PJAS 18-5
Réka M. Cristian
Healing Processes in Aurora Levins Morales’s Remedios and Medicine Stories
Polish Journal for American Studies, vol. 18 (2024), pp. 69-81
Abstract: The article maps the healing processes contained in Aurora Levins Morales’s two works, Remedios and Medicine Stories, in which the author combines life narratives, history, botany, autobiography and fiction in a synergic way. Levins Morales considers life as a net of ecosystems, where the writer works as an “organic intellectual” by creating stories that have a certain power, including a healing potential. Levins Morales uses medicinal history and generally history “to cure the wounds of a deeply colonized sense of ourselves” by charting a mosaic of histories with a microhistorical strategy that deconstruct compounds of mainstream history and replace them with the untold, idiosyncratic histories of generations of women. Besides texts, the process of this deconstruction, too, holds a curative power that can heal even transgenerational traumas.
Keywords: Aurora Levins Morales, Remedios, Medicine Stories, curandera, healing, women, trauma, generations, feminism, ecosystem, microhistory
DOI: 10.7311/PJAS.18/2024.05