Creating a Latina Feminist Elegy in “Year of the Dog”: An Interview with Deborah Paredez
Cover design incorporates details from photographs taken by and of the author’s father, Gilberto Villarreal, in Phu Bai in 1971, and details from Pierre Peyron’s “Despair of Hecuba” (ca. 1784).
Though the Vietnam War officially ended in 1975, trauma lingers long after. Poet Deborah Paredez’s latest book Year of the Dog explores her own childhood as the daughter of a Vietnam veteran, while also tracing her father’s experience through memories, photographs, and elegiac poetry. In this collection, she creates a mosaic of history, Greek mythology, biblical allusion and Latinx folklore in order to capture the essence of fragmented memory. In doing so, she has created a new aesthetic that explores the experience of war for both soldiers and their families.
Yollotl Lopez (YL): I read your new book and I love your engagement with memory. How is it that we memorialize? I absolutely love how you have done that in Year of the Dog. What has that journey been like, especially as a poet portraying something that's true life? Trying to portray both memory and somebody else's memories?
Deborah Paredez (DP): I have always been very invested in memory, memorialization, and, in particular, thinking about it within a kind of brown aesthetics. So for me, the book Year of the Dog refers to the year of the metal dog, the year of my birth, 1970, which was also the year my father was preparing to go to Vietnam. Many young, working class and poor, black and brown folks were drafted to go to Vietnam. Like for many in Latinx communities, when my father fortunately returned from war, there was such a tremendous silence in the house about it. I remember being a kid and feeling that the silence in our house, as it was often the case with in PTSD households, had to do with the war. I remember going into his room furtively; the way that kids sneak in to look at Playboy or something. I would go in there and try to look through his photo albums of snapshots he had taken in Vietnam. [I thought] maybe in those images, I would find a key to unlocking some of these silences. And so the book, in some ways, is about that moment that the Vietnam era [where] photography has both overdetermined our way of seeing and thinking about that moment, and trying to undercut those ways by literally slicing in his own photographs, offering up a brown archives to challenge the ways we think of that moment.
As a poet, it's always difficult to write about [the] personal, the familial and the memories that often aren't told. I think my father would say the same, because I've had to share with him along the way. It can be profoundly healing. It can give voice to that thing, which otherwise wasn't ever going to be spoken. It was tremendously scary. And yet, because I was using his photographs, I had to start early on in the process asking him, “Can I use this stuff?” It did provide a way for him to speak in ways that he might not have been able to do before. For me, it was very important that I preserve that. I didn't set out to feel like, “Oh, I am speaking for him, right?” No, I didn't. And there were ways that I also tried to very much protect his privacy. None of the photos that he gave me ever show his face. There's a way that I'm also interested in, by using fragments, to also preserve his subjectivity in a way that is not entirely accessible.
To speak to this idea of larger, brown memory, the book title also refers to the figure of Hecuba, who, after the Trojan War is transformed into a dog because she howls and howls from [the] horrors of the war. She's so committed to her grief that when she's being taken by the Greeks to be enslaved with all the other women, she leaps from the ship and she transforms into a dog and spends her life out at sea, on an island, howling in horror and grief. It evokes a figure like La Llorona and others in our community. [I’m interested in] how have women of color been othered? What kinds of ways have they shown us how to manage and be deeply committed to memory in the memorialization, our horrors over the violences that have been done unto us, in our communities? And so that book resonates with me in my long-standing interest in showcasing women; so that the book both tells my father’s story and a more mythic, larger story of a kind of Latina feminist elegy and how it's been so central to our communities. How have we designed a life and a way of making it through by our commitment to that elegiac?
YL: I love the combination of Ovid and all these different references, because the stories of marginalized people in general are never really put into conversation with the “classics” in terms of scholarship. And it's like, actually black and brown people have been doing this for ages -- calling back to the classics. In fact, my favorite one is “Self-Portrait in Flesh and Stone.” I love how there's this ongoing metaphor of the mouth, the tongue and the tongue of the shoes. It also has biblical allusions. I was wondering if you wanted to speak to this poem, specifically.
DP: We deserve the epic telling and we so often don't get it. I wanted the book to be both for its particularities [and] to also be epic. Our stories are worthy of epic, our grief is worthy of epic, and I'm wanting it to be that big. There was a thoughtful review that insightfully observed, “Some might say this book is like to be trying to do too much.” And I thought,, “Yeah, it is, I want it to!” I actually agree with that review. I want this to be an epic register, because that is how important our stories are.That’s how big our grief is because those stories have been relegated to the very margins of the epic narrative. But in regards to the “Flesh and Stone” poem, that was a real breakthrough for me, because I was also very interested in making these connections through the kind of body part metaphor, but also making connections across from Anzaldua to the Bible to Sylvia Plath, to my father in Vietnam, but wanting to do it in a kind of associative way, not necessarily a narrative or linear way. I felt that the poem was teaching me a way by which to hold them all together was to do so associativity and to do so through a kind of declarative language. That poem also broke open for me the registers with which I wanted to speak in the book. I wanted it to be that capacious. And yet, also that specific. So, how to connect them was often through the kind of language of, not just the parent-child, which we see in Persephone or Cronus, but also through the actual tongue, or the mouth. The book in general is so much about body parts strewn throughout as I work with idioms. I think it unlocked for me a way of understanding the book as a whole, because of the way it speaks. Links through the image or in that case, the body part, in ways that are more associated than in some kind of strict linearity or narrativity. That was a huge breakthrough. For me, that one was what helped me understand how to do the rest of the book. It was a definite departure for me in tone and in style. And it did open up from the kind of frame and a form by which to then move forward.
YL: I don't want to like turn Latinidad into this monolith of silence, but there is this culture of silence, not just surrounding war and PTSD, but surrounding all kinds of trauma, especially with men who are raised in this [idea of] masculinity of like, “You’re men, you hold it in, you survive it, you must be strong!” Then you don't share about it. Now we're more accepting of talk therapy, but that's still not resonating in the Latinx community. How many of us have grown up with a father who is silent and stoic? You’ve partially answered it, asking your father for permission, or asking for more details about certain things. What was that journey like?
DP: What was important for me is, even as this book is in some ways about him, I had to constantly be aware that I grew up in this house where the war still waged through a kind of pervasive silence or a kind of volatile anger that was capricious. Even as much as the story is about him, this is my story. This is ultimately from the perspective of the girl child, who then becomes the daughter. It's the daughter's story. It became clear that I have every right to tell that story, because it is one about the daughter, about the woman's sort of crying out about the horrors of war that continued. Just because the person comes home doesn't mean it's over.
For me, and I think for many artists who have to write about difficult familial stories, is understanding what is the part of the story that is mine to tell. Understanding that there were parts that I would not tell, or could not tell, because that is his story and maybe it won't get told ever, or it'll get told in different ways. That was part of how I was able to reckon with what is the story the daughter would tell. It's a constant negotiation of how to both be committed to a truth, whatever that is, and not using that truth as a weapon to harm those who were a part of that. And I think part of the way we do this, and certainly we do this all the time in scholarship, but I think the same was true for my poetry. If you do the structural analysis, you understand exactly the forces that are bearing down upon him so that the “Edgewood Elegy” poem, that literally makes you disorient the page and yourself as a reader, that understanding, that is the environment that created the silence. It's not just the demonized trope of the machista father.
YL: I especially love that as a whole, it's the portrayal of intergenerational trauma. The trauma of the father comes to the children, comes to his house, comes to everybody around the veteran.
DP: The story of trauma is often the story of intergenerational trauma. The daughter always has a story to tell. I've had long-standing conversations with, for example, daughters of Vietnamese refugees, because the refugee experience and and the veteran experience, especially from Vietnam, there's so many resonances among the children of that war, who may not have experienced it firsthand, but absolutely lived some part of it through the parents. It was very important to foreground that right away and not just a story I've inherited. Certainly, the traumas of that war, but I have also inherited Latina feminist tradition of understanding how to cry out against it. And so the mother poem works in the way of also understanding what else I've inherited, and how I am positioned by my community, by the kind of feminist elegiac tradition in my Latino culture and the literature that excites me in the Greeks.
YL: I love the inclusion of all these images and I love how it's like these fragments of paper. Were they already fragmented pieces of paper? Or did you curate and crop certain pieces?
DP: All of the photos that I was able to access were completely whole when I got them. Whether it was the photo of Mary Ann Vecchio, that John Filo took at Kent State or whether it was my father's snapshot of a landscape, or a snapshot of my father that one of his bunk-mates took drinking tequila or working in the dental unit. For my own aesthetics in what we call more broadly documentary poetry, was the work of collaging and fragmenting and using fragment as the way to both disrupt the official archive, but also to acknowledge that no matter our search for reclamation or recovery, it's always partial. And so fragment[ing] really became a methodology that has aesthetic and political implications, a method by which to foreground the fragmentation that happens to the body and to the psyche. For example, there were captions on [the] back [of] my father's photos. His own writing was also very important for me to put there. But again, by fragmenting, it both captured his own telling, but also another shot [that] allows us to understand the links between the gun and the camera; the ways that they frame certain kinds of things in their sights in dangerous ways. It also provided me an opportunity not to reproduce what I found to be some of the violence in the iconic photos, and particularly Nick Ut’s photo of Phan Thi Kim Phùc. And so it was a way for me to suggest the photo we know without wholly reproducing it.
YL: Speaking in terms of reproduction, there's always the difference between the page poem and the spoken poem. Are there any of these particular pieces that you like to perform or that you meant them as a performative piece?
DP: I've been a page poet for so long. So there's a couple of things I would say. One: The poem that's in a play form, that poem insisted on being a play with multiple characters, “Self-Portrait in One Act.” And so that one, I'd be interested to see what folks do with [it]. I've had people say to me that they would love to have “Edgewood Elegy” made into a piece of music.
I recently did a reading with Aracelis Girmay, who's one of my favorite poets and people in the world. She did a reading of that opening poem “Self-Portrait in the Year of the Dog.” It was such a gift to me, because she read it, and she was noticing how many times the sound “eye” is in that poem. So that in some ways, that's the enunciation of the subject of “I.” But she also read it as “ay” as that sense of pain and loss. The thought of anyone being able to hear it that way, I think someone who would be attuned to a kind of brown feminist elegy, was extraordinarily moving to me and is my greatest aspiration, but not something I intended to do outright. I always say to my students, if you do your art right, it's going to be way smarter than you. So you know, in that case, I would love for people to hear both the “I” and the “ay” in that opening poem.
YL: One of the ones I was wondering about was “Hearts and Minds,” especially with the use of the brackets. Whether as a page poem or as a performance piece, it's all about the absence, it's all about the silence. I was just wondering if this is one of the pieces that you perform at readings?
DP: I almost never perform it precisely because I haven't figured out how to perform those silences in a way that satisfies me. Maybe if I was working with a director. I have a performance background, but I feel like I need to ask some of my much more experienced poets “Okay, how would I perform these brackets?” I was doing a reading with Natasha Treathway, who just published a memoir about her mother's murder called Memorial Drive, which I highly recommend. She uses brackets as well throughout the book. We were having a conversation recently where she was recording the audio book and trying to think through how do you perform those brackets in the audio realm? It's a very important question to think through, like, how would I do that? And how, beyond the spell of silence, would that look and sound like? I don't yet have the answer. So I'm always open to ideas.
YL: Any piece of advice that you would give to, not just budding, but experienced poets and writers who are trying to navigate that kind of delicate balance of capturing something that is historical that's also familial? There's so much that hangs in the balance, especially if the people that you're writing about have not passed. How do you navigate this with your family? How do they feel about you portraying their lives? How do you do justice to the deceased? Any advice for writers embarking upon this kind of journey?
DP: Memoirists talk about this all the time: what is the story that is yours to tell? I think it is an important distinction to make. And to be fully situated, and to own that, which is your own story to tell, understanding that any writing involves risk. There may be an understanding that there may be fallout if one is truly invested in truth, as opposed to using the truth as a weapon. Saidiya Hartman writes [about how] we have to be careful not to use the dead in the service of our romances. I think it could be said, not just for the dead, but for those who cannot speak. And then finally, what happens if we think about the poem as a love letter to the girl we were? What happens if it's sort of framed as a love letter? Then, what kind of ways might that story be able to be told that does honor to the truth?
Yollotl Lopez is a new member to the Intervenxions team, joining in September 2020. She is a doctoral candidate at NYU English Department, finishing her dissertation “Dream On: Undocumented Youth Immigrant Narratives and the Rhetoric of Immigration.” She is also an educator, editor, and creative writer in the New York area. Native of the Mojave Desert of California, she is the proud daughter of Mexican immigrants.
Deborah Paredez is a poet and interdisciplinary performance scholar whose lectures and publications examine Black and Latinx popular culture, poetry of war and witness, feminist elegy, cultural memory, and the role of divas in American culture. She is the author of the award-winning critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke 2009) and of the poetry collections, This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA 2020). Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, National Public Radio, Boston Review, Poetry, Feminist Studies, and elsewhere. Her research and writing have been supported by the Hedgebrook Center for Women Writers, the American Association of University Women, and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation. She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Theatre and Performance at Northwestern University and her BA in English at Trinity University. Born and raised in San Antonio, she has lived on both coasts, endured a handful of Chicago winters, and taught American poetry in Paris, while remaining rooted in her Tejana love of Selena and the Spurs. She currently lives with her husband, historian Frank Guridy, and their daughter in New York City where she is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University and the co-Founder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poets.