The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Alma Cruz is a Dominican American writer who decides to end her literary career by burying or burning all of her unfinished, untold stories. To this end, she creates a cemetery on a plot of land in Santiago. In the Dominican Republic, residents assume that she is American. Her pen-name is Scheherazade, after the narrator of Arabian Nights. Alma’s self-descriptions often revolve around her relationships to words and stories. Though she writes in English, certain expressions evade her because “English wasn’t her original language, [and] its root system didn’t go deep enough in her psyche” (7). Despite that limitation, she is in love with finding the right word for a feeling. Even at the end of her life, when she is implied to be experiencing the early stages of dementia, she is “still hopelessly, helplessly in love with naming things” (205) as a way of knowing and of feeding her curiosity. For this reason, she has always been troubled by her lack of knowledge about her father’s life. Her arc in this story is about letting go of her need to know about her father’s life, and she learns to accept the idea that his stories died with him.