A Loving Memoir of Her Husband’s Life in El Salvador

STILL LOVE IN STRANGE PLACES

A Memoir

By Beth Kephart

W.W. Norton

224 pages, $24.95

“Words are the weights that hold our histories in place. They are the stones that a family passes on, hand to hand, if the hands are open, if the hearts are,” writes Beth Kephart in “Still Love in Strange Places,” a prose-poem of a memoir focusing on her fascination with her husband’s native El Salvador. Though Kephart (“A Slant of Sun”) had little interest in that Central American country prior to meeting her husband, Bill, her imagination was fired by Bill’s tales of his upbringing and his extended family.

She is particularly interested in giving to their son Jeremy the fully imagined world of his father’s roots, and in doing so, writes lovingly and thoughtfully. It is through stories, she finds, that we reconcile and embrace our heritage.

El Salvador’s “prosperity and poverty and politics, its murders, reprisals and grace all had tracers back to coffee,” she suggests of the strife-torn land and provides a fair amount of historical and geographical background on the region. Her in-laws, who own large coffee farms high in the mountainous jungles of El Salvador, are also defined by the crop, and the family’s coffee plantations make up the vivid backdrop of the narrative. The tale moves gracefully between Kephart’s visits to El Salvador, with luscious scenes of day-to-day existence on the coffee farms--portraits of beauty and awe on one hand, danger and extreme poverty on the other--juxtaposed against the life she shares with her husband and son in suburban Pennsylvania.

In creating scenes of her husband’s land, Kephart relies as much on her imagination as on facts, piecing together, for example, numerous stories of her husband’s grandfather, re-imagining for the reader what his life may have been like. Don Alberto founded the family farms and died before Kephart married into the clan, yet she artfully joins the tales told by her husband and his Aunt Adela with torn photographs and her own conceptions to construct a narrative, admittedly closer to hagiography than biography, but fascinating nonetheless.

Though the intent of the book seems to be to introduce readers to the intrinsic beauty of El Salvador and its culture, a splendor obscured in recent decades by violence and political unrest, its most intriguing subtheme (and perhaps an unintended one) converges on Kephart’s seemingly uneasy relationship with her spouse.

She writes of Bill as if his being born abroad makes him exotic and unknowable. The longing she feels in the face of his mysteriousness impels her story and forces her to dig deeper into his past in order to possess a piece of him. “I want Bill and his brothers ... to know more about their histories than they do ... I persist. I ask. I supplement,” she writes of this drive to know his family better without addressing the deeper question of why? Certainly, it’s human to want to fully know one’s spouse, to enter his childhood, to hear stories of his life before you came on the scene. The unequal nature of her drive, though, becomes apparent when she acknowledges that he has no interest in knowing about her past. “Years ago, Bill concluded that the suburbia of my youth was ... benign,” she writes, and thus, her stories were deemed neither interesting nor worthy of exploration the way his life, in the wilds of El Salvador, has captured her attention. A foreign land and language clearly add a layer to what is unfathomable in another’s life, but they are not the only impediments to entering that life, though Kephart writes as if they were.

She photographs, documents, researches and questions his family tree, becoming essentially the family historian. Meanwhile, the reader detects the low flame of resentment burning, her exasperation over his lack of interest in her personal history. “His stories have become the habit with us--his childhood photos the ones I study. His memories the ones I tap. He asks me little about where I come from

As lush as the mountainous terrain it depicts, “Still Love” is a poetic evocation of Salvadoran life, its magic and tragedies. The book is also--by design or not--a sketch of the disparities in this one cross-cultural marriage, and a sidelong view of how women’s stories have been silenced for eons.