Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa Quotes

In a world where families are suddenly and inexplicably separated, where life and death can come at any time, the community holds continuity and safety.

“...We all have stories. Sometimes the pain lies so heavily inside us that it can only be whispered. Sometimes it can't be spoken out loud at all. So you think you're different? There are many silences. You've got one kind but each of us has her own. Listen and you will hear them all around you...You're not alone in your pain, never have been. We're all part of each other's pain and can be a part of each other's healing too. But when you clutch on to the first, you'll miss out on the second.” (p19)

Don’t forget that the artist still has to be a woman. Nourish them both. (p317)

These are the stories. My stories, their stories—just as they were told to my mother and her mother and hers. They were given to me for safekeeping, and now I give them to you. (first lines, Prologue)

I don't map out my novels. I go where my characters take me. In Daughters of the Stone, I wanted to explore how the past acts as a foundation for supporting the present and building towards the future. I also wanted to explore art, and especially storytelling, as healing and guiding mechanisms in our society.

Eventually, I came to understand how liberating fiction would be. I would be free to let my imagination soar. I could include the stories of my family and add to the many stories I was given by friends and students who shared their lives with me as well. Fiction gave me the freedom to adjust, invent, build bridges, raise my figurative voice and superimpose a structure on the images I had been collecting all along. It gave me permission to omit the extraneous and sharpen the essential. I could inhabit my characters' thoughts, explore their innermost feelings and tell their stories from various perspectives. I could experiment with language, both English and Spanish, using the rich vernacular of my youth, in both the Bronx and rural Puerto Rico, creating a bilingual, bicultural, biracial world. I had a whole set of tools at my disposal that would allow me to tell many stories my way. In fact, I could write metaphorical narrative of the Afro-Puerto Rican journey from 19th century Africa to colonial Puerto Rico to contemporary urban America, something I knew had never been done in American letters. In a sense, I could become the storyteller for all of them, a modern day griot of Afro-Puerto Rican tradition. For years, I had been a receptor, collecting stories and holding them in trust. Now I knew why. Seeing my work within the framework of narrative fiction, was like pushing aside a curtain and seeing the world for the first time. Writing this novel became my primary goal.

We all carry our nightmares in unspoken places. The details are different, but the outcome is the same. They want to steal our humanity, to ease the weight into their own souls. Don't you let them. Don't give them one piece of you they can't take. Don't you become the empty vessel they want to believe you are.

My writing begins with dreaming, journaling and meditation.

"Nightmares are for people who refuse to listen to their hearts. People who have lost their way, who are hollow. Fear slips into those hollow places. It is the very emptiness that draws the fear." (p164)

When physical reality becomes unbearable, then an alternative is needed. My characters don't escape from objective reality, they simply exist in a more complex worldview than is the norm in the world they are forced to inhabit. Their perception of the world goes beyond that of the Western imaginary. Whether you call it magic or mysticism or religion or spirituality, it is that which binds the characters and allows for their survival in spite of the violence of their lives.

Coming from a traditional Puerto Rican family, I wasn't allowed to express my displeasure at or disagreement with my parents' point of view in any meaningful way. Since I couldn't 'talk back', I started writing.

I couldn't write my stories without the constant presence of my ancestors who await me in my dreams and my meditations, whispering their stories and reminding me of what I have forgotten. This book is dedicated to them because their stories have lived for too long under the waters of the Caribbean, unrecognized and in imposed silence.
Let there be light to illuminate as-yet-to-be-told truths.

I love the African proverb “you’ll never know what happened on the hunt until you speak to the lion.” I think many readers realize that, for the most part, the story we have gotten has been from the perspective of the conquerors. That is why is it so important for us to tell our own stories. What we have been taught has been distorted, one-sided, self-serving, and incomplete, at best. I think readers are thirsty for another narrative, one that feels more authentic and truthful.

She moved by rote, dragging her grief into the fields with her. (chapter 12 p149)