Mother Tongue

By: Demetria Martinez / Narrated By: Alyssa Bresnahan

Length: 3 hrs and 42 mins

I started out haaating it, but gosh it winds up with a nice punch…!

Yes indeed, I must admit that I almost stopped listening to Mother Tongue, thinking that, since I’d not listed it in my Listening to Now section, it wouldn’t be missed if I passed on it and reviewed some other audiobook for Hispanic Heritage Month. After all, so many books and authors; soooo little time!

I think part of the issue I had was that Alyssa Bresnahan’s narration is very slow, serious, ponderous. I usually listen to my books at x1.25 speed, but I definitely jacked the speed to x1.5—it’s that slow. Plus, Bresahan is portraying Mary, a 19-year old, I want to say young woman, but she comes off as more of an older girl. She’s also supposed to be a Mexican American living in Albuquerque, but again? What she comes off as is much different. Tho’ the accent for some of the words/phrases used is good, she very much sounds like a naive Anglo waif. I had no patience with her, I admit, as she reminded me of what happens when sheltered people hit that age, especially if they’ve experienced many an introduction during college: Religions and gods change; political belief systems change; views on sex, on the way the world runs, change.

She’s self-absorbed, and while I had trouble stomaching her dabbling in gods, her finding herself through men, what held my interest and made her tolerable was that obviously the story was being told by a much older Mary/Maria, a person with a helluva lot of self-awareness, somebody who could say that she was pretty much clinically depressed at the time (Her mother had just died after a lengthy bout of cancer; she’d just dropped out of the University and moved towns; she was going through a series of boring and meaningless jobs). She finds breaking the law to be excruciatingly pleasurable, and at least, I thought: At last! She feels SOMEthing, instead of the mind-numbing obsession with a man that she so deeply describes.

Mary’s way of waking up is through breaking the law by being part of a sanctuary movement that smuggles refugees from war-torn countries, in this case El Salvador, into the US for political asylum. And here, in the opening of the book, is where she meets Jose Luis and falls instantly head over heels in love. (Again, I have no patience with such things… so it took me awhile).

Jose Luis realizes she, whom he now dubs Maria, much to her endless delight and gratification, is looking to fill a void in her life, and he just happens to be the object that’ll do that for her. She immediately speaks of a future with him, of their undying love, but Jose Luis (And she doesn’t want to know his real name) is simply seeking peace through sex. His conversation is not of the future but of death squads and civil war and assassinations and murder and landowners and it goes on and on, one nightmare topping another. He’s been a victim of torture, and he doesn’t see himself as the hero of her story or any story, but more as a man who’s alive simply because others were murdered, and he just lived to put one foot in front of the other.

The story picks up as their relationship progresses until there’s the fateful night of his disappearance, from town, from her life. And then we meet their son, some twenty-odd years later.

THAT’S what I found so fascinating. Author Demetria Martinez turns a story about a self-absorbed girl into stories about a boy who wants to save the world, about a man who wants to save his country, about a woman who simply wants to save herself—and I could feel plenty of sympathy for all three of those people. Martinez’s writing style isn’t convoluted, but it’s fraught with emotional similes, with depictions of violence and horror. It’s a sort of poetry of the depraved and of the haunted.

I soon enjoyed the seriousness of the writing as the subject matter’s depth became more visible. And I soon enjoyed the seriousness of the narration as Maria’s experiences gave her such consequence.

I can’t say I enjoyed the ending as I find it truly disappointing to be led to believe, by the writing, by the action, that an ending will be one way, some odd, bittersweet, not par for the course, way only to have it turn out in the “usual” fashion. Still, I found myself feeling pride for the characters, a boy who discovers his real place in the world, a woman who discovers the wounds in her heart and in her soul, and a man who discovers that he’s so much more than rage and agony personified.

Give this little book a chance, and you’ll find a surprising depth (Or maybe I’m the only one who found it shallow at the start?). Clocking in at just under 4 hours, it certainly packs a wallop. And maybe you’ll learn a thing or two about our own history of our nation as it relates to terrors in other parts of the world.

I felt pride for the characters, pride for the movement. But for my country’s history? Ahh, now there’s where the shame starts…