Julia Alvarez
Author
of Saving the World talks with Robert Birnbaum about being
a storyteller in a world where things are falling apart
Writer Julia
Alvarez is the author of a book of essays; five collections
of poetry; five books for children; and five books of fiction, including
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time
of the Butterflies, and her latest novel, Saving the World.
She received her Bachelor of Arts degree summa cum laude from Middlebury
College and also attended Syracuse University, from which she received
her M.F.A. She did not attend Harvard University (though she was
accepted). Alvarez has held various positions—she served as
Poet-in-the-Schools in Kentucky, Delaware and North Carolina and
was a professor of creative writing and English at Phillips Andover
Academy in Massachusetts, the University of Vermont and the University
of Illinois. Until her recent retirement (though she is still affiliated)
Julia Alvarez was a professor of English at Middlebury College,
having taught there since 1988.
Saving the World is a novel within a novel. Latina
writer Alma Huebner is sidetracked by the little known (but true)
story of Francisco Xavier Balmis, who in 1803 undertook to vaccinate
the populations of Spain's American colonies against smallpox.
Needing living "carriers" of the vaccine, Balmis approaches
Isabel Sendales y Gómez, the rectoress of La Casa de Expositós,
who selects twenty-two orphan boys to be the carriers and joins
them on the voyage. Isabel's noble example moves Alma to write
a much different story than she had intended. It is Alma's
efforts to write that novel that forms the superstructure of Saving
the World.
Julia and I (for the second time) met at a coffee shop in Andover.
Our conversation, as is my wont and habit, ranges far and wide and
occasionally deep. Whatever the topic, Senora Alvarez's wit,
intelligence and compassion shine through. Which, finally, is the
point of all this talk.
I think you will agree.
Robert Birnbaum: What ever happened to Las
Girlfriends [Ana Castillo, Denise Chavez, Sandra
Cisneros and Julia Alvarez]?
Julia Alvarez: Well, there was some truth to the
term. We all began writing at the same time and reading each other's
work. I was reading Sandra. Sandra was reading me. We were reading
Ana Castillo, Denise Chavez. Back then literature by multicultural,
ethnic writers was relegated to sociology. But we were reading each
other, writing with the others in mind. So we felt like, "Here
we were, a little coven." A coven airbrushed and physically
brought together—
RB: —by Vanity Fair.
JA: Yeah. I think they approached Susan Bergholz,
our agent—
RB: I had forgotten she represented all four of you.
JA: Susan was out there from early on, fighting the battle—out
there representing us when no one was paying any attention to our
work. So I think Vanity Fair approached her and she said,
"How 'bout this? Putting these women together in one of your
glossy pages?" It felt a little bit like we were performing
ourselves. But I think a lot of writing and promoting often feels
that way.
RB: If I recall correctly I had talked with each
of you at that time. And each of you sort of scoffed at—
JA: We were all a little embarrassed by it. Aware
we were made into a product. There is always that sense of being
marketed when they do something like that. But hey, we are still
in touch with each other, still reading each other, still girlfriends.
RB: Well, how could you not be?
JA: Oh yeah and happy for each other's successes. As for the Vanity
Fair idea, it was sort of like when your parents push you together
and say, "You're friends. We (the parents) are best friends,
so…" It felt a little bit of that—
RB: My recollection was that the piece in Vanity
Fair asserted that you had created a new genre of fiction.
JA: Well, I don't know that we created it. Maxine Hong Kingston
had published Woman Warrior years before. Call it Sleep,
remember that wonderful novel?
RB: By Henry Roth?
JA: The American novel has always had a touch of that, the outsider,
the coming of age [narrative] and so on.
RB: In your new novel, the character Alma, a Latina
novelist, seems to be very well regarded, and is doing well by book
industry standards. She expresses great resentment and bitterness
about it. That couldn't be you—you seem to be flourishing.
So are you—
JA: —she doesn't think she has been ill
served by it. What she regrets is that the book biz has gotten her
far away from her reasons for writing—that the biz can become
very much this performance and this self-promotion and this kind
of glossiness, and a certain amount of inauthenticity tends to creep
in. I don't know if that happens more when you are from an ethnic
community or not. When the year 2000 was approaching and everybody
wanted a Latino pundit on their radio program or TV, [I was asked]
to predict what I saw for Latinos in the new millennium. [laughs]
You find yourself with your Latina training, wanting to be polite
and kind and to oblige and you feel like you need to be nice because
here you are being asked a question and it's an honor and a privilege
and you are so lucky that anybody would even care, etc. But you
find that you are saying things that sound bogus. Because statements,
reactions to questions—they just don't have the complexity,
the texture, the largeness of story. Here you've worked for three,
four years on a novel, that you hope approaches that complexity
and mystery, and then you're asked to summarize what it's all about
for a sound bite. You have your picture taken. People are responding
to you, not to the work. It's the creation of personality and celebritydom
around writers—you know the book tour—
RB: Do you have to participate?
JA: You know, it's funny. There are several answers to that.
First of all, I already gave you one—good training as a Latina.
You pitch in and you do the work and you do what is asked of you.
You are polite and you don't say no. There's that. I am still with
Algonquin, my little publisher, who is one of the little independent
publishers still trying to make it. Most people in the company read
the list. You talk to the person in the mailroom—they have
read you and they are all pitching in. There is Michael Taeckens
[Algonquin publicity director] who is lovely—
RB: —and Shannon [Ravenel]
JA: Shannon and all these people are pushing for your book, working
their butts off and you'd feel like some diva if you don't pitch
in to help. So I think you have to do a certain amount to survive
in the book culture. Sure, you'd like to be like Coetzee and say—
RB: Or Roth.
JA: Or Roth. Although I heard him [Roth] on Fresh Air
with Terri Gross.
RB: He just did an interview with a Danish journalist that was
published in the Observer.
JA: Nobody says no to everybody. I am sure even Coetzee—
RB: Reading the interview I wondered why he even bothered. He was
gruff and dismissive.
JA: It's not that there is anything wrong with a certain
amount of book biz, because you know what? I read a book I love
and I go to the Web and look for interviews with that author. I
want to read Coetzee's Nobel
Prize speech. I'm curious about what he thinks about this or
that aspect of craft. So there's nothing wrong with the process.
It's just that sometimes, as a writer, it takes you away from this
(picks up a copy of Saving the World), which is what you know. I
mean it's what I really know. What do I know about bilingual education?
I'm not busting my butt in the schools of Lawrence [MA] with all
the teachers there. Why should I be the one to comment on what they
do day in day out? The things I really know I know through story.
So sure, I feel unsettled when I'm being asked to comment on these
other things. And some of us are good or gracious about doing what
we are asked to do. But the most important thing is to stay focused
on your work because I have seen young writers made into stars and
I don't think it's good for them. But you go out there and
promote your book and talk about the things you know. Heck, I did
a website!
I didn't want to do a website at all.
RB: [laughs]
JA: I thought, "I don't need a website." But Susan Bergholz
kept getting called left and right. She said, "If you have
a website, I could say, 'Go read it on her website.' I wouldn't
have to be inventing the wheel each time." But now you know
what's happening? Everybody thinks my website is a blog. So they
are writing me wanting me to respond. That's the new thing—to
have a blog. So, yeah, we have to be careful not to let ourselves
get too far away from the writing. As for Alma, I wasn't necessarily
speaking about myself but about the ways a writer can be pigeonholed
and become a kind of product: the ethnic writer, the girlfriends.
Alma acknowledges that it has worked in her favor. It's part of
what gets her launched. So how can she be scoffing at it? Yet it
puts her in places which—
RB: So it becomes a burden? The very business that creates success
becomes a double-edged sword.
JA: It's true of anything, right? My sister has a little restaurant,
and I used to complain to her about grading papers. I love the classroom,
but grading all those stacks! She pointed out that every job has
parts you don't like, "I don't like to chop vegetables."
I said, "Why don't you get a sous chef?" She said, "I
can't afford it." The thing is to try as much as possible to
stay connected to the things you feel are serious and important
so that you don't sell yourself down the river. I suppose you can
decide to be a purist like Bartleby and refuse to do anything. But
most of us do a certain amount of it. And when it starts to feel
inauthentic or not right, you stop. It's a constant, everyday
balance of knowing how much. It's great to live in Vermont, to live
out of the way. But right now, I have to brace myself and put in
the work as I haven't come out with an adult novel in six years,
so I have to do a certain amount of the book promotion. And then
come summer, back to my real work. As for Alma, I think she got
lost for a while in the inauthenticity of it and so she is pulling
back. But really what's going on for Alma is a Dantian dark night
of the soul. She is questioning everything about her life, including
what it means to be a storyteller in a world where things are falling
apart.
RB: Have things in the book world gotten more inauthentic?
JA: For me?
…the
biz can become very much this performance and this self-promotion
and this kind of glossiness and a certain amount of inauthenticity
tends to creep in. I don't know if that happens more when
you are from an ethnic community or not. |
RB: In the business of books, in publishing. Are
things more mechanical and formulaic and marketing-oriented? Book
touring appears to be a big thing.
JA: Oh my god!
RB: Ten years ago it was getting big, but there
was an ebb and flow, but now it's a relentless stream of authors
crisscrossing the country and the world.
JA: It's hard when you ask me about trends. I don't feel like I
can make such a general statement. But I know I still read for the
reasons I was reading back then. I think readers still read for
the reasons that we all read. But the other stuff, I think there
has been an appetite created, like there is now about coffee [we're
sitting in Starbucks in Andover]. Before, there was your basic Chock
Full O Nuts and Maxwell House brands. The market develops an appetite
for seeing the authors, hearing them on radio and television. And
in some ways that's a good thing. It gets the word out. That's
why we authors do it. But in some ways often it becomes the thing
that drives—
RB: It becomes the wrong thing, the focus of efforts—
JA: Some people come to my readings and they have never read any
of my books. Maybe they've seen an article or they've heard that
I am Dominican or a Latina. But the people who are readers are still
reading—there is something we need that we can only find there,
in stories, in poems.
RB: Everyone will say that there is a constant but small group
of people who are the readers. The business needs to expand that
core of readers, and the expanded constituency seems to have been
badly trained.
JA: I myself will go to a reading by writers I like the first time,
to hear their voice. I am curious. But usually the next time it's
like a job. If it's a friend, it's because it's a friend. It used
to be there were no author photos in the backs of books, no blurbs,
no nothing. You'd finish a book you loved and you'd stroke the cover
and rush to read the next book by that author.
RB: Now you have celebrity photographers and book-cover
designers and coaches and all sorts of stuff. Apropos of nothing,
when you go to a place and you don't know anyone and get into a
conversation and you are asked to describe yourself, do you say,
"I am Dominican and a writer?"
JA: It depends on who it is I am talking to.
RB: A stranger.
JA: Depends on the stranger. I was just in Lawrence and every second
person was Dominican. We talked Spanish and Spanglish with the kids.
Back and forth. No need to describe myself. When I tell people about
my Dominican background, it's a way of explaining my roots, where
I come from.
RB: Would you say, "I'm a Dominican from Vermont"?
JA: I don't ever talk of myself that way. We would start talking
and I would say, "I'm originally from the Dominican
Republic—"
RB: If I just met you, you wouldn't say Vermont? You would say
the Dominican Republic?
JA: I would say I live in Vermont but I'm originally from the Dominican
Republic. So, I let people know straight off that I once came from
somewhere else. I guess when we arrived in New York, immigrants,
when someone asked us where we were from, it often felt like they
were telling us we didn't belong.
RB: A question as an accusation—
JA: To just say "I'm from New York" would be to deny
something. So I always learned to say—because I didn't want to
be ashamed of it—that I was originally from the Dominican
Republic. I would always add that. But the question can still be
an accusation—I can still hear in a conversation where someone
is putting me in an ethnic cubby hole and that's where I get my
elbows up because I feel like once they do that they are closing
me down in a little box that won't allow for all the complexity
of who we all are.
RB: But everyone does that to everyone.
JA: I suppose we are all so mobile and our American culture is
so complex that we are all trying to get a handle on each other.
You are on email with someone and you don't know where they are.
Accents still tell us a little bit, but email doesn't tell
us anything. And so we are trying to give each other a local habitation
and a name.
RB: Anyway, do see yourself as a writer or a teacher? What do you
say?
JA: I guess now I am saying more I am a writer.
I used to be a teacher who wrote on the side. And now I gave up
tenure—
RB: So now you are writer who teaches on the side?
JA: Right and it's a very nice connection with Middlebury
College. They allow me to come in and teach periodically. I can
use the library. Living in Vermont, you can feel very isolated.
Being at the college gives me a structure to belong to—a community.
Though the longer I live there, the more my community becomes the
community itself, beyond the college.
RB: Middlebury has a lot of writers, yes? Jay Parini—
JA: Yes, Robert Cohen, who was at Harvard for many years. David
Bain, who writes nonfiction. Ron Powers, who did the recent Twain
book.
RB: And there's Breadloaf.
JA: There's actually a very large community of writers in Vermont.
A few years back, some magazine published a map of writers living
in the state with who's where, and it was amazing how heavily populated
the state is with writers. But Vermont is still basically a rural
community. In fact, I can go days without seeing people. Now, my
connection to the college is that I teach occasionally; I'm also
an adviser to the Latino student association, ALIANZA. They call
me their madrina [godmother]. I love being there for them.
Many of them are Dominicans from Lawrence and New York on full scholarships.
It just gives me some sense of connection to some other part of
myself—so I would say mostly I am a writer who teaches on
the side.
RB: So this is the first novel in five or six years—you have
published how many novels?
JA: Adult novels, four.
RB: And a book of essays? And the book on coffee—
JA: A
Cafecito Story, I call that one a green fable. And some
children's books. Poetry.
RB: I don't know your poetry.
 JA:
I began as a poet. That's my first love.
RB: Why did you give it up? Or have you given it up?
JA: I just came out with book of poems, The Woman I Kept to
Myself, in 2004.
RB: I don't know why, I lost interest in keeping up with poetry.
JA: Yeah, part of it is that it is not out there in the market.
RB: I was glad to see Camille
Paglia's book—it started me thinking again about poems.
JA: When I go to Breadloaf, I like to go to the poetry lectures.
I am much more interested in what the poets have to say. They are
the ones at the cutting edge where language meets the ineffable,
the silence. Seamus Heaney gave a reading a few years back at Middlebury
and he said poetry is about [she opens her mouth as if to say something].
He just stood there, his mouth hanging open, as if dumbfounded,
like he couldn't find the words.
RB: [laughs]
JA: His point, I think, was that poetry tries to put into words
what can't be put into words! That is what poets do. I think of
them as the hot lava pushing out. They are the scouts, traveling
out into the unknown where language has not gone before. They are
doing interesting things with language, thinking about ways of using
syntax. They talk about line breaks, about the breath as opposed
to the visual cutting off of language. Storytellers, we're the settlers,
we come in later, we need schools and a post office and homes and
day care centers—but I am more interested in poets. I learn
more from them. I don't know why.
RB: It's interesting to me that your partner is a farmer.
JA: He's a physician. But his first love is farming.
RB: I got the impression that he devoted himself to the eleven
acres you have.
JA: No, no no. He's a physician. But he grew up on a Nebraska farm.
RB: That's what I get for taking this dust jacket bio seriously.
[both laugh]
JA: I know. I once told a journalist the story about how I never
went to Harvard for a doctorate. I explained that my papi was always
saying, "You have to have the last degree. We are immigrants.
You have to have the last degree." So after I got the MA in
creative writing he said, "You have to get that Ph.D."
And he really was pushing for it. So I went ahead and applied to
Harvard, thinking I'd never get in and that'd be the end of it.
But I got in. [laughs]
RB: You wouldn't have liked it.
JA: Not only did get in, I got a fellowship. And so I didn't turn
it down at first. Instead, I went and checked it out. I spent a
day attending classes and I thought, "I will die. I will die
here." So I had to tell my father—I was Papi's daughter.
He was so proud, he was bragging about it to everybody. He wanted
to frame the acceptance letter.
RB: What could be better than turning it down? Everyone accepts.
JA: That's what I said. I told him, "Papi, I'm going to frame
this. On one side you'll have the acceptance letter and on the other
side you'll have my letter turning them down. And you can say: not
only did I have a daughter who was accepted at Harvard but she refused
to go." [both laugh] But Papi wanted me so much to go. Anyhow
I told the journalist this story, and next thing I know, the article
comes out saying I have a Ph.D. from Harvard. People I know were
coming at me saying where do you get off saying you have a Ph.D.
from Harvard?
RB: All right, so Bill is a doctor and grew up in Nebraska.
JA: On a farm. His first love is farming. That's why we got involved
in this project
in the D.R. with small farmers, who are struggling to stay on their
little parcelas and not sell out to the big plantaciones,
the big agribusiness model of farming that does away with the little
farmers, the same thing that happened to farms in Nebraska when
he was growing up and what is now happening there.
RB: What isn't happening, I take it, is what happened in Puerto
Rico, where people don't even want to work on the land?
JA: Sorry, that's happening in the D.R., too. That's why
there is a big Haitian immigration. Illegal immigration like the
Mexicans that do all the work in the fields in California. Haitians
are everywhere. Haitians are doing a lot of the construction work
and sugar-cane cutting. It's hard work. The Dominicans won't touch
it. So yeah, it's happening in the D.R. too. Because that type of
work doesn't pay. When the market went down in coffee a few years
ago, some of those farmers were getting 33 cents a pound for coffee.
Who can survive on that? Fair trade is at $1.25. Who can survive
on 33 cents? And so the rural communities empty out and folks end
up going to work at the free zones or the resorts—sexual tourism
is also a big problem, but hey, it pays a lot better than coffee.
And of course, many end up illegally in the USA.
RB: What about tobacco?
JA: Same thing. A little more lucrative. No, it's happening
to farming everywhere—the technification of agriculture. Bill
saw that happening to the little farms where he grew up. His parents
were sharecroppers. They never owned their own farm. Only later
when he became a physician—he got off the farm and got educated—he
bought his folks a little farm in Vermont. So their last years were
spent on land they owned and they farmed. Which was really special.
RB: That reminds me of the book The
Long Emergency, which is about the end of the oil era and
argues that we need to return to local agriculture and be closer
to our food sources, we won't have the fuels to run these agricultural
concerns.
JA: Exactly.
RB: I bring up the farm and such because that's a real dose of
reality. We are talking about writers and poets who seem in a way
to be increasingly marginalized from mainstream perceptions, as
if they have nothing to do with real life. Is your life real to
you?
JA: What do you mean?
RB: Do you feel like you may be cloistered in this artistic bubble—
JA: Not at all. I guess because I live in a rural
community where my neighbors aren't necessarily intellectuals. My
next-door neighbor is a sheep farmer. Biggest compliment he ever
paid me was when he said he'd seen my book in the library. My husband
is an ophthalmologist and has a lot of the old timers for patients.
Old French Canadian farmers who are barely surviving out there.
He comes home every day with stories. My world isn't really even
the academic world, which can also be its own kind of bubble. When
we go to the D.R., we are in a totally rural community, up in the
mountains, off the grid, no electricity, no phones. Most of my neighbors
up there don't even know how to read or write. What does it mean
that I've written a book? I like that. I like to be in those worlds
where I'm not in a bubble. But that said, I think a lot of life
seems very unreal to me right now. Partly, it's because now with
all this technology we are exposed to so many other worlds, especially
when you are traveling between them and one world is still inside
you and you are moving to another world or you are hit by something
like the news of Katrina or Iraq or 9-11, or some other devastating
reality and you are thinking, how do I make sense of this? A lot
of it is that we are getting so much information all the time and
trying to integrate it and make meaning of it—that it just
ends up seeming unreal. Which is the reason that maybe—as
you were saying—people go to nonfiction—I mean why read
fiction? I'm reading 1491, an excellent book by Charles
Mann. Also, Collapse by Jared Diamond, excellent. Both nonfiction.
I am getting information from both these books, that's good, but
I also need to make sense of it. How do I integrate what I've learned
into my own life? How do I make meaning of the experience of living
in this world? That's what I think fiction can help us do. It provides
a way to emotionally integrate and make sense of this mysterious
world through story and character. That's why I appreciate fiction
that lets more in. That's why I don't like fantasy fiction or specialized
fiction. I don't want gated communities when I read novels. Why
I love Coetzee's work. The worlds in his novels are almost as big
and baffling as the one I live in. I love what Czeslaw Milosz said
when he was asked if he was a political writer. He said he was not
political in the usual way the term is applied, politics as in an
ideology, a polemical stance. But he said that poetry that sinks
below a certain level of awareness, that that is not good poetry,
it is no longer useful to us. This awareness doesn't have to come
out in obvious ways, and in fact the writing gets flat and useless
if it comes out in obvious ways. But good writing has a level of
awareness of its own time. So if you are living in Nazi Germany,
say, and you are writing delightful, exquisitely beautiful little
clueless poems and stories, well, how can those be of value to your
readers trying to integrate the reality around them? Even García
Márquez, when he writes about a wild, magical world, there
is a level of awareness in his work of the reality out there. So
I agree with Milosz's observation that good poems, good stories
must have a certain level of awareness to be of value to the people
we are writing for in our own time and down the line to others in
the future. So you have Milton writing about Paradise Lost
but he is totally aware of 17th century British politics—it's
there. We go to fiction that has that level of awareness in part
to help us integrate things.
RB: "We" meaning serious readers? Everyone?
JA: I think William Carlos Williams was right, "We cannot
get the news from poems but men die daily for lack of what is found
there." That failure of awareness, of emotional connectedness,
is all around us, just look at our White House. At officials and
pundits reacting to Katrina. "We didn't know that this
could happen here. We thought this only happened in the third world."
The third world indeed. Since when were there levels of other people
who can suffer more? The head of FEMA said, "We are seeing
people we didn't know existed." Edwidge
Danticat wrote a wonderful essay about this kind of response.
Did you read her essay?
RB: I love her work but no, I didn't see it.
JA: I think it was in The
Progressive. I felt the same outrage she expressed so very
eloquently in her essay. I felt relieved she had written her essay,
as I don't think I could have been as wise and precise. My anger
would have gotten in the way. Anyhow, I ended up writing Edwidge,
thanking her—
There
is shit everywhere. The language itself gets muddled and used
dishonestly. For me the way to clean the windshield is through
writing, which goes hand in hand with reading. |
RB: —the last thing I read by her was when
her uncle was detained in Florida entering the country and he died
in custody of the INS.
JA: That was a terrible story. Now there is someone—she has
done the going on tour, she has been on Oprah—who
has stayed true—stayed focused. And that's what I am talking
about, there is no reason to be Alma, to become jaded unless you
have somehow sold out to that. But at least Alma starts to realize
that.
RB: Why did Alma take on a pseudonym?
JA: Because of being caught between worlds. There is a prohibition
on taking stories outside the community. It's very tribal. An understanding
that stories are powerful. That to know someone's story is a privilege
and a power. And so our communities, which often already feel marginal
and powerless, respond negatively to this kind of exposé—what
feels like an exposé to them. I read how this happened to
Maxine Hong Kingston with the Chinese American community after Woman
Warrior. And I guess a similar thing happened to Edwidge with
Breath Eyes and Memories with the Haitian community. Alma
herself is caught in a compromising place in terms of being a writer,
trying to be true to what she sees and not betray her community,
her family, she is trying to juggle worlds, trying to negotiate
between them.
RB: In Saving the World, the story about an early 19th
century voyage—
JA: —a true story—
RB: —right, the trip to inoculate the world against small
pox—
JA: It was the first global attempt to eradicate a deadly disease.
1803-2003. And we don't even know about it in this country.
RB: How did that happen?
JA: I don't know. I found out about it as I was doing research
for In The Name of Salomé and it was a little footnote
that said that the smallpox expedition that was going around the
world with the recently discovered smallpox vaccine did not stop
in the Dominican Republic because the island was at war: the eastern
side was occupied by the French who were fighting the Haitians in
the western side. Smallpox broke out among the troops and the footnote
lamented that the island could not avail itself of the vaccine.
The note mentioned that the carriers of the vaccine were 22 little
boys who'd been taken from an orphanage in Spain and sequentially
vaccinated. And I said, "Oh my!" We have a friend who
is a physician but his hobby is medical history. So I called him
up and said, "Peter, what about this smallpox expedition?"
He said, "I never heard of it."
RB: Wow.
JA: And I started to read more and more about it.
RB: Is it possible that it was ignored because it was written about
in Spanish?
JA: Actually one of the best articles about the expedition was
written in English by a fellow named Michael Smith, a professor
of history at Oklahoma State University. Things started coming together
for me—I googled the expedition and it turned out that the
bicentennial was coming up, 1803-2003, and a conference was being
organized in Madrid. One of the organizers was this American woman—a
science editor—who lives there. So, I got in touch with Catherine
Mark and she connected me with all the material that was out there.
Of course, I also had to go to Spain and walk the streets the orphan
boys had walked and visit the dock the expedition set out from.
I began to learn more and more curious little details. One of the
most amazing details, for me, was finding out that the rectoress
of the orphanage not only released the 22 boys but she got herself
invited along on the expedition. I mean a novelist loves this—when
you come across this bit of information that's also a lacuna, because
all that is known for certain about her is her first name, Isabel.
We know she went along with the original 22 boys and then continued
with the group expedition as far as it went to Manila in the Philippines.
Balmis, the expedition leader, went on by himself to China and then
back home to Spain, picking up new boys at each stop to be his carriers.
It is an amazing story. Also such a metaphor for how we move forward
as a civilization but often it's off the backs of the little people.
Sure, the results were great. Hundreds of thousands of people were
saved by this vaccine. On the other hand, there were the little
orphan boys. In our own time, we have the AIDS situation, comparable
in some ways to the smallpox epidemics in Isabel's time. I started
researching our own contemporary epidemic, trying to educate myself
on what was happening with AIDS in the Dominican Republic and so
many of these little third world countries. What was that movie—The
Constant Gardener?
RB: Yeah, the LeCarre story with Ralph Fiennes?
JA: He's great and the actress [Rachel Weiz] was also very good.
That movie addresses the very issues I am talking about. The issue
of pharmaceutical testing in Third World countries and people being
used as guinea pigs. AIDS clinics that are testing sweat shops.
Don't get me wrong. There are conscionable clinics, real Isabels
out there. One of those I met in the D.R., Dr.
Ellen Koenig, who has set up a first-rate treatment clinic in
the country. She has managed to get first-world treatment for her
patients, and when there is a study of a new medication, there has
to be the same commitment to ethical procedures as would be required
in this country. In other words, her clinic is committed to long-term
treatment of her patients, not just using patients for the length
of a study, when their usefulness might be outlived.
RB: So they are not guinea pigs?
JA: No. But atrocities are out there. We see them all around us,
especially in our so-called "Third World countries."
But it happens here in the USA, too. This, in part, was what Edwidge's
essay about Katrina addressed. But no one, no one, is a person that
it's okay that this happens to. But what do we do when we encounter
those people who are not getting a fair shake? But how do you live
a conscionable life in the midst of this knowledge?
RB: An authentic life?
JA: An authentic life, a life where you feel like your moral compass
is somewhere in the range of a true north. Fiction—I go to
fiction to find out. What I am saying is, how do you do it?
RB: Doesn't it start with wanting to do it? It seems like
many people don't frame life in terms of moral imperatives
and concerns.
JA: I don't know, maybe I'm romantic about thinking that readers
who are thinkers, that—
RB: That's probably not a lot of people.
JA: I realize we went off on a tangent—
RB: [laughs]
JA: I think we started with William Carlos Williams, what he said
about how we get things from poetry that we need in order to be
spiritually alive, aware. The importance of integrating things emotionally
and intellectually, spiritually—that's what happens
when you make the work large enough to hold what you know, so it
does not sink below a certain level of awareness. But hey, we all
get tired—I want to go watch, not a football game, but my
version of a football game—we need relief from all that we
know, because we don't want to end up as Cassandras, going
mad from taking it all in, these inequities, these juxtapositions.
And yet, we also don't want to end up in a bubble, in a gated community
in our heads, Fortress America, dividing the world into us's and
thems, like the President does.
RB: It seems like everyone does it.
JA: I suppose. It's like the passage in the novel where Alma remembers
her husband telling her about some Far Eastern monks who could not
harm any living thing. What would happen if they found out about
microscopic life? They wouldn't be able to sit anywhere, wouldn't
be able to breathe [laughs]. So we have to live with a certain amount
of forgiveness, cutting ourselves some slack, of selecting and leaving
some things out. But we periodically have to come up for air and
try to put more of what is out there into the picture. People say,
"What is being political? And what is to be a spiritual person?"
That, to me, is being a spiritual person—it's that integration
and that constant challenge to take as much in as you can bear,
to struggle to put it together, and that means also on the action
level to a certain extent—our actions integrating as much
as possible. And it's hard work and we all get tired. And
that's okay too. It's okay to take some time out.
RB: I am troubled by this question of why some people care about
inequities, injustices, things that seem self-evidently troublesome
in the world. So many people seem not to care. Where does that come
from?
 JA:
I think it's shutting down. It's not seeing.
RB: Maybe they were never engaged. Shutting down means there is
some base-level awareness.
JA: I wonder about myself. I wrote a poem called
"Homecoming." It was the title poem of the first book
of poems I wrote and one of the lines is, "One does not see
the maids when they pass by with trays of deviled eggs arranged
in daisy wheels." There is a way in which, when you are embedded
in a culture, you don't see the things around you. It's often a
blind spot for the whole culture. So, I don't think I have
more integrity or spirituality than anybody else in my family. It's
just that my life took a different turn. We came to this country
and here I became one of the others. So maybe that made me develop
a certain sensitivity. I became one of the others. And I think that
also happens when you read. You become aware of the other. So, I'm
not more noble or moral—I just got lucky by being . . . I was catapulted
from a certain complacency. That's a danger, too: to take on marginality
as a mantle of noble sentiments. One of the things I found out from
working on this coffee and literacy project in the D.R. is about
the pitfalls of being a do-gooder, the danger of moral arrogance,
a kind of visionary imperialism—sometimes kids come down to
help and they really believe that in three weeks or even a semester
or a year they are going to change the world—
RB: They are doing it for their college education.
JA: I don't know why. In every field we have to try to keep
a clean windshield, you know?
RB: [laughs]
JA: There is shit everywhere. The language itself gets muddled
and used dishonestly. For me the way to clean the windshield is
through writing, which goes hand in hand with reading. Jay Parini
said something really interesting when we were on a panel together.
He said, "When my writing isn't going well, my reading
isn't going well." That is certainly true for me. I need
to be reading things I am excited about, things that are maintaining
a certain level of awareness in me, language that is setting a high
standard for the clarity and luminosity words are capable of; otherwise,
my own writing is not going well. My own living isn't going well.
They're all part of the same thing—reading and writing and
living. Reading is one of the ways I stay conscious. You know how
in a choir, the choir leader will play a note that the singers are
going to begin with? Good writing, excellent writing plays that
note for me so I can pitch my own voice at that level, or try to.
The danger is to fall back on all the things that worked last time.
The writing becomes inauthentic. Sometimes that's what people
want or think they want. I can't tell you how many times on
the book tour with In the Name of Salomé or after
one of the poetry books I'd get a question from the audience,
"When are you going to write another book like In the
Time of Butterflies?" [laughs] "When are you going
to write the sequel to García Girls?" The point is
that if I am really doing my job, really serving my readers, I have
to keep pushing myself as a writer.
RB: Did you read Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat?
Sort of the same subject as Butterflies?
JA: Yeah but from a different point of view. I actually thought
his best was his depiction of Balaguer [perennial presidential candidate
in the D.R.].
RB: He is he still alive? [laughs] The last time I took note of
D.R. politics, he was running for office again and he was in his
90s.
JA: [laughs] Yeah, I know. There was some wonderful joke and I
can never remember it about, "Yeah, is he still alive?"
[laughs] Anyhow, his [Vargas Llosa] depiction of the plotters [group
plotting to overthrow Trujillo] was heavily influenced by Bernard
Diederich's The Death of the Goat. Even Vargas Llosa's
title for his novel [The Feast of the Goat] is an echo
of the Diederich title. A way for Vargas Llosa to acknowledge his
debt to Diederich. All of Vargas Llosa's chapters about the plotters
follow the way Dietrich put them together. You follow one plotter,
then another plotter and then another plotter. But then, I don't
think there's a problem with this. Stories don't belong to anyone.
Only in America–and England, I guess—do we suffer the
anxiety of influence and sue each other for traces of one story
in another. Hello?! This is the way stories work.
RB: And have you read the new Garcia Marquez?
JA: No
RB: It's a bittersweet little book. There has been a muted
and mixed reception that seems to me to be from a refusal to relate
to a 90-year-old character.
JA: On the other hand, Marilyn Robinson's Gilead—people
really responded to that. I thought that was a wonderful book.
RB: And there was another book, Old Man Waiting by Peter
Pouncy, that had an elderly man as the protagonist. These are all
books that make readers think about that fearsome time called old
age.
JA: Yeah and then [Joan]
Didion wins an award with that incredible book. That's
really a wonderful book. Part of the reason I was reading it was
to make meaning of what is happening to all of us in my generation
as we begin to lose the people we love.
RB: I was amazed that people went crazy about that book. That book
just went flying out of bookstores. She certainly had a large audience
but that book touched a nerve.
JA: And it's a scary book.
RB: Here husband dies and then her daughter.
JA: A lot of people who are readers and a lot of baby boomers are
thinking about how we are we going to grow old? How are we going
to lose partners and people we love? And for me that book is like
fiction. A lot of Didion's nonfiction always read to me like
her fiction. It was the same voice. A quirky voice that it always
feel slightly—
RB: Elliptical?
JA: Yeah. And metaphoric.
RB: Every sentence seems to not quite end with a period. Speaking
of writing, did you write this book in English?
JA: I don't write in Spanish.
RB: There were a few places where I was reading Isabel's—an
early 19th century Spanish woman.
JA [in a tremulous laughing voice] I know—
RB: —but her diction didn't sound like an early 19th
century Spanish woman.
JA: Oh really? She sounds too contemporary?
RB: Not too. Just a little bit.
When
the reader finds a glaring error, a contradiction, they wake
up. John Gardner writes about it in The Art of Fiction.
Writers are weaving a narrative dream and where there is a
tear, the reader wakes up. Not good. |
JA: Well, yeah, that would have been a place where
Shannon and I both nodded [giggles]. I tried hard to keep that voice.
RB: [laughs] Why don't you write in Spanish?
JA: I never learned to craft that language. I came to this country
before bilingual education. I was discouraged from speaking Spanish
with my sisters at school. In fact, in high school, I was made to
take French. My advisor said, "You already know Spanish!"
So, I lost the capacity to really express myself in my native tongue.
It remains a childhood language.
RB: So your Spanish is oral Spanish?
JA: Yes, mostly oral Spanish. I never learned to craft that first
language, to swim and not sink in its poems and stories. A loss
I still lament. One I am trying to remedy, but it would take a whole
lifetime to catch up. I tell this to my English-speaking students
in writing classes, you have to re-learn English as a writer. It's
not the same as spoken language, informational language. They have
this illusion that they already know English, but they have to become
conscious of it in order to be able to access its richness and variety
in their writing. They have to learn how to use it as a writer.
Yeah, it is probably where I failed at conveying—
RB: Don't be hard on yourself.
JA: I always say—my excuse—is: "This is Alma
imagining Isabel's story." Blame it on my character!
It is always, in a sense, Alma's lens of Isabel. Alma is the
carrier of Isabel's story, much like the little boys where carriers
of the vaccine, much like we, the readers, become carriers of the
larger story, Alma's as well as Isabel's.
RB: You are using true history as a basis for a fiction that does
let you off the hook for certain things.
JA: Was it the Roth novel Plot Against America, people
said, well that's not what happened? I felt I had to stay
true to certain parameters.
RB: What if you said there were 24 boys?
JA: Well, I invented the 22nd kid.
RB: [laughs]
JA: Actually, I didn't invent him, just his character. We know
there were 22 little boys but only 21 names are given in the official
documents. For me as a novelist it's a lacuna which I am grateful
for. I can invent and imagine that 22nd boy. Why was his name left
out? What might have happened to him? I do feel compelled to observe
the facts that are out there. Same with the Mirabal sisters in In
the Time of the Butterflies. Theirs was a nation's history,
so I didn't feel like I could really bend things. But fiction
is thankfully more interested in character, the truth according
to character. Which gives you lots of wiggle room.
RB: Why do people read a novel, a product of creation, and want
it to be factually correspondent to what they know?
JA: Because they believe it so much that the narrative world becomes
real, maybe even more real than real life. So when the reader finds
a glaring error, a contradiction, they wake up. John Gardner writes
about it in The Art of Fiction. Writers are weaving a narrative
dream and where there is a tear, the reader wakes up. Not good.
Readers sometimes write to tell you that on page thus and such,
they found a mistake. Kids in fourth grade react the same way when
there is a misspelling on their handout. This actually happened
with the advanced copy of Saving the World. It had a slightly
different ship on the cover. I sent the advanced copy to one of
the women who had helped me with the maritime stuff and her reaction
was, "That's not a corvette on the cover." [laughs]
Nothing about the rest of the novel! Did you notice the bed on the
beach? Beds are in bedrooms. It's a novel.
RB: It's an odd kind of disjunction. Is this an odd period
for you? [we spoke before the book was published]
JA: Yeah.
RB: Can you get started on something else now?
JA: I am working on a nonfiction book that I don't know where
it's going to end up. On quinceañeras, the big ritualized
celebrations that Latinas have on their 15th birthday [like a Sweet
Sixteen]. The book was originally commissioned by a Penguin imprint
which was doing a series of books with DVDs, pairing up different
writers with different topics. An under-one-hundred page book—kind
of like those Short Lives but on cultural topics. They
had one on Kent State, Thirteen Seconds. Then the head
of the imprint quit to go grow grapes in upstate New York, so all
of a sudden my book is in an odd limbo. But I have gotten so involved
in the material that I can't stop now. On the one hand, the statistics
are telling us that Latina teenage girls are topping the charts
for all kinds of at-risk behaviors. On the other hand, this Cinderella-type
fantasy is being perpetrated. A lot of families even go into debt.
They mortgage the house.
RB: Instead of attending to real-life concerns?
JA: Yeah, but it's not that easy ditching it. Imagine, a
whole community spends three months, six, a year, preparing and
focusing on its young girls. Quite an investment of time and energy,
and it makes the girls feel supported, loved, encouraged to be the
new up and coming leaders in the community. Positive things happen
at a time in life when young girls are especially vulnerable. Read
Reviving Ophelia, about the research on what happens to
young girls at this pivotal time in their lives. So the tradition
is also onto something that's important. Again it's complicated,
and the writer wants to get all of that perplexing variety down
on paper.
|
Posted:
May 22, 2006
