Not Knowing the Precise Word According to La muerte feliz de William Carlos Williams, by Marta Aponte

Abstract

The article centers on Puerto Rican writer, Marta Aponte’s reading of La muerte feliz de William Carlos Williams (2015). The novel fictionalizes the poet’s search for an American Idiom or an “American expression”, and his ties with his mother, Raquel Helena Hoheb Monsanto, born to parents from the Lesser Antilles in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. The author asks herself such questions as: What happens when the absence of the precise word imposes itself on the written stroke? And what does this event mean when those unpronounceable and impossibly spelled words constitute other forms of naming one’s mother? The article explores the complex relationship between cultural heritage and the memory that supports it with respect to the language that materializes and writes that received heritage, where the native tongue is reinvented in the transit of travel, exile, and dispossession: between the desire of escaping and the need to take root.