By Sarah Hoenicke for Gulf Coast
Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas’s series of essays, Don’t Come Back, is an exploration of belonging and of the ways memory and imagination interact to create history. Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas reminds readers that we can still write creation narratives, as she does in four of the essays. There are still stories untold, and original ways to tell them. Part legend, part graphically violent cultural history, part familial myth—here, magical realism meets the explicitness of Annie Dillard. In many of the essays, Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas takes information from interviews with family members and builds on it, imagining backgrounds for the interviewees, and connecting these individual stories to the larger events of history and cultural myth.
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