Ina Cariño, author of the poem “Bitter Melon” in NER 40.3, talks to Angela Narciso Torres about growing up in the Philippines, acquiring a taste for the bitter ampalaya, and for writing that draws from both her languages—welcoming us all into the conversation of her poetry.

Angela Narciso Torres: Growing up in the Philippines, ampalaya (bitter gourd) was the vegetable we children loved to hate because of its acrid flavor. But as I grew older, I acquired a taste for it, and even learned to prepare it for my family (which my children promptly resisted). So it seems to me a brilliant choice that you use ampalaya in this poem as a metaphor for awakening into one’s body and coming to terms with one’s personhood with all the accompanying angst and resistance one might expect. Can you talk about the origins of this poem and how you came to employ this vegetable as a central metaphor?

Ina Cariño: So, like you, I despised ampalaya when I was little. I grew up in the Philippines, and my grandmother liked to sauté it for dinner and add a bit of scrambled egg or tomato to the mix. She would always try to get me to eat a bit—sneak it in here and there, as if to get me “on her side” over my two older sisters (I was the youngest for a long time). But of course, it is an acquired taste.

I moved to the United States when I was ten, and still, for a long time, I couldn’t bring myself to like the vegetable. In the last two years, my mom has started pickling ampalaya (she got the idea from my first-ever boss, the Okinawan owner of a sushi restaurant for which I have worked on and off since the age of sixteen, and who everyone lovingly calls “Machiko-san”).

The ampalaya is cut into half-moons, and submerged in heavily-salted water to get some of the bitterness out. Then you wash it, and pickle it with vinegar, sugar, peppercorns—garlic and chili if you like. I grew to like it in this form. It’s quite good with hot rice, as a side dish.

Anyway—all this to say that this poem is a mirror of that transformation. My taste buds have matured. But also, I’ve learned to move past the trappings of being assimilated into American culture. I’ve moved past the self-hatred towards my body as a queer woman who identifies as female only some of the time. And I’ve found that, despite being a small, small person—from culture shock, and from growing up as an immigrant in America—I want so badly to be seen, just like everyone else.

ANT: You use a lot of code-switching in this poem between English and Filipino. As a native speaker, I enjoyed encountering familiar words like “mantika,” “parsyak,” “dugo’t laman,” and the speaker’s final plea: “huwag mo akong kalimutan.” I noticed that you chose not to italicize the Filipino words or provide definitions, and admire your decision not to prioritize one language over another. How do you think it impacts the non-Filipino-speaking reader—and in the end, does it matter in the context of this poem?

IC: I’m going to use a word that one of my thesis committee members used to describe what I was doing in this poem (and what I do in a lot of my other poems): “non-exceptionalism.” This professor specializes in sociolinguistics, and was intrigued by how the poem worked and held together despite the inclusion of these words, and especially without the italicization signaling “foreign-ness” or being “other.”

This is my reasoning for not italicizing Tagalog in my poems: in this century, a point at which there are tools such as the Internet available to many of us, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to expect that the reader does some of the legwork in attempting to understand the poem. This lends itself to my definition of art as not only communication, but also as conversation. Having been partially raised in the Philippines, I also don’t think of Tagalog as “other,” and this practice of italicizing foreign words is counterintuitive to my goal of getting rid of this “otherness” that a post-colonial past has made the norm.

There’s something beautiful to me about finding that a poem is a puzzle. Some poems you shoot back. On others, you dwell. The norm is what your lived experience is. And my poems, whether in English or otherwise, are my offering to a particular understanding of the world through writing.

ANT: Who are some of your favorite poets, Filipino (if any) or otherwise, who have influenced your writing?

IC: I’m going to sound a bit sentimental when I say this, but my mother, poet Luisa A. Igloria, is one of the biggest influences on my writing. I remember that she would write poems and stories for me and my sisters when I was little, and read them to us before bed. She encouraged me to read and write from an early age. I resisted specializing in English or writing in college for a long time—I thought I was being rebellious—but writing is my home, and it’s because of her.

Otherwise: Li-Young Lee, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath are some of my favorite poets. Galway Kinnell, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye. This is such a hard question to answer. The poetry faculty in my MFA program—Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, Eduardo C. Corral—were hugely impactful as well. Currently reading a lot of contemporary poets. Lots of Asian American voices. Franny Choi, Khaty Xiong, Cathy Linh Che, Chen Chen, to name a few. I love Sam Roxas-Chua 姚—he combines his work with asemic writing and often does sonic elements. I could list so many more!

ANT: What new projects, poetry-related or not, are you currently working on?

IC: I’m trying to start a reading series for writers of color based in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I’m located. There’s a serious lack of platforms specifically for writers of color in this city. There are a few pockets here and there, and more in Durham nearby, which are little seedlings of something great. But I’m talking to a few people about how to go about this, and I would love to make it happen fairly soon.

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INA CARIÑO was born in Baguio City in the Philippines. Her poetry and prose appear in New England Review, The Oxford Review of Books, Fugue, Tupelo Quarterly, Nat. Brut, Raleigh Review, VIDA Review, and December Magazine, among other journals. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State University in Raleigh and was a 2019 Kundiman fellow. Find out more at www.inacarino.com.

ANGELA NARCISO TORRES recently served on the editorial panel at NER. Her poetry collection Blood Orange won the Willow Books Literature Award. Her work appears in Colorado Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Jet Fuel Review, Water~Stone Review, and other journals and anthologies.

Sharbari Zohra Ahmed talks to NER about her short story “The Length in Six Strokes” (40.3)—and about Dhaka, screenwriting, and her new novel, set in 1940s Calcutta.

Carolyn Kuebler: In your story, Shalini’s editor asks her to review a book, saying, “It’s short and shitty and I’m curious what you think.” It’s a novel by another Dhaka writer who seems to have won the favor of the white publishing establishment—and who also happens to be young and attractive. Reza wants Shalini to be truthful about the book. There’s always a risk in writing a negative review of a book by someone in your own circles, but do you think there’s a particular risk for Shalini and for Reza?

Sharbari Zohra Ahmed: Because the burgeoning English lit scene in Dhaka is so small and dominated by the ruling class, who jealously guard their little piece of the pie, it could mean, as demonstrated somewhat cheekily in the story, social isolation for Shalini and even the loss of Reza’s job. The risk is particularly high for Reza because he is middle class, a self-made person, who taught himself English and is talented and instinctively worldly. He doesn’t have the buffer of inherited millions or connections in whatever government is in power at the moment. This is how it works in sharply class stratified places like Bangladesh. Reza is not, in fact, in Shalini and the author of the shitty novel’s circle. He is less protected. But Shalini could lose her circle and be isolated. It could upend whatever community she may have. But I think she realizes it’s not much of a community in the end. 

CK: Shalini likes to say that her book, which didn’t sell particularly well in the US, “killed in Dhaka.” It’s a joke for her. She and her editor Reza talk about Dhaka as if it’s a provincial, insular place, and yet it’s a major city—one of the most populous on the planet. Why do they feel this way about it? Is it a fair assessment on their part?

SZA: Dhaka is an ancient, vibrant place. It used to be center of the muslin industry. The British Raj effectively destroyed the industry by co-opting it and moving it elsewhere for nefarious, colonial purposes. It’s one of the main hubs of the region of Bengal, a region where some of the greatest literary and artistic figures, such as India’s first Nobel laureate, Rabrindranath Tagore and the filmmaker Satyajit Ray come from. The poet Nazrul Islam is from Dhaka, which falls in East Bengal and Kolkata; where Tagore and Ray are from falls in West Bengal. Dhaka is teeming with artists, painters, writers, dancers, singers. The world within Dhaka I am describing in the story is not that Dhaka. It’s the minuscule elitist ecosystem that is so small it sometimes consumes itself. And that microcosm is provincial in a way because it is so insular. It is not greater Dhaka or Bengal. That is why I needed to include the bit about the terrorist attack, to draw the distinction between the bubble land of the American Club and Gulshan and the rest of the city, and thus the nation itself. I think Reza and Shalini are aware it’s a bubble and are weary of it. They are both intelligent and restless and have a certain integrity. They find the social structure suffocating. That is what informs their attitudes. 

CK: According to what I read on Wikipedia, you were born in Dhaka and left there when you were three weeks old during the Bangladesh Liberation War. First of all, is Wikipedia correct? And next, what is your relationship to the city now?

SZA: Yes, Wiki is correct! I left when I was around three weeks old and landed up in Chester, Connecticut. I have a complex relationship with Dhaka. It’s not an easy city. It’s stultifying at times. The traffic is the fourth level of Dante’s Inferno. If I had supernatural powers, I would send my enemies (chiefly certain book critics) to sit in Dhaka traffic for a day. But I also love it, because I hear Bengali everywhere and I have close childhood friends and my parents live there and the food is fantastic. I also know artists and writers there who are deeply talented and committed to their craft. And Bangladeshis are happy go lucky by nature. Curious and friendly. I could only live there if I was working full time and had a specific goal or purpose. I am going there in December for the launch of my new novel, and people seem excited and welcoming. Incidentally, I think I am killing there because my novel sold out within hours. It makes me happy. 

CK: I’m glad to hear it—life imitates fiction! That novel, Dust Under Her Feet, is your second book of fiction, after the story collection The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai, and it’s set in 1940s Calcutta. Was there a particular event in history that led you to write about this time and place? 

SZA: Yes, my mother describing watching the horrendous communal violence in Calcutta right before Partition in 1947. She was very small, about seven, and she lived in the Muslim section of town and watched a Muslim mob fall on a Hindu boy, killing him. Elsewhere Hindus were attacking Muslims. People who had been neighbors and even friends murderously turned on one another. I also grew up watching the old black-and-white movies from Hollywood’s golden age, like Casablanca and The Lady Eve and Bringing up Baby and I loved them deeply. Those were the first stories that made me want to write. That time was so specific. Especially politically. There was no ambiguity or confusion about who the bad guys were, unlike now, when geopolitical agendas are terribly opaque. But no-one looked like me in those films. I was American but Bengali too and wanted to find an intersection. Dust Under Her Feet is that center bit of my personal Venn diagram. It’s my love letter to Hollywood and Bengal, both epicenters of great storytelling. 

CK: How did you go about doing the research?

SZA: I had the privilege of traveling to Kolkata and drinking in the atmosphere. I walked down the where street I set some of the story and tried to imagine what my protagonist, Yasmine, saw in 1942 when she did the same. It was magical. And I read so many books about the China Burma India theater of World War II. As a result, I firmly agree with the assertion that that was the greatest generation to come out of the United States. 

CK: In addition to writing short stories and novels, you also write for television and theater, which are much more collaborative genres. Which came first for you, and how do these different projects complement or compete with each other?

SZA: Short fiction came first and then a play, Raisins Not Virgins, which will be produced again—a revised version as part of New York Theater Workshop’s Next Door Season 2020. Raisins was produced while I was still writing and sporadically publishing short stories. Eventually I started writing feature scripts and then landed a TV job in a room, which is a very collaborative experience and different from being a solitary writer. Ultimately, story is story and the rules for a good story are the same. Because of my TV gig, I learned to write a first draft faster—of anything I was working on, and I have become a champion outliner! I have also learned to look at bigger pictures of plot and narration. I work simultaneously on things. Right now, I am working on my second novel, revising my play, and writing a feature script. 

CK: Are you tempted at all to make a film script from any of your own fiction? 

SZA: Yes, I plan to adapt Dust Under Her Feet into a screenplay. That is always a possibility for me, if the story lends itself to scripting. 

CK: What feeds you as a writer? Any specific books, music, or film—people, places, or things?

SZA: Politics, human nature. I listen to Aretha Franklin, Amy Winehouse, and those of their ilk a lot when I am writing. Women, with strong, distinct voices where one can hear the longing in them. Also, the vulnerability. I need to be near trees and water. I have started taking long walks in the woods with my goofy dog Percy to help ground me. I have also learned to avoid people and energies that are not expansive or generous. I need rocks and flowers and shells around me. I have stones I collected from Alaska to Malaga. I am of Muslim descent but have statues of Buddha from Sri Lanka to Bali and Japan and China, where I lived for a couple of years, all over my house. I try to show up for my friends and family as much as possible while guarding my time and space. I love to socialize and spend time with people I love. Maintaining boundaries feeds my creativity. 

CK: Thanks for taking the time to give us some background on your work, Sharbari. And best of luck with whatever comes next!

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SHARBARI ZOHRA AHMED is the author of two books: the novel Dust Under Her Feet (Amazon India/Westland Publishing, 2019) and a short story collection, The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai: Stories (Daily Star Books, 2013). She was on the writing team for season one of the ABC TV Series Quantico, and her play Raisins Not Virgins will be produced as part of New York Theater Workshop’s Next Door 2020 season. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Manhattanville College and Artist in Residence in the Film and Television MA Program at Sacred Heart University.

Alisa Koyrakh, author of the essay “Tomorrow We Travel,” talks to nonfiction editor Elizabeth Kadetsky about history, reverie, and the role of research in lyric nonfiction.

Elizabeth Kadetsky: “Tomorrow We Travel” brings readers on a desultory, emotional journey through physical spaces scarred by the traumatic history of the Holocaust. There is a nonlinear, intuitive quality to the structure, creating an almost dreamlike, dissociated landscape for the reader. We move through the traumatized lands of Eastern Europe, Russia, Austria, and Germany alongside you and experience the almost surreal juxtaposition of the everyday with that of living history. Often, the transitions from the past to the present are jarring: “I go shopping,” you write, after visiting a former synagogue that is now a museum for Jewish history. You so effectively create a structure that mimics the effects of trauma for the reader. Was this conscious on your part, or did you arrive at the form intuitively?  

Alisa Koyrakh: To be honest, I didn’t know I was writing about trauma. I certainly didn’t plan to. As I mention in the essay, I was in Prague to work on my novel. I thought by going alone to a foreign country, I would retreat into my own inner world. I thought it would be safe and quiet in that world. Instead, the exact opposite happened. I felt careened into the physical world. But writing this essay wasn’t quite intuitive, it was more like a compulsion. The very early sections of the essay came from several Facebook posts—I almost never post to Facebook or social media platforms and so it was strange that I was suddenly sharing my thoughts and experiences in that way. I thought the loneliness had gotten to me. I had moments of respite, of course, when I was with Kate or my cousin or when Colin visited. But mostly I was alone. I thought I was losing my mind.

During that time, I was reading Maggie Nelson’s books about her aunt who was murdered at a young age; so my break from dealing with my own painful inheritance was to read about Maggie’s. I’d read about the horrible violence one man did to her family and then switch to researching exactly how cyanide pills worked. It was a very dark time for me, and yet I somehow reveled in it. I can’t explain. The original essay is much longer than the published version. When I came home and gained a little distance and renewed a life with Colin, I was able to reread and shape and think critically about what would give the words a proper arc. I had to ask very pointed questions and find a way to give myself and my readers a sense of closure within the essay. But yes, for most of the experience of writing this, there was no thinking involved, not in the usual sense. My “thoughts” were the ways in which I circled the synagogue in that shopping center or stared at paintings in Vienna. I suppose when you’re experiencing trauma, you don’t really know what’s going on. I did the everyday things, bought eggs and picked out nail polish colors, but I was saturated with the history of these places. I didn’t know how to ignore the history, even though at times I really wanted to.     

Maybe I love to write because I can’t stop thinking most of the time. Writing is my respite from thinking and yet it’s the only way I can think straight. I don’t know how to make sense of that. 

EK: You powerfully juxtapose reverie and reality throughout. At times, the reverie is so rich that it becomes almost another form of reality, for instance when you shift from a description of your pleasant apartment in Prague to an imagined scene among imagined former tenants there. “Maybe an elderly couple lived here before World War II,” you write. Later, that imagined couple becomes just “the husband and wife.” Still later, it is as if you have inhabited the consciousness of Magda Goebbels when you imagine giving cyanide to “your” six (imagined) children. This technique stretches the language of nonfiction. Imagination is real, and yet somehow, nonfiction too often sticks to hard and fast reality. How did you come to this technique?

AK: When I began my research, I worried a lot about how a sane person could come to murder their own children. I thought the only way I could understand it was to do it. So I did it. I also felt sorry for the Goebbels girls, which in turn stirred up my Jewish guilt. How dare I spare any sympathy for the families of Nazis? To work through those feelings, I had to put myself in the bunker and see if these children did deserve my attention. It is difficult for me to claim this as a technique because it’s actually the way I tend to live my life and make decisions. If I’m not sure that I want to meet friends for a drink, I’ll take turns picturing the different evenings I could have. If I’m not sure that I want some chocolate cake, I imagine myself eating it in order to decide. I’ll even mimic taking a bite. Colin laughs whenever I do it. I conjure scenarios for myself all the time. They are part of my ordinary reality, so they have to be part of any nonfiction I produce. So to say that the building I live in is somehow more real than the mind I spend my time in just doesn’t make sense to me. We all live in our fantasies and our physical world and move between them all day long. So they’re both forms of truth. Imagining how the young artist Stepan felt in Terezin admittedly reveals more about me than it does about him; as long as that distinction is clear, I think anything goes.  

EK: Late in the essay you mention Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic, a YA novel published in 1988 in which a twelve-year-old Jewish girl drinks too much wine at a Passover seder, then opens the door for the Prophet Elijah and steps into an alternate world in which the Holocaust is about to happen; then, she becomes trapped there. I found your reference to be so satisfying, particularly because of the way you as the author are continually inhabiting individual experiences from the Holocaust—just as Hannah does, if more supernaturally, in The Devil’s Arithmetic. You mention that, later in your life, you were less interested in YA depictions of the Holocaust because they “removed the events from reality.” I would be curious to hear more about your sense of the range of possibilities for depicting “unspeakable” horror—your take on the notion that certain things are “indescribable.” What is the role of un-literal representation, and do you see your work as a part of a conversation about where the bounds lie, or what, even, they are? 

AK: Some of the people closest to me have alternately referred to the piece as both an essay and a story. I don’t really bristle at either of those classifications, mostly because I would have a hard time classifying it myself, if I ever wanted to. But that does mean that I have to ask myself if there’s any such thing as nonfiction. More interestingly, I have to ask myself if there’s any such thing as fiction. Most importantly, I have to ask myself if I think this debate matters. I’ll maybe save that for later.

At the age of twelve, I was reading fantasy novels with concentration camps and Holocaust fiction with magical cities. I was also reading many nonfiction accounts of the Holocaust like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Despite all this reading, nothing prepared me for standing inside the crematorium at Terezin. So I think it has nothing to do with the fact that some books were fiction and others weren’t. Given the sheer unbelievability of very real events in our immediate past, un-literal representation is often the only foot we have to stand on. Oscar Wilde almost certainly didn’t mean it when he said, “The only real people are the people who never existed,” but his point is clear. We need our minds to create realities because most often reality is too surreal. There’s some comfort that in the realm of literature all genre can quickly become part of the same structure, the same imaginative world. 

Facts, data are so easy to manipulate too, right? Even with a balance sheet, you can tell any story you want. So for me, the distinction is not between fiction and nonfiction, instead it’s only the following: there are people who tell stories for personal gain and greed and there are people who tell stories to connect with others and understand human nature. I judge great literature, whether we call it fiction or nonfiction, by how well it does the latter.

EK: Your mother is a winning character throughout your essay, offering wisdom and humor. At one point, you express, with irony, frustration at your mother’s “trying to live vicariously through me.” Of course, so much of the essay is about transposing one’s own experience into the lives of others, and using that transposition as a vehicle toward empathy and achieving a deep understanding of history. I was wondering what factors led you to choose to include your mother, who figures in only a small portion of the narrative. Did you think of her as a figure who could offer dramatic irony, and did you see her role in the narrative as fulfilling other textual functions as well?

AK: I’m so glad you say she’s a winning character. I worried a lot about my portrayal of her and what she would think after reading it. My mother is the person I love and respect the most and understand the least, and unfortunately for her that means I’ll be writing about her for a long time. I imagine I’ll be able to understand her better if I get to have children. In that sense, I’m very curious how raising children could affect my writing. After reading the essay, my mother’s friend told her that it was a love letter to her. I think there’s a good argument to be made for that. It’s just amazing how technically small a mother’s current role in your life can be and yet how she can still loom over everything. Loom of course has a negative connotation, which I don’t mean to imply at all. In this essay she keeps me grounded. She puts me in my place. If she’s a device she’s there to remind the reader not to take the narrator too seriously. And you’re right to point out the irony—transposition is such a big part of this essay, and there I am accusing my mother of trying to do that. That’s another way I think my mother, as a device keeps, me in my place. 

EK: I loved your use of research. At times there was a feel of an existential mystery. If only we could find out exactly what happened to the man who lived on your street in Prague and was born in 1895! Were Ottla Kafka and Stepan Pollak on the same transport to Auschwitz? In the same gas chamber? This fascination with the particular detail is juxtaposed against the flatness and misinformation that you encounter at so many of the Holocaust museums and memorials in the region. And yet the particular details, in the end, lead down vague pathways toward confounding unknowns. What thoughts do you have about the role of archival research for the lyric essayist? 

AK: I am at once a lover of words, of the sounds they make when they’re put in the right order, and someone deeply concerned with the ways that words are used to lie or misinform. I like to speak clearly. In my religious days, when I attended seminary, we did an activity there: we were asked to write down our top twenty values, then winnow the list to the top ten, then the top three, then to one. The last value I had left was “Beauty.” I could not cross out that word, I just couldn’t. I remember being frightened of myself in that moment. How could I choose Beauty over Truth, over God, over Family? Was I confessing in that moment that I cared for lyricism over truth? Maybe, but I think that’s because to me beauty is more “real” than truth. In that moment, I think some part of me realized I wouldn’t be religious forever. Today it seems like no one believes truth exists anymore. Truth never really existed, not in the way that I think people wish it did. 

The truth is, I miss Stepan so much even though I’ve never met him. I worry about how Franz would have handled Ottla’s death, even though he died before the war began. I worry for Karel, the man from my street, though I know next to nothing about him. I love Gonda deeply and have often imagined him holding his baby son inside the gas chamber. I worry about the husband and wife I made up, who I imagined living in my apartment, even though they never existed. Sometimes, I just choose to think that they did.

But the question was about the role of research in lyric essays. I never thought about either of those labels in direct reference to this work. I researched what I wanted to know and wrote what I needed to understand. Of course many beautiful essays have been written without any research. But I think that archival research does have the effect of grounding the lyric essay, making it somehow more immediate. Perhaps an obsession with facts combined with a love for the sound of language leads to a kaleidoscope form that is more reflective of everyday life. Our minds are both filled with our own individual music and the pressing clatter of outside information.

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ALISA KOYRAKH received her MFA in fiction from NYU and studied Comparative Literature at Barnard College. She lives in Chapel Hill where she is finishing her first novel. Her essay in NER is “Tomorrow We Travel.”

ELIZABETH KADETSKY, nonfiction editor at NER, is author of the forthcoming lyric memoir The Memory Eaters (U Mass Press, 2020), the novella On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World (Nouvella Books, 2015), the story collection The Poison that Purifies You (C&R Press, 2014), and the memoir First There Is a Mountain (Little Brown, 2004).

      

Poet and novelist Jenn Givhan talks to Angela Narciso Torres about overhauling the word “mother,” ideas of empathy poetics, and her new poem, “Lila,” in NER 40.2.

Angela Narciso Torres: In a recent interview, you talked about developing your own “poetics of motherhood”—something you explore in your first book, Landscape with Headless Mama, and beyond. In “Lila,” the characters are a mother and a daughter coming of age. While the mother is more of a “supporting character,” she is clearly a huge part of this daughter’s identity—her nurturing, her superstitions and religious beliefs, even her loving chiding at the end—providing a kind of protective shell for the daughter to push against as she comes into her own. How has your own daughterhood, and, more recently, your motherhood changed or influenced your poetics?

Jenn Givhan: I’m struggling to find time to answer these questions (let alone work on any of my writing projects) this summer, as both kids have been home with me all day (I teach online classes from home as an adjunct), and it seems the older they get, the more attention they need. Perhaps there’s something about motherhood poetics encompassed within this dilemma, within the chaos of my fuzz-addled and exhausted mother brain. 

In Landscape with Headless Mama, readers might expect that the mother figure is primarily my mom, and that I am primarily the daughter, but this is not the case. Throughout the entire collection there exists blurring of voices and perspectives, and I think that blurring between mother/daughter is what most encapsulates my poetics. I’ve been an official “mother” in our society’s definition of the term for twelve years, since perhaps my son’s birthmother handed him to me, from her birth canal to my arms, as I was the first person after the doctor who held him. With women’s bodies continually policed and persecuted in our still-patriarchal society, some people might secretly (or not so secretly) counter that even then I was an “adoptive mother” and it wasn’t until I birthed a living child that I was a “mother.” Though of course most people will never voice this aloud, I spent enough time as a woman unable to birth living babies and then as an adoptive mother to understand our society’s deeply-woven, often-hidden but still very rigid constructions of “motherhood” (and policing people who identify as mothers is still America’s favorite pastime). I need to write an entire essay sometime about how I truly believe the word “mother” needs an overhaul, stretched wider and sinuous enough to encompass those who do motherwork and give motherlove yet are not given the credit they deserve (let me hear it for the grandparents, the aunties, full-time stay-at-home fathers, the members of the LGBTQ community who might not feel welcome with the gendered connotation of the term “mother,” and those who have taken on the responsibilities of childrearing, along with the childless and/or child-free people who serve mothering roles in their communities, and I could go on and on). 

All of this to say, while my motherhood and daughterhood poetics might seem to have been woven separately, at distinct times in my life, the fuller truth is that I’ve always been a mother, in the sense that mothering means to feel responsibility for and to act on that responsibility toward the caregiving, nurturing, and life/emotional sustenance of another human being. As the child of one alcoholic/abusive parent and another emotionally traumatized/anxiety-ridden parent, both of whom loved and tried to protect me fiercely even as they struggled within their own desperations and failures, I learned early on to mother—them, my siblings, myself, those around me. 

Motherhood poetics means perhaps empathy poetics, and thus encompasses a much vaster perspective and set of voices and concerns than people might generally come to think of as motherhood poetry. It is docupoetics, yes, putting to paper the daily experiences of parents and children, giving voice and space and attention to the domestic space, seeing the inherent politics and power and drama of the parent/child relationship and the family dynamic, seeing women as active agents in that space, all of which I think are as necessary as ever, given our current political climate which continues to seek out regressive policies for women, people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ communities, and the list goes on. A black woman in Alabama was charged with murder after she was shot in the abdomen and thus miscarried her fetus (though, thankfully, prosecutors dropped the charges). Latinx children came home from their first day of school the other day to empty houses, as their parents were rounded up by ICE raids, and untold numbers of others are sleeping on cots or concrete benches in detention centers without their families tonight, after months of separation. I fear every day for my two small loves, Latinx and black children growing up within the hateful rhetoric fomenting and subsequent hate crimes escalating around the country, from the White House to the border towns where I grew up, and everywhere in between. So I believe that documenting our experiences has always been important, and perhaps more so now. 

But beyond the voicing of our familial/domestic experiences and the places in which questions of science/power/politics/identity etc. interact with our daily concerns, motherhood poetics (in my own poetry and the work of those who feed my soul) is intersectional and creates spaces for the liminal, the unspoken and unspeakable, the under/mis-represented, the chided and belittled. Motherhood poetry is sometimes written off as only for mothers, as sentimental or confessional. And like any writing through any lens, poetry that focuses on the motherhood experience can be narrowed, can be written ineptly by poets who haven’t honed their crafts or wrestled with their duende. But motherhood poetics done well should be called motherfuckinghood poetics, the way that Cheryl Strayed as Dear Sugar in The Rumpus tells us to write like a motherfucker, with all courage, with all strength, getting down on the kitchen floor and wrestling with the second beating heart within ourselves, or, as Lorca would say, haunting death’s house, struggling at the edge of the pit, in that wound that never heals. And yet the paradox is that the mother (at least, the mother in my own work and life) must survive this, must find a way to heal the wound, if only to get her babies to the other side, safe. That second beating heart must continue beating, that festering wound must heal long enough to keep the child alive. And there within lies the crux of motherhood poetics. My dear friend, fantastic, powerful mother poet Leslie Contreras Schwartz, writes of mothering the world to end mass shootings, as she wrestles with continual fear stemmed from the uncontrolled beast residing in this country, the NRA and the greed politics that feed it. She writes of mothers sometimes barely holding ourselves together, sometimes not holding ourselves together, and still trying to hold those vulnerable growing creatures entrusted to us. I would say that Contreras Schwartz’s poetry is an example of motherfuckinghood poetics that I aspire to, and expresses what I’m trying to articulate here about intersectional poetry that does the damn work, that digs deep and keeps digging and finds no easy answers and will have none of them anyway. 

Since I had children, I was able to tap more explicitly into the traumas of my own childhood, to find a road toward healing, to heal the past so I could heal the present and thus my children’s future. Motherhood poetics is multigenerational and has the power to effect concrete change in the world. But I don’t think one needs to adopt or bear children to tap into this ability. And the potential for cleaning out wounds and healing across generations, for changing hearts and lives, for slipping into the liminal spaces and seeing across borders (of flesh and blood, of imagination and reality, of past and present), and perhaps most important, of crossing those borders as though crossing bloodwaters and birthwaters—that potential energizes motherhood poetics and is available to all who are willing to get down on the kitchen floor and wrestle. 

ANT: I so admire your use of image and metaphor in this poem. The title of the poem, “Lila,” is the main character’s name, and poem’s central image is the calla lilies in the first line. Their blooming becomes a metaphor for this daughter’s coming-of-age, with all the tensions, angst, body image insecurities, and defiance that often accompany this turbulent stage. But the lilies (“the funnels of their flared hearts, little throats opening”) also embody the voice that instructs her to “open the book . . . the book I want to write”—insisting on another, perhaps deeper kind of blooming. Can you tell us more about the genesis of this poem and how you came up with this metaphor?

JG: My dear friend Alicia Elkort and I collaborate on poems together, have written a chapbook and plan to set to work on a YA novel, and we’re thinking of a novel-in-verse, as we’ve both read and adored Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, a bildungsroman set in the barrio of Harlem, featuring the dazzling sassy voices of Xiomara and the girls in her neighborhood. 

We’d been thinking of a YA novel for a while, and when we read Acevedo’s work, we felt emboldened to speak in the language of our poets’ hearts, and set for ourselves an exercise of writing the voices of our respective main characters, who would also stand in as our memoired girl selves, the girls back when we were growing up, who needed to hear our grownup voices telling them You’re strong, you’re powerful, you’re a warrior who will thrive and empower others someday. Keep singing. 

Lila was the alter ego self / character who emerged for me, and I’m currently trying to get Alicia Elkort to move to New Mexico to be closer to me so we can finish our projects! 

The calla lily is a flower I’ve always loved, for its champagne-flute shape, its slimness that grows into a full skirt, its trumpeted opening, that speaks to me of dancing (I was a ballet dancer and then a cheerleader, though since puberty I’ve been thick and sometimes full-out fat, still always athletic, and I didn’t have a body positivity movement back then to help me at all) and singing/speaking out loudly and clearly (something else I did with sass as a girl, though I wish I’d have known more about poetry and the arts and the opportunities for young people to articulate their thoughts and emotions and share those with others). So the calla lily image grows from what the shape and gestures of the flower conjure within my imagination and memory. 

And then deeper than that, the flower represents death and rebirth, symbolizing my best friend Renee, who drowned when I was fifteen (she was seventeen). Ironically, this was the flower at my wedding (I married shortly after turning twenty-one, still in many ways a girl working through my identity as a young woman). As I delve deeper into Lila’s story, the calla lily and the book she needs to write will take on these connotations of death and rebirth, and will speak to the underbellied underworld she will traverse as she comes to realize her own power as a girlwoman and dancer/poet. 

ANT: This poem is deeply rooted in your Mexican heritage—the calavera, the image of La Virgen, the maize man, and Mami in chanclas speaking in Spanish. How much of this poem, and of your poetry in general, is drawn from your personal life, cultural background, and family experiences?

JG: As I alluded to in my articulation above of motherhood poetics, the mothers in my poems (and “Lila” is no exception) are comprised of the many voices of mothers and mothering figures whom I grew up with, the nanas and tías and abuelas both in my own familia and in the families of those I’ve loved, such as my ex’s family, with whom I spent much time learning to cook and speaking Spanish and being the Mexican hija my own mother was not fully allowed to be since her mom and dad (my grandparents) tried hard to make their family assimilate to American values and culture to spare their children from the ridicule and racism they’d experienced growing up in poverty and speaking primarily Spanish. Still, deep in our family’s veins, within the home, all of this culture has always existed, and came full circle to thrive again when I was a girl and my grandparents felt safer in expressing their culture (as opposed to when my mother was growing up). So for instance, I would always hear my grandparents speaking Spanish to each other and other Latinx peoples, though my mom only knows a handful of Spanish phrases, songs, dichos (sayings), etc. My grandfather, when he retired and began taking care of my young cousins, taught them Spanish, and they, this youngest generation, are now fluent, a fact I lament since I wish my mother and I had also learned from my grandfather, who speaks gorgeous, perfect Spanish. 

I speak Spanish at home to my children though I don’t feel comfortable speaking it much outside of the home because mine is so broken and pocho (whitewashed) and often grammatically incorrect. But the way the Mexican mothers in my poems speak to their children more often resembles the way I speak to my own children and the way my ex-suegra speaks to her children and grandchildren than the way my own mother speaks to me (though I try to capture my mother in spirit, and the deeply religious vein is certainly true to life as my mother is probably the most devout Catholic I know). All of this to say, my Mexican culture is so important to me, and whether I’m expressing my own personal experiences or those of the gente in the places I’ve lived and loved, I think it’s necessary now and always to sing our truths, to never be silenced. I’m passing on our family’s traditions to my babes, and my grandma even told me last New Year’s that my posole rivaled my uncle’s, so I think, with my grandma’s stamp of approval, in both poetry and life, I’m doing well! 

ANT: You recently released your novel, Trinity Sight (Blackstone Publishing 2019)—Congratulations! This novel comes after four full-length poetry books and several chapbooks. What struck you most about the differences between completing a novel as compared to a book of poetry? What aspects, if any, of your poetry writing, helped you in the completion of this novel?

JG: The poetry comes most naturally, ha! The noveling often feels like work, where the poeming is like breathing. The poems often happen at the subconscious level, and with at least one book for instance, Rosa’s Einstein, my most recent collection from University of Arizona Press, I sometimes feel as if I wrote the poems (merging physics and fairytale and girlhood and borderland Latinx identity) in my sleep, and they magically appeared on the page. With noveling, I have to plot. I have to sketch out exactly how I’ll get to the ending, though my characters often show up in unexpected moments and decide to do outrageous things (like fly off to New York for a writing scholarship) and I have to follow them (I used part of my NEA grant in 2015 to fly off to New York for the first time ever because my protagonist of my forthcoming second novel, Jubilee, up and flew away)! So with both the poetry and the fiction, there is magic happening at the subconscious level that I’ve allowed in after honing my craft (I have read dozens of books on writing novels, though I’ve earned all my formal education in poetry). But it still always feels more like home when I’m writing poetry. 

I do love a good novel, though—love to stay up past my bedtime and follow a character through her dark alleyways as she strives for her heart’s desire too often thwarted, and I have things to say as a writer that lend themselves more aptly to prose. But I’ll preach this ‘til I die, I believe at the heart of all things, we all of us writers are poets, concerned with language at the level of language. Poets tend not to have to consider “plot” as such, though poets and fiction writers are still both concerned with desire and what the speaker/protagonist wants more than anything or believes she will die without, or even will die without. Deep desire and narrative arc, the hero’s journey-esque mythology, that Jungian archetype guiding us through most story—these are just a few of the “fiction-writing” lessons that have grown and stretched and buttressed my poetry. I’ve been seriously writing novels as long as I’ve been seriously writing poetry, so the two are interlinked. And as a poet-at-heart who writes across the genres, I encourage and challenge all writers to get in touch with their poet-at-heart, the lyricist who joys in the sensory image, and takes lessons from the structuralist muscles of the prose-writer, that shapefinder. We shapeshifters. 

Write on, y’all world crossers. Thank you so much for reading. 

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Jenn Givhan, a Mexican-American writer and activist from the Southwestern desert, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Rosa’s Einstein (Camino Del Sol Poetry Series, 2019), two chapbooks, and two novels, Trinity Sight and Jubilee, both forthcoming from Blackstone Press. Her poems have appeared in The Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Poetry, the New Republic, Crazyhorse, and Kenyon Review. She has received, among other honors, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowship, and New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, chosen by Tyehimba Jess.

Angela Narciso Torres serves on the editorial panel at NER. Her poetry collection Blood Orange won the Willow Books Literature Award. Her work appears in Colorado Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Jet Fuel Review, Water~Stone Review, and other journals and anthologies.