Soham Patel Interviews Ronaldo V. Wilson at Georgia Review

In the latest installment of Georgia Review's series "Seven(+) Questions," Soham Patel speaks with Ronaldo V. Wilson about persona and cross-genre interdisciplinarity. Patel leads the discussion, asking, "[y]ou often perform at your readings and in your poetry as Lucy. Can you talk about the recurring impulse towards persona in your work? Has it always been there, how has it developed over time?" From there: 

Ronaldo V. Wilson: Persona, to me, in some ways, provides a means to immediately contest the boundaries of racial and sexual designations under the sign of how many of us understand these to be fictions. Or—maybe persona is a way to have always been there, as the fiction, that is, as a way of removing oneself from the act being in the zone of who one might have to be, from “the labor in speaking writing, being,” to quote Lucy. But I wonder, too, how persona might operate in some permanent relationship to loss, particularly to loss of language, somehow, or in working primarily in a single language. This is what I was thinking about one morning, about how loss, loss of language, must somehow be related to shame in being monolingual for those of us who were not taught our Mother’s Tongue’s, primarily, if being taught is learning in language beyond the shame of being so untucked from something in the ear or heart, a sound which registers in memory, or maybe in a made-up-thing.

Even though I did ‘study’ various languages through my life, Spanish, in primary school, high school and college, and French in graduate school (reading proficiency), and of course English—my primary language—there was always within this study, the sudden stress in needing to be proficient. But how does this relate, directly, or indirectly to persona? The bigger issue, for me, is that somehow persona pulls me, if even momentarily, into recalling my mother in Guam, in a room I don’t quite recall, but somewhere speaking Visayan, or Tagalog, or her teaching herself Japanese, which I do recall her speaking too, sounds of these languages, their music in my ear making a way through my body, and I am thinking, then as this moves in: who or what’s made up in these memories, what sounds, resound, now? 

Read on at Georgia Review.