ern society values the written history, the one written by the conquerors, and dismisses memory and the oral tradition. I love the African proverb, you won’t know what happened on the hunt, until you talk to the lion.

KRL: How are the characters in the novel using storytelling as a mode for resistance or pathways for liberation?

DLF: In our society, the narrative is controlled by the conquerors, usually European historians who wrote about what they saw as they conquered other people, certainly the peoples of Africa and the Americas. Storytell-ing, and the oral tradition, is a form of claiming and directing our own nar-rative. The protagonists in Daughters of the Stone protect and pass on their own narratives to their daughters as a form of self-identity and personal strength. Mati is adamant that Concha not go to school, not because she es-poused ignorance but because she knew that schools were the instruments of their oppressors who had no respect or even awareness of the richness of the African traditions in their lives. When Concha rejects her mother’s way of knowing, she literally loses herself, loses her way in the world. Until she comes to terms with it, she cannot heal and go on to heal others.

If we want to think of Carisa in relation to motherhood, we can think of her birthing the novel and the written archive.

Though Carisa is not a mother in the story, her role is critical to the development to the story because she is the archivist and author. In fact, the manuscript she attempts to write in the novel is materialized as Daughters of the Stone—the novel we read. If we want to think of Carisa in relation to motherhood, we can think of her birthing the novel and the written archive. In the “Postscript” the author reveals herself: “My name is Carisa Ortíz and I am a teller of stories. It is what I do. It is who I am. I have collected many stories. They have been given to me freely. And now, I give them to you. All I ask is that you listen with your heart and, if you have a mind to, that you pass them on” (Llanos-Figueroa 2009, 317). Additionally, at the end of the novel Carisa explains she is the collector of stories and suggests there are many stories that she stores, thus demarcating her the archivist of this (fa-