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Unsent Letters to my Mother. By Adriana Páramo. ISBN 978-0-915745-23-4.
It took me over ten years to give Unsent Letters to My
Mother its present form. The harder I worked on the manuscript, the more
elusive its final presentation became. At first, I thought I was writing a
denunciation of the plight of Indian laborers in the kingdom, a version that
underwent its own cycle of revisions and iterations. In a different
incarnation, I alternated the criticism of the social inequality in Kuwait with
a linear account of my life there. This version left me grossly unsatisfied as
I wanted to cover more ground, to go deeper and share my journey as a wife as
well as “the other woman.” This desire to be more personal on the page led me
to rewrite the manuscript into an epistolary that although intimate lacked the
cultural element, my experience as a teacher of young Kuwaiti girls, the
socio-political nuances of an emerging country desperately fighting for
recognition and inclusion. I rewrote the book from scratch more than a dozen
times. Naturally, all these constant rewritings left me exhausted. I put the
book away for a few years, wrote and published another two, plus dozens of
essays, some of which went to win awards. Two years ago, I started all over
again, this time slowly, and perfectly at peace with the possibility that the
manuscript would never leave my hard disk. I wrote this last iteration, almost
to and for myself. I did it more than anything because I wanted to have it all
tidied up so I could put my life in the kingdom into a single Word file called
Kuwait and forget about it. As luck would have it, Floricanto Press deemed the
story worth publishing and gave birth to it in its paper form.
Unsent Letters to my Mother gave me the freedom to look at
my mother—now deceased—through a different lens. Understanding who she was
outside of her parental role and have, on the paper, what we could never have
in real life: an intimate conversation about what it means to be a woman, love,
sex, and marriage was, is, the most unexpected gift. And the freedom I
experienced in writing the stories gave me an even more unanticipated gift, one
of love. Rekindling the turbulent beginnings of my relationship with El
Capitán—now my husband—put my marriage of twenty plus years under the
microscope. What I saw was an older version of ourselves, still trying hard to
remain connected, working tirelessly at preserving this we started one day twenty-six
years ago in a squash court.
Adriana and El Capitán