lows the women to speak to their ancestors. It is through this stone that Mati is able to communicate with her mother and see her face, since Fela, the first mother, died after childbirth. While the oral history is a family tradition and an act of preserving memory and healing practices, it eventually transforms into a written tradition that Fela’s great-great-granddaughter, Carisa, strug-gles to write, in part because of institutional and cultural bias. However, the tradition kept alive through five generations of women is an act of resistance and a testament to their survival.

Storytelling and Motherhood as Motifs for Resistance

The novel follows five generations of women: it begins with Fela who is cap-tured in West Africa and forcibly taken to Puerto Rico as a slave, and it ends with Carisa—the daughter who is converting the family’s (and island’s) rich oral history tradition into the written word. Carisa’s family’s stories are met with rejection by her white professors at the University of Puerto Rico due to her manuscript’s usage of mythological imagery and magical realism, yet she is not defeated. Though the university professors represent institutional racism and elitism towards diverse voices and stories and thus function as a barrier for publishing stories about black women, Carisa prevails and con-tinues to write. In fact, the Daughters of the Stone novel that we are reading can very well be Carisa’s finished manuscript.

KRL: How important is it to show the evolution of family history via storytell-ing practices that begin with an oral history tradition, to the written word? Is Daughters of the Stone Carisa’s finished manuscript?

DLF: The novel could be construed as the product of Carisa’s search. Since she is the narrator, this would certainly be one interpretation. I trust my readers to make up their own minds. I can say that I have no plans to follow her to West Africa within the context of the narrative.

Motherhood and writing are both elements in the novel that signal Puer-to Rican culture and politics and seek to answer the question of how women have been displaced by men. I argue that the complexities and realities Lla-nos-Figueroa pens in her book as an author is similar to the struggle Carisa, a diasporic Afro-Puerto Rican woman, encounters and attempts to overcome