.” She struggles to be “harder” her entire life, facing several relapses and feeling as though she will never have enough strength to conquer her addiction. She does not feel like she has enough force to be the kind of girl she strives to become: “I place a hand on the cold glass counter and picture it cracking under my weight. I am thin and wispy like a bowl of feathers, like crumpled paper tumbling in the wind. Nothing cracks in my presence.”
Simultaneously, Gloria and Ana are facing deportation in Miami. Gloria is deported while her young daughter Ana is away from home, and Gloria fights to stay strong for her as the men in the detention center keep her in the dark and take away her rights by coercing her to sign documents she cannot understand. When Ana and Gloria are reunited and brought to Mexico, the tables turn and teenage Ana fights desperately to stay strong enough for her mother: “She’d smiled strong for her mother … Her very job, Ana thought, has been not to grieve, so that her mother could.”
Garcia carries the thread of force through her novel from the very beginning to the very end, bringing a historical and literary spin to the idea of female strength. Garcia traces the original sentiment of being “force” through these generations of women both abstractly in their journeys and concretely in what gets written into family heirlooms: “We are force. We are more than we think we are.”
The women of this novel, while all struggling with their own unique misfortunes, find a connection to their force and their mothers and their daughters. Each woman’s story is nuanced and deeply layered, all while each hinges on a mother-daughter relationship.
While I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of characters and stories in this novel — a skill that I would not usually expect from a debut author — I could not shake the feeling that this was still something experimental. “Of Women and Salt” reads more like a collection of short stories at times rather than a cohesive novel, largely because Garcia chose to never stay in one place or perspective for more than a chapter. However, despite the eccentricity of the novel, I found that each of the five main women’s stories in this novel was equally compelling. Garcia certainly showcases her storytelling skills in writing a novel that focuses on several unique stories while managing to give equal attention to each. Garcia shows great potential for future writing, as I can only imagine she will continue to share equally, if not more, captivating stories with readers as she becomes a more seasoned writer. For now, María Isabel, Carmen, Jeanette, Gloria and Ana’s stories will continue to captivate readers and share the generational journey of female force.