The Poetry Project

A Future that Doesn’t End: An Interview with Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Kyle Carrero Lopez

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal has a powerful and fascinating mind. In her new book, Magical/Realism, she pulls from a disparate array of language systems and approaches—Spanish, computer language, theory, pop cultural criticism, and memoir—into a singular hybrid form that ultimately aims to question (and perhaps collapse) the line between fantasy and reality. What is reality to someone who undergoes the gaslighting tactics of an abusive partner? How possible is escapism within the fantasy genre, which emerges from and recreates contexts of real systems of subjugation? How much can anyone whose family line has endured colonialism, enslavement, and the like—forms of major, violent, informational rupture—truly know about our histories, and how much of what we claim to know or believe to be true lives within a fantastical realm?

I had the pleasure of studying as one of Vanessa’s students during the Tin House Winter Workshop a couple of years ago, after having been entranced by her poetry debut, Beast Meridian. She had us engage in exercises meant to estrange us from our drafts: dramatic syntactical flips, huge spacing shifts on the page, changing certain words within a poem to the word before or after it in different online dictionaries, and so on. It changed how I look at everything I write. Vanessa’s writing has this same kind of effect—reading it sparks all new possibilities for freedom on the page, for interdisciplinarity, for play, and for synthesizing all of the knowledges that compose one’s being. VOICE, baby!

We meet on video chat, between Brooklyn and Los Angeles, for a conversation that meanders through, among other things: alternative schooling, AI as a harbinger of the capitalist death drive, Game of Thrones, archives, The Lord of The Rings, what the fear of being canceled really means, the war on Gaza, fantasy vs. magical realism, and the difficulties of writing about one’s family. At one point in the conversation, we joke that this is what happens when the interviewer and interviewee both have ADHD. Her generosity and virtuosic analysis shine through in her answers. I’d gladly listen to her opinions about anything.

—Kyle Carrero Lopez

KYLE CARRERO LOPEZ: First of all, how are you at this moment?

VANESSA ANGÉLICA VILLAREAL: I don’t even know. I was telling Amanda [Orozco] yesterday that I put everything aside for this book. I stopped going out. I stopped seeing friends—not because I didn’t want to see them, but because I felt like if I left my house, I wouldn’t have time to like, latch onto an idea. Normally, the way I write is: I have a plan for an essay. I have an idea. And then I’m just grasping through it. But with this, the writing process was so different and, you know, with my son, it’s just really hard to get my ideas together. And so, I would have to grab the idea as soon as it happened. Everything in my life took a hit—my health took a hit, my social life took a hit. Everything was put on hold. And so now that it’s finished, I’m just like, oh, now what, book? I don’t even know what the fuck to do, and I’m also really shy about promotion. So I’m in this weird place. I don’t want to sell things to you, but hopefully you’ll read it. I don’t know. So yeah, maybe anxiety is a one word answer to that. Grateful anxiety, if that makes sense.

KCL: I was really excited to read it, and I think a lot of people who haven’t read it yet are really, really excited, too. I hope you at least feel the support and love. Lisa Jarnot did an interview with Bernadette Mayer for the Poetry Project Newsletter back in ‘98, and she led with the question: do you remember the first poem you ever wrote?

VAV: There are two poems. One is a long kind of inverse elegy with a refrain from the fifth grade after my grandmother died, and the refrain was like Grandma, I miss you, Grandma, I love you. And then it was like, when we would go to AstroWorld and ride the roller coasters, blah, blah, blah, Grandma, I miss you, Grandma, I love you. But that’s not my good poetry. Good poetry came when I first dropped acid. It was the first hit of acid that I got at alternative school. I’d never done drugs before, but because they thought I was a drug dealer, I might as well have tried drugs. So I went home and my mom had bought me this Brother typewriter from Office Depot or something for about 79 bucks; those 90s typewriters that were mechanized. I remember writing the worst, angsty eighth grade poetry on that thing. I was just ripping through all my ideas. Something like, I make a bed in my head of dread—eighth grade deep thoughts. So that would probably be the first poem.

KCL: Did you share it with anyone?

VAV: No, it’s lost to the ages.

KCL: I love the stories in the book on going through schooling and how you were being understood within the school system. How did you come about writing the essay “Alternative School: A Very Special Episode?” Did you journal a lot at that time? What was your process of digging through those memories and putting that time back together?

VAV: That one, in particular, was really hard to write. It was part of the original project that I pitched. This book was going to be called Chueca. Which is a sort of pun, because my dad and I have a very similar nose and he always calls it a nariz chueca because we have a very prominent bump. But also, chueca or chueco is somebody who’s always on the wrong path, or making the wrong decisions. In my preteen and teen years, I was a runaway. I was expelled. I was in a psychiatric hospital. And so I felt very chueca for a long time. Part of getting better, achieving mental health after big, traumatic events, is a form of assimilation and self-erasure, right? You’re suppressing your crazy. In order to prove that I had gotten better, it meant performative gender, you know, heterosexuality, performative sanity. Which meant that a lot of those memories were shells. I could summarize what happened, but re-entering the memory was tough. The only way I could access those memories—I often use the defrag screen on my computer as a metaphor. It visualizes the computer’s memory, and if the memory is healthy, it’s a blue square. If the memory is corrupted in some way, it’s a yellow or pink square. That whole period of my life was just yellow and pink squares. Corrupted little memories. What would refill that data was music and movies from that time. And so, I would have to listen to that music or watch those movies again to trigger a certain memory. But that also meant triggering all this other shit.

In the end, it ended up not being as important to write about what happened so much as an analysis of what the time was, because it really was so different. I remember my dad and I used to go to this H-E-B all the time, and it was before H-E-B was a bougie, Texas grocery chain. It was the cheap, immigrant, grocery store, and they closed that H-E-B down and made it into another alternative school right next to my high school. So now there are two alternative schools in my district. That encapsulates that time, right? Businesses constantly closing. Disciplinary and carceral logics everywhere. It’s enmeshed in the map of my childhood. The geographies are carceral, you know? So yeah, analysis was easier than remembering, if that makes sense.

KCL: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate how you use corrupted memory and its colors as metaphor. I find you to be a very technological writer, and what you were just saying makes me think of Nikita Gale. She’s proposed that “bodies are never entirely absent from what we refer to as technology.” Tell me a bit about what your relationship to technology has been like over your writing career—where that may have started and where it’s led to now.

VAV: I can start with the fact that my ex-spouse is kind of a tech bro. He came from a very Bible Belt Christian, heavily evangelical, blue collar, Texas family. He’ll be the first to tell you that his family lives in a trailer park in East Texas and they have the politics they have, so he very much escaped from an incredibly repressive environment. Growing up, he was a punk and went to jail for—you know the inspection stickers on cars? All poor folks do this. I still remember the font: you use the Impact font to print off a registration sticker because that’s what they used to look like in Texas. But he got in trouble for that. He never went to college, so he got a certification instead in web security and engineering. And so, I’ve always just been technologically adept. The language of technology is a really powerful metaphor for memory to me. Also, the fact that all technology is written in English. No matter where you are in the world, you have to have some kind of working knowledge of English. Root memory and binary code, all of these things have symbolic resonances. Root memory is like ancestral memory. Binary code relates to gender expression.

Almost all of our research happens on the internet now. If I want to find my ancestry, I go to Ancestry.com or whatever and you are sort of bound to that archive, and what those documents are, and the limitations of those archives, and what ghosts come through the machine in that way. The difference between a digital archive versus a living archive, when you see a document in front of you—I had the privilege of seeing Octavia Butler’s real journals in The Huntington, and there’s a vast difference.

I do look at technology critically in Magical/Realism, actually, in the essay “The Final Boss: A Poetics of World-Building and the Apocalyptic Imagination.” It’s a look at how sci-fi is only capable of imagining the apocalypse. We’re always headed toward or surviving after an apocalypse any time the West imagines its future, because it’s a future that is rendered in the memory of colonialism. And AI—if AI has trained on everything the West and the Global North has written, then all it will remember is essentially the memory of the West. There’s this video game called Horizon Zero Dawn where, first of all, it’s white people cosplaying as Indigenous because they’re the people who have survived the apocalypse, and they’ve so fucked the world. There’s a tech company that has so fucked the world that AI now runs nature. The AI turns against the humans that designed it, and in rebellion, all of these metal flowers start popping out of the earth. And those metal flowers run on code. But the code that they run on, the computer code, is poetry. It’s old fragments of poems, like Bashō, and the only problem is that the AI can’t come up with new poetry. It can only regurgitate poetry that’s already been written, and it’s ancient poetry.

We are trapped in western consciousness, which includes linear time, capitalistic growth, progress, discovery, all of the things that have to do with the future as ahead of us, which is a very Western concept; other Indigenous cultures think of the future as either coming down or behind us. This idea of the future that we’re heading toward is inevitably going to be an end because we’re composing and composed of Western consciousness and capitalism, which is essentially designing its own end. And that’s what AI is, right? What it produces is essentially a death language. Think about what’s happening in Gaza, right—the AI that’s able to identify and target families. AI has all of these horrible, nefarious uses. The fact that facial recognition trained largely on migrants, for example. AI is essentially the apocalyptic imagination.

AI sucks at poetry really badly. It literally can’t write a poem to save its life. And if it does, it sounds like, I don’t know, like, Wordsworth or something.

KCL: There’s a New Yorker piece that tried to do that in the style of different famous writers. So many bad poems.

VAV: I mean, it’s all bad poems. Poetry is an insurgent language in that it resists emptying by design. AI is this empty language—it can generate language that can fulfill an assignment, like marketing, or whatever. It’s designed to spit out what your prompts tell it to. It’s been emptied of meaning because no one is producing it. Poetry resists emptying because it itself challenges grammars, and relation. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says that the poet speaks on the threshold of being. Poetry is the anti-AI. Those two languages are opposites. And so if we’re going to build a new world, if we’re going to imagine a new world, if we’re going to think of a future that doesn’t end in apocalypse, if we’re going to get out of Western consciousness and get out of capitalism, which is bringing us to our end—poetry can imagine something else.

A really roundabout answer to your question is that technology has been helpful when it comes to memory, archive, record, producing counterpublics, right? When people talk about cancel culture, I don’t think they’re talking about cancel culture; I think they’re talking about being accountable to a counterpublic. The public being the mainstream sort of narrative, and then the counterpublic being like, this you? You said this before, you’ve done this before, the North remembers. So I think technology is useful for that kind of organizing, and that’s what excites me.

KCL: While we’re on the tech beat: whether it’s AR or VR or any number of other emerging technologies, I wonder if you see potential for where else poetry can go and what poetry can do. I think of your work as future-forward in a way that can meet those questions in interesting ways.

VAV: I think there is a really responsible way to use AI in poetry. Lillian Yvonne Bertram, first of all, is just an incredible artist. They’re always a very forward-thinking poet, always pushing the boundaries of the tool and ways of seeing, in that very John Berger sense. What does how you see say about the world at large? AI gets very uncomfortable about race, but it also shows its bias as soon as you start talking about it. Lillian’s project is called A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content. “Tell me a Black story” is the prompt for AI, and they ask it questions until it inevitably reveals a source of bias. Vauhini Vara is an essayist who’s been working with AI and was able to access the memory of her sister’s ghost through the language that AI was able to produce as her sister, which is an intriguing concept.

The artists that have always excited me are the people who use tools wrong or push them to extreme degrees. A very formative poet for me has always been Jennifer Tamayo. That’s one of the first poets who really broke my world open in terms of visuals and performance and technology. It’s not about proficiency with that technology. It’s more about: how is the machine a sort of filter or a sort of interpretive device, and you see that a lot in YOU DA ONE. Poetry is always, for me at least, language that I want to expose or reveal something. And so I’m never writing on a literal level. And the ways I think that technology can help with that is like, let’s say you’re using a translator wrong. There were a few poems in Beast Meridian that I fed through Google Translate and then took that translated text and then fed it back. And using the translate feature wrong gave me a lot of stray words or stray clauses or idioms that were translated literally, that you know, sort of pushed the boundaries of language. I’m always against writing literally when it comes to poetry, so if a tool can help you expose the structure or the grammars and reveal something, that’s the best use of technology, if that makes sense.

KCL: Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad you brought up Beast Meridian. That book and this one—well, you write books that are formally challenging. This is not easy writing. I can only imagine the process of putting one of them together, but both of them!? How would you compare the processes of composing Magical/Realism and Beast Meridian? Was one more difficult than the other?

VAV: I wish I had an answer for you. The writing process is very mysterious to me. I’ve never intentionally sat down to write something and then just had moments of discovery. It’s always this moment of deep accessing, and in that accessing is a deep wounding. But that wounding is almost like bloodletting. So with Beast Meridian, I think I was teaching myself how to excavate an intuitive language that was not telling a story, not relaying. When I look at it now, I don’t know if I succeeded, but I’m not necessarily interested in story or literal representation—meaning the representations of nature, adequate representations. I was trying to find dream logic, dream language, and create or invite the reader into a fantastic rendering of grief memory. Of ancestors and stories that you’re told about yourself and your family that you can only imagine and that are refracted through a new knowledge of borders, institutional violence, state violence, domestic violence, all of that stuff. So that was the Beast Meridian project, and I embrace mess. Ruth Ellen Kocher was my thesis advisor. She goes, “this is three books. I just need you to know.” And I was like, I’m just gonna have to embrace it. And luckily, it kind of hangs together.

Magical/Realism. I abandoned Chueca, which was more of an autobiographical essay concept, because I wasn’t interested in telling that story. I felt like I told a lot of that story before the new obsession, because I was writing in this state of incredible grief and incredible—I mean, I hate to go in this direction, but trauma—so I was diagnosed formally with PTSD, ADHD, and I was put on five psychiatric medications which completely changed my way of being in the world and thinking and working. And so I would read and read and read and read, and then crash out. I was raising a child at the same time, so I was taking in all these Marvel movies. Ghostbusters. I was showing him movies from my childhood. We were watching new fantasies. And so I was constantly in a state of fantasy, and then the pandemic happened. And I was being gaslit by my ex. I was being subjected to all the violence of divorce, single parenthood, financial struggle, being a grad student—you know, like exploited labor—and I was worn so thin, but I had so much to say. I was on 1% battery all the time, but I had 10 million times 100% things to say. Unfortunately, because we were in a lockdown state, it all had to happen in this kind of theoretical place. I planned to write my second poetry book, Extinct and Endangered Florae of the Americas, by going to the Huntington, which was closed during COVID; really looking at the history of flowers and connecting it to colonialism. But I couldn’t do that project, and I also was way too emotionally tender and raw to do that project, because I was looking at mass sterilization of Latines and Black women and Indigenous women in the Americas. And just that violence, the violence of the history of gynecology, the history of Indigenous erasure and Black erasure through the maternal, and through forced marriages and things like that. It just really complicates your understanding of how we got here. And I just couldn’t do that during the pandemic while raising a small child. And so fantasy became this really productive, fertile space for these ideas, and because fantasy is earthy in nature, it felt connected to what I was doing with Extinct and Endangered Florae of the Americas. Magical/Realism focused on a different kind of colonialism: fantasy rendered as imagined histories that all contain colonialism in some way. They all contain the memory of colonialism because they’re rendered in the history of the West, which is already a very narrativized, aestheticized history, a very sanitized history. But that was useful to critique too, because I don’t need to give you another critique of fucking Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen. That’s been done to death. What is it about Game of Thrones that was so captivating for us and captured our attention so much? And why is it that people only pick up on oh, it’s political, and it’s about Trump and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they don’t zero so much on it being about abolition and borders. I have a whole critique on Daenerys that didn’t make it in here. I love Daenerys. I really do. I critique her a lot. Her storyline is an abolition story.

KCL: Yeah, absolutely.

VAV: But then there’s also that image of her coming across the Middle Passage with her Unsullied, which are all Black, formerly enslaved soldiers, and her black translator, Missandei. And then all her ships coming across the Narrow Sea between Essos and Westeros, these two continents. I was like, are people not seeing the Middle Passage right now? It’s a radical, radical story, right? But it is a white savior story. Jon Snow is flipped for me. To me, he is a mestizo who is like first generation and second generation Mexican-Americans who become Border Patrol, and literally patrol the people who would have been their parents or grandparents. A mestizo who, in observing the wildlings coming across the wall, is both radically estranged from his Indigeneity and also in the midst of it and having to negotiate his complicity in Indigenous erasure. Anti-Indigenous violence, anti-immigrant violence. And that crisis of conscience and that crisis of identity is what causes him to say, fuck borders, the wildlings can come across and I’ll give them asylum and give them their land back. What the fuck? These are incredibly radical ideas and they’re happening on the margins of the continent, too. Jon is on the bordered margin. And Daenerys is on the continental margin and the Orientalist margin. Like all radical politics, right? They start out on the literal margins of the world and then make their way toward the center. And so it’s incredibly radical, but I don’t think they meant to tell that story. They just meant to, I don’t know, have tits and dragons or whatever. One of the actors from Deadwood called it the tits and dragons show, which has stayed with me.

I was really craving that reading, because that’s the show I was watching. The media landscape was watching a very white show. And so, Game of Thrones was that first step of understanding for myself: oh, so actually, what I’ve been writing about in my poetry and what I’ve been trying to negotiate are these margins of the world that are actually the story of the center. And how these things are connected. And all of that took place in the theoretical, which, to me, is no different than trying to think of my ancestral memory; like, what was my great grandmother’s life like on a hacienda in San Alberto, Durango? It’s no different than fantasy. I’m so far removed from that memory, that I have to be able to self-critique: in trying to remember that history or claim that history, that Indigenous history, I’m already rendering it in the space of fantasy, right? It’s a lineage that cannot be reclaimed because the forces of erasure have forced it into the realm of fantasy and not history.

KCL: That makes a lot of sense. The fantasies embedded in the real.

I did want to circle back a bit and talk about the title. In my head, I keep pronouncing it Magical Slash Realism because the slash is very important. It contains a lot. Knowing your work and reading you, and as a writer of Latin American heritage myself, I get the immediate sense that part of the title’s intention is tongue-in-cheek. In the book, you describe an instance of a professor at your PhD program relating your work to magical realism within the first week despite it having almost nothing to do with the standard definition of the genre. It reminded me of Adrian Piper’s essay “Passing for White, Passing for Black.” She writes about how, at a first week reception of her PhD program, one of the professors greeted her, a light-skinned Black woman, by saying, “you’re about as Black as I am.”

Anyway, how did you land on this title?

VAV: I remember talking with Amber Oliver and Phoebe Robinson at Tiny Reparations about the old title, Chueca. And they were like, “we love this title. We totally get the title. But we’re afraid that because people don’t know this word it might not immediately be obvious what this is about.” And so they left it up to me to keep the title or come up with something. As I told you before, the writing process is a complete mystery to me. So I remember just dozing off to sleep and oh! The name of the book is Magical/Realism. Okay, cool. Things kind of come to me in a fugue state. That’s why I also go on so many hikes.

The title serves a couple of different functions. One is that very tongue-in-cheek, all Latinos write magical realism in some form or another. There’s always some magical abuelita making magical soup or a magical curandera or a drug lord who has a chamán or whatever the fuck. But I was also really concerned with the imagination as a kind of revolutionary tool. Who gets the privilege to imagine? Why is it called magical realism when Latines write it, and why is it fantasy when folks from the global north write it—I should say, white folks from the global north, because there are Black writers like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston who very much write magical realism, and that was one rabbit hole I wanted to follow. And the conclusion I came to, which I write about in “The Uses of Fantasy” and “After the World-Breaking, World-Building,” is that the global north is trying to tell a history of the West as a history that has learned its lesson.

Take Lord of the Rings, right? In World War I, war went from being fought on frontlines and battlefields to technological warfare. So, how does one imaginatively render this in fantasy? The orcs and the army of Uruk-hai felling trees to build Saruman’s technological warfare machine. This is the colonial imaginary of Lord of the Rings—the memory of creating racialized labor divisions, the seizure of land, how the Industrial Revolution changed how we perceived nature as a thing to exploit for its utility—ancient tree spirits vs. new machines. Tolkien said that his shit wasn’t an allegory. It is an allegory. The imagination is not an escape from this world, but a product of it. Lord of the Rings reproduces the memory of European empire at the height of global control in a time of crisis, reproduces Western consciousness—race, the Human, land as property. What underlies all of that is its racial geography—in Middle Earth, men, Dwarves, Hobbits, Elves, Orcs, and Uruk-Hai are arranged into realms, geographies of life and death, and the “Black Uruks of Mordor” are an allegory for Black social death—beings who exist only to fight, work, die. Same with the Dwarves. The Dwarves are described as having these very Semitic features. They’re greedy, they dig, they’re secretly very rich. They have an underground cabal that influences the world. It’s a very antisemitic rendering, but because he also had this feeling of empathy toward the Jewish people, he wrote this kind of "redemption arc" for the Dwarves through the Legolas-Gimli friendship. Race and colonialism pervades Lord of the Rings, that’s just one example.

The global north is always writing. They’re still the authors of history, even in our imaginations. One of the critiques I have of my own book is that I don’t actually talk a lot about magical realism books. I can go on and on and on about Isabel Allende, Gabo, Pedro Páramo. But they’re so not part of the common language that we all speak, the mainstream literary canon. Lord of the Rings is canon. Game of Thrones is canon. Macondo… Chicano studies, comparative lit, and Latine literature students will know what that is. And maybe a few good white folks. But because it’s not part of this common language, I didn’t get to write about it as much as I wanted to.

If you look at the Chiquita Banana massacre, Pinochet, El Halconazo, all of these suppressed Latin American histories, every country has this very specific experience of empire and world-breaking—political meddling, assassinations, murders, massacres, labor exploitation, resource exploitation, all of that stuff. And that history forms the imagination. In the same way that Tolkien’s fantasy imaginaries can’t help but reproduce a world with slavery and antisemitism, colonial trauma can’t help but come through in magical realism. And magical realism, to me, narrates a world in a post-traumatic break from reality. In the US, we look at PTSD through an individual lens: you have PTSD because you went through something traumatic. It’s a private condition to be dealt with alone, and never seen as a collective, ongoing, systemic experience. Magical realism is a genre, I think, that pushes back on that—a result of collective generational trauma, mass coping, mass magical thinking. Gabo (Gabriel García Márquez) has this really famous quote about how blood runs up the streets in Mexico. “In Mexico, surrealism runs through the streets … Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.” And it’s true. The postcolonial world is surreal, a fractured reality produced by a fractured history. It has survived world-breaking: the colonial encounter, mass enslavement, mass genocide, displacement, dispossession, forced conversion to Catholicism, unnaming, renaming, detribalization. All of these postcolonial conditions. The way we perceive reality is made surreal through the West’s narrative control of history—through their worldbuilding.

I think I arrived at this through my divorce. One of the things that happened in my marriage and its aftermath is that I lost narrative control of my world, my reality, my life. Anything I said would be met with, “that never happened.” That denial of your truth, your reality, and the force of someone else’s narrative control—that creates a permanent break from reality. And that created a lot of magical thinking, drew me to spiritual practice. For the 10 years I was with this person, I gave him bits and pieces of my reality so that by the end, nothing was real. A therapist was immediately able to identify it as PTSD. That loss of narrative control, we see happening with Palestine.

But I was also caught between two ways of healing—therapy to become grounded in “reality” vs. curanderismo, divination, ancestral communion. Realism vs. magic. I started thinking about how therapy is re-storying trauma, reclaiming narrative control of the past, and how my own healing process coincided with this collective historical reckoning, from Ferguson to the 2020 uprisings, and the stories that came of it—Get Out, Zong!, The 1619 Project, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments—the speculative as a mode of re-storying silenced histories, and how that made imagining new futures possible. Not just a fantasy. Magical realism is a genre that emerges from geographies of grief, collective trauma, from groups whose worlds have been broken and histories have been denied. And so what comes through in stories is a world in which reality is an unstable thing. Magical realism is always taught like, oh, it’s the ordinary world where magic just kind of happens as normal. But it’s so much deeper than that. I’m interested in what realism is. When we think about America as a narrative authority, a worldbuilding project, what does it mean to write its “realism”? I studied that craft—your Lorrie Moores, your Raymond Carvers, the insistence on concrete detail. And then in magical realism, a girl flies out of the window or something. What is that fracture? Who do we believe? Realism is the narrative authority to be believed. To say, This is what reality is. And magical realism is a way of resisting what the Empire says is real.

KCL: That’s brilliant. I love all of this. Early on in the book, you use the phrase “historically silenced voices” to identify those whom history, which you call “one man speaking over a vast silence,” strategically erases; those groups of people who some would gleefully call the losers of colonial conquest, imperialism, and survival of the fittest. It reminded me of Arundhati Roy’s point that there are no truly voiceless people, only the silenced or unheard. Within your craft, what’s your relationship to silence and silencing?

VAV: Especially as a mestiza writing, I’m both silenced and silencing. I love that you point out Arundhati Roy because she and Gayatri Spivak kind of address the same thing. In her very famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” she writes about how modern academics and politicians and whoever are always speaking for Indigenous people. Even when we think about the genocides happening in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there are advocates for it, but we rarely hear from the survivors of those genocides themselves. There was a self-immolation recently in the DRC and we didn’t even hear about that. Any marginalized community is always speaking. One thing I’ve tried to do, especially recently, in light of the Palestinian genocide, is that I try to limit my commentary and just amplify what Palestinians are saying, because my analysis is not adding to the conversation. It is literally drawing attention away or centering my analysis. I’ve taken a lot of what Palestinian poets like Rasha Abdulhadi have said to heart—empire loves to look at itself, so even critique misses the point. “Don’t be the nicer settler trying to prove you’re better than the bad settler. Pay attention to what Palestinians are writing instead, repost news from Palestinians in Palestine instead. Lose your taste for competing in public with other settlers to be one of the ‘good ones.’” Or like George Abraham said, we don’t need more special issues or anthologies. Palestinian poets, writers, artists, journalists have already done so much intellectual and critical labor, given us their embodied analysis, their stories, even to the point of documenting their own genocide—in English! Palestinians don’t need American poets to “imagine” unimaginable violence, or try to stir empathy. So when I do offer an analysis, I want to be careful not to speak over them. As Westerners, our ways of thinking are steeped in imperial logics, so our critical work is one of accountability and self-interrogation—divestment, the exposure of propaganda, of holding institutions and language to account, of giving Palestinians back narrative control. No matter what, even if I’m the most thoughtful or I’m really trying to interpret in a way for Westerners to understand. The act of making others understand, like Sontag says in Against Interpretation, risks dire mistranslation. The only interpretation I can contribute is one that cites as it compares, toward unwavering solidarity.

One of the big things that I’m trying to tackle in this book is trying to find out my grandmother’s story, right? So she was born on a cotton hacienda in Durango, to parents who were considered nativos. So nativos, or originarios, which is what their records say, are essentially Indigenous people who have been detribalized. They are a worker caste, and they worked on this cotton hacienda and were given room and board and a small salary. But they are essentially indentured workers. And when she was married off in order to better her family’s station, she was married off to a castizo. So, her first marriage was lower middle class. Her second marriage, when she escaped Tampico, was firmly upper middle class, but she never had anything because as (what was seen as) an Indigenous woman who had married up, she couldn’t. She couldn’t even have a bank account. She had no money. So when she escaped those men, she fell back to that status. When she came to the United States, she came alone. As an undocumented woman. My mom and my uncle came over as unaccompanied, undocumented children. In trying to find out her history, I started finding out more about our Indigenous roots, and it’s just started really to become this thing where any investigation I did into our Indigeneity felt like—I found this article that had the perfect language for it—like a bid for racial innocence. In trying to claim this lost history, how much of that is motivated by this bid for racial innocence? Wanting to reclaim an Indigeneity that cannot be recovered, that cannot be reclaimed. I could try to reconnect, maybe, but I don’t know how to do so ethically. And not acknowledge the whiteness that comes with that, the whiteness that motivates that. What was your original question? I’m sorry, I was getting to the answer.

KCL: Your work’s relationship to silence and silencing.

VAV: One of the big problems is that when I was looking for my grandmother, her records didn’t exist. So I would call Tampico, Torreón, Durango, and my mother and grandmother’s records don’t exist under the names that I know. And that’s because of the conditions of surviving domestic violence, right? Like, maybe my grandmother changed their names. I have proof that she changed their names, at least when they went from Torreón to Tampico. The loss of Indigeneity isn’t a choice, really, if you’re escaping an abusive partner. There’s these intimate contexts where that loss is really determined by patriarchy, by structures of power, by feminized ways of surviving that end up becoming this vast silence in one’s history. So I encountered silence when I was looking for my grandmother and my mother. I encountered silence, or this vast erasure. These traces of my grandfather coming over to Arizona to work, all this other stuff. But then, I feel like I’m doing the silencing when I want to even try to tell those stories because, what am I leaving out? What am I claiming is my history when I don’t really know that history? And I tried to illustrate that with this tension between me and my mom in the book. I would ask her questions, and she would just be like, “that was your grandmother’s name, why would she make that up?” We came to butt heads a little bit because she began to question my motivations. I have this bit in “About a Girl” where I talk about how I admire writers who are able to write about their mothers surviving domestic violence. I think when I tried to do this kind of work, I came up against a different set of gendered circumstances that I did not expect. My close friend Marcelo Hernandez Castillo has a project in Children of the Land that’s about domestic violence and his mother, and all this stuff. When I tried to do it, I encountered this mother-daughter tension.

KCL: I loved this part of the book, where you go into this tension—almost distrust.

VAV: I feel like sons who have witnessed this gendered violence, domestic violence, and who have survived it are taking their mothers under their protection when they tell that story, and are reclaiming their narratives and very much vindicating their mothers. I completely believe in that project. When daughters do it, it is a betrayal of survival. It is a betrayal of this understanding that silence is actually what has protected us. My mother doesn’t talk about her father or her stepfather, both of whom were very abusive to my grandmother and to my mother. She doesn’t talk about them, because by not talking about them, then they can’t find us. By not talking about it, they’re not re-traumatizing. You know, she’s not re-traumatizing her mother. Anytime anybody in our family brought it up, there would be these big blowups, like “how could you let this happen!?” Blah, blah, blah. There was just a lot of blame. And so, for a daughter to tell that story, it’s like you’re airing out the dirty laundry. Because the daughter has survived it too, and doesn’t have the power or the authority that men do in reclaiming that story. It’s a survivor story in a different way. And so I did not expect to encounter that really tough, gendered territory. I was trying to do that same project that Marcelo and Ocean Vuong and other writers have done in a really beautiful way. And that’s not a critique of them. It’s just one more factor that I didn’t consider before. My queerness is involved in that too, and the ways I’ve been expected to perform gender as an extension of that violence. And I feel bad, you know, to bring this up as a complication, because I do think that telling your mother’s stories of violence, state, domestic, intimate, and otherwise, is a valuable project that should be done. But it is different for a son than a daughter to tell the same story.

#276 – Spring 2024

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