The past few times that I’ve found myself procrastinating, distracted, and generally blocked creatively, I’ve thought about Susannah Rodríguez Drissi. As of this writing, Cuban-born Rodríguez Drissi has penned a novel, a poetry collection, short fiction, creative nonfiction, literary translations, scholarly articles, book reviews, multiple plays, and a jukebox musical. (By the time I finish writing this introduction, that list is likely to have grown.) Looking at my own untouched to-do list, I think of her prolificacy, of the sheer volume and breadth of her work. Rodríguez Drissi’s curiosity is one that can’t be constrained by genre. She’s multidisciplinary, to put it mildly—an artist and an academic, working across forms with a fluidity that is rare.
As of late, like most people, my attention span has shriveled, and my energy reserves feel regularly depleted. With much of the city shuttered, my evenings and weekends are mostly vacant. In these moments, disappointed with my own inertia and daunted by the unstructured time before me, I wonder what Rodríguez Drissi might do. Currently, she’s promoting her debut novel, planning the unconventional productions of two original works of theater, and translating a Cuban story collection. In the midst of chaos, she creates. If she felt as I do now, would she snap herself out of inaction through the sheer desire to make something? Would she look at an empty weekend like mine and see its generative possibility?
I had the recent pleasure of speaking with Rodríguez Drissi about her work and upcoming projects. Naturally our conversation spanned celestial bodies, bricolage, and some of our favorite Spanish-language writers. I regret to report that I am still unable to explain how she and I have the same number of hours in a day.
—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor
Sophia Stewart (SS): You are a true multi-hyphenate: a writer, poet, playwright, translator, and scholar. How do you balance your creative endeavors and your scholarly work? Do they ever intermingle, or do you try to keep them siloed from each other?
Susannah Rodríguez Drissi (SRD): It used to be nearly impossible to practice one while pursuing the other, particularly during graduate school. I had a lot of things working against me, things that might have been understood as incompatible with an academic career: I was a married woman with children. Had I been a married man with children, then things would have been understood differently. You see, I didn’t have a wife’s assistance at home to shield me from domesticity and scattered toys. So, for a time, at least, I was overwhelmed with nursing babies and research.
In academia, intellectual and artistic pursuit tends to tilt more toward one side than the other. But working across genres provides me with a broader understanding of the reasons why we write. For me, genres are always intermingled. The same basic questions that guide my research are the same questions that I attempt to answer from one project to the next. They are just different ways of getting at a problem. A poem or an academic article—they are not much different to me, except for their packaging. Different packaging for different audiences. I write so that I can explain what I don’t understand, so that I figure out the why of something—or, if I already know the why, so that I can snap a picture of it for posterity, for those who might not understand it.
SS: As a scholar, your research focuses on Latin American literatures and cultures, with a special focus on the Caribbean and particularly Cuba. In the many Spanish literature classes I’ve taken, I found Caribbean authors to be consistently underrepresented. Over the course of six years and dozens of syllabi, I recall being assigned only three Caribbean writers: the Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, and the Cuban poets Jose Martí and Nicolás Guillén. Are there any other writers you feel are overlooked in the Spanish-language canon, and who are some of your all-time favorite Spanish-language writers?
SRD: You can’t go wrong with Burgos, Martí, and Guillén. All three are poets and advocates of their nations’ independence, be it from Spain, as in Martí’s case, or from the United States, as in the case of Burgos and Guillén. With the three of them, you’re in good company. However, we need to make room for other voices. We don’t read enough Lydia Cabrera (if we read her at all), and there are plenty of contemporary writers who don’t get their time in the sun because we insist on the same voices time and time again. Right now, I’m obsessed with Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor and Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez—theirs are heartbreaking, astonishing voices that should be included front and center in every syllabus. We should start first with more women writers, then go from there.
SS: Can you talk a bit about your work as a literary translator?
SRD: Translation is also one of those situations where you must work with what is available to you, and what is available to you in the act of translation—besides your own language skills and cultural competency—is someone else’s words. For this reason, translation can feel like very claustrophobic work. You can rarely escape the limits imposed by the work to be translated.
I am currently revising the introduction to my translation of selected stories from Cuban writer and ethnographer Lydia Cabrera’s 1948 book ¿Por qué? . . . : Cuentos negros de Cuba. The collection is comprised of twenty-eight stories of the etiological or explanatory type, wherein the title of each tale continues or completes the question, “Why?”. As was the case for her 1936 story collection Cuentos negros de Cuba (Afro-Cuban Tales), ¿Por qué? . . . was translated into French by Francis de Miomandre. My translation into English, Why? New Tales from Afro-Cuba—Selected Stories, follows Miomandre’s original French title, Pourquoi: nouveaux contes nègres de Cuba.
After numerous close readings, it seemed to me that the importance of this collection lay in the etiological nature of its stories—the clue was in the title: Why . . . Cuentos negros de Cuba—or, to be clearer, “Why cuentos negros?” The text’s very existence revealed itself as Cabrera’s answer to a very basic question: Why was it necessary to transcribe, transpose, and re-elaborate the stories that comprise this work? What I love about Cabrera’s stories is their rhythmic, musical quality—they beg to be read out loud, to be embodied through gestures and articulated in a style and voice that will draw an audience response. I am advocating for a bilingual edition that readers at various levels of Spanish and English mastery can access.
SS: Last year you penned a poetry collection called The Latin Poet’s Guide to the Cosmos, which draws from Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, and French, as well as Tamazight, an Indigenous language in North Africa. The result is a fascinating hybrid language. There’s so much to talk about with regards to The Latin Poet’s Guide to the Cosmos that it’s hard to know where to start. I’ll begin with the title—can you talk a bit about the meaning and inspiration behind it?
SRD: Using the word “cosmos” rather than the word “universe” implies a very different imaginative engagement with the world, and an understanding of it as a complex and orderly system—the opposite of chaos. The collection, on the surface, seems like chaos, but on closer look, there is an order, a kind of harmony and aesthetic that rules over every word grouping. Words, like celestial bodies, can assume any shape (that is, any meaning) for their perfection, since their matter is already perfect.
Medieval astronomers, dating all the way back to the first century, sought to explain what they called “wandering stars,” which we now call planets, hoping to predict their course across the universe for past and future generations. Likewise, the “language” I’ve created and rely upon in The Latin Poet’s Guide to the Cosmos reaches into the past while moving toward the future, in the hopes of predicting our relative position—in cultural and linguistic terms—in space. If there is no real center, the collection suggests, nor limits, nor up or down—if there is nothing really fixed in space—then the universe and, thus our potential, is infinite.
SS: Reading The Latin Poet’s Guide to the Cosmos, I’ll admit I initially felt a bit daunted by it. This is a reaction I’m sure you expect from readers of this collection. You’ve even warned readers to “take heart [because] this collection is not for the faint of tongue.” How might you prepare a reader who wants to a) engage with the text as rigorously as possible and b) extract from the text as much enjoyment as possible?
SRD: I’ll start with enjoyment first because I think that enjoyment should come before rigorous intellectual engagement: these poems are about surrender, letting go. Close your eyes, listen. If you want a more “immersive” experience, read the poems out loud. Why is it that we can enjoy a baby’s babble even when we don’t understand what it means? I imagine it’s because the utterances a baby makes reach us at some basic, primitive level. We don’t need to know what they mean. Perhaps with time, by paying attention to the context in which the babble is produced, we begin to ascribe meaning to the sounds. But decipherable meaning is not a prerequisite for our enjoyment.
Now to rigorous intellectual engagement: through sound association and—in many cases—the use of Latin roots, the words in each poem suggest possible meanings, though these meanings may change for each reader. The best way to explain it is that the sound combinations and associations allow for a kind of impressionistic experience.
Let’s take for example my word baterzubrica, a combination of bater, the letter z, the u in ubrica, and ubrica itself. First, I derived bater from batir in Spanish, which means to beat or stir (from the Latin battuere or batuere—to beat or strike). Then, by combining the letters z and u, I recall words such as azul, azur, and lazuli—in other words, “blue.” So, the letters z and u combine to suggest the color blue, which is then combined with bater to evoke beating or stirring. Then the suffix ubrica allows for several possibilities: the Spanish words ubre (from the Latin uber or uberis, which means fertile, fecund, or abundant); súbito (sudden); and lúdico or lúdica (ludic, characterized by play).
Put it all together and you end up with “a sudden stirring of blue.” In essence, a wave—perhaps even a crashing wave, if we take in consideration the word lúdica or lúdico. If we then consider the possible association with ubre (which means udder in Spanish), we get: “A sudden stirring of a playful and abundant (or fecund) blue” or even “a playful and fecund stirring of a sudden blue.” In any case, the word baterzubrica, as the poem itself tells us, “tel di mare”—it speaks of the sea. Tel from the English tells, and mare, Italian for sea.
SS: Some elements of the text brought to mind Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s creacionismo (creationism), which basically asserts that poems aren’t recreations of the existing world but rather acts of creation—new inventions—in themselves. Through the lens of creacionismo, poems are created for their own sake, not to please or even be understood by anyone else, and the poet becomes un pequeño Dios—“a little God.” In your own poems, you essentially invent a language that only you understand, but the challenges of its decipherability don’t undercut its aesthetic beauty. How do you feel the linguistic creation of A Latin Poet’s Guide might be in dialogue with Huidobro’s creacionismo?
SRD: We live in a world where everything around us is derivative, where a lack of originality has become a prerequisite to being and moving about the world—a sort of permanent nothing new under the sun. Huidobro’s creacionismo was an avant-garde poetic movement during the first third of the twentieth century that called on the poet to create a world completely disconnected from reality, a new world. Creacionismo rejects mimesis—that is, the reflection of reality in a plausible way—because according to creationist ideology, mimesis does not create anything that did not previously exist. As a friend and colleague has pointed out, The Latin Poet’s Guide is a post-post-avant-garde text. In other words, it is a gesture of moving away from the new to the old-like-new—I think.
However, it is undeniable that the collection shares with creacionismo a knack for a world in which the poet assumes the role of “a little God.” As Huidobro writes in “Poetic Art,” poets rely on wordplay, a lack of narrative line, irrational metaphors, lyrical effect, and neologisms—all of which are traits of The Latin Poet’s Guide. The collection may also share aspects with ultraism and dadaism. It is also a polyglot ideology, if you like, since it crosses linguistic borders. Many of these characteristics appear in Huidobro’s Altazor.
SS: You’re currently working on a Zoom production of a short play called Hola, Soledad, which takes place in Los Angeles during the current pandemic. These past several months have been particularly difficult for artists who work in theater. To adapt, some productions, like American playwright Richard Nelson’s What Do We Need to Talk About?, have even begun incorporating Zoom as an integral part of the plot. It’s an exciting prospect, of course, to make theater more accessible, but Zoom can also sometimes flatten the dynamic quality of live performance. Can you talk about your approach to producing Hola, Soledad, and what this moment might mean for theater as a whole?
SRD: Like Nelson’s play, Hola, Soledad also incorporates Zoom in the plot. The play takes place during the pandemic and focuses on the impact of the early days of confinement on women’s autonomy and mental health. It was just recently included in the anthology Cenas do confinamiento / Escenas del confinamiento, published by Brazilian press Galpão Cine Horto, which brings together plays that reflect on and explore our time of confinement during the global pandemic, so I’m very excited for people to be able to read it.
As for producing theater right now, I think as artists we know how to work with what we have. Theater—true theater—can and does happen anywhere. We happen to have Zoom at our disposal today and that’s wonderful. I don’t believe that adapting to the needs of our current moment portends the end of theater as we knew it before COVID-19; on the contrary, COVID-19 has allowed us to reimagine what theater can be, or reminded us what it always has been: action, desire, conflict, place. The word theater comes from ancient Greek theatron, which means seeing place. Zoom is a seeing place, isn’t it?
SS: One of my favorite projects of yours is Radio Nocturno, a jukebox musical that takes place in 1970s Cuba and features some of the most iconic Spanish-language songs of that era. You’ve called it “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg meets Mamma Mia! in revolutionary Cuba,” a description that I am totally obsessed with. Can you shed some light on this project, from inspiration to inception to production?
SRD: Radio Nocturno is one of those projects that came to me already formed before I sat down to write. I sat down over a Labor Day weekend, and by Sunday evening I had the first draft of a musical. It is a project that is very close to my heart because it is largely based on my parents’ story, so I feel very protective of it.
Radio Nocturno is a jukebox musical that pays tribute to the legendary Cuban radio show “Nocturno,” which first aired in 1966, and features some of the most iconic songs of the Spanish-speaking world from the 1960s and ’70s. The story takes place in 1975 during one of the most repressive times in Cuban revolutionary history, which becomes the backdrop to dreams of personal freedom and love in the tropics, and towards a way of mitigating food shortages, power outages, and the violation of human rights. “Nocturno,” the real radio show, was special to Cuban people for many decades, and the musical combines the magic of radio and the exuberance of youth at a challenging time in Cuban history. After a sold-out public reading in December 2018 at Hecht Studio Theatre at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Radio Nocturno was scheduled to premiere at Miami Dade College’s Koubek Center this past August. Unfortunately, the production was cancelled due to COVID-19, so we’re currently working on an open-air production in Miami-Dade County.
SS: Your debut novel Until We’re Fish, published just last month, is a sprawling portrait of Cuban history, beginning a few days before Fidel Castro’s arrival in Havana and spanning several decades that followed. How did you approach a project with such a large scope? Did you find writing about Cuba through a novelistic lens to be any different from the other genres through which you’ve explored Cuba?
SRD: I suppose that unlike a play or a short story, exploring the various forces that motivate Cubans to leave their beloved island demands a certain real state—many more pages and years. The novel is made for larger concerns, for seeing characters in thought and action over time and across space. A short story, for example, might focus on a single question or limit itself to fewer characters. Meanwhile, theater intensifies and condenses—it packs a punch that perhaps only the short story can approximate; it’s the immediacy of the theatrical experience that distinguishes it from other genres. The novel, in my experience, is closer to a dissertation—it swims in deeper, more expansive waters. It’s possible to meander in a novel, to relish every moment, to really dive into the deep. Exploring Cuba in Until We’re Fish was an absolute treat. Dictatorships don’t happen overnight—likewise, I needed the novel to tell a story that takes place over many decades.
SS: You’ve called yourself “a comparatist by training and a bricoleur by circumstance.” I love this phrase. Can you expand on what you mean by it?
SRD: Bricolage is a French word that refers to something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available, so a bricoleur constructs bricolages. The bricoleur, in essence, creates from “odds and ends.” I think imagination works best under certain confines. I like to look around me and see what I can work with. Bricolage is the skill of using whatever is at hand and creating something new through recombination.
In The Savage Mind, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss points out that in bricolage, signs already in existence are used for purposes that they were not originally meant for. The approach, I think, is intuitive: as an artist and writer, I identify a problem I need to solve. If the problem is a scene I need to stage, then I look around my environment and see what’s available. When it comes to constructing language, I am always collecting sounds, words, phrases, and images that I think will be useful to me at some point. Ultimately, a bricoleur deals in signs, recycling previously available meanings. Nothing is wasted.
SS: As a writer, you are prolific, to put it mildly. You’ve said at home you have “boxes, baskets, and drawers jam-packed” with your writing. How do you manage to maintain such a high level of productivity, especially at a time as distressing and fatiguing as this one?
SRD: It’s a matter of survival, of finding a project to wake up to, of committing to the thing that will propel you into the next day. New projects, however small, become the quest. I grew up making plans. As a family, we’d say, “Let’s make plans.” And we did. Plans were the way we dealt with challenging circumstances, with waiting for change to happen, for planes to arrive or depart. It was what we did to survive. Our current moment insists on snatching our plans away from us; but plans are the live line to the next day. We need them now more than ever. Plans are stories. You find your story and see it to the end.
Susanna Rodriguez Drissi is an award-winning writer, poet, playwright, translator, and scholar. Her poetry, prose, and academic papers have appeared in journals and anthologies such as In Season: Stories of Discovery, Loss, Home, and Places in Between, which won the 2018 Florida Book Award; Publisher’s Weekly; the Los Angeles Review of Books; and Miami Herald, among many others. Following readings at the University of California, Irvine and the University of California, Los Angeles, her award-winning play, Houses Without Walls, premiered at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2018. More recently, her short plays, The Fruit Flies and Rey y Atenea were selected for the 2019 Short+Sweet Theatre Festival and premiered at the Lee Strasberg Film & Theatre Institute in Los Angeles. Rey y Atenea received an Audience Choice Award and was Finalist for the 2019 NBC Universal Talent Infusion Programs Award. Her musical, Nocturno, will premiere this winter in Miami. Rodríguez Drissi is the author of The Latin Poet’s Guide to the Cosmos (Floricanto Press, 2019) and Rey y Atenea / Rey and Atenea, a Bilingual Edition (Cassandra Press, 2019). She is on the faculty of the Writing Programs at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her novel, Until We’re Fish, was published in October, 2020.
Sophia Stewart is the assistant interviews editor at Asymptote Journal. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, and other venues. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Brooklyn.
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