Soraya Membreno Interviews Vickie Vértiz & Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

At Bitch Magazine: In "Fierce as Fuck: The Future of Poetry Is Brown & Queer," Soraya Membreno talks with Vickie Vértiz, author of Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press, 2017); and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017). "Both of your books are rooted in place. Talk to me about home as a physical space, about leaving and returning," says Membreno. In response:

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal: Beast Meridian started as a project of trying to write myself into existence. I remember reading a lot of Chicanx work and feeling like it was so varied, what every poet and every writer was trying to do with their books, yet it all gets lumped together as this documentarian project of “this is how my abuela was” and “this is how it felt like to be poor” and “this is what it felt like to do this.” Especially when it comes to writing about identity and history and family, Chicanx and Latinx work across the board gets unfairly overlooked because people have certain expectations about that. I wanted to create a project that was rooted in place, was rooted in the act of remember and misremembering, in the act of creating your own narrative from the ruins of erasure. And of mapping the emotional textures of that, instead of trying to access real memories. Because those memories are eroding quickly and what the missing feels like, what the longing and the memory feels like, that is what I wanted to capture formally and through the strangeness of language.

Vickie Vértiz: My geography of home was very small; the circumference of home was very small. And my relationship to home is connected really closely to the way my father related to the family he made with my mom. Which is that he was gone a lot. And because he was a man he could be gone a lot. He could be at the yonque (at the junkyard), he could be at work, he could be anywhere he wanted. And it extended to the point of him creating a whole other family in Tecate, in Baja California. Because there’s the immigrant idea that you’re coming here for something better, but then there’s the male idea that there’s always someone better. And not just male, but maybe capitalist in some way. My model of home was that I could leave, and I should leave, and I could always come back.

Please read the full interview at Bitch.