An Interview by Jennifer Maritza McCauley
I’ve been a fan of Raquel Salas Rivera as a writer, activist and a person for some time. Salas Rivera is kind-souled and fierce-spirited and has a great love for poetry, literature and marginalized and forgotten voices. Their poetry cuts and pleases, is thrilling in its sophistication and abandon, and forces you to see the un-seeable. They tackle gender non-conformity, love, Puerto Rican culture, identity and various other weighty themes with power and convention-busting lyricism. As Salas Rivera says, “Poetry is something that hopefully makes people fucking feel,” and man, will Salas Rivera make you feel.
Salas Rivera has published poetry and essays in numerous anthologies and journals. Their book Caneca de anhelos turbios was published by Editora Educación Emergente and their chapbooks include oropel/tinsel (Lark Books & Writing Studio) and huequitos/holies (La Impresora.) Salas Rivera is also a Contributing Editor at The Wanderer.
Here, we discuss Salas Rivera’s origins as a writer, the power of voice, what is lost in translation and fighting oppression, amongst other topics.
ORIGINS
Our journal is interested in your "origins," i.e. where you’ve come from and where you want to go as a writer and individual. Would you talk a bit about how you became invested in creative writing, and poetry/essays in particular?
SALAS RIVERA
I am deeply invested in a queerness and Caribbeanness that is originless in the familial sense, and prefer the Glissantian rhizomatic mangrove over rootedness. I come from all the places where I lived as a child: Wisconsin, California, Nebraska, Alabama, and Texas. I come from the half of my life I lived in Puerto Rico: the smells coming from the Cerveza India factory, the strikes, el mar. I come from alienation, isolation, anger, young adult fantasy fiction, long rides across grassy plains, racism, terrifying Waffle Houses, uncomfortable tree names, singing Juan Luis Guerra in my living room, opening owl pellets, playing with snakes, displacement, and having to relearn the same language in multiple spaces. I also come from the present. The remembrance of my past is haunted by the knowledge that I may be arrested for resisting, protesting, and refusing integration into the U.S. nationalist-fascist ideological project. I fear this multiverse will disappear like so many multiverses disappeared under Pinochet, Franco, and Trujillo.
ORIGINS
On that note, Audre Lorde says, “the personal is political.” In the poem you gave us “i fight with my girlfriend because the fascists want me dead” you list “reasons to hate yourself and all others by extension.” The narrator’s “reasons” imply that identity and love have consequences in a repressive society. In your work, you also capture the politics of love, sexual orientation and Puerto Rican culture with incredible complexity and fierce language. Do you see writing about your life or topics you care about as a radical or “political” act? And if not, why?
SALAS RIVERA
Poetry is something that hopefully makes people fucking feel. Experiencing deeply can lead us to fight for change in ways that affect more than just ourselves. Sometimes I think poetry is just a form of self-medication. Sometimes it feels like an industry in which the most disadvantaged workers are expected to do free labor. Other times, it has played a significant role in shaping revolutionary movements. A responsible answer would be: name the writer and the context, show me the book and the poem. An irresponsible answer would be: when are we going to end all this horror, and finally create something different?
ORIGINS
I love that. And you’re also a talented and inventive translator. You’ve said, beautifully, “Spanish is the language I write in, but English is the language most accessible to a great deal of people...so rather than choose, I decided to use translation as a means to talk about impossible choices that always leave traces of loss...” What are some of the losses and gains you’ve experienced when translating your own work?
Recently, I translated a few poems from my new book tierra intermitente, which is being published by Ediciones Alayubia, and in the process I kept thinking, “Wow, it really sounds better in Spanish.” Still, some words in English intensify through translation. For example, in the poem “canción cantada,” I write “llegué al día/despierta.” In English, I chose to translate it as “i came to day/woke.” By using the word “woke,” the English translation narrows down the possible interpretations, but also opens up a world of resonances.
What I miss the most are all the experiences that cling to my Boricua Spanish. I often have to translate terms for my partner Alli, so that she can then incorporate them untranslated into our lives. Words like buchipluma, ñoña, changería, and tostonera, are tied to collective practices. A piropo is not the same as a catcall because a piropo is an artform. The same goes for popular expressions. I try my best to capture the spirit, but like father like son doesn’t sound as playful as de tal palo tal astilla or he/she/they is/are a splinter of the tree.
Finally, how can I talk about loss, without talking about the Spanish speakers who are being barred entrance into the U.S., without talking about arrests, ICE, people with green cards being detained at airports, and this repressive government. How can I talk about loss, without talking about the Control Board, the new oligarchy set up in Puerto Rico, not to govern, but to rule. Language control is central to colonialism. As people are killed, their languages are killed with them. I am haunted by this. My work is haunted by this.
ORIGINS
One of my favorite lines (of any recent poem) is from “suprasegmentacionalidades,” in which you say: “you are so much more than your translation/she doesn’t understand why my home is not her sanatorio.” Would you talk a bit about what it means to transcend your own “translation” in your work and/or personal life?
SALAS RIVERA
For me there has been no transcendence. There has only ever been home, and something else that I call a translation. The U.S. invisibilizes languages, in ways that most English speakers don’t have to think about. To those speakers I say: Many of the people who are speaking English with you, are translating as they speak. They are finding mismatched equivalences in order to make themselves legible in your language. Some part of who they are will never be yours.
ORIGINS
You have a bold, sensual, unrelenting voice that grabs readers and refuses to let them go. Your writing is as honest as it is pressing, as vulnerable as it is powerful. How do you craft your poetic voice? Does voice influence the poem’s form?
SALAS RIVERA
I have no idea how many poetic voices populate mine, or if it can even be called mine. I’m sure if you looked closely you could find Vallejo, Dávila, Palma, my mother, my grandfather, and who knows who else. The voice I developed in my first book, Caneca de anhelos turbios, was a dense, baroque voice. I wanted the readers to have to unpack each verse. With time, I began to unwind that voice a bit, to let it breathe. The more I came into the gender and sexual identity I now call my own, the less tense this voice sounded. I was trained to be afraid that my words could be used against me in a court of law. That still holds true, but now I refuse to do the state’s work by self-regulating. I know this puts me in a precarious position, but I’ve lived a closet-free life for this long, and I plan to defend that with all I have.
I thought about form obsessively for a long time, and decided to stop using it as a descriptive term after realizing the form-content binary is racialized. Form is violent because it resembles the state. To learn certain forms is to gain access to resources. I’m definitely not the first to think about this; D.A. Miller wrote on it extensively in The Novel and The Police. Discussing works in terms of form and content is also violent because it hierarchically distinguishes supposedly universal formal qualities from particular and fleeting content.
ORIGINS
oropel / tinsel (Lark Books & Writing Studio) is your newest chapbook. Would you talk a bit about how this project came together?
SALAS RIVERA
In July of 2015, I went through a bad poetic-political breakup, which left me pretty disillusioned with poetry. I felt depressed and isolated, and tried to figure out why I was writing. I then began to deal with my inherited political trauma. In December, Elizabeth Treadwell wrote to solicit a manuscript. I read up on her press and who she was publishing, and got excited. I’d been writing poems that were helping me heal, so I put these together and sent them in. These poems are joined by their relation to queer supplementarity as a political compass. Up to this point, I hadn’t articulated what I wanted out of a political project, since I almost always found myself doing work with others and adjusting to their needs. oropel/tinsel became a blueprint for my future work.
ORIGINS
Do you have any new projects you're working on? Have any writers, politically leaning or otherwise, influenced your new work?
SALAS RIVERA
All I can really think about is destroying fascism, so I’ve been working with a group called Yerbamala Collective. Our name comes from the expression, “Yerba mala nunca muere” or “A bad weed never dies.” We didn’t want our name to belong to us alone. This way, if anything happens to the members under a fascist regime, other poets and artists can keep the project alive.
Right now I’m being influenced by the writers I am hanging out with. They usually share their work with me informally. This includes: Chloë Rose, Colette Arrand, Joohyun Kim, and Oki Sogumi. Most of the books I’ve been reading have been about the history of fascism and the political history of the U.S. You could say they are influencing my work, in that they are influencing my existence, which encompasses my poetry.
Raquel Salas Rivera has published poetry and essays in numerous anthologies and journals. In 2011, their first book, Caneca de anhelos turbios, was published by Editora Educación Emergente. In 2016, their chapbook, oropel/tinsel, was published by Lark Books & Writing Studio, and their chapbook huequitos/holies was published by La Impresora. Currently, they are a Contributing Editor at The Wanderer. If for Roque Dalton there is no revolution without poetry, for Raquel there is no poetry without Puerto Rico. You can find out more about their work at raquelsalasrivera.com.