“Interview with Alberto Ríos”

 

INTERVIEW WITH ALBERTO RIOS
An Interview with Alberto Ríos.
By Susan McInnis.

 

Glimmer Train.  26.  Spring 1998.  105-121.

 

 

This interview was first recorded for Conversations with Susan McInnis, KUAC-FM/TV, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, then revisited in written form in Glimmer Train.


MCINNIS: You grew up in Nogales, Arizona--cheek-to-jowl with Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Were you growing up with a foot in each culture?

RÍOS: For me, it’s more than straddling two cultures. It’s really three. There is an in-between state, a very messy, wonderful middleness to the culture I come from. It is a culture of capillaries, a culture of exchange, of the small detail that is absorbed the way oxygen enters blood. On the border we’re dealing with several languages, several cultures, different sets of laws, and everything else you can imagine. Nevertheless, you’ve got to live side-by-side. What results isn’t neatly anybody’s law, anybody’s language. It’s more a third way of living, and that time, or place of exchange, reckons with the world a little differently.

Is it a place where divisions break down?
They have to break down. Otherwise you’re just like two animals butting against each other, and you don’t live that way. That’s how you fight. And I think that wasn’t what we were doing. It seems that way by some measures. The fence across the border is an example. But it’s a silly fence. When I was a boy, there were holes all over it. You could go anywhere along the fence and see where it was cut. And even now, if you stand at the border you see people running wildly across the hillsides going from one country to the other. So that part’s pretty silly. But the fence--now a wall--is there.
I grew up with it, but my sense of place has a lot to do with the stories I heard, not just the things I lived through. In their stories, my great aunts and grandmother talk about a time sin linea, “without a line,” a time of hillsides and of people: a time of manners, where you just don’t cross into somebody else’s yard, and you live by that understanding.

You’ve said that, as you grew up, your first language wasn’t really Spanish, and wasn’t really English, but was a language of listening. What does that mean to you?
Well, it was, again, a language of manners. In the mix of cultures I grew up in, children were first and always told to “be quiet.” That would seem to be restrictive--a punishment--but, in fact, it wasn’t. It was how they were teaching us that first language of listening: “Be quiet!” It’s not a terrible thing to hear.
In that quietude we were able to hear with both ears. And also with the eyes and with the nose and with everything else we had. I mean, we had two ears--which was very convenient. We had one for each language. And then, the nose for the smells of cooking, and so on. And I think the great mix of things made listening all we could do. We couldn’t talk very well. It wasn’t something we were capable of when we were being inundated with so much. We were simply, I think, positioning ourselves, so we could have something to say and be a player as we grew a little older, when it was appropriate in that culture to have something to say.
This sometimes was perceived as a negative thing in the classroom. We were told to be quiet by our parents as we went to school. Our teachers might have tried to say things like, “Just ask! just ask!” but we didn’t understand how to do that. We knew how to listen, and that was our way of learning.

This is the Mexican kid, the border kid.
Very much. Very much. At least as I was growing up.

Were you absorbing?
I think we were working a little harder than that. I remember, in second grade, getting in some trouble--even though I was a good student. I was doing all the homework and finishing everything on time, but my parents were called to the school because I got caught committing that heinous crime of daydreaming. I think now that’s probably when I was starting to be a writer. I was not simply absorbing. I was engaging. I was putting all that stuff together in some way and projecting. And to get into trouble for it! You know, I think school was set up to give you information, but they forget that at some point, you learn how to do something with it.
As a child, a second-grader, all you can do is daydream. All you can do is imagine how to put it all together. There should have been a reward, but we don’t know how to reward daydreaming. And so, I think that “quiet,” in a school setting, can sometimes be perceived as a negative thing and it shouldn’t be. Not if you’re doing all the other things they want you to do.

A related question: In this day and age, we would say, “How good that Alberto speaks two languages!” But in the early ‘50s?
Very different, very different. In fact, language was effectively taken away from us. We came to the first-grade classroom, and rather than hearing, “Congratulations, we’re so glad you can speak these languages,” the first thing we were told was, “You can’t speak Spanish here!” We all looked at each other, and that seemed a very strange observation about us. So we raised our hands, and said, “Seguro que sí! Of course, we can speak Spanish!”
The teacher said, “That’s not what we mean. We mean, you are not to speak Spanish here, and if you do, we are going to swat you.” And, in fact, we got hit for speaking Spanish at school. We were learning a great deal more than was communicated by their words.
Our parents told us to listen to our teachers. The term “teacher” in Spanish, maestro, is a term of respect for anybody who teaches you something. Unfortunately, it was too quickly applied to those people. They weren’t always the best teachers, even though it was their name and their job. And our parents got fooled as much as anybody. I don’t say that with rancor. I just think it was true.
So our parents said, “Pay attention to your teachers.” Our parents also taught us at home, with a belt, if I can be sort of graphic in that sense, that if you do something wrong, you’re going to get hit. You’re going to get punished. And so you learned that you get hit for doing something bad. And if at school you’re paying attention to the teachers who say, “We’re going to hit you for speaking Spanish,” well, you make the mathematical leap. The mathematics of language says Spanish, then, must be bad. And there was another equation: If Spanish is bad and your parents are speaking Spanish, they must be bad people, too.
What we learned was sociology. We learned to be embarrassed of them in public. We learned to be ashamed. And we did everything we could to make sure--because we loved them--that they didn’t blunder by coming out in public. We didn’t let them come to PTA meetings. We didn’t take the notices home. Because we loved them. We knew that if they came to school, they’d open their mouths, because that’s how parents are. And because they were our parents, when they opened their mouths, they’d speak Spanish, and when they did, they’d get swatted. Now we, as second graders, thought that made sense. It was our way of taking care of them and of the world. We wanted to be good kids, and this was our way of being good.

But then, of course, somebody at the school, undoubtedly an administrator, said those Mexican parents don’t care about their kids--
There you go.

They never come to meetings.
Absolutely right. Absolutely right.

Caught in the trap.
But not in, the long run. It’s not always as dire as it sounds. I think there were a lot of people, a lot of families, who didn’t survive this. But there were many who did, who were smarter than that trap, and I think that needs to be said somewhere along the way, as well.

You have a poem called “Nani” that speaks, in some respects, about being smarter than that trap.
Let me tell you something about it. Toward the end of elementary school and the beginning of junior high school, I really couldn’t speak Spanish anymore. Which is to say I learned well. I let them take it away from me.
But you can’t have words taken away. They’re yours forever. You can change your attitude towards them, and that’s what I think happened. It wasn’t until later, in high school and the beginning of college, that I re-learned Spanish. And what I was really doing was not re-learning the words at all, but relearning my attitude toward them. Nevertheless, there was a time, late in elementary school, in particular, when I thought I couldn’t speak Spanish.
My grandmother could only speak Spanish. And I was still going to her house once a week at least, for lunch, just the two of us. We had a problem. I mean, we can describe it that way. She didn
’t speak English. I didn’t speak Spanish. But in fact, there was no problem, because we were grandmother and grandson, and what we created for ourselves was essentially another language. I don’t know what to call it. It’s too easy to call it the language of love or something like that. I see it as a language of some ultimate necessity. I needed her, and she needed me, and so we created for ourselves a third language, one that didn’t diminish either of us. It was a simple language. It’s one I think a lot of people understand. Simply, she would cook, and I would eat. And that’s how we talked. It tasted good.

You’ve called “Nani” your breakthrough poem. Is it because, somehow, this was a poem of truth for you?
It was a poem of truth in the greater sense, in that when I wrote it, I didn’t know what I was writing. It was writing me. And I think that happens sometimes with language. I wrote these words down, but I didn’t “get” them.
Each time I’ve read “Nani,” each line has come up with a kind of currency for me, a kind of meaning that is important. And I think when I realized that, I began to see that I had something in me. Maybe I didn’t recognize it yet. I didn’t know how to articulate it. But it was starting to come.

Has writing been for you an exploration of languages, spoken and unspoken?
Sure. And it’s something bigger than that, in that it’s an exploration of what languages are. I try to write to the event, to the moment. And I’ve come to see that language is a very poor reflection of the event. If we can stop worrying about how to say something, and look at what the thing is, we’d be in much better shape. All of us.
I think I have a playfulness of language, an awkwardness sometimes, a use of many languages at the same time in an effort to say that it’s not about the language. It’s about what the language is reflecting, or attempting to reflect: the event. That’s what I try to get at. The heart of these things. Not the clothing that an idea wears.

Is it an attempt to bring all of life to bear on the page? And if that’s so, how great a challenge is that?
It’s a way of bringing one moment to bear, one moment to clarity. Drawing it up, like bringing a fish out of the water. And if you always think of it in terms of those parameters--of the single event, the single thing--trying to make that thing clear, it’s not hard at all. It’s not easy. It’s not hard. That’s the wrong measure. It’s just what it is. It’s just that thing you know and can talk about.

Is that poetry, for you?
It is. For me, poetry travels on a lateral plane. It’s not about getting from the beginning to the end. It’s about staying where you are and understanding the moment. And not being done until you essentially can show that. Anything that propels you or compels you forward strikes me as being troublesome. It’s at the heart of everything we’re seeing now in the world. All advertising, all everything makes us go forward. Clocks make us go forward. Everything says, “Keep going!” “Move!”
And that’s, in some sense, what makes poetry exciting. It’s outlaw-like. It’s almost heresy. It’s saying, “Don’t go forward.” Stop for a moment and understand where you’re standing. Just understand this moment. I don’t think you can exhaust a moment. In some curious way, I think a poem can go on forever sideways.
You can look at anything many, many, many ways. Languages show us simply alternative ways, maybe two ways, like English and Spanish. But there are many languages, and many ways to see something. And so I don’t think a moment can be exhausted. I think that there’s a lot there, and I don’t know if that sounds deadly, this notion of non-movement, but I think there is movement. It’s just lateral. It’s sideways.
Burger King. Right? “Fast food for fast times!” And everybody moving to the city! And everything getting faster! We need to listen to something else. Some other message.

I don’t mean this to sound too simple, but what’s lost as we race forward, and what’s gained if we stop?
Understanding. We know how to use things and use them well. But we don’t know what they are. My favorite example is the alphabet. We use it to form words. We write sentences and paragraphs, but we build them on a foundation that we truly don’t understand. We don’t know what the letter A is anymore. A, going back to the Greek, is alpha. We say it’s the beginning of the alphabet. Or it’s just the beginning. Or it’s a sound. Or it’s a symbol. But we don’t know what it’s the sound of, or symbol for. In fact, it comes from the Phoenician, maybe two thousand years ago when it was upside down, a V-shape that represented the horns of an ox. An ox, for the Phoenicians, was food, and that’s the first letter: food. It’s the first thing. It had meaning all by itself before there were other letters. As I read it, the crossbar on the A was a sign that the ox was domesticated and yoked.

How did it turn itself around?
I picture a cave drawing illustrating the whole body. By the time you “wrote down” the whole ox, the ox was gone, and you didn’t get to eat. So, in my way of imagining it, they used a shorthand even then: the horns. But the shorthand was asymmetrical--two horns coming to a point at the base. Human beings are particularly uncomfortable with asymmetry. So slowly--if you look at its history--the A starts to tumble sideways, and goes around and around until it seemingly rights itself. But, in fact, what you’ve got is an upside-down ox.
I think that notion of using, as opposed to understanding, is crucial. In fact, let me use one or two more examples from the alphabet. We talk a lot about sexism and racism, never considering that they’re right in front of us from the moment we begin to speak. The letter B was originally written on its side in Phoenician. In Hebrew, it’s beth, meaning “house.” It was a drawing of a traditional Middle Eastern dwelling, which had two rooms. Two very absolute, distinct rooms, one for men, one for women. Men and women were not allowed to mix because women were said to be--and this is what all the literature says--unclean. We may think that’s absurd, but we continue to use the letter B without a thought to what it may convey from history.
My favorite is the letter Z. It’s the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet, but it’s our last letter. One of the first things you do when you conquer somebody is take away their language, because inherent in language is culture, everything about living. And when the Romans conquered the Greeks, they wanted them to become Roman, to live like them, to follow their laws. So they took their sound away. But when they used the Greeks as tutors, I can imagine the Greeks saying, “The only worthwhile literature is Greek literature. We’ll teach your children, but we need our sound back to do it.”
And the Romans would have said, “All right, we’ll let you have the letter Z--that sound--but, because it’s Greek, it’s going to the end of the bus, the end of the alphabet.” Because it’s Greek. To me that’s a lesson. That’s immediate. It’s right in front of us. It’s right there in the alphabet we use. And that’s where, I think, the work of staying in place, staying with the alphabet until you understand what it is--before you start to use it--makes sense. And that “staying in place” is part of my job as a writer.

Is one of the lessons learned by the study of the alphabet, or perhaps by thinking laterally, that our histories and issues are long and deep, even in a fast-food culture? We seem to want to fix things rather quickly. We say, “Why can’t people get along?” “Why can’t we get rid of this prejudice?”
There’s a great line by William Carlos Williams, something to the effect of, “We don’t go to poems for news, yet everyday, millions die for lack of what is to be found in them.”
We can learn, but we’re not learning. We don’t read poetry. We don’t read those things that don’t seem to have movement. And so I don’t think we are learning from all this.

I want to ask you about the relationship between poetry and prose. You’re a writer of poems that in some ways are very prose-like, and your short stories seem to emerge from poetry--sometimes literally, from particular poems.
That’s right. I’m at some point of epiphany or revelation about my own work, about forms and about genre. As I’m moving toward what has traditionally been called story, I’m beginning to understand that you see poetry better in prose than you do if you go read a book of poems, where poetry is everywhere. You get inundated. You get oblivious to it. You don’t recognize the moment if there are many, many moments equal to it around it. In prose, you know the poetic moment. It is blatant. It affects you. It changes how you read and how you breathe at that moment.
By the same token, I think much of poetry has lost the sense of story. And so I think my poetry has moved more towards story while my prose is moving more toward poem.
Story goes from beginning to end and gets you there. It moves. It’s not lateral. It’s linear. I’ve looked at my poems, and I’m beginning to think that’s what they’re doing. They have more story in them. They have more movement. They compel you increasingly forward.
My stories, though, are going more sideways. They don’t offer traditional plot and structure, of going from A to Z. I think they do that ultimately, because as human beings we can’t help but tell stories. We take care of ourselves by wrapping things up. We watch the letter A right itself, because as human beings we need the world to be right, however we measure that.
So I can start writing a story anywhere and as long as I write long enough, I will eventually tell a story. I don’t think I necessarily have to impose plot, but plot I think is an organic thing. So if I begin to write a poem and I don’t stop at a line break until twenty pages out, I am still writing a poem. I am truly writing a poem. It is the act of writing as an exploration, much like getting on a boat and just going with it. That’s a harder, more real poem to me. What I can do in prose, or what looks like prose on the page, I’m beginning to see has more value to me as a manifestation of the poetic impulse, an exploration of the moment.

You’ve been doing this as writer and professor in a class you laughingly call Obsessions. But it’s serious, yes?
It’s very serious. I think it has transformed students. It has changed their way of thinking and of writing. It’s an exciting notion. Each student comes up with one image. One student chose most recently “two people drinking from the same glass.” Very simple. Just a short phrase. Each student begins with a piece of writing based on their chosen image. A poem, perhaps. They stay with the image for the rest of the semester. That’s all they write about. It would seem impossible to write for three or four months about a single image. But if you can do it, the result is magical: If you can draw the rabbit out of this top hat, you will be amazed by what’s possible in the world, in all those things around you.
So, we begin with the image. We extend it first backward, rather than forward, because this has to do with that temporal notion we were talking about: I don’t think you should always go forward. So we go a little bit backward, to a sentence that is that image, and then to a word that is that image-not that describes the image, but is the thing. We are trying to get at what language represents. What is that image? And then we go to a letter, just as I was talking about earlier. We find a letter that is the image of two people drinking out of the same glass. It may be visual. It may have some meaning. It may be any number of things, but we find the letter that is it.
Then we go forward again. At this point it’s like pulling a slingshot backward. Tension comes as you pull those rubber straps backward. When you let go of it, then you can go forward like crazy, and you’ve got so much farther to go if you’ve gone backward first. Suddenly that image has all sorts of potential. We then write it as a short story, as a prose scene, as epistolary writing, characters writing to each other. And after you’ve explored it, obviously you must add things, and that’s what’s fun. You start adding characters and setting, and it’s just to accommodate the image. But in fact, you’re doing all the right things you ought to do as a writer. By the end of the semester, we come back to the original form. If you wrote a poem at the beginning of the semester, then you write a poem again at the end. But the difference between those two poems, after millions of miles of exploration, is extraordinary, and it’s what my students learn to call craft. That there’s that much even in the single image. That, in fact, you can be a voyager of sideways.

Your own work has these powers of transformation. “The Birthday of Mrs. Piñeda,” for example, began as a poem and emerged later as a short story.
And actually is evolving now into a novel.  If you can’t exhaust anything, it makes sense that a thing will go on. You’re going to see characters in my works reappear in different settings and sometimes just in a phrase. I feel my books talk to each other, that they ought to talk to each other, that there’s a sense of community here in my works, oblivious to the outside world. My books take care of each other in that way.

When “The Birthday of Mrs. Piñeda” emerged as a short story in The Iguana Killer, it seems as if the camera was pulled back to show more of the Piñedas. The tragedy of the moment which she can never forget was not obscured, but it took its place in the house. Is this a result of writing the poem into the “poem” of the short story?
I think it is. That notion of pulling the camera back is an excellent way to think about it. That as you go farther back, you see more, in the same way that if you begin to use more languages you understand a thing better. It is a “physicalized” language in some way. You stand back and you can say more about it.

In an essay in Ironwood you wrote that you’ve always written, even as a little boy, but when you were young you “called it nothing,” and you didn’t tell anyone about it.
I think if I had been writing something and I called it poetry, I might have gone to a poetry book or a poetry teacher--even though we didn’t have any--but I might have tried to do that. And I think that would have been wrong. It wouldn’t have been my poetry.

Could it also have been tainted by the boys on the streets? By your buddies? Was there an urge not to appear bookish?
Profound! A profound urge. It was more than not wanting to appear bookish. Whatever our perceptions are, they’re strong, they’re social, they
’re what guide us through life and let us do all those things that we do. I know that in growing up, as I was writing in the backs of my notebooks, it felt like I was getting away with something. I did homework in the front, and when I would turn my notebook to the back, I was doing what nobody had told me to do. There was no explanation for that. I was getting away with something. And I was also hiding something. Because I couldn’t show it to anybody. I couldn’t turn the back part of the book in to a teacher, and I didn’t know what that stuff was. If I gave it no name, I also didn’t know where to take it.
We didn’t, in fact, have a poetry teacher. I lived in a very small town. I would call it a tough town, whatever that means. But the most immediate thing it meant to me is that if you’re doing something at school that nobody tells you to do, you’re different, and different isn’t good to a child. And I was clearly doing something nobody else was doing. They did their homework and they were out of there--if they even did their homework. So I couldn’t show it to a teacher, and neither could I show it to my friends. I’d be exposing myself in some way as something I couldn’t explain even to myself. How could I explain it to them?

It’s interesting that a secret became a life.
Well, I think it is.
You know, I couldn’t show it to my parents, either, because kids can’t do that, period. So there was some sense of hiding, and they would ask me, “Well shouldn’t you be doing your homework?” It was not that I was afraid of my parents, but I knew they worried about me and what I should be doing.
As I got into high school, it’s not like I couldn’t figure out what I was doing, but I didn’t change the mechanism. I knew that if I showed this work that--first of all, I would still be different because I was doing something others weren’t doing--but if I showed it, I’d be writing, which was a curiosity, period. And I’d be writing poetry. Given the stereotypes, there was nothing to be gained. I wasn’t threatened by it, but it wasn’t going to help for me to show my work and to have it be labeled. If I wasn’t going to use adjectives for it, I certainly wasn’t going to let anybody else use adjectives for it. And so I think my writing became forcefully mine.

The short stories in
The Iguana Killer deal with what a critic called “borders.” 7he borders between children and adults, between kids who are accepted and kids who are not. They show up in stories about the fat kid and the kid who smells funny and the kid who’s flatulent and how they all learn to cope with their worlds.
One is about youngsters on the edge of puberty--a girl who is just beginning to menstruate, and a boy who is having wet dreams. They know each other, but they don’t talk because one’s cool and one’s not. Still, they manage, leaving notes in little pouches strung around cows’ necks at the fence between them, to tell each other the most intimate details of their lives.
I’m wondering how this story came to you. Was there a basis in what we think of as the real world? Did you want to talk about secrets and how they’re kept and shared?
It’s all of that. I think I was every character in that story. I was the boy. I was the girl. I was the cows, too.
I was in some way trying to recover something that I felt in childhood about secrets. I think I write a great deal about secrets as well as borders. And this was an exploration of my own questions: What are my secret lives? What are my borders?
Some of it was what goes on between boys and girls. Some of it was about being a girl, or being a boy. No matter what I am as a writer, I was trying to explore those borders, to see what was there, what it meant to be on one side or the other, to be in the middle.
I am always looking for some kind of truth, though not necessarily accuracy. It didn’t have to happen to me that way. It didn’t all have to happen to me. Nonetheless, what I write about is all mine. It reveals a truth. But I’m not a journalist. I’m not reporting anything that happened. Still I’m talking just exactly about what happened. Picasso said, “Art is the lie that tells the truth.” It follows that, in some way, ultimately, we can’t lie. You know? I mean, I think I’m making this stuff up on some level or another, but I’m not. I can sort of go back and figure out why I think I invented something, where it comes from. It’s just using the right... like playing poker, you put down the right cards at the right time. And you make that happen. You make that luck, that story, that thing happen.

In “His Own Key,” you take up that unabsorbable moment when a child meets up with adult information. A little boy learns from his friends how babies are born-at least he learns what they know--and is overwhelmed by that four letter word, by this new knowledge, by his disbelief and the powerful secret he now has in his mind. I would have said that here you were writing “all of life” into one moment.
It’s sort of what we were saying earlier about language and meaning, and writing to the event. In this case you have more than one piece of information--the known piece and the unknown piece, the secret, and the non-secret. When you put those things together, it’s like adding a set of lenses. The act brings that faraway thing, whatever it might be, closer, like binoculars. I love that. I love doing it as a writer. I love looking at the magic of binoculars. I mean, to bring a thing closer is extraordinary, and when I can do that in writing, it just makes me want to do it again.
Secrets are always on the border, on the edge. Somehow, a secret is that faraway thing that is not faraway at all. It’s right in front of us, but we try to make it faraway, and there’s something both right and wrong about that. I don’t know which it is, but the moment you can bring that faraway thing, that secret, up close and look at it, you’ve done a kind of magic. It’s not what the secret is about, but it’s magic.

When you look into your character’s confusion, you look into a very private place, but the act seems compassionate, not invasive.
I don’t think I’m capable of looking at a secret and not seeing what is positive about it. That’s just in my character. If I have to think about how I write, it’s not to expose something that shouldn’t be exposed. I just start writing about a thing, and, in the same way that plot is organic, the thing I’m writing about comes out. I don’t have to impose it. I also know I’m going to take care of that secret even though I might talk about it.

In reading your short stories and your poetry, it seems you are very gentle with your characters and with your subjects.
I like them.

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“Clemente and Ventura Show Themselves, if Just for a Moment, in their Son”


He was a serious man
But for one afternoon
Late in his life
With serious friends.
They adjourned to a bar
Away from the office
And its matters.
Something before dinner,
Something for the appetite
One of them had said,
And the three of them walked
In long sleeves
Into the Molino Rojo.
The cafe’s twenty tables
Were pushed together
Almost entirely
Or pulled apart barely,
Giving not them
But the space between them
A dark and ragged shine
Amidst the white tablecloths.
The tables
And the spaces they made
Looked like the pieces
Of a child’s puzzle
Almost done,
A continent breaking, something
From the beginning of time.
To get by them
Don Margarito had to walk
Sideways, and then sideways
Again, with arms outstretched
And up.
It was a good trick of the place
Conspiring with the music
To make the science
In this man’s movement
Look like dance.


   Excerpted from Ríos’s new book of poems,
   
The Theater of Night

--------------------------
This interview was recorded for Conversations with Susan McInnis, KUAC-FM/TV, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Born in San Francisco, Susan McInnis was a producer and interviewer for public television and radio in Fairbanks for over a decade. She’s now writing and editing, and on a year’s leave from the far north, visiting in Sydney, Australia.

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