Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia
Of Women and Salt is a work of fiction published by Flatiron Books in 2021 and authored by Gabriela Garcia (not to be confused with the athlete Gabi Garcia or the actress Gabriella Garcia). According to information on her website, the author is the daughter of immigrants from Cuba and Mexico and was raised in Miami. She is a long-time feminist and migrant justice organizer who has also worked in music and published poems in Best American Poetry, Tin House, Zyzzyva, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Black Warrior Review. She has a BA in Sociology from Fordham University and an MFA in fiction from Purdue University, where she also taught creative writing. This is her debut novel.
The genre of the novel is a combination of literary, historical, and contemporary fiction. That said, I will add an aside. I was the only member of my book club (fifteen women attending) who liked this book! The major complaint was that the author should have focused on one genre: historical fiction. “Confusing” and “haphazard” were the two words repeated over and over to describe the novel during our discussion. Confusing because of multiple points of view, alternating timelines, and shifting settings that weren’t always stitched together. Haphazard because of loose ends in the storyline (e.g., What happened to Ana’s caretaker?) and events that seemed to have no connection to plot or themes (e.g., What was with that panther?).
While I agree with some of the critics’ comments, I have to say, I loved this book. For me, the prose was well worth the read and the author’s ability to set a scene was genius. As in this quote in which a third person narrator describes the life of Maria Isabel, the only woman working in a Cuban cigar factory in 1866.
At six thirty, when all the cigar rollers sat at their desks before their piles of leaves and the foreman rang the bell, Maria Isabel bent her head, traced a sign of the cross over her shoulders, and took the first leaf in her hands.
“Maria Isabel ran her tongue along another leaf’s gummy underside, the earthy bitterness as familiar a taste by now as if it were born of her. She placed the softened leaf on the layers that preceded it, the long veins in a pile beside. Rollers, allowed as many cigars as they liked, struck matches and took fat puffs with hands tented over flames. The air thickened. Maria Isabel had by then breathed so much tobacco dust she developed regular nosebleeds, but the foreman didn’t permit workers to open the window slats more than a sliver—-sunlight would dry the cigars. So she hid her cough. She was the only woman in the workshop. She didn’t want to appear weak. [Kindle Version, p. 3]
From this point on, a nonlinear narrative and different points of view present a tale of the lives of five generations of women dealing with illegal immigration, exploitation, detention, deportation, the border crisis, drug addiction, domestic and sexual abuse, racism, and classism, as well as the effects of war and brutal living conditions. We follow the author’s characters to Cuba, Mexico, Central America, and the United States where they struggle to find a way to thrive, to be recognized and appreciated. While the structure of the novel may be complicated, I highly recommend Of Women and Salt for its beautiful writing and candid observations. I’ll end this review with Jeanette’s voice describing an event she experiences while visiting Cuba in which she discovers that racism and classism are not unique to America.
I do not know what she means, but she lists kinds of people that exist in Cuba—-freakies, emos, Mickeys, repas. She lists what they wear and what music they listen to and where they hang out and I realize that every country is different but the same. Every country has its own lunch tables. I open the massive ice box, shuffle past slabs of mamey and fruta bomba, cheese wrapped in wet cloth, until my hand reaches a cold Cristal. I can sense Maydelis wants to say more, but I leave her in the kitchen because I am curious about the visitor. I am more curious about the visitor than “kinds of people.” [Kindle Version, p. 136]
