Institute for Latino Studies :: Momotombo Press :: Interview with Steven Cordova

	An Interview with Michelle Otero Carolina Monsivais, poet and co-founder of the Women’s Writers’ Collective, conducted the following e-interview with Michelle Otero. Monsivais graciously continues, then, Momotombo Press’ unofficial tradition of having guest Latino and Latina writers join our expanding circle of conversation and dialogue. Questions and answers were e-mailed back and forth in the latter half of the summer/early Fall of 2006. —Francisco Aragón, September 2006 Interview: CM: You have often referred to Oaxaca as "home" could you explain what you mean by this? Is this connected to the space in which your book was created? MO: When I won the Fulbright and moved to Oaxaca, I felt I was finally stepping into the big, beautiful life that had been waiting for me, the life I’d been afraid to say yes to because I didn’t think I deserved it. I was sexually abused when I was five. I never told anyone or acknowledged it myself until I was 24. Some people ask why I didn’t say anything. Five year olds don’t have language for that kind of trauma. So I internalized this sense that I should play small and be perfect. It wasn’t the abuse that I carried with me to Oaxaca, but the residue—this sense that something was wrong with me, that I deserved to suffer. It goes something like this: I’m not as good as I should be, but I want you to think I’m better than I am. It was only through teaching and listening and writing with my students that I began to untwist this kind of thinking. I wrote Malinche’s Daughter in this context of saying yes and asking my students to say yes to their creativity, to goodness, to joy, asking them to recognize and honor their strength and beauty and to not beat themselves up for their shortcomings. They gave me the courage to write my story. Without them, Malinche’s Daughter wouldn’t exist. CM: (This one is for the readers) Why la Malinche? MO: [She was a teenager named Malintzín when the Spaniards invaded what is now Mexico in 1519. A Mayan cacique gave her to the Spaniards along with jewelry, textiles and nineteen other women. The Spaniards baptized her and named her Marina. As they advanced toward Tenochtitlán, Cortés learned that she spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica or Aztecs. He made her his interpreter and concubine, and she eventually bore his child. Symbolically, she’s the mother of mestizaje, the mixing of European and indigenous blood.] I don’t remember the first time I heard her name—it seems she’s always existed on the margins of my consciousness—but I remember feeling it should be whispered. She was one of those women, like the No Name Aunt in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. I’ve always been drawn to these figures, particularly the women—the ones who talk too much or don’t talk enough, the ones shunned by their communities, the ones who have somehow brought shame upon their people. I wanted to call things what they are. The Spaniards didn’t arrive in the Americas. They invaded. Malinche was not Cortés’s lover. She was his property. He owned her. Their relationship wasn’t based on equality, but on domination. Where there is domination, there is no love. I wanted Malinche to know across time that someone has her back. This is what I’ve wanted when I’ve felt the backlash of speaking the truth about racism or sexism or patriarchal violence, someone who will say, “I hear you,” and will stand by you as people call you disloyal or ungrateful. I’m a writer. I have a voice. That’s an incredible privilege. I feel I have a responsibility to leverage that privilege for good—to speak the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable, to stop patriarchal violence, and ultimately, to heal. CM: As I was reading your book I had this sense that you were writing from within a community. By this I mean that you referred to or wrote in cultural icons/aspects. Was this something you did on a conscious level? MO: I had no idea how to write this book, how much to tell, where to focus. And I was afraid. On some level I knew I would have to tell my own story and I didn’t feel ready to do that, at least not for publication. I turned to Our Lady of Guadalupe, La Malinche, even La Llorona and Regina from Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz, and I tried to ground them in images and symbols that connected them to my students—a reboso, mezcal, the altar, marigolds. I did this both for guidance and as a way of avoiding my own story, but the deeper I wrote, the more these icons and symbols pointed back to me, as if saying, “¿Y tu, qué?” Sue Silverman, my Vermont College mentor that semester, wrote in one of her cover letters, “There is no story without your story.” So I wrote my story. I took all the heaviness I’d felt in my body and wrote it into the icons and symbols. Now the weight is on the page, not on my back. Geographically, Malinche’s Daughter takes place in Oaxaca, New Mexico, Chihuahua and Tenochtitlán. But what holds all these places together across time and languages is a cultural and spiritual community made up of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Malinche, the women in the workshops, the women of Juárez, and other victims and survivors of sexual violence who never appear on the page, but who were present, guiding and encouraging me, as I wrote the book. MO: Who are some of your influences? Toni Morrison said that “the best art is…unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.” That’s the kind of art I want to create, and I seek out writers and artists who risk something in their work, who have something to say beyond, “Look at the clever way I play with words or technique.” When I read Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, or Sue Silverman I know that the words on the page have cost them something and that gives me courage. Just living and working in Spanish has been a major influence. I learned to speak as an adult. Teaching a writing workshop in Spanish forced me to be vulnerable to language in a way I never had to be in English. Through my twenties I felt Spanish was something I had to conquer. I wanted to speak it as well as I spoke English. In Oaxaca, I finally opened myself to Spanish and I think my writing has become more lyrical and more vulnerable as a result. Since my grandma’s death in 2004, I’ve been living with her spirit and studying writers who allow the dead to walk among the living: Juan Rulfo, Maxine Hong Kingston, Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez. I’m reading a lot of poetry these days—Carolina Monsivaís (perhaps you know her?), A. Van Jordan, Sandra Cisneros, Lorna Dee Cervantes. The memoir I’m working on now calls for a closer look at language and rhythm because part of what I’m exploring is the loss of language—the loss of indigenous languages after the Conquest and the loss of Spanish after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I’m also exploring time and how in periods of transition or crisis it’s been necessary for me to break time into the smallest unit possible, not one day at a time or moment by moment, but one breath—inhale, exhale. Poets work with the smallest language units possible, not the sentence or the paragraph, but the syllable. CM: Can you discuss the process behind the book? This can relate to the decisions you made regarding form. In other words, why choose this form? How did you decide on the lyrical moments? There’s a disconnect that happens when you’re violated. You almost have to disconnect just to live through it, and I wanted to convey that sense in the writing with short sentences and sparse language, observing the light in the room, the silence in an empty park, being anywhere but in the body. I couldn’t sustain that kind of intensity for fifty pages, as a writer or as a sensitive human being. And any attempt to do so would have ultimately hurt the book. I didn’t want readers to feel I was holding their heads underwater. That’s why the Prologue is almost dreamlike, why the moments between the women’s stories are more lyrical. The reader needs that respite. I’d thought about ending and beginning an essay on the same page in order to save space. But the page turns and the white space are absolutely essential. They’re like a breath for the reader. CM: How do you feel the book has been received? There’s a saying in Spanish, Te vez más bonita cuando te quedas callada (You look prettier when you keep quiet). Even though no one ever said this to me directly, I received and internalized the message that something bad happened when women spoke their truth. When men speak, they are bold, aggressive, ambitious, and that’s good. When women speak, we are whiny, bitchy, loud, too much. I grew up with four brothers and I don’t remember my parents or other relatives ever telling them that they talked too much or that one of them had “a mind of his own.” In church Mary was revered for “holding these secrets in the silence of her heart.” But no one ever talked to me about the ways these silences eat at our hearts and destroy us. I developed my Fulbright project and wrote this book partly to unlearn the mistrust I had in women coming together and speaking their truth, and I delved into La Malinche’s story because I wanted to hear her voice. People who read the book know that each and every word cost me something. I’ve been told that I’m brave. Some people hug me and just hold on and I don’t know if it’s for them or for me. I’m thankful and humbled to have written something that moves people. *Carolina Monsivais* is a recipient of the Premio Poesia Tejana for her book, Somewhere Between Houston and El Paso: Testimonies of a Poet (Wings Press). Along with Jeanette Monsivais-Ruiter, Michelle Otero, and Emmy Pérez, she co-founded the Women’s Writers’ Collective in the El Paso/Las Cruces Region. She is currently completing her M.F.A. in creative writing at New Mexico State University, and she resides in El Paso, Texas.

An Interview with Michelle Otero

Carolina Monsivais, poet and co-founder of the Women’s Writers’ Collective, conducted the following e-interview with Michelle Otero. Monsivais graciously continues, then, Momotombo Press’ unofficial tradition of having guest Latino and Latina writers join our expanding circle of conversation and dialogue. Questions and answers were e-mailed back and forth in the latter half of the summer/early Fall of 2006.

—Francisco Aragón, September 2006

Interview:
CM: You have often referred to Oaxaca as "home" could you explain what you mean by this? Is this connected to the space in which your book was created?

MO: When I won the Fulbright and moved to Oaxaca, I felt I was finally stepping into the big, beautiful life that had been waiting for me, the life I’d been afraid to say yes to because I didn’t think I deserved it.

I was sexually abused when I was five. I never told anyone or acknowledged it myself until I was 24. Some people ask why I didn’t say anything. Five year olds don’t have language for that kind of trauma. So I internalized this sense that I should play small and be perfect. It wasn’t the abuse that I carried with me to Oaxaca, but the residue—this sense that something was wrong with me, that I deserved to suffer. It goes something like this: I’m not as good as I should be, but I want you to think I’m better than I am.

It was only through teaching and listening and writing with my students that I began to untwist this kind of thinking. I wrote Malinche’s Daughter in this context of saying yes and asking my students to say yes to their creativity, to goodness, to joy, asking them to recognize and honor their strength and beauty and to not beat themselves up for their shortcomings. They gave me the courage to write my story. Without them, Malinche’s Daughter wouldn’t exist.

CM: (This one is for the readers) Why la Malinche?

MO: [She was a teenager named Malintzín when the Spaniards invaded what is now Mexico in 1519. A Mayan cacique gave her to the Spaniards along with jewelry, textiles and nineteen other women. The Spaniards baptized her and named her Marina. As they advanced toward Tenochtitlán, Cortés learned that she spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica or Aztecs. He made her his interpreter and concubine, and she eventually bore his child. Symbolically, she’s the mother of mestizaje, the mixing of European and indigenous blood.]

I don’t remember the first time I heard her name—it seems she’s always existed on the margins of my consciousness—but I remember feeling it should be whispered. She was
one of those women, like the No Name Aunt in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. I’ve always been drawn to these figures, particularly the women—the ones who talk too much or don’t talk enough, the ones shunned by their communities, the ones who have somehow brought shame upon their people.

I wanted to call things what they are. The Spaniards didn’t arrive in the Americas. They invaded. Malinche was not Cortés’s lover. She was his property. He owned her. Their relationship wasn’t based on equality, but on domination. Where there is domination, there is no love.

I wanted Malinche to know across time that someone has her back. This is what I’ve wanted when I’ve felt the backlash of speaking the truth about racism or sexism or patriarchal violence, someone who will say, “I hear you,” and will stand by you as people call you disloyal or ungrateful.

I’m a writer. I have a voice. That’s an incredible privilege. I feel I have a responsibility to leverage that privilege for good—to speak the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable, to stop patriarchal violence, and ultimately, to heal.

CM: As I was reading your book I had this sense that you were writing from within a community. By this I mean that you referred to or wrote in cultural icons/aspects. Was this something you did on a conscious level?

MO: I had no idea how to write this book, how much to tell, where to focus. And I was afraid. On some level I knew I would have to tell my own story and I didn’t feel ready to do that, at least not for publication. I turned to Our Lady of Guadalupe, La Malinche, even La Llorona and Regina from Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz, and I tried to ground them in images and symbols that connected them to my students—a reboso, mezcal, the altar, marigolds. I did this both for guidance and as a way of avoiding my own story, but the deeper I wrote, the more these icons and symbols pointed back to me, as if saying, “¿Y tu, qué?” Sue Silverman, my Vermont College mentor that semester, wrote in one of her cover letters, “There is no story without your story.”

So I wrote my story. I took all the heaviness I’d felt in my body and wrote it into the icons and symbols. Now the weight is on the page, not on my back.

Geographically, Malinche’s Daughter takes place in Oaxaca, New Mexico, Chihuahua and Tenochtitlán. But what holds all these places together across time and languages is a cultural and spiritual community made up of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Malinche, the women in the workshops, the women of Juárez, and other victims and survivors of sexual violence who never appear on the page, but who were present, guiding and encouraging me, as I wrote the book.

MO: Who are some of your influences?

Toni Morrison said that “the best art is…unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.” That’s the kind of art I want to create, and I seek out writers and artists who risk something in their work, who have something to say beyond, “Look at the clever way I play with words or technique.” When I read Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, or Sue Silverman I know that the words on the page have cost them something and that gives me courage.

Just living and working in Spanish has been a major influence. I learned to speak as an adult. Teaching a writing workshop in Spanish forced me to be vulnerable to language in a way I never had to be in English. Through my twenties I felt Spanish was something I had to conquer. I wanted to speak it as well as I spoke English. In Oaxaca, I finally opened myself to Spanish and I think my writing has become more lyrical and more vulnerable as a result.

Since my grandma’s death in 2004, I’ve been living with her spirit and studying writers who allow the dead to walk among the living: Juan Rulfo, Maxine Hong Kingston, Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez.

I’m reading a lot of poetry these days—Carolina Monsivaís (perhaps you know her?), A. Van Jordan, Sandra Cisneros, Lorna Dee Cervantes. The memoir I’m working on now calls for a closer look at language and rhythm because part of what I’m exploring is the loss of language—the loss of indigenous languages after the Conquest and the loss of Spanish after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I’m also exploring time and how in periods of transition or crisis it’s been necessary for me to break time into the smallest unit possible, not one day at a time or moment by moment, but one breath—inhale, exhale. Poets work with the smallest language units possible, not the sentence or the paragraph, but the syllable.

CM: Can you discuss the process behind the book? This can relate to the decisions you made regarding form. In other words, why choose this form? How did you decide on the lyrical moments?

There’s a disconnect that happens when you’re violated. You almost have to disconnect just to live through it, and I wanted to convey that sense in the writing with short sentences and sparse language, observing the light in the room, the silence in an empty park, being anywhere but in the body.

I couldn’t sustain that kind of intensity for fifty pages, as a writer or as a sensitive human being. And any attempt to do so would have ultimately hurt the book. I didn’t want readers to feel I was holding their heads underwater. That’s why the Prologue is almost dreamlike, why the moments between the women’s stories are more lyrical. The reader needs that respite.

I’d thought about ending and beginning an essay on the same page in order to save space. But the page turns and the white space are absolutely essential. They’re like a breath for the reader.

CM: How do you feel the book has been received?

There’s a saying in Spanish, Te vez más bonita cuando te quedas callada (You look prettier when you keep quiet). Even though no one ever said this to me directly, I received and internalized the message that something bad happened when women spoke their truth. When men speak, they are bold, aggressive, ambitious, and that’s good. When women speak, we are whiny, bitchy, loud, too much. I grew up with four brothers and I don’t remember my parents or other relatives ever telling them that they talked too much or that one of them had “a mind of his own.” In church Mary was revered for “holding these secrets in the silence of her heart.” But no one ever talked to me about the ways these silences eat at our hearts and destroy us. I developed my Fulbright project and wrote this book partly to unlearn the mistrust I had in women coming together and speaking their truth, and I delved into La Malinche’s story because I wanted to hear her voice.

People who read the book know that each and every word cost me something. I’ve been told that I’m brave. Some people hug me and just hold on and I don’t know if it’s for them or for me. I’m thankful and humbled to have written something that moves people.

Carolina Monsivais is a recipient of the Premio Poesia Tejana for her book, Somewhere Between Houston and El Paso: Testimonies of a Poet (Wings Press). Along with Jeanette Monsivais-Ruiter, Michelle Otero, and Emmy Pérez, she co-founded the Women’s Writers’ Collective in the El Paso/Las Cruces Region. She is currently completing her M.F.A. in creative writing at New Mexico State University, and she resides in El Paso, Texas.