A New Generation of Colombian Writers: Authors Interviews from the Colombian Writer’s Symposium, Part 2

This interview is the second installment of a three-part interview series. Please head to Part One to read more.

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An Interview with Gloria Susana Esquivel, author of Animals at the End of the World, translated by Robin Myers

 by Naomi Burnett and Dora Zuo

Growing up, what was your childhood relationship with reading? Did you have a favorite book or author as a kid?

I grew up in a household that was filled with adults. I was the only kid there. When I was really little, I started to become very curious about words and about books. I really loved going to the marketplace and touching books. But my parents are dentists, and they have nothing to do with books. They don't know a lot about literature, but they understood my love for books and began gifting them to me. 

They didn't know that there were children's books. So they gave me a book by Gabriel García Márquez, because in Colombia he's very famous for the Nobel Prize. His books are not for kids, definitely. Of course, I didn't understand what I was reading, but I was hooked on the book. I really liked spending my time watching the words on the paper and learning them; it was very interesting to me.  

I have this friend who has a little girl. She's like seven or eight, and she loves to read books. I watch her, and she reminds me a lot of myself, because I think sometimes books give you a shield. In the dining room, when the adults are talking, she’s with a book. I don't know if she's eavesdropping, like I used to do, or if she is just building her own world, but I think that there is something about having a book that gives you a protective blanket. 

When I was like 12, I started reading everything that was in my house. It was a house where there was no literature for kids at all, like you had books about aliens, books about Jesus, the Nobel prize novels… I read everything because I just wanted to spend time reading. I don´t know, maybe I wanted to shield myself from the outer world. 

What was your MFA experience like in the United States? 

I did my MFA at NYU, but they have a Spanish program different from the English one. It would be difficult for me to write in English. This was a program only for Spanish-speaking people, and there were people throughout Latin America and Spain. 

When I met all these people who were writers like me, that was the first shocking thing. Before then, I had never met people who wanted to become writers. I worked as a journalist, and I met journalists, I met English majors who wanted to do literary criticism, but I was the only poet there. I was very lonely. Then I went to this place, and it was like, Oh, my God, there are a lot of people with whom I have this crazy thing in common.

Apart from that, in Latin America, the book industry is quite different, because books don't usually travel from country to country. There are Mexican writers, Peruvian writers, and Colombian writers, but you don't get the books in your bookstore so easily. The beautiful and magical thing that happened at NYU is that all the students brought their libraries with them on their Kindles, and we started exchanging a lot of literary traditions and getting to know each other’s countries. Of course, we have a lot of things in common, but we also have very different things. So I became familiar with the work of writers I hadn’t heard of and that was amazing. It was another type of education for me, because I discovered my own continent in the United States which is pretty crazy. 

Also, I think the migrant experience is difficult. I don't believe in passports or citizenship: I think those things are like another type of fiction, because in reality, there's nothing that separates me from you…but without it, you can't have access to a lot of things: not only health insurance and all those things that I know are even difficult for people with citizenship in this country, but also work. It's very difficult to get a job if you don't have some kind of paperwork, and so it is hard to know the culture of that country for real. I think that was the most difficult part. 

It's very crazy to think that I was more Latin American than ever in the States. I got to know a lot of people from Latin America, and we were very proud of our culture. When I went back to my country, it was like, Oh, my identity now is not to perform Latinidad. I'm talking about this because I think we can all relate. For instance, the racial constructs in Colombia are very different; in Colombia or in Latin America a lot of the questions we ask center around class and money, but here in this country, a big question is about race. When you come here, you understand that there’s a critical race category, and I have never thought about that before. Then I was like: Oh, now I have to check some boxes, because now I am a brown person, and people addressed my accent... I didn’t understand this. That experience overall makes you confront things about yourself and all your experiences.

Where did you get the idea for the novel Animals at the End of the World?

It happened in the MFA program. Like I was talking about, I had the experience to share books and experiences with people from all over Latin America and Spain in my classes, and they were also more or less my age. There was this Colombian group, we were maybe three or four Colombians, and the way we talked about certain things was very shocking to some of the people who didn't understand the history of our country. It was also shocking to me, because I was meeting people who were the same age as me, the same background, but they had a whole different childhood experience, because they lived in countries that were at peace, and I lived in a country that was in conflict. 

I don't know if you’ve ever had this experience, but when you are in a context of violence, discrimination, or trauma in general, you wouldn’t think “oh, this is very bad” in the moment. You have to get out and look back with distance and say, “Oh, that was hard.” It was very normalized to grow up in a very hostile place. It becomes like a part of your landscape. 

When I realized that this wasn't everyone’s experience, it was shocking. So I started to think about what it really meant to grow up in that context. What it did to me and other people that I knew? What happens with your brain? Is my subjectivity different because I had all this fear inside of me? And the answer is, of course, yes. That was something I thought about, and then I asked myself, where do I start to tell this story? How do I go from this story? 

I had two things in mind. The first one was that my first childhood memory is a bomb– not the whole thing, just some flashes and the emotion that is fear, but not really the story, so I wanted to fill the gaps of what happened there. 

The other thing was something else that’s very Colombian. When I grew up in the 80s and the 90s, there was a lot of violence in Colombia, specifically in the cities, because of the narcos. Then the guerrillas became another kind of violence that was common from 2000 through maybe 2005 in rural areas. Then, a peace process started, and things were chill for a time, but before I left for the US they detonated a small bomb. It didn't hurt people, more like something to scare them. That happened in 2012, and one of my friends, my colleague, lived near the event when it happened, and he was woken up at 4am. 

We were in a part of history where, although we didn’t forget the violence, those types of news stories were unusual. When my friend woke up, his first thought was that it was the end of the world. Because 2012 was like, when the Mayans said that the world was going to end. So he woke up with all of this noise, and instead of thinking, “Oh, it’s Colombia,” he thought, “the world is going to an end.” He came to work and told that story. 

I started to put those pieces together. What happens when you grow up in a violent place? What happens when other things are happening in the world? How can I tell that story and fill in the gaps of things that I don't actually remember but that happened during my childhood that have a historic weight?

Your ability to write from the viewpoint of a child and capture that very specific tone in that way was amazing. Why did you decide to write the story from the point of view of a child, and then did that writing style come to you easily, or was it something that took some more practice? 

What was very hard is that I had this technical difficulty in the writing because it was this little girl who doesn't know much of the world. So how is she going to be able to speak to that if she doesn't have the language? That was very difficult. What I discovered at the end of the second draft was that this story was told by a woman that was remembering her childhood. There's a writer that gave me very good advice: sometimes you need to know who the narrator is… Why is she seeing the world the way she's seeing the world? So for me, when I discovered that this was a woman that was talking about her childhood, then I could proofread it better, because sometimes the voice became very childish, and I didn't want that. I wanted the reader to be able to go inside the mind of the girl and to feel like a girl and to bring their own childhood memories and their own childhood experience, but without it being childish. That balance was the most difficult part to get to do that kind of voice.

This novella focuses on the intricacies of female friendship, and you had a very beautiful arc for the female characters in this story. What about this topic interested you? Where did you develop this passion to write about female characters?

I think there's something very interesting about the experience of being socialized as a girl…  I think that they tell us that there's only one way to be a girl, or that there is only one experience… And I think that female friendship is really interesting, because it has a lot of emotions. Like, you go from hating your friend to being in love with your friend, to hating your friend… It is very complex. They say, “No, there's only one way to be girls, and there's only one way to be friends, and that's it.” My experience has never been like that. 

Also, the novel has something that, for me, is fascinating, and that is…my mother was born in 1957, the year when Colombian women voted for the first time, and my grandmother was a woman that never went to college. I think she only did high school, and she married really young. And then I was born in a time when people could get divorced in Colombia, and women were going to the workforce, and a lot of things had happened. So there are three generations in the family, and each of the experiences of being a woman was totally different. For me, that's amazing. And if I had a daughter now, probably her experience of being a woman would be totally different as well… So I think being a woman changes all the time, and in very small periods of time, and it always brings us a lot of questions… So I wanted to play with that as well in the book. 

In writing, what challenges did you encounter?

The things that I used to write before I wrote this book were mostly poetry. I was more comfortable with poetry; I understood it, it's just very intuitive for me to think about the sound of the words and the images. 

So the first challenge that came up was that I didn't know how to tell a story. I started writing down some of the memories, but that wasn't a novel. That was my memory. One of my teachers talked to me about something that I didn't quite understand which was distance. He said, “It's okay that this is your experience. But if you want to write a novel, you have to distance yourself, watch this from afar, and understand the situation.”

I took his advice and started to think about the characters. I imagined that maybe this happened in a multiverse, where I am this girl whose parents are getting a divorce, which was not my story in reality at all. The premise that there is something different between myself and the character helped me a lot in understanding that distance. I was able to see this as the story of someone else. 

Understanding storytelling was also a challenge, because you don't just write a story in order (I wish it were that easy). You don’t just swiftly write the beginning, the middle, and the end. To understand the parts, to organize, to understand the causes and effects... those things all require a lot of practice, and was challenging to someone like me who wasn’t used to writing fiction.

I'm a movie fan, so I started to watch a lot of movies, learning how to tell a story. This has been helpful in the creative writing classes that I teach. I always use this analogy. Where is the camera? How close is it? Perhaps because I come from poetry, I am very visual. So that helps me a lot. 

What was the publishing process like? Did you experience unexpected pushbacks?

When I finished the second draft, there were two big publishing houses in Colombia, and one of those publishing houses said to me, We will publish you. We’re trying to publish more women. I felt really uncomfortable, because they wanted to publish my work not because of quality, but just because I’m a woman. So I said, No, let me work on the draft and see what happens. My dream was to publish with an independent publishing house, because I thought it would be smaller, and they would take care of me since it's a first novel. But that small publishing house was not interested…Then, I had the opportunity to send the draft to the other big publishing house, and people there liked the manuscript, and they said, “Okay, you're good to go.” And I didn't expect that this was going to be the way forward for the book. But, just as the characters have their independent lives, the book also has its independent life. You don't control that. I think it's like the magic of writing, you only have to be present and do what you have to do, and then the book will find the way. I don't know how, but it just crawls like a little baby and goes out into the world.

What was the translation process like? Did you meet with the translator at all? 

I really wanted to try to keep the texture of the language, but I didn't want it to be a Spanglish translation, because I think there is a tradition of writers in the US that are second generation or Latin migrants who have published where they do that kind of mixed experience very well, and that is not my book. I didn't want that kind of translation. We worked a lot on a lot of the variants, because in Latin America, each country has different dialects. The translator, Robin Myers, also brought a lot of her words, like her words from childhood, and that was very interesting to me. I paid a lot of attention to see how she was handling the little details.

If you could go through the whole process again in this book, would you do anything differently?

The innocence that I had when I wrote the first book because I was writing for myself. When I wrote my second novel, I was more in my head… and I didn't enjoy it as much. [However], I think that I needed to go through all of those difficulties. So I think I wouldn’t do anything differently. But I now know after the second novel that when I'm writing, I have to go to that place where I was more innocent and go with the flow. You don't have to prove anything to anyone. Be patient. Those are the things that I now tell myself. Remember to enjoy the writing. It's important. 

What is your go-to advice for someone who's starting as a writer or aspiring to be a writer?

I think that the most important thing is to discover what it is that you have to tell and to be very truthful with it, because the world is going to tell you that it's not important. When I started, I felt that if you hadn’t fought the Second World War, if you were not a guy who had these experiences, you didn’t have anything important to share with the world. And the truth is that the story of a little girl growing up is important, because those stories have never been heard, and they are very, very, very important to other girls and to other people.

The other thing is to show up for your work. Go there, even though it's frustrating, even though it's difficult, even though sometimes you're going to be afraid. Sometimes it's difficult to understand that writing is a process, and that it's only done when it's in the print; only then is it done. Before that, you can still go through it, have different points of view, change it, don't change it. But to understand that writing is something that's living, not something that is definite. It is bubbling all the time, and you can always go back there. I think that is my advice. 

Dora Zuo is a sophomore fiction writer, currently majoring in Theatre and Psychology at Northwestern University. 

Naomi Burnett is a sophomore nonfiction writer at Northwestern University, currently majoring in psychology and creative writing.