1 - The Intergenerational Bildungsroman in Daughters of the Stone and Ponciá Vicencio

Summary

As a child, Ponciá, the title character of Ponciá Vicencio, worked with clay down by the river side by side with her mother, learning how to make figurines— especially those capturing the forms of family members. Years later, these objects would play a pivotal role communicating her whereabouts to her illiterate brother. She never could have guessed that the figurines she made—themselves the legacy of an ancient African craft—would ultimately help to reunite generations of their family that had been dispersed through migration.

The novels featured in this chapter demonstrate how the Afro-Latin American coming-of-age narratives depart from the traditional Western bildungsroman genre that focuses on a single character's journey toward adulthood. These novels include more than one generation of characters, though one young character's journey toward maturity is often foregrounded by her narration of the family story and voicing of its collective memory. However, that individual's journey is clearly intertwined with and shaped by the experiences of earlier generations as we come to understand those ancestors’ own journeys. As postcolonial literature, Daughters of the Stone and Ponciá Vicencio portray the displacement caused by slavery and the struggle of characters to find a home. The importance of home is a central theme in diasporic literature as it emphasizes how dispersed populations look for their own lasting home while they struggle to adapt to new surroundings. Melissa Schindler defines “the idea of home, which can refer variously to a physical place one inhabits (with or without kin) to a figurative national or transnational community.” Furthermore, Schindler adds that “Evaristo, [Mozambican writer Paulina] Chiziane, and [African American Toni] Morrison (re) create women and homeplaces in their writing—as rife with sexism, racism, and contradiction as those places may be.” As these generations struggle to find a home, they draw on African traditions passed on across the Atlantic in their journey toward maturity and communicate with their ancestors. Daughters of the Stone (2009), by Puerto Rican writer Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, describes how five generations of young women, beginning with Fela, an African woman brought over on the Middle Passage, search for a secure place to grow and prosper in Puerto Rico and later New York.