Moments of Uncertainty | An Interview with Katya Adaui
Interviews
By Fionn Petch
Katya Adaui was born in Peru and lives in Buenos Aires. Her first book to appear in English is Here Be Icebergs, published June 14, 2022, in a translation by Rosalind Harvey. It is a collection of twelve stories whose characters are explored through the use of terse, sometimes fragmentary, language. Furnished with a sense of their life stories, the author positions the reader as observer of an unfolding crisis or rupture of some kind, portrayed with what the translator describes as a “fearless looking.” In this interview, I began by asking Katya about the collection’s unifying theme.
Fionn Petch: Almost all the stories in Here Be Icebergs revolve around families; in particular, the relationship between children and adults. In “The Color of Ice,” a character remarks, “Getting through childhood is to survive the worst of all tsunamis.” Could we sum up the theme of the collection as looking back at the rubble of childhood from the perspective of an adult—that is, once “it’s all over”?
Katya Adaui: Louise Glück writes that “we look at the world once, in childhood; the rest is memory.” Thoreau wrote in his diary that “we find only the world we look for.” Giorgio Agamben will go on to say that “remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.” I tried to weave biographies, always with the idea that only if the characters have a past, personality, expectations, weaknesses, and desires can I accompany them into the future. Traces, faces, remain. Characters that can laugh as they stand amid the rubble because they are able to narrate it.
When we recall the pains and the joys of childhood, there are very specific distortions. I’m interested in working with the insistence of false memories: that’s part of the power of writing. In one book, Jamaica Kincaid tells us that her mother chopped down a soursop tree in their garden—her favorite tree—with a machete because it was infested with red ants that were stinging her little brother. In another, she recounts that the tree wasn’t torn up by her mother but by a squad of prisoners, and that it wasn’t a soursop but a cherry. Vivian Gornick, meanwhile, will never forget the hole her mother cut in her favorite dress when she was little, telling her: “This is where your heart would be if you had one.” It takes more than sixty years for her to accept that it never happened. In reality, it doesn’t matter if these things happened or not. What matters is that both authors experienced their birth into writing or encountered their narrative obsessions as a result of these (false) memories.
FP: At the end of the story “Alaska” (which also happens to contain the line that gives the collection its title, Here Be Icebergs), you describe how strains of viruses are preserved “in the memory of the ice”—in the polar permafrost. You also remark on how life quickly begins to form around a newly calved iceberg, “establishing a new cycle.” Is the iceberg a metaphor for the family? Not only in the more obvious sense that the greater part of it cannot be perceived from outside, but also in the sense that it is slowly melting; in the way that the secrets and damage we inherit can take years or generations to manifest themselves?
KA: We inherit misunderstandings that sometimes are never resolved, that slip through our hands, but acknowledging them and admitting their existence allows us to move through these secrets. In the sea, around a piece of rusting metal, fish construct new homes. I’m always astonished by the excessive capacity for adaptation: as a phenomenon, it is at once luminous and sad. The family has this ability that is so ambiguous: to receive you and to expel you, to show you the world and expand it, or to suffocate you. It is the space of the first tooth, the first word, the first steps, the first sleepless night, the first laugh, the first grief, the first consolation, the first associations. But the family is never just one thing and even less a fixed one; it has a dynamic interior.
FP: Water also appears throughout these stories in different forms and contexts. Does water hold some special significance for you? I understand that the presence of the ocean is a constant theme for residents of Lima.
KA: To be born in Lima is to live with the presence of the Pacific, even if you can’t see it or don’t know how to swim. It is an inescapable awareness, like the smell of damp and fishmeal, and we take it too much for granted. For that reason, this line from Martín Adán’s novel La Casa de Cartón is so beautiful: “You don’t understand how it’s possible to go to school so early in the morning when the sea’s down below by the pier.” The book is from 1928 and it’s still the same today. In addition, despite the fact that Peru is a country with a lot of water, over seven million Peruvians suffer shortages of drinking water. And, every four or five years, the skies open and it rains for days on end. The rivers break their banks and wash away everything in their path, and the blue sea turns brown with the sediment. We still refer to this as a “phenomenon” when we know perfectly well that El Niño is a regular event.
I remember once that a tsunami warning was issued for Lima, and people brought out deckchairs to watch from the clifftops. This is the excess of adaptation: believing yourself out of danger but close enough to witness it.
I’m interested in what happens between scarcity and flood because that’s the way I write, too: through sedimentation, through damming up, through broken banks.
FP: You had already published three books when you decided to move from Peru to Buenos Aires to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing. Here Be Icebergs was your next book. What was the driver of this change in scenery? Has anything altered in your way of writing since you’ve lived in a different country?
KA: The idea that Argentina is where the best writing is coming from is true, and I think it has a lot to do with the public universities and their concern with making people think. I particularly like the fact that it is one of the societies with the highest number of psychoanalysts (though I’m sure many people are fed up with so much psychoanalysis), but I love it because psychoanalysis is language—it is active listening. In Buenos Aires, there is a demonstration every day (again, many people may be fed up with this), but it excites me to live in a city with a high level of political awareness, where the ideas of community and collectivity are still possible: the changes that are only brought about together, encounter to encounter, despite differences. It brings me joy to live in a city where people think about and discuss writing, where you can also think politically, question your own feminism, and participate in public debate. There is a circuit at once spirited and animated, the feeling of a conversation that never ends but rather continues. The spirit of social encounter lives on here.
FP: The stories in this collection only contain a few details that give away the fact they are set in Peru. How important is it for you that your stories are located in a particular place? Or are they universal in character?
KA: My homeland is inside me, and I carry it with me wherever I go. Writing is my home. In everything I write, the sea appears time and again as my landscape of obsession; I am a salt-water creature. There are also highways and markets and so on. But perhaps more than an author of external landscapes or atmospheres, I am concerned with inner landscapes. I don’t tend to provide much context either, whether describing bodies, scattering adjectives, or appending colors or names to things. Now that I think about it, what most interests me is depicting a moment of uncertainty, a spiritual state.
FP: Here Be Icebergs is your first book to be published in English. What does that mean for you? Do you ever worry that English-language readers may lack the context for certain aspects of the stories that are implicit to a Peruvian or Latin American reader?
KA: My father, who was Peruvian and Palestinian, lived for ten years in Baltimore and was a parachutist in the U.S. Army. When he returned to Peru, he worked as an English teacher for thirty years (in an institute and at the Naval School). I wonder what he would have thought of this book translated into a language he knew so well but which he never taught me. It gladdens me, and I am very grateful to be working with Charco Press, because Rosalind Harvey, the translator, is obsessed with language. I’ve watched as she considers line by line, shifting from my mother tongue to hers, chasing a music, a beauty, minutiae that are more than minutiae. Rosalind rejoices in the process, word by word, and to see that happening is very special.
I’m incapable of inventing ideal readers in my head. I think more about leaps of trust or faith or love, in delivering something up so that the other (whom I don’t know, and who doesn’t know me either) completes it with me. I’ve tried to be generous, and I hope I’ve achieved that.
FP: You certainly have. Rosalind remarks in her translator’s note that one of the challenges for her was what she calls your use of “jagged fragments” together with a certain deliberate ambiguity in the language. In the first story “The Hunger Angel,” for example, language breaks down as the character returns to infancy. In the eighth, “We the Shipwrecked,” the father’s memories are scattered like shards.
KA: Writing arrives like a collage of materials that are often contradictory, incomplete, unsatisfactory (news items, things you’ve read, your own memories, other people’s memories, forgotten stuff, speculations, insomnia, dreams). I don’t know any other way of writing that is not in fragments—fragments that run forwards and backwards, with a certain nonlinear continuity, and link up without leaving a trace of their join. These fragments are rationed out with careful punctuation work that is the most secret part of one’s own language, more capricious and arbitrary and elliptical. Because it is not a matter of grammar; it is personal and obeys the internal process of breathing that one rehearses over and over. Why has this happened, why language and not something else? I don’t know.
FP: That is fascinating. Similarly, in stories like “This is the Man” or “The Color of Ice,” there are characters who stop speaking, or for whom language does not seem enough, as a result of a traumatic experience. Is writing a way of addressing those things we can’t talk about directly in speech?
KA: I don’t believe that everything can be said, and that is why the characters fall silent. When they fall silent, they are thinking about the next word they will say or not say. Falling silent doesn’t always mean giving up. It can also be a question of waiting or postponing. When I write, I succeed in doing something I never manage to do in real life: getting someone (including myself) to be quiet when I ask them to.
FP: Let us now fall silent, then. Thank you very much, Katya.
Fionn Petch is a Scottish-born translator working from Spanish, French, and Italian into English. He lived in Mexico City for 12 years, where he completed a PhD in Philosophy at the UNAM, and now lives in Berlin. His translations of Latin American literature for Charco Press have been widely acclaimed. Fireflies by Luis Sagasti was shortlisted for the Translators’ Association First Translation Award 2018. The Distance Between Us by Renato Cisneros received an English PEN Award in 2018. A Musical Offering, also by Luis Sagasti, was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 and won the UK Society of Authors Premio Valle Inclán 2021 for best translation from Spanish.
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