The Temple of My Familiar

Content Warning: This book contains descriptions of racial and gender oppression, and the attendant isms and discriminatory language; rape and sexual violence; and substance addiction.

“The years she spent in prison she never spoke of to Carlotta, even though that was where Carlotta was born. […] How her mother escaped with her, Carlotta did not know.”

Carlotta grows up without much information about her mother’s past or her father’s identity. This informs her character arc in the book: She grows up as an immigrant, without the context of culture, community, or personal history for her sense of self. Accordingly, when her relationships with the only family members in her life—Arveyda and Zedé—are destroyed by their affair, she is shattered. This is the heart of her conflict in the story, and why later Fanny remarks that Carlotta’s entire substance was pain.

“His generation of men had failed women—and themselves—he mused […] For all their activism and political development during the sixties, all their understanding of the pervasiveness of oppression, for most men, the preferred place for women had remained the home; the preferred position for women, wherever they were, supine.”

Suwelo reflects on the actions of his generation of men. At this point in the story, he has not yet met Hal and Lissie; thus, this reflection is somewhat ironic. Suwelo recognizes the overt misogyny and oppression perpetrated by men upon women, but it takes him substantial time spent with Hal and Lissie to recognize how he enacts the same injustices in his own personal life and relationships. Even as he ponders men expecting women to handle the domestic sphere, he refuses to use Fanny's shopping cart as it reminds him of women. As he reflects on men’s sexual expectations of women, he places the same upon