Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. With her mother as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often hilarious guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her family into two camps: those who believe 'the secrets' are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse. Spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey home to Colombia to disinter Nono's remains.

So when Rojas Contreras, now living in the United States, suffered a head injury in her twenties that left her with amnesia-an accident eerily similar to a fall her mother took as a child, from which she woke not just with amnesia, but also the ability to see ghosts-the family assumed 'the secrets' had been passed down once again. As a young girl Rojas Contreras spent her days eavesdropping on her mother's fortune-telling clients and eagerly waiting for the phone calls from relatives reporting that her mother's apparition had, yet again, visited them thousands of miles away from where Mami stood in the family's kitchen. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called 'the secrets: ' the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds.

Raised amidst the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house where 'what did you dream?' was the preferred greeting in place of 'how are you?,' very little was out of the ordinary. For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family.

Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras