A Reader's Guide

The Sugar Islandby Ivonne Lamazares

• Questions for Discussion• About the Author

"One day Mamá said life was about to start and ran off to the mountains tobecome a rebel guerrillera. No one knew exactly where she had gone until shecame back pregnant a year later on a burro." From that March day in 1958,shortly before her sixth birthday, Tanya del Carmen Casals Villalta embarks on anever-challenging relationship with her passionate, idealistic, mercurial, unreliablemother, Mirella, that leads to a shared ultimate risk.

Using the voice of young Tanya, Ivonne Lamazares writes with authenticity,immediacy, and grace of her homeland, its people, and a dramaticmother-daughter relationship. The people of Cuba, as seen through Tanya'seyes–at the height of Castro's revolution, in the 1960s and early '70s–are inconflict with themselves and with their own stubborn hopes and ambitions. Atodds with her mother and with the rapidly changing world around her, Tanyaherself longs only for love and stability. When Mirella's first attempt at escapefails, however, the thirteen-year-old girl feels that she has betrayed and desertedher mother. Tanya and her younger brother, Emanuel, are sent to live with theirfather's great-aunt in Havana. When Mirella returns to them from "rehabilitation,"everyone in the household enters a time of indignities, shortages, anddisillusionment with neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolutionand party compañeros watching everything they do. Still, Mirella never surrendershope for a better life. Meanwhile, Tanya's greatest challenge is coping with thetangle of feelings her mother evokes–love, loyalty, fear, anger, contempt, pity,and admiration. When the two at last embark on their perilous flight to freedom,they carry with them their unresolved conflicts and a determination to improvetheir lives in a land where nothing is certain. As they adapt to life in their newcountry, Tanya and Mirella at last move toward a shared resolution of theirtroubles.

With poetic prose and a clear-eyed vision, Ivonne Lamazares tells a timeless taleof love and autonomy while capturing in stunning clarity the colors andatmosphere of a specific time and place. Mirella and Tanya, mother and daughter,are anchored in the now-vanished Cuba and Florida of thirty years ago and at thesame time rise to an well-earned level of universal significance. "The Sugar Island

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is a wonderful amalgamation of culture, politics, and love," wrote the PhiladelphiaWeekly's reviewer; "it is a story that speaks to all aspects of life."

Questions for Discussion

We hope the following questions will stimulate discussion for reading groups andprovide a deeper understanding of The Sugar Island for every reader.

1. "The City will always pursue you," Lamazares quotes Constantine Cavafy in herfirst epigraph. In what ways do Mirella's and Tanya's city and country pursuethem? How might this be true for everyone?

2. Tanya recalls her grandmother saying that "to survive one must make 'heartout of tripe.'" "But for me," Tanya considers, "it was the other way around. Heartwas what got thrown away." What instances are there in the novel of heart beingthrown away?

3. How do the beliefs and practices of santeria, Catholicism, and communismcontribute to Tanya's and Mirella's views of themselves and the world? Whatbeliefs and practices do they share or mutually reject?

4. At Melena's eighty-fifth birthday concert, Tanya realizes that the old woman hasgiven Emanuel "a way of seeing himself, of reaching a depth of concentrationunknown to me, to anyone in our family." How is this manifested in the novel?Does Tanya ever achieve a comparable way of seeing herself and a comparabledepth of concentration?

5. "My idea of love," says Tanya, "was Mamá's way with us . . . I also knew thelove between me and Paula . . . But the old lady's feeling for my brother wasphysical like the world." What kinds of love does Tanya experience and observe?What does she learn about each kind and about the needs and desires that eachmight provoke and satisfy?

6. Melena says to Tanya, "Some people are called upon to carry strange burdens.You're one of them." What strange burdens is Tanya called upon to carry, andwhat becomes of those burdens by the novel's end?

7. "You can't just break the rules and start fresh tomorrow," Andres insists toTanya. What does breaking the rules mean to each of Lamazares's characters?How important to Mirella and Tanya are breaking rules and adhering to rules?

8. How does Lamazares present the various tyrannies of politics, religion, andpersonal relationships? In what ways do her characters attempt to rebel againstthose tyrannies, and with what consequences?

9. In what ways does Tanya and Mirella's relationship echo the relationship ofeach with Cuba? How does Tanya's personal life reflect the political environment ofCuba?

10. What kinds of seduction and betrayal occur in the novel? What are the causesand consequences of the various betrayals? Why do the various betrayers behaveas they do?

11. At various times in the novel, Tanya feels that she has deserted Mirella,

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Melena, and Emanuel. Why does she feel this way in each instance? Why mightTanya, her mother, and others be especially sensitive to the issue of desertion?How does Lamazares present the related paired themes of flight andabandonment?

15. What is the significance of Mirella's observation that many people risk deathitself to become who they are meant to be? What circumstances, ambitions, orhopes might cause someone to take that ultimate risk? "I did what I had to do,"Mirella tells her daughter after their own shared ultimate risk. "I made your lifecount." In what ways might her claim be true or not?

About the Author

One of the most original and exciting new writers on the American literary scene,Ivonne Lamazares was born and raised in Cuba. Her mother died when she wasthree, and she was cared for by her grandparents in Old Havana. She immigratedto the United States when she was fourteen, learned to ride a bicycle in 1992, andnow lives in Winter Park, Florida, with her husband, the poet Steve Kronen, andtheir daughter. Lamazares was "discovered" at the Sewanee Writers' Conferenceby Russell Banks and Mary Morris, both of whom have become enthusiasticchampions of her work. She has been the subject of articles in the New YorkTimes and the Los Angeles Times, and her stories have appeared in Blue MesaReview and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is on the faculty of the University ofCentral Florida, where she teaches creative writing.

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