The Isle is Full of Noises: Puerto Rico Strong, Hurricane María, and the Role of Memory in the Reimagination of a Boricua Nation

Abstract

The text discusses the case of Puerto Rico Strong, a 2018 comics anthology by United Way of Puerto Rico (Fondos Unidos de PR) and St. Louis comics publisher Lion Forge. Profits from the sale of the volume went to a number of relief efforts following the disaster of Hurricane María. The article discusses some of the main narrative lines of the volume, in particular, stories that are representative of what is called the prosthetic nation, an experience proper of the Latinx community across the US. The prosthetic nation is a notion based on ideas suggested by Allison Landsberg and Celia Lury on prosthetic memory and culture, respectively,
which show how identity can be reconstituted by deliberate transformation. It is a community imagined with the memories of others—specifically, a community imagined as nation, yet a nation unlived or not experienced materially firsthand. A prosthetic nation is one in which the sense of allegiance to an imagined community results from memories experienced and lived by someone close to you, who has taken the effort and time to share and nurture them industriously. For this reason, it focuses mostly not on immigration, but on what preceded immigration. In some cases, these fabricated involvements may be triggered through associations with events and/or occurrences parents or relatives have mentioned repeatedly with more than a touch of nostalgia, to the point of generating a sense of familiarity with unexperienced involuntary memories, echoing deceitfully the spirit of the Proust phenomenon, based on emotional sensorial connection. In this sense, the prosthetic nation is the result of a process involving affect—or, at the very least, the consequences of affect resulting from imaginary or highly theorized contact. It does not speak merely of a longing for a homeland—as experienced by many immigrants—but rather of the manufacture of a remembrance for/by a generation of people who never really experienced life in this point of family origin, given they were born or raised in another place, the heart of a colonial experience. Thus, it is a fabrication used to cultivate and preserve a critical discourse involving resistance.