Jamie Figueroa: On Epigenetics, Migration Related Trauma, Breaking the Rules of Writing and Her Debut Novel, "Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer"
I wasn’t too surprised to hear that Jamie Figueroa’s novel, Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer began with a dream, an imaginative memory as she calls it. This story processes such a whimsical, magical quality to it thanks to Figueroa’s sharp use of language and powerful prose. With fabelistic influence, this novel follows siblings Rufina and Rafa in the tourist town of Ciudad de Tres Hermanas, in the aftermath of their mother's death. While back in their childhood home together, they reckon with ancestral and generational trauma as they spend the weekend performing for the privileged tourists in the plaza. We also meet a genderless angel, the ghost of their mother who breaks dishes and lives inside the house and Rufina’s vanished child who she holds each night. This novel is heartbreaking, yet I felt like I read it all in one breath.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Jamie over the phone where we discussed her fascination with epigenetics, the trauma around some people’s migration experiences, breaking the rules of writing story, and her beautiful debut novel, Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer.
Kailey Brennan: I’m curious what the initial spark was that prompted you to write this story?
Jamie Figueroa: The spark was an imaginative memory where I could see very clearly and hear, sort of all senses engaged, this brother and sister on the Plaza making this racket. Nearby there was also this mystical presence of the angel. I wished there was another word for angel that has a little less of a connotation of religiosity because the angel is really this sort of force from the unseen realm that's also quite difficult to describe and very much in a messy transformational state itself.
So, I had this sort of imaginative memory and what went along with that was the language of the first few paragraphs. It was a language that just seemed very electric and very much seemed to suit the scene and suit these particular characters.
Recently, when I spent a little bit more time, looking at a timeline, what I began to see was that a year before that imaginative memory came to the surface, I had spent quite a bit of time in Portugal through the Disquiet program there. I was there a little under a month and was very much immersed in all of these Portuguese writers like Fernando Pessoa and José Luís Peixoto. Peixoto's book, The Implacable Order of Things, which is just a wild ride that I think gave me an example, but also kind of an invitation. A seed was definitely planted. Also being in Portugal, there was a lot of talk of Saudade- this sense of longing and melancholy and nostalgia that really can consume a person. I've been told that it's difficult to translate into English, this state of longing and melancholy.
So all of those things were deeply at work in me. I hadn't necessarily forgotten about them, but they weren't in the forefront of my mind.
I put these pages together at the very end of my MFA program because I had a brilliant mentor who said, when you graduate make sure that you have the beginnings of what you will work on next, because you don't know what your life is going to be and you want to hang on and grow something.
I was able to show those first few pages to Stephen Graham Jones and he was very encouraging. And so I just thought, I'm going to have to be a passenger here and do my very best at following these folks around. And that's what I tried to do.
KB: That’s so interesting it started as a dream because as the reader I felt like it was a sort of dreamy book. The way you use language felt very immersive like I would sort of come to the surface after reading and be like, okay I’m in my room now. You feel like you are in a dream when you are reading it if that makes sense.
JF: It does make total sense. And I'll tell you, Kailey, one of the things that was challenging in initial drafts was that it was so dreamlike and so sort of opaque, that the feedback that I got was- I'm feeling deeply moved here by a lot of emotions, but I'm still trying to sort out what exactly is happening on the page. So I had to spend a lot of time continuing to honor that strange altered state and also root it, so that you could be able to say, this is what happens here. And this is what happens here. So that you can point specific things that happen and lead to that summation and the ending of the book.
KB: Did you find rooting it in that way a challenge?
JF: It was a particular challenge. It took a lot of being very conscious of patterns and trying to become a tracker essentially in my own work. So I would have to shift how I was actually thinking and move from creating from the body as a whole and into a very analytical, hyper-aware state of tracking the marks and the events on the page to begin to make more choices that would render the prose more clear.
Very late in the revision stages of the novel, the voice of the narrator came through. And I actually had some really fantastic feedback around needing a clear sense of the narrator. So that gave me permission actually to have the “we” narrator who spoke throughout the book. That definitely helped anchor the narrators, the place, Ciudad de Tres Hermanas and also of the rocks and the soil and the roots of this place, the actual physical land of this place. As well as being able to speak directly to the reader.
KB: I’d love to talk about Rosalina because I found her a very fascinating character. I was particularly interested in her background. She tells her children stories of how she got to the town they grew up in, but details from the story changes every time she tells it. We never find out exactly where Rosalinda comes from but she had this desire for her children to understand the suffering she went through. What she overcame, how she survived. Am I interpreting that correctly? Can you speak a little more about Rosalinda and her background?
JF: That's a really great question. Thanks for that. I really was basing her existence on the trauma of migration. So obviously not everyone who migrates suffers incredible trauma. We know that. We know also that a lot of folks do and what happens in the process when one is forced from their homeland to find a safe territory to exist. That is the story of so many folks from Central and South America. I almost didn't want to make it a specific story because I wanted to also speak to the multitude of those experiences. Similar, but very, very different, was me drawing on my experience with my own mother who was born in Puerto Rico, came over as a girl and her process of - again this is very different because she was automatically citizen - but her process of assimilation and her process of shame around who she was and where she came from and how that affected her ability to tell stories and to speak Spanish with us, her daughters. Especially because once she came to the U.S. she was put in a place where she was punished for speaking Spanish. So there were these deep influences that were similar, but different where I had to kind of psychologically and emotionally draw from.
So Roselinda would have been a young woman, forced to flee for her life, from her family, from her community, and the memory of that being so difficult to hold and to remember clearly and even recount. We know that trauma affects the brain. It affects our capacity to speak, to imagine, to remember. I wanted to do my best to render that on the page as well as the consequences of that for the next generation. Rafa and Rufina want to understand who they are, where they come from, and to have some concept of that. And they don't. So they have to sort of fill it in. But that puts them at risk for someone like the Explorer to come along and fill in their own blanks for them. It also puts them in a vulnerable position because it creates such a dependency on the mother. She's not just their mother and all that entails, but she is any sort of hope that they have to put semblance together for who their people are, who their family is because there is no other family.
KB: This novel also speaks a lot about what our bodies hold, memories, and stories - how they are all recorded in the body. I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on that and perhaps why you wanted to explore that in your novel.
JF: So I'm really fascinated by epigenetics. I'm really fascinated by these scientific based research processes around genetic information held in ourselves. We know now that it's not just the physical details or the genetic information around allergies and diseases and that sort of thing. But it's also that perhaps your great-grandmother's preference for cherries is something that you also have, and there's a story to that that you may or may not know.
So for someone like me who is dislocated from their larger family and their Homeland and their people, there is a tremendous amount of nourishing comfort when I remember that in my cells, quite literally, is all of this information about those people who came before me. And who are with me. It's not just a metaphor. But it's the idea that even though I don't speak Spanish fluently - no matter all my efforts. It will be a lifelong journey (laughs)- that in my cells is the language and that way of seeing the world.
There's a scene mid-way through the book, closer to the end when all Rufina’s female ancestors are singing out to her from herself, sort of helping to awake her strength. And I feel like that's something that we, folks who aren’t in indigenous communities, don't spend enough time doing. Even if you're not part of an indigenous community, you still have access to that sense of strength and multitude. Not only in the Walt Whitman sense that you contain multitudes, but in a larger sense of wholeness. In the overculture - I use that word like Clarissa Pinkola Estes uses it: of dominant culture, the overculture - it doesn't really make room for that. So we end up walking around feeling really fragmented. We can see on these characters, a sense of fragmentation that sets them up for some really deep hurting.
KB: Yeah. I’m really interested in this idea of passed down trauma as well and am actually in the process of writing about it too.
JF: It's really important work. There's essentially been sort of an end of the world that has happened during this time of COVID, and all of the political crumbling and reorganizing and all of the racial injustice that can not be ignored any longer, and the climate emergency. We're just in this place of an incredible collapse. Thankfully actually. So we are moving from a state of collapse and to a reemergence of being part of that necessary process of accounting for.
Sometimes we don't have the histories because they weren't privileged in the records. And so I think that's where writers, both with poetry and with prose, can work to fill in with a sort of collective consciousness, with imagination, in these imaginative realms, with lyrical language, and tell these stories that serve to help us to remember. And also shed what needs to be shed. To help us remember, and till the ground that needs to be tilled so that what we need to grow and tend to - to become more human and more relational and connected and honoring of each other and all life forms with a sense of dignity- so all of that can move forward and we can all be in a better place. It means that we need to spend time feeling and sharing the really difficult stuff. So a novel, like what you spoke of is absolutely essential.
KB: I’m interested in some of your structure decisions and I’d love to learn more about your choices. How did you decide this story needed to be told over three days? Was that always the plan when you began writing? Were there any challenges that came with breaking it up this way?
JF: Yes, that was always the plan. It really helped me to contain that, which is sort of uncontainable. The emotional states happening here are so large that they could takeover and I could end up with a novel that's a thousand pages. (Laughs) Which is like the deep fear of writers, right? You have to go way out into the ocean where you don't see land in your creative phase and that's hard enough, but to be there and drowning is not what we want. (Laughs)
As a writer, I study structure. I had really incredible mentors and professors who spoke about structure and the need for that to hold everything else. So once I understood that this story was gonna happen in three days, it gave a sense of containment. It gave you a sense of pressure and tension. Also, three in Taíno culture is the sacred number. Three is symbolic to me of the life, death, rebirth cycle in nature. So I felt like there was a lot of symbolism there, and I felt like when you have a trilogy, that inherently creates quite a bit of tension, right? That’s the triangle shape. And so I knew that I had three days and, essentially two nights, and then I could think about moving from one day to the next and how each day had to be different.
When you start as a short story, it's in medias res. Before the middle of things. That was a carryover that definitely helped me as was my own delight as a reader. Being able to sit down with a book and read it in a day, on a Sunday, after a cup of coffee and just kind of curling up and being able to step into this world and be in this world, if one has that freedom in a day. I also wanted to keep the length of the novel quite contained and quite slim. I'm thinking of the Chilean writer, Alejandro Zambra. He has written a lot of novels, including Ways of Going Home, and most of them are quite slim. It’s this middle space of sort of novel - novella - extended story. I love when those places become blurred, you know? Just like when realism and surrealism or magical realism, all of those boundaries get really blurry.
KB: I also loved how we got everyone’s point of view in this story and you also sort of bring the reader in further as the narrator addresses us and points to things we should look for moving forward or take notice of. That seems, craft wise, like a difficult way of writing. Could you speak a little more about that?
JF: I wanted to create an experience of a fairy tale or a folk myth for an adult. I just love being told a story and also being addressed at the same time. I feel like it's something that happens for younger readers. When we get older, we are told there are certain things that we shouldn't do. Like we shouldn't use the second person and we shouldn't have a direct address to the reader. I just felt like who is making these rules up anyway, you know? We spend so much time studying all this craft. We have to, to be able to write.
And then at a certain point, you're like, okay, how can I pull this off? If you can pull it off and it works, then you're good. So that was a challenge to myself to sort of say, you know some of the rules around the craft of literature and how it works - I want to confront them.
It was an honest attempt to sort of bring back a style of story that is way older than “Western literature.” Do you know what I mean?
I think that time is now where we hold both. Where we can say, yes, absolutely, these aspects of craft are important. The traditional plot structure, what all of these folks from the literary Canon have said of Western literature. Yes. Put that in one hand.
And, open up the other hand and be able to say, okay, let's look at story from all of these different cultures and how story works. Let's look at plot structure that is beyond the inverted checkmark. And again, I'm thinking of short stories where it's a spiral, or it's a web. How do we expand our way of thinking about craft and writing? And then in our own work, how do we make choices that take creative risks, that explore territory that we're maybe fond of, but we're not familiar with. Challenge how things are “supposed to be” in order to tell a more visceral story.
KB: I love hearing when writers break those roles. And the Canon is lacking so much and not inclusive so it makes sense that we have always just been thinking of story this one way. But there are so many other ways to tell a story.
JF: And we need the rules to break, right? Like the rules have to be there in order for us to break them, challenge them, bounce off of them. And so they, in that sense, have a place, but they don't get to take up all the space.
KB: Definitely. This novel is set in a tourist town and we see how the white tourists romanticize the people of color who work there. We see this in the Explorer too, who dresses up Rosalinda and her children to be quite literally gawked and seen as “other” or the entertainment. Can you talk about the traumatic effect that can have on someone?
JF: I really needed to flesh out, quite literally in the flesh, this idea or theory or reality of being othered. So often we talk about that, but we don't actually have the day-to-day details of racism and microaggressions that can batter a person. That takes a tremendous toll. And sometimes what happens - I can't speak for everyone but I can speak for myself - is that then gets internalized over time and really funky stuff can start to happen where you find yourself participating in a performance of yourself. And that's devastating. Some people do it and they aren't conscious of it. But when you become conscious of it and you also start to see maybe the person that loves you most, or the people who love you, are also acting out some kind of fantasy about you, that participation in that is incredibly dehumanizing.
Rosalinda feels like she is so loved and doted over and given all this attention by the Explorer. And that's so hard, right? Because it's a basic human need that we want to be loved and be seen and belong.
The problem is that, how much is he actually able to see her? Because he's so busy remaking her and his image of her. And also the same but different for Rufina. The Explorer gives her insights into who she is, even though it's sort of based on the studies that he's done of similar people. But it's more than what she has, so she's so desperate to hold onto it. Despite his abuse of her, despite his sexual violence against her, that was a person who essentially was a place where she belonged and she felt that she was loved. But really was he actually seeing her? How able are we to actually see each other? And what happens when we are actually able to?
So the narrator doing this work exposes the lenses of projection, and then hopefully the reader has to sit with that and wrestle with it. I'm not telling the reader what to do. I had to be very careful with the narrator and sometimes went too far in earlier drafts. I was like, okay, this is gonna make a reader not want to participate. I didn't want the reader to just be a spectator, but I wanted them to be implicated in some way in these kinds of projections. And then I had to also be very clear about projections going towards the tourists, right?
They're sort of lumped into this multitude also. And so I think one of the deep questions here, and the kind of interstitial tissue of the novel is how do we see each other? And how can we see more clearly, right?
KB: Since this is your debut novel, do you have any advice you can give other aspiring writers that helped you along your writing journey?
JF: So I first picked up a pencil to write a poem when I was like five or six. Like as soon as I could spell two or three letter words, I was going to work. Other people can totally relate to that and then other people come to writing later. It's all fine and good. I'm saying that because there's been a magnetizing quality that the page and story and poetry has had for me. I first sent a story out for submission, for publication around 2000 or 2001, and I didn't get my first story published until 2006 or 2007. I didn't have a complete manuscript until a few years ago. My first novel is coming out like 20 years after I got my first story out. (Laughs) I'm saying all of this because one of the reasons why we write is also to share with our readers and to develop and cultivate our readership and take something to marketplace and share it in that way. And also I deeply believe- and this has fueled decades for me - is that my relationship with writing is just that. It's a relationship. And I'm very aware that writing and creativity are having a relationship with me, just like I'm having a relationship with it. It has meant that I have become better at a relationship with myself overall and ultimately had better relationships out in the world all because I have essentially married myself to my creativity, to my imagination, to the forces of the unseen that move through us and move with us when we write.
So would say, it's fine, absolutely, to you want to put stuff out there. Please have all of those dreams of winning the awards or whatever your dreams are, of having “made it.” Please have those dreams. And also do yourself the heartening stabilizing work of realizing that you are a creative being that must have a deep sense and source of meaning. Writing can function to meet that. So find ways to include that. Perhaps when it's low tide or you're in an off cycle year, and you're feeling really frustrated because the stories that you are working on aren’t coming together. You are still cultivating your relationship with your creativity and imagination and with writing on the page. You're still reading, you're still noticing, and feeling deeply into those stories. That space on the page is your home. That's what I think is really important. You might have one book that wins the Pulitzer Prize but if you don't have another book, you'll still always have your home.
JAMIE FIGUEROA received her MFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her writing has appeared in Epoch, McSweeney’s, and American Short Fiction. She is the recipient of the Truman Capote Scholarship and is a Bread Loaf scholar. Boricua by way of Ohio, Figueroa lives in northern New Mexico.
