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Ruin & Want interview excerpt, pt. 2

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Continuing sharing excerpts from my Sundress Publications interview with Izzy Astuto. Here, I go off at length at the process of entangling myself in the project, navigating trauma and self-work, and then having to find my way out via the final draft.

Do consider pre-ordering if you’re able and interested. Either way, enjoy my rambling route and stay tuned for more!

Izzy Astuto: Can you speak more about how you chose the specific experiences throughout to create this narrative?

José: This book started as my creative dissertation during my time earning a Ph.D. My focus was on Latinx/e poetics and hybrid forms. This timing would have the first draft of the book circa 2017. I had tried often to write about these experiences, but often found myself fraught with inarticulation. Some part of me wouldn’t allow me to say it clearly, there was a sense of shame, guilt, responsibility, etc. that kept me starting over only to end up thwarted again. As a lapsed Catholic, I believe I just wanted to self-flagellate (which makes for terrible reading, haha). When I began working on what would become the first draft, I was struck by idea of fragmentation and juxtaposition as formal means to bring together various narratives. 

From there, I worked out that while the relationship with L would be the focus, it could also be used as a lens to engage with the ways the harm from being involved with L had played out in me. So, instead of shame and self-flagellation, the goal became naming what happened and acknowledging it as a part of my history, a part of my self, for better or worse. One of the other sources of thwarting was the fear that by writing about it I would vilify L in an unfair way. Lines were crossed, yes, and naming them is enough; vilifying someone, especially in creative nonfiction, however, implies that there is a hero to that villain. What I felt / feel having survived that relationship and its effects is complicated, for sure, but I don’t feel like a hero. I feel like a ruin, so many scraps of identity, none of them cohering.

Only now, 23 years later, do I feel I am doing the work to bring these pieces together. By doing the work to name what happened I had to get over myself. An example of that is in the use of the word survivor, that for the longest time I wouldn’t let myself see myself as that. I also wouldn’t let myself call what L did to me predatory. Yet, after being an educator myself for a number of years and engaging in that space where learning happens, I couldn’t ignore the thought that arose that L was in the same position I was and made the choices she made. I can’t imagine crossing the same lines with any of my students, can’t imagine betraying the trust of being looked at for help and resources and building, and twisting it into something selfish and harmful.

Reflecting and dwelling on the complexities of thoughts like this forced me to see how the story of L wasn’t just the story of L, but also the story of my youth being stunted; was also the story of my family as authority figures that helped me survive but also harmed me through their homophobia; was also the story of my confused, misguided young self that went through early relationships in college and after that were marked by efforts to dismantle toxic masculinity within me while also trying to live up to toxic masculinity’s idea of what makes a man; was also the story of a white woman doing harm to a brown boy, the racial and power imbalance something that follows me to this day; was also the story of dismantling not just toxic masculinity in its social forms but also in their academic and literary forms…

…how someone like e.e. cummings is beloved yet when you read his deep into his work and biography you learn he was cringe; was also the story of a man having an eating disorder, something that gets discredited due to the same toxic heteronormative gender binary people use to discredit men who have experienced sexual abuse. Really, in a way, the 2017 draft was the outpouring of material, and the time since then to publication has been organizing, editing, and discovering the story from the ruins, so to speak.

More tomorrow!

José

microreview: Dear Outsiders by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

review by José Angel Araguz

One of the first clues into the framing narrative of Dear Outsiders by Jenny Sadre-Orafai comes straight from its stunning cover. This image of two people blending into one only to reveal the sea, one learns through reading, works to evoke the experience of the two siblings who serve as the speakers for this collection. Sadre-Orafai makes use of the first-person plural throughout in ways that reflect the blurring of boundaries and experience.

The presence of the sea is a starker matter; its presence speaks to the death by drowning of the siblings’ parents. The other element to take note of is the title itself. The first-person plural “we” here often feels like it’s addressing the reader in a direct, intimate way, similar to a letter.

These elements come together in startling and powerful ways. In “Low Recitation,” for example, a scene of the two siblings looking over maps quickly devolves:

We try to see different pictures, but the blue is kudzu, silencing the land. Name the world’s seven continents. Name the world’s five oceans. We think we see our mother’s body shape there.

Here, note the way the first sentence describes a sensory conflict, the siblings unable to “see” the map as a map. This sensory conflict, despite the effort to focus and “name,” further develops, with the final sentence in this excerpt showing how grief is pushing through. This sudden impression of their dead mother brings to mind the way grief can be said to come in “waves.”

The image of waves is ideal in getting a sense of the accumulative reading experience Dear Outsiders invites. There are poems depicting memories, some light, some dark; there are recurring statements as well as rich evocations of sea and beach town life. There are also a number of list poems, each a catalogue of reflecting from the details of this world in a rich, revealing ways. In “Boat Call,” a list of boat names ranges from the expected (“Argo / Cheers / Anchor Boy”) and the humorous (“Knot From Around Here”) to the more emotionally charged (“Verdant Hope” “Don’t Panic”).

This sequence helps add a further depth to the narrative. Along with further details of the world of these poems, they also work to vary the tone. In fact, the range in tone across the collection is a revelation to itself.

Yet, even in this variation, grief is underscored. “Historical Overview” has the siblings sharing:

Our parents tell us that all the water in the world has been here forever. The world will never make new water. Don’t bother trying to ask in your baby song.

This sobering, stern tone alongside the more distant, objective tone of the list poems are moments in the collection that give a sense of the siblings as children “trying on” specific tones modeled by their parents. By varying between these “parent” tones and the list poems, the more intimate, mourning tone comes across all the more charged and urgent.

This mirroring of the parents becomes clear by the end of the collection when an earlier reference to the parents keeping an inventory of what the siblings wear each day (“in case we’re abducted”) is brought back to mind in the final list poem, “In Case of Abduction.” This list poem is made up of three columns: one column of dates faces two columns listing sets of clothes worn; the gut punch comes toward the end of the poem which is made up of a series of dates but nothing listed for them.

The visual of this last list poem–that of an incomplete list–drives home the distinct elegiac experience Sadre-Orafai has created here for us. The days keep going, while the one keeping track of them does not. At the core of this experience is family, those people in our lives whose presence point us to the past and future as much as the present.

The title, then, takes on another meaning in the face of these multi-layered relationship. When one close to us dies, they, too, become dear despite being outside this existence.

*

Dear Outsiders can be purchased from University of Akron Press.
Check out more poems from Dear Outsiders here.
Here’s another microreview, this time of Sadre-Orafai’s Malak.
Find out more about Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s work, at her site.