Grandmothers : Granddaughters Remember

by BOUVARD MARGUERITE GUZMAN (ED)

• ISBN13: 9780815605348
• ISBN10: 081560534X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-10-01
• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr

Summary

This book celebrates an intimate and profound link between women -- that between grandmother and granddaughter. This collection of stories and vignettes -- a multicultural anthology of women from diverse ethnic backgrounds -- reveals how the mantle of culture and family is passed from woman to woman. As they vividly explode stereotypes, the pieces illustrate not only the courage of older women, but the received wisdom of younger women. Granddaughters remember their grandmothers as extraordinary women at once defiant and tradition bound, loving and stubbornly dogmatic. Some reinvent their grandmothers, others discover them for the first time. For example, Mary Helen Washington unmasks the word "freedpeople" in her grandmother's story to reveal the widespread aggression against supposedly freed slaves. Beryl Minkle's Bubba tells a tale of cultural and religious injustice that includes the oppression of women. Noted Native American writer Paula Gurin Allen reflects on her different cultural threads, as she searches for her Lebanese great-grandmother for whom she was named.

Author Biography

Marguerite Guzman Bouvard is a resident scholar with the Women's Studies Program at Brandeis University

Table of Contents

Illustrations	ix	(2)
Acknowledgments	xi	(2)
Introduction	xiii
Grandmothers as Mentors	3	(72)
The Day My Grandmother's Eyes Turned to Glass	3	(17)
PATRICIA TRAXLER
The Color of Anguish	20	(10)
ANA ALOMA VELILLA
The Grandmothers Speak Forever: Communing with the Ancestors	30	(10)
MARILOU AWIAKTA
The Essence of You	40	(9)
MICHELLE V. CLOONAN
My Adopted English Gran	49	(9)
LAURENCE B. CALVER
Not Just a Bubbe-Mayse: Tillie's Story	58	(17)
BERYL MINKLE
The Rub of Love	75	(44)
Bread Pudding	75	(10)
JEAN GOULD
The Geraldine Easton Story	85	(11)
MONTY S. LEITCH
The New Deal	96	(12)
ROBIN BECKER
The Peak	108	(11)
CHRISTINA CHIU
Searching for a Grandmother	119	(42)
What I Know About You	119	(12)
AIMEE LIU
My Lebanon	131	(13)
PAULA GUNN ALLEN
In the Absence of My Grandmother	144	(5)
MARTHA COLLINS
A Grandmother Twice Lost	149	(12)
ANN KIMMAGE
Grandmother Histories	161	(68)
The Four Lives of Malissa Dalton	161	(12)
MARY HELEN WASHINGTON
One Village	173	(16)
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
Two Grandmothers	189	(11)
ANNELIESE WAGNER
During the Reign of Queen Anna	200	(10)
MARGUERITE GUZMAN BOUVARD
Memories of My Grandmothers	210	(7)
FLORENCE CAWTHORNE LADD
The Grandmother Speaks: Spirits of Place	217	(12)
PADMA HEJMADI
Contributors	229