This story is part of a series about arts and culture in Washtenaw County. It is made possible by the Ann Arbor Art Center, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, Destination Ann Arbor, Larry and Lucie Nisson, and the University Musical Society.
Novelist Gina María Balibrera, who will give a reading at Ann Arbor's
Literati Bookstore at 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 20, says she's always been "drawn to stories of families, and [particularly] of sisters."
"That whole arc … of separation and then reunion can be very moving," Balibrera says.
Balibrera's debut novel, "The Volcano Daughters," will be published by Pantheon on Aug. 20. The book, which has garnered rave reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, among other publications, describes a pair of sisters growing up in 1920s-1930s El Salvador.
The sisters, Consuelo and Graciela, are taken from their mother to be raised by the cruel (and wealthy) wife of their biological father, who is unable to bear children of her own. Consuelo, a natural artist with an uncanny flair for the dramatic, is taken before Graciela is even born; Graciela joins her only after their father, an advisor to the general rapidly gaining power over the country, dies.
The general, who is referred to as "El Gran Pendejo," is a dictatorial, mystic-minded fool with "not a cookie left in his head," Balibrera writes. He forces Graciela, still a child, to take her father's place as his "oracle."
After the general gives the order for the massacre now known as La Matanza, in which an estimated 30,000 people (most of them indigenous) were killed, the girls, separated, flee the country. The story leaps beyond El Salvador to San Francisco and Paris, Hollywood, and Marseille.
Balibrera, whose own family roots reach back to El Salvador, says she began writing a version of "The Volcano Daughters" in 2011, when she moved from San Francisco to Ann Arbor to earn her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program.
It was the novel's unusual narrative voice, a collective or plural first person that Balibrera describes as a "choral voice," that first took shape.
The story is narrated by a quartet of ghosts — four girls who grew up with Graciela and Consuelo — who for the most part speak as one, but whose individual voices are occasionally teased out into distinct threads.
"That voice came to me early on," Balibrera says.
For a novelist, she adds, the use of a collective voice can be a "fraught choice" because it can so easily be rendered as "flat [and] unified," something meant to represent "the voice of the state [or] … some kind of unwavering authority."
"I wanted to play with that a little bit," Balibrera says. She adds that her narrator represents "the voice of a collective of women," and, more than that, "a voice of friends, of sisters," who are all individuals.
"I wanted to allow for them to talk back against what has been written without their consultation," she says.
While Consuelo, Graciela, and the ghost-girls from their village are all entirely fictional, Balibrera's emphasis on the experiences of women, and especially indigenous women, is both intentional and pointed. The wide-ranging work touches on the echoes of Spanish colonialism, wealth inequality, colorism, and massive social change — all through the eyes of women. The result is lush, lyrical, humorous, and deeply moving.
"A communist? Is that when a person only eats fruit?" Graciela asks Consuelo at one point.
"No, you idiot!" Consuelo responds. "A communist is like a university student with a beard. Who wears rough, wrinkly pants."
But as she worked on the book, Balibrera also found herself pushing back both against other flawed depictions of Central America, and the stereotypical magical realism so often ascribed to Latin American literature.
"One of the first books I ever read about [El Salvador] was Joan Didion's 'Salvador,'" she says, describing it as a "very slim, very terse book … from a very specific and very removed point of view."
Didion based the book on a two-week visit to El Salvador, the bulk of which she apparently spent at a hotel. Of the country as a whole, she famously wrote, "Terror is the given of the place."
Throughout "The Volcano Daughters," Balibrera emphasizes the idea that "every myth, every story, has at least two versions … depending upon who tells their story and who listens."
"If you don't tell [a story] properly, if you say it too quietly, you erase everyone's face as you go," she writes.
Then, too, Balibrera says she found herself wanting to play with the concept of magical realism, a term often applied to Latin American literature.
"It's not so much the idea of the fantastical being a part of the stories told about Latin America, because that's absolutely there," she says.
But Balibrera describes "magical realism" as "almost a reflexive label that is placed on writers who are writing about Latin America," a marketing gimmick rather than a profound insight.
"I certainly do not consider what I'm writing to be fantasy," says Balibrera, whose ghost-narrators are occasionally able to reinhabit corporeal form.
"Latin American literature and Latinx literature is a lot richer and more nuanced than that label," she says.
That's another reason Balibrera chose to focus on women. So much of literature, she says, features "a flattening of their [women's] own desires, their own artistic capacities … the complexity of their own lives," which she says she takes "a little bit of an affront to."
"I definitely wasn't trying to write
against anything, but I was really trying to write into this story and this history and these characters with as much vigor and truth as I possibly could," she says.
More information about Balibrera's upcoming reading at Literati is available here.
Natalia Holtzman is a freelance writer based in Ann Arbor. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Millions, and others.
Photo by Charles Amyx.