By Amaris Castillo
Erika Morillo has revisited her family history before. The Dominican-born photographer and writer did so in her photo book, All of Them, where she narrated a conversation with her disappeared father.
But there was still more that eluded Morillo. She yearned to grasp what she described as the core story – about her upbringing, her mother, and their larger family history.
So Morillo began to write about her life in bits and pieces, until she had before her a collection of disparate notes. Those fragments came to form Mother Archive: A Dominican Family Memoir, Morillo’s forthcoming memoir about her life and the lifelong pain embedded in a turbulent relationship with her mother.
Out on Oct. 22 from the University of Iowa Press, Mother Archive is an incredibly affecting and incisive memoir about a quest for love and the attempt to undo generations-deep damage. Morillo presents memories and family stories with unflinching honesty, intertwining them with archival family photographs, film stills, images she herself choreographed, and news clippings. And she offers her new book with the acute awareness that the ethics around writing a memoir, and about living family members, is complicated. “But I find that everybody processes pain differently,” she said recently. “Some people prefer to process in silence because it hurts too much. Others develop a certain anger and direct it towards others. In my case, I write. I make images.”
In Mother Archive readers are brought into Morillo’s difficult childhood in the Dominican Republic, where her father disappeared physically and then visually after her mother threw away photographs of him. The author then brings her readers along to New York City and Chile, where we watch as she navigates layers of trauma and abuse, and becomes a mother herself.
As a reader, one of the most striking aspects of Mother Archive for me was Morillo’s decision to structure the book as if she was speaking directly to her mother. It was both empowering and unsettling to read, and I found myself rooting for Morillo to come out stronger on the other end of her story. In one passage, the author describes receiving photos her mother sent by mail. At the time, Morillo was in the middle of moving out of NYC when she received the last photos. They were two portraits of her mother.
“I had to decide what to do with you, and in a split second, I opted to put you in the trash. I tore the box with my house keys and undressed you out of the plastic wrapping,” Morillo writes. “Holding your gaze through the cloudy glass on the frames, it unsettled me to see how much I resemble you, even in my rejection.”
Ahead of the book’s release, Morillo spoke with the Dominican Writers Association about the decision to write this memoir, the role of photography in her life, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Congratulations on Mother Archive: A Dominican Family Memoir. What compelled you to write this book?
This was the end of a very long search that, for me, started with the disappearance of my father. There was always this need to understand what happened to him – to seek answers. And that led me, from a very young age, to write and try to express this void that I felt. But, initially, everything was shrouded in silence at home. And that just made me very curious and with a need to seek answers. When I moved to New York City and I became a single mother, that put that search at the forefront. What had been dormant there came up, and I started to photograph as a way of understanding my experience a little deeper. When you’re a mother, everything that is inside from your upbringing comes up. I felt my motherhood definitely enhanced that need to understand.
I was mainly a photographer for over a decade, but I always felt while I was photographing that I wanted to pair the images with words. The images were the starting points to say something larger. I did two photo books before this one that were mixed with poetry and poetic prose. Understanding it now after I wrote this memoir, I was trying to get to the core story about my upbringing, my mother, and our larger family history. And at that moment, I didn’t have the distance and understanding to process that. Or maybe I just wasn’t ready to talk about it with words.
When I did my MFA at the Image Text Ithaca program, I started writing more and toying with the idea of different experiments for this book. Although I’d written two other photo books with text in the past, I had inside me something else that I needed to express and work through. I started writing bits and pieces, which lent itself to the fragmented nature of the writing. Because I was writing about this, and writing about that, and I had a whole bunch of disparate notes. At one point, I felt like I was ready to edit and put it all together. And that’s how the memoir came to be.
This book is unflinchingly honest – as many memoirs are. Being that I’m Dominican, too, I couldn’t help but read it through that cultural lens. Many of us don’t air out our family trauma the way you do in this book. To me it felt like a resistance to that silencing – that aspect of our culture. Is this how you felt as you wrote this book?
Yes, and there’s actually a lot of contention around the book from my family – especially around its publication now. Because, as you mentioned, culturally people don’t like to air out family grievances in the Dominican Republic. Hay que aparentar ser una familia de bien – right? But mostly in the case of my family, it had to do with a lot of unexamined and unprocessed pain from my mother’s generation. Like my aunts and my mother, who were the direct victims of that femicide that happened to my grandmother. There was a lot of pain there that was not processed. And I started writing about it in my first book, All of Them, which focused on my father. There, very cryptically, I started talking about the murder. It was really painful for my family, and they were really hurt that I brought this out into the world – although I didn’t mention any names and there were just a few family photographs [in the book]. But they were really upset, and that cost me a few of the relationships with my family.
For a while, I was very sad about it but I understood when I did that book about my father, that it helped me grieve him. I couldn’t speak about my father before without having a lump on my throat, or becoming really emotional about what happened to him. But after I did the book, people started to approach me and share stories from their families as well. I started to feel that this really wasn’t a frivolous attempt. That there was actually value in doing this. And I connected more with my purpose of writing about my family, and understood that it was important not only for me, but it was important as an act of resistance. And to not live your life in silence and not to inherit the shame and pain that previous family members have experienced.
With Mother Archive – which is a lot more ample in its descriptions of everything that happened – there is still some discontent from some family members who don’t want the story to be out there. The ethics around writing a memoir or writing about living family members – in the case of my mother – is also complicated. But I find that everybody processes pain differently. Some people prefer to process in silence because it hurts too much. Others develop a certain anger and direct it towards others. In my case, I write. I make images. I have to find a way to process that and put it elsewhere to move forward…
I find that although it is very difficult and painful that some family members feel hurt about my attempt to heal, or my writing, I have to go through with it because it is important. It is a way of breaking that chain of silence, abuse and that generational baggage.
In your book you address the disappearance of your father when you were very young, and what a monumental impact it had on you and on your life. What was it like to write about your father?
In All of Them, my first photo book, it was extremely painful at first. But it came out of me really quickly, like a fever. I sat down and wrote the poetic texts and started playing with the images…. In Mother Archive, I feel like it was definitely less hard to talk about my father. I have placed a lot of distance already. I have worked through it in therapy for many years, but it has been more difficult to talk about my mother and other family members, because there is guilt. I feel guilt about exposing the history. Definitely at the forefront of this work are guilt and some feelings of shame. But I feel that the more opportunities I am given to speak about it, or when people read the book and reach out to me, I feel that chipping away slowly. It’s the way of working through it. Not normalizing it, but understanding that those feelings are not the reality.
You are the narrator of this memoir, but it reads as though you’re talking to your mother. Can you tell us about your decision to structure the book this way?
Usually when people use the second person, they use it as a way of distancing themselves. But to me, it felt on the contrary. There was a subtle anger underneath the work. I had a need to confront and speak directly to my mother, to address certain things. That’s part of why I wanted it to feel like a direct address to her.
The book is addressed to her, but she’s not the audience for the book. Because she can speak English and I’m not writing it for her to read it. In that contradiction, I wanted to represent the same contradiction in our relationship. There’s a push and pull. There’s a need to get close, but I’m gonna take it away, too. There’s a desire to be loved and close to someone, but then a fear that comes with it. That was some of the thinking behind that decision in addressing the book to my mom. It’s a way to confront, but at the same time, it’s also an attempt to get close. A coaxing.
You include some very difficult stories from your life and past, including abuse and trauma not just inflicted on you but on your mother. I was struck by how you wrote about these plainly and affectingly. There were times when I had to stop and take a breath. I needed a moment. What was your approach to these stories, as a writer who was confronted with the task of depicting all this on paper for readers – many of whom you don’t know?
That’s a great question because I’ve always felt there’s so much generosity in that act – in reading someone else’s trauma. It’s not an easy read. It’s not like, Oh my God, I’m so grateful I read this. It is difficult to sit with someone’s experience. One of the concerns I had in writing this is, Who is going to want to sit through all of this? This huge, heavy brick?
Thinking about it in literary terms, it was really helpful to break up the story in these different parts. A friend of mine, John Rufo, was an initial reader of this work. In some of his feedback to me, he said, ‘It is so potent. It’s so heavy that we need breaks – kind of like a musical score.’ And I started to think of how these parts could really help the story. One of the ways that I thought of it was dividing it by actual physical places – so DR in the beginning with that opening image of the ocean, Nueva York with its buildings, and then Chile with its snow peaks. I felt that having those landscape photographs break up the book really helps readers feel like they’re entering another part of the story… I wanted an image to somehow either cleanse the palate or intensify the meaning that I was talking about – or complicate it.
There’s a lot of gaps in this story and a lot of voids and interruptions, which to me was also essential to this work. In recounting trauma, a linear narrative didn’t work for me. Because I don’t think that’s how we remember trauma. At least in my life when I’m remembering something that happened to me that is very difficult, I never have the full image in my head. I have a memory, and that memory tends to mutate the more time passes and the more people I talk to. I might not remember all the details, but I might remember the wallpaper in the room, the texture of the bed sheets. But I might not remember the face of a person, for example. That’s how I approached it in a literary sense, to mitigate the heaviness of the text.
Mother Archive features black-and-white photos throughout – photos of your family past and present. It’s not lost on me that you are a photographer, as your father was. What has photography meant to you, in your life?
It has served a different purpose in my life, depending on the different stages that I’ve gone through. When I became a single mother, photography was a way of both understanding this new experience that I was in, and a kind of rebellion against motherhood. I didn’t want to feel like, OK, now I became a young single mom. This is all my life is going to be. I’m not going to be able to pursue anything else. So I’m like, No, I’m still going to be an artist. I still have something to say. I’m not only just a mother. So I think initially, photography played that role in my life.
But as I started making more images, in hindsight I started to realize that I was creating a family album. I was documenting domestic life at home. In my own childhood my mother destroyed that evidence by getting rid of the photographs because I think it was maybe too painful for her to be faced with these photographs all the time. Now when I look at the role of photography in my life, I also understand that I was reversing that action by making images.
Photography allowed me to connect with a part of myself that didn’t have an attachment to any history. It was new. It wasn’t like something that I lived when I was in Dominican Republic. It was like something completely new that was enriching my life, and giving it this new dimension. And I’m very grateful. It was a tool that obliterated that silence that was so pervasive while I was growing up, and gave a literal image to feelings, to experiences. And it gave me a voice initially. But that voice was never complete without the writing, which is something that I realized later on as I started to make more images and make sense of them. When you’re in the editing process, you’re like, Wait a minute, what am I trying to say here? Then I understood that I wanted to write, as well.
One of my greatest takeaways from your book is just how paramount the role of a mother is in your own sense of security and self-worth. We watch you travel to Nueva York in the summers, when your mom would send you there. And there you grow close to your Tía D – who you did everything with. At that age, during those summers, did you hold that same recognition that someone who is not your mother could serve in that motherly role?
My aunts and, as I became an adult, a lot of the mothers of my friends really love me and consider me a daughter. When things got rough at home, I went to friends’ houses and lived there for a few months. Those mothers were really instrumental and loving in my life. I always feel extremely grateful to have such ample support and love from those kind of pseudo-mothers close to me. But it’s a very bittersweet feeling, because you know it’s not your mother. So you’re being loved and embraced, but it’s not by your mother.
One of the things that the book has helped me understand is to fight that notion that a mother can only be the person who birthed you. There are different ways of mothering as well. It’s not only who you live with and the person that provides that tender love and care. Mothering is also support, companionship, friendship. I found what I was lacking, in that sense, in so many different people around me. It’s a kind of spiritual journey for me to understand that that can be enough. And that if the actual motherly bond in my life with my birth mother is not there, it does not mean that my life is incomplete. It does not mean that my life is lacking, or that I am somehow inadequate or incomplete. I’ve learned that this is something very hard to understand and internalize, especially when you see it playing out in relationships.
What do you hope readers take away from Mother Archive?
I want the reader to come out with the hope for the possibility of change – change in circumstance, but also in your emotional landscape. The situations that we grew up in of course have a huge impact on our lives. But they are not the end-all of our existence. I want the reader to go on a journey where they watch me become more independent emotionally. And I want to present that to them as a possibility in their own life, too – especially if they’ve dealt with difficult circumstances. So that’s what I feel is my intention with it [the book].
I also would like to encourage some investigation into oneself. I think that’s a very worthwhile endeavor. Sometimes we don’t want to go deep. We don’t want to look within. We’re scared to sit down with our emotions and feelings, and examine them deeply. I want the book to feel like an exhortation to really sit down with one’s experiences and look at them closely – unafraid of what you might encounter.
_____________________
Visit our BookShop to preorder a copy of Mother Archive: A Dominican Family Memoir.
_____________________
About the Author:
Erika Morillo is a photographer and writer born in the Dominican Republic. She lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.
_____________________
Amaris Castillo is a journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, the Lowell Sun, the Bradenton Herald, Remezcla, Latina Magazine, Parents Latina Magazine, and elsewhere. Her creative writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms be Like..., and most recently in Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, "El Don," was a finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. Amaris lives in Florida with her family. You can follow her work at amariscastillo.com.
Yorumlar