This Blue Novel
by Valerie Mejer Caso and
translated from the Spanish by Michelle Gil-Montero
interview by Ae Hee Lee
On the preface of This
Blue Novel, Raúl Zurita writes “My experience with Valerie Mejer Caso was
one of startling revelation, of wonder: I knew nothing of her book, and hardly
an hour later closing it, my life was another.” And indeed, Mejer’s poetry does
more than address the subjects of homes, family linage, and identity— it
revisits and reinvents memory. It is a poetic narrative of weaving loss and
hope, past and future. One that surpasses “the logic of the world.”
***
Note: The book by itself was a delight to read, but the answers Mejer gave me for this interview threw another yet wonderful light upon my reading of her poems. There was so much wisdom and poetry in the process of gleaning and
creating this book that I could but admire and reflect. I realized her answers were like the blue in this book, a water lamp that illuminated every word and memory, drowning it and saving it at the same
time.
- A family tree of open mouths
seeps the dizziness of time. (45)
To large extent This Blue Novel is described as
autobiographic. And we notice several family members of different
nationalities (German, Spanish, etc.) making an appearance. To start this interview off, could you tell us more about your
heritage and how you were inspired you, or maybe even drove you, to write this
book?
I still have the notes I wrote down before writing the book.
I did this for three books, I drew or outlined them beforehand, thought about
their systems. This Blue Novel was also created this way. Zurita has
repeatedly told me in many occasions an incredible phrase by Pacheco: “The past
is a foreign country, the people there do strange things.” Now if to this
we add that these people are not only foreign because they exist in the past
but because in fact they were... they become doubly foreign to my
understanding, as they were figures I had known in their old age and of whose
past splendor I was aware of, “but I did not know them.”
Look, this is what I wrote on my notes: “the purpose of this
book of poetry titled This Blue Novel is very simple: tell my story, the
story of my mother, the story of my father and their respective genealogies.
Tell what happened in the three houses of my childhood: my house, the house of
the mother of my father, and the house of the mother of my mother.
When you are a child, the events have a phenomenological
halo, that is, you see them pass by you and you don’t understand them. This
book, then, has the intention of revealing the events of my childhood, of
connecting this amorphous phenomena, beautiful, tragic; of tracing between them
invisible strings that in their togetherness make a novel, using a poetic point
of view, the mythology of this family of immigrants.
When I was a child and I would see my German grandfather eat
a raw egg at 4 a.m., destine a gigantic room to set a collection of ships; when
I would see my grandmother from my mother’s side (Luz) copy paintings by Goya
everyday from 5 to 7, these actions were the phenomena, because they did not
belong to the logic of the world, but to a poetic universe.
On the other hand, there were the stories I would listen to
as a child: one day, after 8 months of being married, my grand uncle and aunt
were returning from mass when they were caught in a shootout related to the Cristero War, which he had
been involved with. My grand uncle fell onto my grand aunt’s
lap, she moved the body and ran to the home she lived in with her ten siblings,
she shoved her hand into the coat to take out the keys, and took out instead
her husband’s eye. That eye occupied a central place in the imaginary map of my
childhood: how did it slip into the pocket, how did the eye transform into the
key, that is, in all these stories I found a poetic dimension to those
phenomena without logic. My family, these people I did not know, the things
they did, the inexplicable part of their lives and actions, are the crucial
ingredients that will construct the plot of this book.”
A last thing regarding how I had already been a kind of
spectator of them and how there were enormous gaps in their stories— writing a
book presented me with the possibility of embodying them, of turning them into
proper nouns. “I will introduce you to my dead,// one by one” I say at one
point.
- Starting from the very title
of the book, “This Blue Novel” is a phrase is peppered throughout the
collection of poems. Breaking the fourth wall constantly, the book
references itself various times:
And at the end of the autopsy,
at the door to our room at the Golden Motel: this blue novel, (29)
This created for me a fascinating effect of the blue novel weaving
itself into existence. Could you tell us about how you approached working with
the individual poems as you envisioned them as a collection, that is, this blue
novel?
To start, this is what I wrote back then: “The fact that the
title of the book includes the demonstrative “This” hopes to give the feeling
that this book, that is to say, this mythology, has already been written in the
sense that everything it talks about has already happened.” And that feeling I had in writing the book influenced, I
think, the fact that I wrote the book as if it were really already written.
My daughter was very young, I had little time, and I locked
myself up in two occasions in order to write it. Without crossing anything off
or erasing it, as if I were simply reading it instead. In my first try, I
covered my father’s family, in my second, which I think it goes from section XI
to XXV, my mother’s and that final elegy in which the ships sink. “Two houses
sink like ships”... and that is why the book starts saying “They sink, I
ascend.”
But I also see that in that apparition in the line you
mention is the fragment that occurs in Texas. It was a frightening journey in
which we accompanied my father to buy weapons, and I think it was then that the
idea that one day I would write became related to my survival. This is why I
put it there, never have I ever been in need of more saving than then. And
what was going to save me was my own book. I think later I was much affected by
that novel by Unamuno, which he called “una nivola”
instead of “una novela,” Abel Sanchez, where the character rebels
against the author. This is in a secondary way, but
I recall having read it many times in the fascination of discovering a new way
of writing.
- Time is a subject that
hovers over the entirety of This Blue Novel. In my reading, I found
it breaks the conventions of linear narrative, challenging the traditional
connotations of a novel, and it creates a poetic space of past and present
in which stories of objects and the house go hand in hand with prophecies:
It already happened (but not on this page).
It will happen as right words arrive.
The date will arrive. The dart will fly.
Meanwhile, fog circles my waist. (115)
Other times, time also seems to loop in the page. For instance,
the speaker cannot seem to escape Sunday. It comes again and again:
I knew the infinite was flat, with no distinctive smell
in the pool, on the road, in the desert,
that white arithmetic, miles from all piano… Is it Sunday again?
(27)
How did you visualize time in the scope of your life and the book?
What kind of role did you see it taking as you wrote the book?
What comes to mind is an incredible phrase in
Forrest Gander’s novel As a Friend (a novel that has a poem at its core): “Time is what the stars shine through.” I think that in the
physicality of poetry and literature, time is the great subject of study. In my
case I think I made it into a character. It turns into such, little by little,
from when you are a child: you feel an hour passed as if it were five minutes,
and that one minute felt eternal… and it starts to become a question mark. And
later it never stops being one, and even more so when existence happens in
time.
I also think that one of the most important books in my life is “Sculpting in Time” by Tarkovsky, a book that seemed more about how poetry works
than any other theories directly addressing poetry. I think it is a way of
flooding, of seeing that life. I think it is a way of tackling/confronting how life, like cinema, occurs in a
medium, time, which we are ignorant of. We try to take it in all at once, as I
specifically did in this book.
On the flipside, there are the dates. I found I wrote about
these in a note that existed before the book: “The dates will be very important
like markers throughout the poem, as they will indicate the places in time
where events happened and ended up being milestones in the stories of these
families. The dates are clean daggers that write a text in another language. Fatality is a date because
it was a Wednesday when the library of my grandmother’s house caught on fire,
and from then on that date became a milestone, it crystallized. In this the
book, the date will approach itself as if it were an object in itself.” I think
that tragedies are what make of time something else, they encapsulate it. In
the last section of the book I have this feeling “There is fate, beginning that
Wednesday,” “Fatality is just a date” and phrases in a similar vein accumulated
in section XXIV, when the library burned.
- The Blue Novel invents nothing. Neither is everything true. Its wildest improbability is life. (31)
This is probably one of my favorite moments in the book. You
also wrote in the postscript “History enters with the image,” which caught my
attention in a different way. It made me want to ask: how would you say you
reconcile the relationship between truth in those memories that dwell in the
mind, the concrete pictures that photographs offer (which are so wonderfully
woven into the book), and the surreal imagery you paint? Or maybe you think it
is not necessary to reconcile at all?
It is an important fact that I did not have access to the
pictures that appear in this book until two years after I published it in
Spanish. It was when I returned to see Maria Cristina Caso, to whom the
postscript is dedicated. Upon reading the book, she gave me the photographs.
Maria Crisitna my aunt and her daughter, also called Maria Cristina, were
“corroborating” the story, recognizing the stories in the images. I think when
I said “History enters with an image” it has to do with the process of memory.
In the back cover’s inside there is the photo of children petting a deer, and
next to it, a dog. They were the pets of the house, and it was maybe 1924. The
younger of the sisters of my Grandmother Luz (the one who made copies of Goya and
to whom I dedicated this book) is called Teresa, and she had been born in the
year when the revolution was coming to an end but when the Spanish flu was
making its way in. These children grew up with a mental injury, and remained
children forever. All of this brings me back to the deer, which one day
came into the house and broke something that was important to my great-grandmother, and
then when Tita (Teresa) walked into the kitchen, they were beheading it. From then on, Tita did a hand gesture that pretended to be a knife
on her own neck every time someone died… People who had died from then on, were
referenced with this gesture as well. Her father who died in the sugar plant,
Ramón who dinned so much a Christmas
thirteen years ago and was found dead in the morning. In the book, a deer
crosses the garden without a head. I think that’s what they said, that the body
kept walking for a moment.
This happened not a week after a headless deer
ran through the garden.
In this house, the true stories seem like dreams.
“She is real only to the point where I
can imagine her” writes Gloria Gervitz about her mother in her book Migraciones. This is of course a point of paradox between the real and the
surreal. I recall that book that Lorca’s sister
wrote clarifying that almost everything that her brother had written “had
really happened.” This is what I proposed to myself about reality before
writing This Blue Novel:
In This Blue Novel, the words will form connections
that currently are nothing but empty spaces in my memory. In this way, with the
necessity of revealing these lacunae, these vacuums, between story and story, this book happens not in
the known stories but in the effort of going through them, of embroidering all of that unknown territory.
“In my house the dead were more than the living,” writes Octavio
Paz in his book Pasado en Claro. The objects belonging to my father’s
first wife surrounded my childhood. She died while giving birth her first
child, which is why I never met her. She is one of those dead that were more
than the living. The invention of these unknown living and dead with whom I
grew up is one of the purposes of this book. Only the poetic language can trace
reasons and connections between all these events.
What I do know is that this story ended in tragedy, but this
tragedy is only the denouement: my father destroyed all the ships in my
grandfather’s collection. This tragedy, like all tragedies, asks why? And I
chose the poetic route to answer the question. This is like what Paul Auster
does in his book The Invention of Solitude. From this same question that emerged from the way his
grandmother murdered his grandfather, that is, from a tragedy, the author
dedicates himself throughout his book to attempt to write the portrait of an
invisible man, inaccessible, a man who had been his father and whom he did not
know. Auster chooses prose to write it all, absolutely everything that he
remembers in relation to his father. I would choose poetry as my medium.
This book of poetry starts when the denouement of this
tragedy is already inevitable: my father has already destroyed that large
collection of ships that belonged to his father, my mother has already died
from cancer. The image that would best describe would be that of encountering a box of damaged
photos and make sense of the fragments through
words. In this sense, the book doesn’t have truth as purpose:
“Language is not equivalent to truth; it is our way of existing in this world,”
writes Auster in the Invention of Solitude.
- Translator Michelle
Gil-Montero expressed her thoughts about the “blue” in the book, the azul.
In her own words, the Spanish word for the color “in fact comes from,
‘lapis lazuli,’ whose own etymology conflates stone and sea and sky…” To
this she adds the blue of fire and the blue of death. For my part, I have
always associated azul with the color of the fantastic and
fairytales. And indeed, the book refers to Snow White and the Hunter,
Hansel and Gretel, Christian Saints, characters from Greek and Roman
Mythology, and more. The more I read, the more I felt you inserted the
seemingly unreal to real living spaces and lives. This long introduction
boils down to me being very interested in hearing more about the color azul
and what it means to you.
I think that an invention in the moment in which it occurs
comes from multiple places, all of the ones you mention, but the fact is that
when I told myself the title would be “This… blue… novel” the blue appeared
alone. In this book the title existed before any of the poems. All of the
epigraphs in this book elucidate the references (debts) that were already
existing for me. These are some of them:
The houses are all gone under the sea. – T.S.Eliot
Le bleu est une
couleur propice à la disparition. – Jean Michel Maulpoix
¡Todo a
voces azules el secreto de su infantil mecánica! – José Gorostiza
And to end, I think the one by Eliot became the main key:
the houses sank in the blue of the sea. The book then could not be anything
else but blue.
- I am aware you are a
translator yourself, having translated works such as Tremble, Temblar
by C.D Wright and Apalaquia, Apalachia by Charles Wright, and Torn
Awake, Arrancado del Sueño by Forrest Gander (2005). Could you also
tell us how did you find yourself as a writer and translator engaging with
the published translation of your work? Especially as you write in This
Blue Novel that “English is a language of water and good for
recounting disasters” (31).
The violent family spoke in English. This is why they
returned to that scene, making the whole first part of the book return to its
original medium for me. And Michelle Gil Montero was someone whom C.D. Wright
asked to do this translation. And I think among the innumerable debts that I
have with C.D. that I will never be able to pay back, there is the one in which
she picked Montero, who not only did a detailed job but also did so with a
great perspective on the ensemble, and with an artfulness that made the broken
cup in this book one that could be drank from.
***
Ae Hee Lee is a South Korean by birth and Peruvian by heart and memory. She is currently an MFA candidate in the creative writing program of The University of Notre Dame and works as a graduate assistant for the university’s Institute of Latino Studies. You can find (or will find) her poetry in Dialogue, Cha, Cobalt, Spark: A Creative Anthology, Ruminate, Day One, Silver Birch Press, and The Margins.
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