Tracing the four days from the moment she gets the call that every immigrant fears to the burial of her mother, Elizabeth Nunez tells the haunting story of her lifelong struggle to cope with the consequences of the “sterner stuff” of her parents’ ambitions for their children and her mother’s seemingly unbreakable conviction that displays of affection are not for everyday use. But Nunez sympathizes with her parents, whose happiness is constrained by the oppressive strictures of colonialism, by the Catholic Church’s prohibition of artificial birth control (which her mother obeys, terrified by the threat of eternal damnation), and by what Malcolm Gladwell refers to as the “privilege of skin color” in his mother’s Caribbean island homeland where “the brown-skinned classes…came to fetishize their lightness.”
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“In her delicate, cultured Trinidadian accent,
author-narrator Elizabeth Nunez unpacks the emotions that her upbringing taught
her to hide meticulously as she copes with her mother’s death. Her deep voice
becomes tremulous at times, as if the force of her own words is threatening to
swallow her. But it rises again, steady and sure, when she recounts the
strength of her parents and the challenges of raising eleven children amid the
social restrictions of 1950s Trinidad. Nunez manifests the grief that comes
from losing a parent but tempers her depth of emotion with wry tones when
recounting the humorous dramas that arise amid island life. Self-effacing and
honest, Nunez gives listeners a unique window onto a foreign world. Winner of
AudioFile Earphones Award.”
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AudioFile