Emma Trelles Interviews Ana Menéndez
Emma Trelles: Your latest book, Adios Homeland!, is constructed around stories told by sundry narrators - Herberto Quain, an Irish impostor scholar who is the self-appointed curator of the stories in the book, an old fisherman, a parachute maker, a coterie of poets.... In this sense, the book is a return to the story-telling style of In Cuba I was a German Shepherd, which also held multiple and subtly connected points of view. What do you value about this kind of narrative structure? How does it spur your imagination and your writing?
Ana Menéndez: When I moved to Amsterdam I started two novels. They were drudgery to write. I thought, well, this is no way to live. I was reading a lot of short stories, like Italo Calvino, Jorge Borges, and I got so much pleasure from them. I realized I hadn't really read a novel in a long time. Short stories were what I love to read and write, so why not go back to it? Of course, there's no market for it, like poetry, but it's really where my interest as a writer lies. Stories are a lot like life, really, when we go through a period where there seems to be connections, or the way that the human mind is always looking for patterns. The idea of mimicking that really appealed to me.
ET: I was delighted to find that so much of this book eschews sequential or traditional plot forms and, instead, experiments with not only points of view, but our perception of time, the disjoint of dreams, humor, tone. In one particularly meta-fictional stroke, you included a final story by Ana Menéndez. What interests you about this blur between the real and the invented?
AM: I think that all of us who write are interested in that boundary –– I think that's why we become artists. One of the particular things that animated the writing in this particular book was an idea borrowed from abstract painting, the repetition of forms of patterns. I wanted to paint a book, to repeat a piece and come at it from different perspectives. The conceit of the book is that it is an anthology, but it’s also a wry look at the way we are packaged as writers. This is an examination, not a criticism, about how much the marketplace goes into these books, how much is real. Identity is really this fluid thing; I realize that the more I travel, especially for Latino writers. Identity is a construct other people come up with. That in itself is a fiction.
ET: I also wasn’t expecting the book to be as humorous as it was. There are a lot of sly jabs at Cuban and Cuban American politics and perceptions.
AM: The humor is something that is missing from a lot of my work, although I tend to be a happy person in my life. There is a seriousness that permeates fiction, and that’s a shame. Humor is such an important part of life and sorrow. With my first books, I was in a difficult relationship, a difficult marriage. When I moved to Amsterdam I moved here with my boyfriend, who I met in Cairo. He’s very smart and very funny, and a lot of his silliness rubbed off on me. I think that writers and artists are afraid of happiness; everyone struggles with this. It’s true that with a certain contentment the fire is gone. But having joy in your life can bring out new aspects to the work. It freed my imagination in ways I couldn’t conceive before.
ET: The wandering, migratory feel of these stories, and your lyrical style of writing, made some of them read like prose poems. For example, "The Glossary of Caribbean Winds" and "You are the Heir of All my Terrors" both have a hallucinatory, poetic feel, as do many passages throughout. Poets are vital to the book, not only penning the stories presented but appearing in a list of fictional bios in the back. And in your acknowledgments you thanked the first poet you knew, your uncle, Dionisio Martinez. Do you write poems? Tell me about what seems to be a deeply felt connection to poetry and how it informs your prose ?
AM: I've always been too scared to write poetry, aside from all the awful stuff we all wrote in high school. My uncle, though, is a very serious poet; it's his profession, I had a certain amount of awe for him. I did strive for a certain lyricism in honor of the Cuban poets. It's really how I got into literature, my uncle always gave me poetry books: Carl Sandburg in first grade and Jose Marti. You had to memorize his poetry. Every year my family went to his memorial in Tampa and we laid flowers. We were always reciting décimas, and my father would write them for us for birthdays. For us, poetry was not a fancy-pants kind of art. It was vital.
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