We return this week with the second, and final part of our interview with author, Reyna Grande.
If you missed the first part you can read it here:
CHRISTIAN PENA: In the essay, Stitching My Mother Tongue, you write about the uncertainty you felt in your own identity as an immigrant girl being forced to speak American or risk living on the margins. Being bilingual can often help us step in and out of two worlds and help ground us in our identity, as I experienced in my own girlhood. Unfortunately, that is not often the case and it can actually be traumatic.
REYNA GRANDE: That’s a nice point that you made about how there’s a version of yourself that speaks Spanish and there’s a version of yourself that speaks English. When society makes you feel ashamed of the version of yourself that speaks Spanish, you begin to reject that version of yourself. And you try to do as much as you can to distance yourself from that version.
And so that speaks to what I went through as a kid where I was made to feel ashamed of that version of myself that was a Spanish speaker, that was an immigrant, brown girl. And so I started to not only reject my language, but also me. That part of me. It took me a long time to reframe that and to realize the harm that had been caused because of that language trauma and to try to walk myself back to my native tongue and back to myself, that version of myself.
When society makes you feel ashamed of the version of yourself that speaks Spanish, you begin to reject that version of yourself. And you try to do as much as you can to distance yourself from that version.
When I was at UC Santa Cruz, that was really for me, the beginning of finding my way back to Spanish because my teacher, that I write about in A Dream Called Home, Martha Navarro, she was just so good at constantly talking about us not being ashamed, to not be ashamed of how we speak, to not be ashamed of where we come from. She was constantly given us these pep talks because it wasn’t just me, but it was her whole classroom. We all came into her classroom feeling all this shame about not speaking Spanish correctly, our “broken Spanish,” and she was so good at just instilling in us a lot of pride. I want to credit her for that because she put me on a path of embracing my Spanish and trying to learn it. Now, I speak Spanish much better than when I was a teenager.
CP: Wow, that is incredible. It makes me feel so much better about my own journey with Spanish.
RG: Yeah. Now, I really love being able to work on the translations of my work. I spent the entirety of las week reviewing the Spanish manuscript for A Través de Cien Montañas, my first book that I published 20 years ago, because it’s being published in Mexico for the first time ever.
CP: Congratulations, that’s amazing!
RG: Thank you, yes I’m very excited. They sent me the manuscript so I could review it one last time before it goes out. When I was reading through it I was able to catch things like typos, clunky sentences, or when there were some accent marks missing. I really surprised myself. To have the ability now to be able to see when a sentence is clunky or when a verb is wrong or the word choice is not correct, I don’t know I just feel very proud about that. Proud about reclaiming my mother tongue, and about getting rid of that shame. My daughter graduated high school last week and she got her diploma with the seal of biliteracy from the state of California on it. When I saw her diploma, it just made me so happy.
To have the ability now to be able to see when a sentence is clunky or when a verb is wrong or the word choice is not correct, I don’t know I just feel very proud about that. Proud about reclaiming my mother tongue, and about getting rid of that shame.
CP: That’s just wonderful to hear. Reading your essay, The Storyteller’s Daughter, and the conversation of those two essays between you and your daughter made me very emotional. Personally, I feel like this is the heart of Migrant Heart. This mending of the wounds you shared with readers in your previous work, sort of happened here in this conversation. It was beautiful.
RG: Thank you. The essay that my daughter wrote, was a last minute thing that I put in the book. It wasn’t there until the very end when we squeezed it in there and it was because she wrote it for her college application and I didn’t know about it until my son’s girlfriend mentioned the essay.
CP: Oh my gosh you didn’t know about it?
RG: I didn't know about it. I said, “What? There’s an essay about me and I haven’t read it.” So then I asked my daughter to send it to me. When I read it, I got so teary-eyed. I asked her if I could put her essay in my book because I felt like these two essays were in conversation with one another.
CP: It was truly wonderful. There is a lot of playing with form as we talked about, I loved reading the Menopausal Almanac and reading about you in the middle of the night with the slugs in your garden. what helped you move out of your comfort zone?
RG: Because I love lyric essays, and braided essays, I’ve always wanted to write essays like that. To just let go of the traditional structure or rules of essay writing and push past those boundaries and see what comes up. To try different things. So I stared with horror story, giving myself permission to write it as a braided essay where I was exploring vision loss or distorted vision and using my corneas as on braid and then weaving in the rest, the politics, the way this country has a very distorted vision of its immigrants. I was also taking a playwriting class and so that inspired me write another essay using what I was learning in my playwriting class.
With the Menopausal Gardeners Almanac, at first I was writing it as a braided essay, but then I thought, “Well, If I’m going to call it an almanac, then I should put it in columns so that it looks like an almanac.” I needed to change it visually, to play with it some more.
Then when I wrote Dictionary of a Father’s Death, I decided I couldn’t write it in a traditional structure because the year that my father died, I remember only snippets of it. I wish I had kept a journal, but I didn't. I had these different memories that were kind of fragmented and then I realized, you know grief is very fragmented. Grief is not linear. There is no beginning, middle or end when it comes to grief.
I began experimenting with this piece and trying to find words that could define my grief. Asking myself, what are the words that I can use to define how I feel about my father dying. I had some poems, or more like prose poems that I wrote about ten years ago, with the words Dandelion and Cast Iron so I had a few words I could begin to build this sort of dictionary of my grief with. Slowly working my way through words, A, for the alcoholism because essentially it’s about my father’s alcoholism right. The dictionary was created that way, slowly and experimentally.
CP: A serious journey of experimenting and so many moving parts to putting together some great work.
RG: Yes, so many moving parts.
CP: I have one final question for you. La Cuenta is an ongoing exploration of the costs of individuals labeled undocumented in the US. We’re sort of tallying these costs right. If you were to put together a receipt tallying the costs of being an immigrant in this country, would you have a clear number, or a list of items. What does that receipt look like for you?
RG: The cost of distance. There’s the physical distance, the emotional distance, and the distance created by language when children learn English and then the parents don’t. The distance created by education. My siblings and I continue with our education and our parents only had an elementary school education. When I went to university, that created a huge distance. There is the socioeconomic distance now between me and my mother. The distance between you and your homeland, between you and the community you left behind. That version of yourself that you left behind too. Then there’s the distance between you and US society here.
CP: It’s hard to reconcile with that distance. We are sort of always thinking about the homes we left behind, our parents’ pueblo and what could have been.
RG: Perpetual nostalgia.
CP: Yes the perpetual nostalgia of being an immigrant in the US. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Any writing advice for the dreamers, the storytellers, and writers out there?
RG: Embrace your voice and write for yourself. When you first sit down to write, it should be for you, when you think it is ready to be published, think about the reader. When you’re thinking about the reader, when you are first creating, you immediately start by censoring yourself. If you can begin by writing just for yourself it leads to more authentic and honest writing.
And finally, revise, revise, revise. And just when you think you’re done, revise one more time.
Propina
We are grateful for Reyna’s incredible work. If you would like to read more from her, Reyna has written several memoirs illuminating the complexities of being an immigrant in this country as well as beautiful fiction novels. See the list below for some of our favorites!
We’ll see you next week.