to Indigenous heritage, still pervades in the present.3 Because Daughters of the Stone is a historical fiction that attempts to rewrite the nation’s history in a way that honors and respects the African diaspora and its roots in Puerto Rico, Llanos-Figueroa rejects the power structures that seek to obliterate the Carisas of the world and uses writing as a liberatory tool.

Roberta Hurtado turns to Xhercis Mendez’s (2015) “Notes Toward a Decolonial Feminist Methodology” to explain how seeking validation and acknowledgement within the categories and value systems set by those in power, who are responsible for systemic violence erasure, will not liberate you. Instead, it furthers your dehumanization: “Attempting to gain acknowl-edgement as humans via the categories provided within a coloniality will only perpetuate the systematic dehumanization that founds such categories. Indeed, those who are oppressed by a coloniality do not gain liberation from domination by achieving category-inclusion, but instead become more in-sidiously imbedded into its mechanisms of control” (Hurtado 2017, 3).

Returning Home: Ancestral Lands/Motherlands, Memory, and Identity

Moreover, Carisa continues to dismantle colonial and modern ideas of literature and bigger notions of knowledge and knowledge production by writing her family’s epistemologies and ‘ways of knowing’ through maternal and healing practices. Therefore, it is not surprising that Carisa finishes the manuscript after she visits Puerto Rico and Africa—her ancestral lands. Because she is a diasporic subject who accesses the memories of her mothers, including her great-great grandmother Fela, both Puerto Rico and Africa are deemed motherlands. Fela is taken from West Africa and forcibly brought to Puerto Rico against her will, which is why three generations of mothers are born in Puerto Rico. Because Ca-risa is born in the United States, she is pulled to Puerto Rico to find the answers to her questions. Upon arriving in Puerto Rico and feeling alienated in the uni-versity and society, she learns from her mentor that she should return to Africa and includes this diasporic history and cultural exchange in the manuscript.

KRL: At the end of the novel, Carisa “returns” to Africa to finish writing her manuscript and uncover her roots. Is there a lesson here in relation to an-cestral lands, motherlands, belonging, memory, or identity? Should we all be learning from Carisa?