Karen Cordero

My Grandmother’s Brown Notebook

2022

This project is titled My Grandmother’s Brown Notebook in homage to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, because it refers to an object that I found in the family archive which encompasses, in a fragmented fashion, 60 years of history, and contains interventions by my maternal grandmother, my mother and her sister as children, and probably my grandfather (my mother’s stepfather) as well. When I first opened this notebook, I found an unmailed letter that my grandmother had written to my father, her son-in-law, in the 1980’s, which opened up a chasm in my idealized vision of my parents’ lives, revealing a side of them that I had perhaps sensed but not clearly identified (or perhaps I hadn’t wanted to see). After recovering from this blow, months later, I discovered the multiple levels of discourse and time periods that overlap in this notebook. It registers aspects of my grandmother’s interior life between 1923 and 1985, in diverse languages, and in visual and verbal formats, including a barely legible dream penciled in a palimpsestic manner on the reverse of a mimeographed letter. Opening the door for possibilities of knowing and narrating my family and myself from new perspectives.