Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is a foremost voice in contemporary Mexican literature. Known for her frequently dark subject matter and hybrid styles, her work focuses on marginalized people, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions about boundaries and transgression. She has won major literary awards and is the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (in 2011 and 2009). Her latest work to be translated into English, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, has just been published by Feminist Press and is a hybrid collection of journalism, crónicas, and essays, that explore systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. To coincide with its much-anticipated release, Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with Cristina Rivera Garza about the ideas behind this compelling work.
“Let me just bring some tea, and I’ll be right back!” Cristina Rivera Garza dashed out of her Zoom screen briefly before settling back into her chair and adjusting her glasses with a warm smile, her air of familiarity challenging the oppressiveness of the geographical and technological distance to which we’ve lately become accustomed. In the following interview, we discuss Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, the striking latest collaboration between Garza and translator Sarah Booker. She reflects upon the demands that she makes of syntax, the enigmatic character of reality, the importance of solidarity and imagination, and how she and Booker coined the term “The Visceraless State.” Very much of the borderland between Mexico and the United States, her work meets the global, contemporary moment not despite its specificity, but because of it.
—Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor
Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve stated in interviews, and it’s apparent in your work, that you intentionally test the limits between what language normally does and what it can do in order to discover new experiential possibilities between writer, text, and reader. I wonder if you could point to places in the text where you tested and stretched the limits of Spanish but were not able to do so the same way in English and vice versa. How do Spanish and English need to be challenged differently?
Cristina Rivera Garza (CRG): Every single project has to challenge language in specific ways. It always depends on the materials that I’m exploring, affecting, and letting myself be affected by, and there are specific ways that you can do that both in English and in Spanish. I tend to write longer sentences in Spanish and more fragmentarily in English, for example. When I am getting too long-winded in Spanish, I try to convey that thought with the directness and economy I associate with my relationship with English. At times, I try to use the semicolon in English, just because it is more common in Spanish and I want to see what happens to both sentence and sense. Constantly borrowing from English and borrowing from Spanish and taking traces and echoes from one language into the other, trying to honor and replicate the tension and friction that maintains them together where I live and how I think, has been almost a natural way of continuing to challenge both.
Sarah [Booker, translator of Grieving] is such a deft translator and we now know each other quite well. She’s been translating my work for a number of years and we have a very open, fluid conversation as she goes into the translation process: less a process of moving language from one context to a another, and more a search for similar effects based on the affective capacities of host and receiving languages. I work closely with syntax, especially if I’m exploring issues such as violence and suffering. Pause, breathlessness, all those aspects of a body going through tremendous pressure or pain inflicted—in terms of keeping both form and content responding to the same challenges, it is important that syntax and semantics are somehow reflecting and embodying that experience. That’s when writing occurs.
I think of translation as a creative process too. I see Sarah as my co-author and her work as a way through which I receive my book back anew. I think she’s a poet at heart. I don’t know if she knows that, but all those experiments with language, that’s something she’s very deft at.
LS: There seems to be a level of communication between the two of you that’s liberated from language. Do you find different responses to those passages from native English and Spanish-speaking readers?
CRG: I’ve written most of my work while living in the States, so all of these works that I have written originally in Spanish are heavily influenced by English and United States literary traditions. The kind of work that I’m interested in is not very conventional in form, and I’m very adept at challenging my readers’ expectations. That’s something that readers in the Spanish-speaking world have gotten used to, more or less, although I do still get comments like, “Oh, I didn’t understand that,” though not understanding something right might as well be a fundamental part of the contract of the reading experience.
Translations, specifically English translations of my work, have allowed these books to go back to the language in which they were originally conceived, if not originally written in. These books are not going figuratively to new places, but returning to a place—and language—of origin. Perhaps that’s the reason why some readers of the English versions have been able to trace literary references or winks, even inner jokes, that have gone unnoticed by readers in the Spanish-speaking world. The cultural nuance that goes into this process fascinates me. On the other hand, readers in Mexico, for example, are able to pick up on issues that are of little relevance for readers of the United States. In any case, reading continues to be a productive process, and a very creative one at that.
LS: Grieving is a collection of shorter texts written over the course of about a decade, but when read as a whole, you become a character, a protagonist and narrator, in a story with a rather unconventional arc, with frequent climaxes and an indeterminate resolution. “Your” character is not unlike some of the protagonists in your fiction, detectives who interrogate and search without finding tidy conclusions. The resonance comes through especially in “The Visceraless State,” in which you investigate the end of the State’s concern for the bodies and lives of its citizens via a series of correspondence between a sick woman and her representatives. What is it about that figure that intrigues you, and how does it function differently in fiction and nonfiction?
CRG: Just as detectives who work with “cases,” I see myself as working with enigmas. Reality is convoluted, troublesome, problematic, horrific, and above all enigmatic. I am in that sense a “detective of language,” indeed. Unlike real-life detectives, however, I don’t aspire to resolve the riddle, find the culprit or uncover the story, but to share a secret. Preserving the enigma and sharing it as such, as an enigma, is central to what I do.
When we were putting together this English version of the book, we discussed issues of pertinence: how well these essays, or texts—pieces—would communicate with English-speaking audiences now. I wanted to keep the kind of immediacy that I was working with when I first wrote several of these pieces, but I also had to reflect on time, the passing of time, and the pertinence of my themes and approaches. Sadly, we are still in a grieving world. Sadly, we may still need books such as this one.
A note on the making of the book: I was writing a weekly column for a number of years—seven years—for a Mexican newspaper, Millenio, and I had to write around 5–6,000-character pieces. But it forced me to be very alert, to be on my toes all the time, trying to discern which among the many things that were happening was relevant enough, strong enough, attractive enough, enigmatic enough even, to devote time to.
I wrote about a range of issues, ranging from new books to expos, movies, and trips, but the pieces that eventually comprised Dolerse (Grieving) were selected in conjunction with the editor of this book in Spanish, Saul Hernandez Vargas, who was the first to notice I was writing a book. He saw the axis, the set of questions, that held these pieces together as a unit. I was just writing my column, interested in the present. I wanted to be a contemporary of my contemporaries. I wanted to share that sense of urgency and emergency that I felt all around me. He was the one who said, “You have a book here. And I want to publish that book.” We replicated that process with Lauren [the senior editor] at the Feminist Press. We were trying to keep the sense of the context, historical context, without losing the specificities of our time. So I added some more recent essays, not included in my columns in the 2000s, and some other pieces that I’ve been writing more recently but that are still very much responding to that presentness.
Now about “The Visceraless State”: I’m a trained historian, and one of the things that I do when I visit places is visit archives. Instead of asking my host where the trendy bars and restaurants are, I’m like, “What about archives?” If there’s an interesting one, I try to spend some time there. That happened when I visited Mexicali, which is the capital of Baja California Norte. I was looking for the files of the state insane asylum there. I had visited the ruins, which are located in this very powerful place called Campo Alaska. The name, in and of itself is striking, stunning, poetic, and the physical landscape is incredible.
That’s how I came across the letters that I quoted in that piece. They were just stunning to me. The amount of intimacy, the level of care, the trust that this woman placed in the bureaucracy, in authority figures, was just absolutely alien to me. It made me think, “Well, no wonder she was in an insane asylum, she was crazy, right?” Just her trust that the governor was going to be paying attention to what she wrote about the ailments of her own body, prompted the question: “What kind of world was she living in?” I wouldn’t even dare to speak about my body, sometimes not even to my doctors, but certainly not to authority figures. For sure, I would never send a letter to a governor thinking that he or she would pay attention to my intimate circumstances.
I was trying to figure out why that was the case. Instead of thinking of her just as a crazy woman, which would have been the easiest way out, I thought about someone whose belief system was in fact grounded in a relationship, real or perceived as real, between her body and the state. So I had to revise my notions about the bond between bodies and power in general, and more specifically about the link between bodies and the Mexican state during the early twentieth century. Unlike the relationship that I had developed with the neoliberal state of the late twentieth century, she believed that it was the responsibility of the state to take care, not only of her body, but also of her remains.
I could have written a short story, I guess, but at that point I was very interested in thinking about the state as such, through that relationship. In Spanish, and this is very hard to translate, el cuerpo entrañable is something that is near to your heart, right? Something that is close to your viscera in a material, almost palpable way. It is visceral. But ‘visceral’ in English takes on meanings not necessarily encompassed by entrañable in Spanish. Still, it is close, or at least, close enough. It gets there, but not quite there, right? And it loses the endearing aspect of that relationship, which is included in the word entrañable. Sarah’s first attempt at this translation was to stay with the heart, ‘the heartless state.’ But I thought it was too corny. We tried several solutions and we ended up with ‘visceral.’ It’s not exactly entrañable, but I think it conveys the argument about a radical transformation of the relationships emanating from the Mexican State, which were related to or founded on certain understandings of the body and of the state responsibility towards the body.
This relationship transformed later with the changing mores of the state, as both the administration and the economy decided that economic gain was to become our ruling contract. Life, human life, and life altogether, the life of plants and the life of animals, no longer deserved the attention and care of the state. In fact, the state became a killing machine. Those letters from that woman in that insane asylum encapsulated a very complex, deeply felt, incredibly important human relationship to a state that I no longer had a connection with, a state that had been radically transformed by the late twentieth century.
LS: This word “visceraless” perhaps wasn’t a perfect solution for you, but . . . I’m not actually certain if it’s a real word or not. It strikes me as not quite being a real word, “visceraless” . . .
CRG: Visceral is! “Visceraless” may not be grammatically correct, but it brings that strangeness to it.
LS: It makes you pause and engage with it, which is an effect that maybe compensates for its imperfection.
CRG: I think it is much better than “a state with a heart.” That sounded too hippy to me. Lots of respect for hippies, but it’s not what I was going for.
LS: Another theme that comes up in your fiction, particularly The Iliac Crest, also translated by Sarah Booker, is the language(s) that women speak amongst ourselves. This theme shows up in Grieving as well, in the way you weave into the stories the voices of other Mexican women with their distinct historical eras, social backgrounds, and mediums of communication. You create a plane, a wavelength of sorts, characterized by great resistance and resilience, by which they can connect. Do you think that exploring that possibility in fiction prepared you to set it into motion through your nonfiction?
CRG: It worked both ways. I wish that publishing this work, this Dolerse, this Grieving, didn’t make sense anymore. I wish the situation had changed dramatically and that writing and publishing a piece like Grieving could be senseless. But it does make sense because the world is still a very complicated place, with inequalities of class, gender, and race and violence of all sorts. One of the things that makes me feel hopeful is a mobilization in which women are instigators, not just reactors.
I grew up in a time in which it was very easy for both men and women writers to avoid discussions about gender and the body because we were “artists,” and art and writing were not supposed to be tarnished by the interests of everyday life. I’ve always been a contrarian. I’ve always believed that writing is a community-making practice. I’ve always thought of writing as intimately, necessarily connected to the communities in which we live and which, ideally, we serve. So, I’ve never had any problem including social issues not only as topics of my writing, but as this spine, this inner skeleton, that keeps all the exercises together.
I’ve been paying attention to women’s issues and women’s mobilizations as long as I’ve been a writer—and alive. Witnessing the increasing mobilizations and effectiveness of the mobilizations led by women, and specifically by younger generations of women, makes me on the one hand sad, because those are still necessary, but on the other hand very hopeful. I see a very energized, incredibly smart and effective group of people working together to fight against discrimination, inequality, and violence in all its forms.
There are scenes in The Iliac Crest in which the women speak a language that is not shared. It’s a private language. And I think we all do that every now and then. We let, or we don’t let, people be privy to our conversations depending on the kinds of alliances and solidarities that we are building. Books, depending on how they are written, are doors. They are not doors that open indiscriminately. You give keys to certain people, because you are creating alliances too.
LS: You quote from Arundhati Roy’s recent essay “The Pandemic as a Portal” in the final essay of the collection, and I see a lot of affinity between it and Grieving for a lot of reasons, but there are two that I’d like to discuss: firstly, the role of and call for imagination as a tool, like a hammer, that we carry with us as we construct our present and future; and second, the really rigorous, unflinching examination of the transition moment between what you call “horror,” which is paralyzing, and “grieving,” which is active and generative. How does, and how can, the artistic imagination translate into the sort of collective imagination that transforms material reality?
CRG: I’m convinced that one of our greatest enemies is indolence, the incapacity to feel the pain of others, the incapacity for empathy. On the other side of indolence—exactly why the Spanish version of this book is called Dolerse—is a willingness to feel the pain, your pain to begin with, but the pain of others too. The closest translation for that was Grieving. I perceive grieving to be an opposite force against indolence. I believe that grieving might become the spark that makes you react in different, compassionate ways. Just to get up from your chair and be willing to do a little bit more, even clicking. Everything is important, I believe.
The very basis for all those works is imagination, which we work very closely with as we write. I remember myself as a child, not liking the world in which I was living, and reading and finding that the world could be something else, something entirely different. Books didn’t tell me what to do or lecture me. But what they gave me, something that I cherish and hope my books can give back, is the assurance that the world can be a different place. That we can reshape it. That we can participate in different ways, generate different ways of engaging, of reaching one another, and of constructing our everyday life. I think writing, when it works, gives you that possibility. Imagination is the basic mechanism, the most radical of operations.
LS: This collection is specifically about Mexico—its past, present, and future; its suffering; and its interpretation both of many of the -isms that plague contemporary humanity and the modes by which we resist them. But it is simultaneously nonexclusive. It invites solidarity amongst the global horrified and the global grieving. What characterizes and how do you craft, a literature that simultaneously honors the specific and embodies the solidarity that it calls for?
CRG: There’s a quote by Walter Benjamin that has something to do with how the very small already contains the very large. The quote, I’m sure, is incredibly beautiful and poetic and polysemic, and I don’t remember it by heart just now. But the point that I’m trying to make is that, when we pay attention to what is very specific, the questions that emerge are usually questions that affect much larger issues.
We have learned now, or else we have been forced to remember, through the pandemic, for example, that we are in close, tactile contact with our world. What I’m touching here was touched by someone that left it at my door, and someone who handled it earlier in an office, and someone who cultivated it in a field, and someone who touched that person on the forehead. That chain, that cataclysm which neoliberal policies have rendered invisible, the pandemic has rendered completely visible. It is inescapable, because it is a matter of life and death. If we don’t pay attention to it, we die.
What we have uncovered are the multiple relationships that are embedded in every single thing we touch. It might seem simple, minuscule, irrelevant, and yet it’s not. As a writer, that’s my task, to go through that multiplicity of connections that make the world what it is now. By doing so, I uncover inequality, violence, imbalances, because that’s how we produce the world if we live within the silhouette of what we call the capitalist system, specifically the neoliberal policies that Grieving is very much criticizing.
The transition that you’re asking about, that’s how I see myself going through it. The books that have marked me, the ones that I go back to, both in fiction and nonfiction, demonstrate what good writing is about: being able to look at, to make room, to clear a space, to ask that question about accumulation and about justice. All of that has to do with the multiplicity of questions embedded in our daily life, that sustain our daily life, and that we don’t see because the powers-that-be don’t want us to see. They say it’s not in our benefit. But it’s clearly in our benefit.
Grieving is about Mexico, you are right. But a Mexico always in contact with its powerful neighbor in the north: the United States. Most pieces were written in the United States, and many refer, albeit obliquely, to happenings on the border areas. Even though, as a topic, the United States is not massively present, I think it’s always there. To me these are pieces on Mexico as well as on the border between Mexico and the United States. The US presence is as relevant as everything else that I talk about in regard to Mexico.
LS: The nation becomes an arbitrary unit of measurement.
CRG: Exactly! They say that Los Angeles is the second largest Mexican city in the world. And they say it for a reason. Mexico is not neatly contained by geopolitical borders—no country is. When Mexicans cross these borders—and we all know we do and continue to do so—we become something else, but something that is not necessarily not Mexico. It’s a different kind of Mexico.
Photo credit: Leigh Thelmadatter
Cristina Rivera Garza is an author, translator, and critic. Recent English translations of her work include The Taiga Syndrome, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana (Dorothy Project, 2018) and The Iliac Crest, translated by Sarah Booker (The Feminist Press, 2017). Forthcoming by Random House is Autobiografía del algodón. She is Distinguished Professor and founder of the PhD Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, Department of Hispanic Studies.
Lindsay Semel is an assistant editor for Asymptote. She daylights as a farmer in North-Western Galicia and moonlights as a freelance writer and editor.
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