A Caribbean epic of blood ties

Of Forgotten Times

A Novel

Marisela Rizik

Curbstone Press: 216 pp., $14.95

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Though stripped of dates and geographical markers, without even a scattering of brand names as cultural reference points, “Of Forgotten Times” nonetheless bears all the earmarks of a certain time and place. Its author, Marisela Rizik, was born in the Dominican Republic; this, her debut novel, which first appeared in Spanish in Santo Domingo in 1996, is a four-generational tale of post- colonial life mostly overshadowed by a general called Iron Fist -- a figure suggestive in his public and private dealings of the long-term Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

Rizik, who has lived in the United States for more than two decades, joins an array of writers whose work looks back on both a personal and an inherited Caribbean experience -- Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Patrick Chamoiseau and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, to name a few of the first rank. It is intriguing that a small, culturally fragmented region, one moreover where literacy can’t be taken for granted, has produced such a wealth of writers of stature. Their voices are as original and distinct as their individual island cultures; they range from lyric to satiric, nostalgic to bitter, whimsical to elegiac.

Rizik’s narrative approach might be described as superficial-omniscient. The saga begins in a backwater village notable since colonial times for its seductive green-eyed women, descendants of slaves who are gifted with supernatural powers and exploited as prostitutes -- all except the purest strain, surnamed Parduz. Their females are kept in reverent isolation by an ancient voodun-style cult, the Council of Twelve. To this point, the novel’s introductory back story owes a great deal to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the time-bending conventions of magical realism.

A more conventional sort of realism takes over when the story focuses on the main character, Herminia, the only child of Lorenza, rebellious daughter of the seer Rolanda Parduz. The runaway Lorenza surrenders her virginity in a romantic encounter with a patrician landowner, is subsequently rejected and selflessly sends infant Hermi to be raised by her well-to-do father. Although the child suffers her father’s embarrassed distance as well as malicious humiliation from her stepmother and two half sisters, she rejects Lorenza’s overtures of maternal love, finding refuge instead with an aunt. Just as the girl’s future begins to look brighter (“She felt pretty in her pink taffeta dress and very much seventeen years old”) and she experiences the first thrill of attraction to a young man (“Her flushed face and sincere display of shyness affected every fiber of Antonio’s body”), Hermi suffers the misfortune of attracting the notice of no less a personage than the general himself. Thanks to her cloistered boarding school, Hermi “knew little about what went on in the world outside.... She focused on details: the hair that was beginning to grey; the white uniform covered with medals.” The die is cast, the wedding rushed and soon the innocent girl awakens in enviable luxury as Dona Herminia, locked in a loveless union.

But on the night before his wedding, the general has bought himself a fresh young mistress, Mercedes, a washerwoman’s daughter. Though the two women never meet, Mercedes’ illusionless street smarts serve as a foil for Hermi’s emotional dissatisfactions. Desperate for a child, Hermi threatens suicide, fearing the general would subject her to another abortion. And so is born Sara, who ironically becomes her father’s spoiled pet -- and yet another ingrate daughter of a yearning, remorseful Parduz mother.

Numerous other characters -- an architect suborned by the general, a doctor besotted with Mercedes, Hermi’s old flame returned from exile -- occupy the spotlight briefly in the course of the novel’s 109 pop-up chapters. Most are challengers of the generically cruel general. Most are, in one sense or another, inadequate men who leave little lasting impression on the female protagonists. Even the question of whether Antonio will win back Hermi after the general’s mystery-shrouded death eventually seems to leave both the author and her heroine cold. In this matrilineal drama, passion -- both love and hatred -- runs deepest between mothers and daughters, granddaughters and grandmothers.

The quick scene shifts serve up moments of sharp observation: a jealous wife who “began looking for proof of guilt. She would smell Antonio’s shirts, sniffing out different scents, or try to capture a change in his demeanor.”

Overall, however, an air of claustrophobia clings to “Of Forgotten Time,” occupied as it is with the interior, domestic lives of related, rather similar women. The outside world remains distant, a sea storm that occasionally hurls debris into their houses.

Meanwhile, the rapidly flowing stream of familial incident, of estrangements and reunions, insults and forgiveness, never quite thickens into that satisfying complexity called plot.