How does the author use flashback in the novel, Land of Milk and Honey?

Over the course of the novel, one of the narrator’s primary internal conflicts originates from her fraught relationship with her past. In order to enact this complex psychological and emotional dynamic, the author embraces frequent temporal shifts on the page throughout the narrative. These flashbacks or allusions to the narrator’s past, however, do not always come about in an easy or fluid manner. However, the way in which the narrator relates to her past life is most apparent within the one-page prologue. As soon as the young girl approaches the narrator and starts asking her about “a period of time that her generation prefers to forget,” the narrator begins “slipping [her] old woman’s skin as if it is costume; I am sloughing this room, this soil, this year; I am back to that place very high and very far where I can’t speak for the thinness of crisp, mountain air” (1). In the narrative present, the narrator is an old woman. Therefore, decades have passed since her time in the mountain country. In spite of all the time that has elapsed, the narrator is immediately transported into the scenes and sensory experiences of her time on the mountain.