responsibility. Each daughter learns about and has to internalize that power for herself, in her own time and place, giving it a different face depending on her geographical, linguistic, historical and cultural experience. These ad-justments create conflict that are, hopefully, mitigated by love and compas-sion between mother and daughter. The mothers pass on the stories. How they are received and passed on by their daughters to the next generation--now that’s the question. I think you can see this conflict in our lives today. I certainly saw it in my own life.

KRL: In the text, Puerto Rican memory is entwined with motherhood and maternal practices, since mothers carry their familial histories, and national history, in a stone that eventually leads to the written word. How are these two ideas related in the greater discussion on Puerto Rican memory? Do you think there are other avenues that are important to consider?

DLF: For me, storytelling is so closely aligned with the traditional griot of African tradition; the person who keeps the oral family history and passes it down. At least that’s the way it was in my family. The men were out in the fields all day, so it was the women who had the time and space to pass these on to the children.

I think the trajectory from the physicality of the stone to the written word follows the historical journey of the women. Fela, Mati and even Con-cha (to a much lesser degree) didn’t trust written language. After all, that was the mode by which they were enslaved—sales receipts, messages between their masters, the Bible (another document that justified their enslavement in the hands of the masters, including clergymen who were also slave own-ers). Everything about the written word was associated with the white elite, the enemy. But by the time we get to Elena and Carisa, educated women in the western sense of the word, the written word had taken on other dimen-sions. For Elena it provided a sort of freedom. Literacy meant the ability to rise within the society, awareness of what was and was to come, and there-fore, the ability to prepare for it. For Carisa, the word had become her famil-iar, so much so that she raises it to the level of art. She is comfortable with it and uses it for her own purposes.

In terms of memory and the word, all people who are denied a written language develop a thriving oral history. In our ‘modern’ world, the people who own the written language, own the history. No matter how much or how wealthy the oral history, it is dismissed because of its very nature. West-