Interview with Ivonne Lamazares
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Ivonne Lamazares was born in Havana, and at the age of thirteen, left Cuba and settled in Miami, Florida. Her first novel, The Sugar Island (Houghton Mifflin), was translated to seven languages. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Latina Magazine, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Florida Review, A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida, Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NEA and three Florida Individual Artist Fellowships. She lives in Miami with her husband, poet Steve Kronen.
Her new novel, The Tilting House, is coming in July, published by Counterpoint Press. It tells the story of two Cuban sisters separated by politics and life, and explores migration, losses and the complexity of identity. DOVALPAGE: First, I want to tell you that I read your wonderful novel “de una sentada” in a couple of days. I lived in Havana until 1996 and it took me back there with images, descriptions, smells and everything. But let’s talk about Mariela, a Cuban-born woman whose early life in an orphanage and a foster home in Nebraska leaves an indelible mark on her. How did you envision the emotional weight of that experience shaping the adult Mariela —especially in contrast with her sister Yuri, who remained in Cuba? LAMAZARES: Thank you so much, I’m so glad to be talking with you. The Tilting House tells the story of complex, multidimensional immigrant characters, and I want to first acknowledge that you and I are speaking now in a summer of nationwide protests against the cruel and inhumane deportations enacted by this administration. Many people have taken to the streets to passionately reject the dehumanization of U.S. immigrants and this is heartening, yet it feels incredibly sad to know that we still have to march on the streets to declare that we’re not bands of criminals or rapists or poisoners of this country, and also, that we’re not blank slates or beings without history or without relationships with the countries and history and families we came from. |
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This last point was a theme I wanted to explore in The Tilting House. The idea for the book came to me when I read a blog in which a Cuban American writer was discussing her decision to return to Havana to live permanently. This is not the usual trajectory of migration that we hear about in the Cuban American community, or in the larger U.S. immigrant community, and it raised a number of questions for me that wouldn’t go away. Sandra Cisneros has said that all writing is a question, and certainly for me this is the case. I kept asking myself, what is someone seeking in returning to live in their country of origin, in this case Cuba, an island suffering from severe economic scarcity and political repression? And soon the character of Mariela came to me—a Cuban American immigrant, sent as an unaccompanied minor to the U.S. and raised in a Nebraska orphanage, now seeking to recover her Cuban origins, to become part of a home and homeland she feels she was cut off from, and determined to insert herself in the family she feels she was denied.
So often migration is presented as mostly a trajectory forward. But migration journeys can be diverse and complex and multidirectional; there is back and forth sometimes, coming and going, and I wanted to explore that motion physically and emotionally in the novel, the leaving and the returning and the in-betweenness, through the relationship of the two sisters in the story, the 16-year-old narrator Yuri whose mother has died and who lives in Havana with her strict Aunt Ruth, and Mariela, a Cuban-American immigrant who comes to visit the family in the summer of 1993 during the island’s Special Period, a major economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mariela, having grown up in a Nebraska orphanage and briefly in a foster home, has experienced severe dislocation, loss, betrayal, and abandonment. Yuri’s Aunt Ruth, who at first claims to be Mariela’s mother, sent Mariela as an unaccompanied four-year-old to the U.S. through the 1960’s Catholic-run Operation Pedro Pan. And in the process of writing about Mariela, I realized that she was an artist and that she planned to make her art in Cuba, to carve and paint and create performances and shoot rifles and use gunpowder to explode homemade little rockets in her “homeland.” She wants to leave her mark in the place she’s been denied. But having grown up in the U.S., Mariela is also clueless about the limitations on art making and self-expression that exist in Cuba, and her art projects and her uninformed, sometimes reckless behavior end up destroying the family structure that she’d wished to become part of on the island.
This irony interested me, and I wanted to explore this dichotomy and conflict. For most of the novel, Yuri resists Mariela’s version of their sisterhood. After Ruth finally reveals that her dead sister, Yuri’s Mamá, was actually Mariela’s biological mother, the relationship between Yuri and Mariela gets worse, not better. Even when Yuri and Mariela confront parallel losses—orphanhood, abandonment—they seem unable to establish solidarity in their common grief. They reel from the loss of the same mother, but their experiences of that grief are radically different. This interested me personally—the fact that so often individuals going through a common loss have difficulty understanding one another. I experienced some of this as a child. My mother died when I was three years old, and I had great difficulty expressing and owning my grief while I lived with my grandmother’s intense and what felt like all-consuming suffering over her daughter’s death from cancer at the age of 25. My grandmother and I grieved the same person, but my grandmother’s ongoing outpouring of sadness had the effect of muting or hollowing-out my own. My grandmother assumed, or perhaps wanted to believe, that I didn’t suffer over my mother’s absence because, like Mariela, I had no conscious memories of my mother. My grandmother loved me and cared for me, but we couldn’t really share our pain, and as a child I felt that my loss, in comparison to hers, couldn’t be as legitimate or important. It wasn’t until I visited Cuba again in 2012 after a 36-year absence that I was finally able to grieve my mother at her grave, as an adult.
And as I wrote more about these two sisters—one without memories or a sense of her own mother and history and motherland vs. someone who has experienced these things and then loses them—I began to think about whether we can ultimately recover our origins as Mariela wants to do. And in an attempt to recover those origins, what disruptions occur, what unintended consequences, especially when someone goes back to join a family dynamic or a culture and history they were never a part of. What does the arrival of immigrant Mariela do to the family that stayed in Cuba? And ultimately, where is home for an immigrant, especially for an orphan raised far away from her original culture and family, as is Mariela in the novel? How do we as immigrants (and all humans for that matter) integrate a difficult past with our present, especially when there is trauma, loss, oppression, grief, and disruption of family relationships and narratives? How do we come to give justice to ourselves and to each other and to integrate those experiences compassionately into who we are today?
DOVALPAGE: Your answer illuminates not only the novel, but our past and present history. Yes, integrating them, particularly the losses, is often hard. And deciding where “home” is for an immigrant is even harder.
Speaking of home and houses, there’s a powerful contrast between the dilapidated house in Paladero and the modernist setting of El Focsa building, with its “revolutionary” foreigners like the Chilean family, and echoes of international socialism. How do you see this physical transition reflecting the ideological or emotional changes in Yuri and Mariela?
LAMAZARES: The collapse of Ruth’s dilapidated house is a pivotal event in the novel and in the narrator Yuri’s life. This physical collapse of Ruth’s house marks for Yuri the most painful and concrete manifestation of her losses since Mariela’s arrival in Havana. When Ruth is arrested because of Mariela’s art, and the house physically comes down, nothing of Yuri’s former world remains. Yuri fears ending up in the Llega y Pon squatters’ zone in her Paladero neighborhood, but Mariela assures her, in her privileged fashion, that “we are not Llega y Pon people.” And indeed, Mariela arranges for the two of them to go live in El Focsa, a modernist high rise overlooking Havana Bay and one of the best residencies in the city.
In the novel I tried to present a contrast between Llega y Pon squatters in Paladero living in degraded circumstances, Ruth’s old bourgeois dwelling with a garage and a former servant’s room which crumbles the same way that the old regime it represents has crumbled, and the El Focsa high rise, reserved under the revolution for the socialist intelligentsia (foreign and domestic) and for the elite in the new society. Ironically, Yuri and Mariela are able to join this elite space because Mariela has American dollars, and as a result has been able to acquire influence and stature in Cuban society. While Mariela exhibits a capitalistic sense of class privilege when she assures Yuri that she and Yuri are “not Llega y Pon people,” Mariela is at the same time promoted within official Cuban media and art circles as a symbol of the failures of capitalism and of the Cuban exile community; in fact, Mariela proudly declares in Cuban media interviews that her birthright and duty were to fight alongside the Cuban people and she portrays herself as part of the revolution “she’d been wrenched from.”
These realities highlight some powerful ironies present in Cuban society. For example, I wanted to present the social class differences that continue to exist under a government that bills itself as an anti-colonialist, socialist, egalitarian movement. It’s been my experience, both as a child growing up in Soviet-style Cuba, and in my return visit to Havana in 2012, that corruption and privilege continue to suffuse everyday life on the island. At the same time, the novel explores some of global capitalism’s inequities, and it also presents how some Cubans on the island, suffering from ongoing scarcity and lack of personal and political freedom, long for, and in some cases romanticize, the U.S. capitalist model.
DOVALPAGE: The irony was so well done. As a reader, I got to trust the narrative voice, seeing that no place was idealized. And I certainly remember the Focsa building and barrios like Llega y Pon. Your portrait of them was certainly accurate. Same with Viñales, where Mariela creates “Nadies,” impermanent art figures that were not supposed to last. Was her artistic vision inspired, even tangentially, by the work of Ana Mendieta in terms of exile, loss, and embodiment?
LAMAZARES: You’re right that Ana Mendieta’s art, especially her work in Cuba, was an inspiration to me, as was Tania Bruguera’s. But Mendieta, as far as I know, didn’t shoot at her creations with a modern weapon, and this was something that I felt Mariela was compelled to do. So for the Nadies that Mariela creates and then shoots at and partially destroys, I was particularly inspired by Niki de St. Phalle’s shooting paintings. I was also inspired by the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who uses gunpowder and creates explosions to explore themes of destruction and transformation.
Mariela’s shooting actions and performances seemed to me to speak to her desire to create and destroy at the same time, to defy and also to reenact her losses and to put herself, in her own words, in “the moment of grief.” Mariela shoots at her Nadies figures using Mamá’s old rifle, and this is a powerfully symbolic and cathartic action for her. The Nadies figures (Nobodies, Forgottens, as Mariela calls them) serve also as representations of a larger, lost history; Mariela identifies these figures with the Taino and African goddesses lost through colonialism, and she attempts to connect her own lost personal history and orphanhood with the larger history of loss and genocide in the Americas.
DOVALPAGE: Thanks for clarifying that. I am going to look for these artists’ works! Yuri renames herself Julie after settling in the U.S. This shift feels symbolic but also practical. What does the change of name mean to you in the context of migration and self-reinvention?
LAMAZARES: Yuri renames herself Julie in Miami, without planning to do so, in a kind of impulse, an attempt, to distance herself from her past. She tells the man that she eventually marries, and soon divorces, that her name is Julie partly in order to avoid speaking to him about her background and losses.
Her desire to re-name herself strikes me in part as an immigrant’s desire to fit in, or adapt to, or survive in a new culture and language. But there’s more to it than that in Yuri’s case. When Yuri says she’s trying to become someone of “her own invention,” she also hopes, perhaps not entirely consciously, that by shedding her old name and identity she can start over and be free of the past. But by running away from her past Yuri remains stuck in it, and part of her journey in the novel is to attempt to integrate Yuri and Julie.
DOVALPAGE: The journey to integration is indeed long and winding. As an immigrant who underwent a last name change, I totally connected with Yuri’s struggles. Also, her name conveys the reference to Gagarin, which your Cuban-savvy readers will relish.
You left Cuba as a teenager, like Yuri. How did your own experience of migration inform the emotional arc of the novel? Are there elements of your own story braided into the sisters’ journeys?
LAMAZARES: Actually, the literal events of the novel do not reflect my personal experiences, but as you say, parts of the emotional trajectory of the two sisters echo my own. One of the reasons that it took me so long to begin this novel was that at first I tried to write it from the perspective of a middle-aged woman. I was trying to stay away from teenage narrators. But that was a dry, long struggle that yielded little; the writing was flat and static. It wasn’t until I came upon Yuri’s voice, a teenage girl of about the same age I was when I migrated to the U.S., that I found my way into the story. It seems that I had to write from that moment of migration as an adolescent, a time in my life of great vulnerability and possibility.
When I migrated at 13 with my father’s parents, I experienced, like Yuri, a radical rewriting of my family’s narrative. I had been told that in migrating to the U.S. I would reunite with my biological father who had left Cuba when I was six, and my grandparents, too, would reunite with their only son. We would become a family, and I would live with my surviving parent. I longed for this as a child and adolescent. But my biological father soon abandoned both me and his parents, and when he resurfaced sometime later he proved to be abusive.
As in Yuri’s case, it took me years to process the collapse of the family narrative I’d grown up with and to move from surviving to emotionally thriving. I’ve been extremely lucky to have the support of many in finding a way to live, not in a tilting house of grief, but in a house of many rooms, one of which contains the losses of the past. But it’s now only one room, not the whole house.
DOVALPAGE: That is great! Thanks for the tilting house that you so expertly built for your readers. And for sharing your personal story with Latino Book Review. Muchas gracias for agreeing to this interview!
So often migration is presented as mostly a trajectory forward. But migration journeys can be diverse and complex and multidirectional; there is back and forth sometimes, coming and going, and I wanted to explore that motion physically and emotionally in the novel, the leaving and the returning and the in-betweenness, through the relationship of the two sisters in the story, the 16-year-old narrator Yuri whose mother has died and who lives in Havana with her strict Aunt Ruth, and Mariela, a Cuban-American immigrant who comes to visit the family in the summer of 1993 during the island’s Special Period, a major economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mariela, having grown up in a Nebraska orphanage and briefly in a foster home, has experienced severe dislocation, loss, betrayal, and abandonment. Yuri’s Aunt Ruth, who at first claims to be Mariela’s mother, sent Mariela as an unaccompanied four-year-old to the U.S. through the 1960’s Catholic-run Operation Pedro Pan. And in the process of writing about Mariela, I realized that she was an artist and that she planned to make her art in Cuba, to carve and paint and create performances and shoot rifles and use gunpowder to explode homemade little rockets in her “homeland.” She wants to leave her mark in the place she’s been denied. But having grown up in the U.S., Mariela is also clueless about the limitations on art making and self-expression that exist in Cuba, and her art projects and her uninformed, sometimes reckless behavior end up destroying the family structure that she’d wished to become part of on the island.
This irony interested me, and I wanted to explore this dichotomy and conflict. For most of the novel, Yuri resists Mariela’s version of their sisterhood. After Ruth finally reveals that her dead sister, Yuri’s Mamá, was actually Mariela’s biological mother, the relationship between Yuri and Mariela gets worse, not better. Even when Yuri and Mariela confront parallel losses—orphanhood, abandonment—they seem unable to establish solidarity in their common grief. They reel from the loss of the same mother, but their experiences of that grief are radically different. This interested me personally—the fact that so often individuals going through a common loss have difficulty understanding one another. I experienced some of this as a child. My mother died when I was three years old, and I had great difficulty expressing and owning my grief while I lived with my grandmother’s intense and what felt like all-consuming suffering over her daughter’s death from cancer at the age of 25. My grandmother and I grieved the same person, but my grandmother’s ongoing outpouring of sadness had the effect of muting or hollowing-out my own. My grandmother assumed, or perhaps wanted to believe, that I didn’t suffer over my mother’s absence because, like Mariela, I had no conscious memories of my mother. My grandmother loved me and cared for me, but we couldn’t really share our pain, and as a child I felt that my loss, in comparison to hers, couldn’t be as legitimate or important. It wasn’t until I visited Cuba again in 2012 after a 36-year absence that I was finally able to grieve my mother at her grave, as an adult.
And as I wrote more about these two sisters—one without memories or a sense of her own mother and history and motherland vs. someone who has experienced these things and then loses them—I began to think about whether we can ultimately recover our origins as Mariela wants to do. And in an attempt to recover those origins, what disruptions occur, what unintended consequences, especially when someone goes back to join a family dynamic or a culture and history they were never a part of. What does the arrival of immigrant Mariela do to the family that stayed in Cuba? And ultimately, where is home for an immigrant, especially for an orphan raised far away from her original culture and family, as is Mariela in the novel? How do we as immigrants (and all humans for that matter) integrate a difficult past with our present, especially when there is trauma, loss, oppression, grief, and disruption of family relationships and narratives? How do we come to give justice to ourselves and to each other and to integrate those experiences compassionately into who we are today?
DOVALPAGE: Your answer illuminates not only the novel, but our past and present history. Yes, integrating them, particularly the losses, is often hard. And deciding where “home” is for an immigrant is even harder.
Speaking of home and houses, there’s a powerful contrast between the dilapidated house in Paladero and the modernist setting of El Focsa building, with its “revolutionary” foreigners like the Chilean family, and echoes of international socialism. How do you see this physical transition reflecting the ideological or emotional changes in Yuri and Mariela?
LAMAZARES: The collapse of Ruth’s dilapidated house is a pivotal event in the novel and in the narrator Yuri’s life. This physical collapse of Ruth’s house marks for Yuri the most painful and concrete manifestation of her losses since Mariela’s arrival in Havana. When Ruth is arrested because of Mariela’s art, and the house physically comes down, nothing of Yuri’s former world remains. Yuri fears ending up in the Llega y Pon squatters’ zone in her Paladero neighborhood, but Mariela assures her, in her privileged fashion, that “we are not Llega y Pon people.” And indeed, Mariela arranges for the two of them to go live in El Focsa, a modernist high rise overlooking Havana Bay and one of the best residencies in the city.
In the novel I tried to present a contrast between Llega y Pon squatters in Paladero living in degraded circumstances, Ruth’s old bourgeois dwelling with a garage and a former servant’s room which crumbles the same way that the old regime it represents has crumbled, and the El Focsa high rise, reserved under the revolution for the socialist intelligentsia (foreign and domestic) and for the elite in the new society. Ironically, Yuri and Mariela are able to join this elite space because Mariela has American dollars, and as a result has been able to acquire influence and stature in Cuban society. While Mariela exhibits a capitalistic sense of class privilege when she assures Yuri that she and Yuri are “not Llega y Pon people,” Mariela is at the same time promoted within official Cuban media and art circles as a symbol of the failures of capitalism and of the Cuban exile community; in fact, Mariela proudly declares in Cuban media interviews that her birthright and duty were to fight alongside the Cuban people and she portrays herself as part of the revolution “she’d been wrenched from.”
These realities highlight some powerful ironies present in Cuban society. For example, I wanted to present the social class differences that continue to exist under a government that bills itself as an anti-colonialist, socialist, egalitarian movement. It’s been my experience, both as a child growing up in Soviet-style Cuba, and in my return visit to Havana in 2012, that corruption and privilege continue to suffuse everyday life on the island. At the same time, the novel explores some of global capitalism’s inequities, and it also presents how some Cubans on the island, suffering from ongoing scarcity and lack of personal and political freedom, long for, and in some cases romanticize, the U.S. capitalist model.
DOVALPAGE: The irony was so well done. As a reader, I got to trust the narrative voice, seeing that no place was idealized. And I certainly remember the Focsa building and barrios like Llega y Pon. Your portrait of them was certainly accurate. Same with Viñales, where Mariela creates “Nadies,” impermanent art figures that were not supposed to last. Was her artistic vision inspired, even tangentially, by the work of Ana Mendieta in terms of exile, loss, and embodiment?
LAMAZARES: You’re right that Ana Mendieta’s art, especially her work in Cuba, was an inspiration to me, as was Tania Bruguera’s. But Mendieta, as far as I know, didn’t shoot at her creations with a modern weapon, and this was something that I felt Mariela was compelled to do. So for the Nadies that Mariela creates and then shoots at and partially destroys, I was particularly inspired by Niki de St. Phalle’s shooting paintings. I was also inspired by the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who uses gunpowder and creates explosions to explore themes of destruction and transformation.
Mariela’s shooting actions and performances seemed to me to speak to her desire to create and destroy at the same time, to defy and also to reenact her losses and to put herself, in her own words, in “the moment of grief.” Mariela shoots at her Nadies figures using Mamá’s old rifle, and this is a powerfully symbolic and cathartic action for her. The Nadies figures (Nobodies, Forgottens, as Mariela calls them) serve also as representations of a larger, lost history; Mariela identifies these figures with the Taino and African goddesses lost through colonialism, and she attempts to connect her own lost personal history and orphanhood with the larger history of loss and genocide in the Americas.
DOVALPAGE: Thanks for clarifying that. I am going to look for these artists’ works! Yuri renames herself Julie after settling in the U.S. This shift feels symbolic but also practical. What does the change of name mean to you in the context of migration and self-reinvention?
LAMAZARES: Yuri renames herself Julie in Miami, without planning to do so, in a kind of impulse, an attempt, to distance herself from her past. She tells the man that she eventually marries, and soon divorces, that her name is Julie partly in order to avoid speaking to him about her background and losses.
Her desire to re-name herself strikes me in part as an immigrant’s desire to fit in, or adapt to, or survive in a new culture and language. But there’s more to it than that in Yuri’s case. When Yuri says she’s trying to become someone of “her own invention,” she also hopes, perhaps not entirely consciously, that by shedding her old name and identity she can start over and be free of the past. But by running away from her past Yuri remains stuck in it, and part of her journey in the novel is to attempt to integrate Yuri and Julie.
DOVALPAGE: The journey to integration is indeed long and winding. As an immigrant who underwent a last name change, I totally connected with Yuri’s struggles. Also, her name conveys the reference to Gagarin, which your Cuban-savvy readers will relish.
You left Cuba as a teenager, like Yuri. How did your own experience of migration inform the emotional arc of the novel? Are there elements of your own story braided into the sisters’ journeys?
LAMAZARES: Actually, the literal events of the novel do not reflect my personal experiences, but as you say, parts of the emotional trajectory of the two sisters echo my own. One of the reasons that it took me so long to begin this novel was that at first I tried to write it from the perspective of a middle-aged woman. I was trying to stay away from teenage narrators. But that was a dry, long struggle that yielded little; the writing was flat and static. It wasn’t until I came upon Yuri’s voice, a teenage girl of about the same age I was when I migrated to the U.S., that I found my way into the story. It seems that I had to write from that moment of migration as an adolescent, a time in my life of great vulnerability and possibility.
When I migrated at 13 with my father’s parents, I experienced, like Yuri, a radical rewriting of my family’s narrative. I had been told that in migrating to the U.S. I would reunite with my biological father who had left Cuba when I was six, and my grandparents, too, would reunite with their only son. We would become a family, and I would live with my surviving parent. I longed for this as a child and adolescent. But my biological father soon abandoned both me and his parents, and when he resurfaced sometime later he proved to be abusive.
As in Yuri’s case, it took me years to process the collapse of the family narrative I’d grown up with and to move from surviving to emotionally thriving. I’ve been extremely lucky to have the support of many in finding a way to live, not in a tilting house of grief, but in a house of many rooms, one of which contains the losses of the past. But it’s now only one room, not the whole house.
DOVALPAGE: That is great! Thanks for the tilting house that you so expertly built for your readers. And for sharing your personal story with Latino Book Review. Muchas gracias for agreeing to this interview!
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