People From Puerto Rico

"The other element was Paz's borderline personality disorder, which I modeled after my own experiences. I received my diagnosis in 2020, as if that year wasn't hard enough, and while I was strangely grateful to discover that my worldviews and behaviors were linked to a disorder instead of all my negative impulses and reactions being me and nothing but me, it was still really suffocating and made me feel powerless. What was extra hard about writing Paz's BPD is that while I have the perspective of someone who went through dialectical behavior therapy, Paz doesn't, so I had to keep forcing him to make the wrong choices since he's yet to learn how to self-regulate. It broke my heart and made me feel so cruel as the author, but it was important to make sure BPD was reflected accurately to help others better understand how the headspace of someone with the disorder might think. I love Paz so much and I feel so protective of him, which, in retrospect, became a big lesson for me because if I can love this fictional character so much, I needed to show my very real self that same love."

"Robbie Couch: After meeting Paz and Alano as children in The First to Die at the End, readers got to follow their journey as teens in this book. What was the most exciting- or agonizing- aspect of writing each character? Adam Silvera: Okay, well, Paz Dario is the most Adam Silvera character I've written since Aaron Soto in More Happy Than Not. That was my debut novel, and it's not uncommon for a writer's first protagonist to be modeled after them and their life, but I definitely didn't expect to feel this connected to a character in my tenth novel. I haven't written a suicidal protagonist since Aaron, so to be doing it again a decade later with Paz definitely came with a lot of baggage, especially since my mental health was at a terrible low. This novel was so painful to write because it kept me locked in that headspace. Sometimes I'd write a scene and then I couldn't go back to the manuscript for days or, in a couple cases, weeks. This novel was ultimately therapeutic but, wow, so, so, so hard to write."

"The Death-Cast universe is my favorite universe that I've created. It was born out of my fear of unexpected death and has ultimately changed my perspective on life. I make bolder choices in my life, almost like I have nohing to lose, but I could definitely take more risks. One of the worst parts about creating this universe, though, is that I spend so much time in it, and it's not real! I truly wish Death-Cast existed, and I often have to remind myself that it doesn't."

"I succeeded in making you care. If you feel nothing, I failed you as a storyteller. I love happy endings, but some readers need the darker stories, too. The stories that don’t make them feel disturbed by their own reality because it doesn’t reflect what they’re used to seeing in fiction. There’s some comfort in harsher stories, and witnessing how one character rebuilds after tragedy can provide hope for the reader."

"All stories that are centring queer kids and their experiences are all valid whether it’s dealing with the trials of having parents who aren’t as welcoming about it or parents who are totally chill about it, which is obviously the hope for all teenagers. I think there are some things that could be said too, especially culturally, like there’s a lot of stigma in the Puerto Rican community that fathers especially are so hyper masculine that they will always be uncomfortable with their children being gay…"

"Some people like ‘happily ever after,’ but I don’t think that’s me. I’m always writing from some difficult place and seeing how the character survives … or doesn’t. When I really want to be comforted myself what I look for is a story about how somebody could survive something really difficult. There are happy stories out there but I think some of them may raise false expectations for teens…"

"I don’t ever see any character as 100 percent good or 100 percent evil…"

"The truth is that our men writers get a lot more attention than our women writers. There are some very good female writers, like Magali Garcia Ramis, who has a beautiful novel, Felices dias, Tio Sergio, translated as "Happy Days, Uncle Sergio." Her novel is as good as Luis Rafael Sánchez's La guaracha del Macho Comacho, published in the United States as Macho Comacho's Beat, but it hasn't been admired as much."

"Remember that Puerto Rican literature always experienced a kind of shortcoming because there was a moral obligation to write realistically, to dramatize our struggle for independence—our colonial drama. If this was ignored, it became a faulty literature which should be punished with oblivion. Imaginative literature was practically disqualified…"

"…The resistance to English, the fear of English, has made us bad readers of English literature, because of our fear of contaminating the Spanish language, of losing it in the avalanche of North American influence…"

"…every day I’m convinced that if one is firmly planted in his own world, the work necessarily appeals to a greater number of people. In that sense, I want to profit from my Caribbean self and incorporate it into my literature, hoping to give testimony to who and what I am…"

"…I have discovered that plays are easier to write than novels if the writer has a certain verbal facility, a certain capacity for the colloquial, an ear for the secret cadences of the spoken word. A play can be written with more ease than a novel…"

"When I started writing, there were only two women writers that I knew: Lorraine Sutton and Margie Simmons. There were very few Latinas writing in English... So when I started, I was mainly surrounded by men-Pedro Pietri, Jesus Papoleto Melendez, Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Tato Laviera. Many of them had books already published. I was like a sponge, absorbing different things from these male contemporaries."

"Little attention has been paid to the fact that the most significant Chicano and Puerto Rican organizations turned to poetry to mark their entry into the public realm...A great deal of "classic" movement poetry has a strong civic impulse-it seeks to be both educative and socializing. Poets such as Gonzales, Alurista, and Pedro Pietri saw their poetry as an organizing tool that served an "agitprop function.""

"During this period, Latino artists did not shy away from taking on issues of racial and economic inequality many artists displayed a newly politicized style of expression. The music, murals, literature, and theater of the movement period most often explored racial identity, cultural pride, and social inequality. Pedro Pietri's oft-cited poem "Puerto Rican Obituary" is representative of this developing aesthetic… Poetry such as "Puerto Rican Obituary" highlights another significant aspect of movement thought: the shift from cultural shame to ethnic pride. Unlike earlier critiques of prejudice and discrimination, movement rhetoric and writings often focused on the emotional and psychic damage of racism, exploring the need to overcome internalized shame and self-hate."

"…It goes back to 1945; when my parents, right, they left paradise looking for paradise…During the adventure of Operation Bootstrap, a lot of people were brainwashed to believe that if they leave there you can have a better life over here."

"I was introduced to Langston Hughes, who became one of my favorite poets…I mean, he was a poet; he wasn’t about words, he was a poet, he had rhythm."

"Like I said, it was 1957 when I started in oral tradition by memorizing all the poems I wrote…And I’d sit in parties, and bars—they were just poems to make people feel good…"

"She become one of Latin America's most powerful writers. Still controversial, her works critique Puerto Rican society with detachment and precision: a cultural sexism that makes middle- and upper-class wives and daughters into dolls; the moral bankruptcy of a corrupt aristocracy; class conflicts that erupt into random violence; the desperation of women and men who are marginalized by poverty and racism."

"What a delight to discover that Ferré is as good a storyteller in English as in her native Spanish!"

"I certainly don't think that the discovery and colonization of America by Spain is anything that should be glorified. The first Indians who came into contact with the Spaniards were the Taínos, the native Puerto Rican Indians, who were a very peaceful people. The relationship which developed at first was very interesting because the Indians had no idea what the Spaniards would eventually do, and they trusted them and befriended them. The Indian leader Agüeybana even offered his daughter in marriage to Juan Ponce de León. But then they realized that what the Spaniards were doing was taking them as slaves, and this is when they began to rebel, without any success. When one thinks of what happened, it is truly an extermination of a people, comparable only to what happened with the Jews in World War II."

"It's not that I want to victimize men, but I think that women have been the victims throughout the centuries, a fact which has been incorporated into mythology and which I thought it was high time to change."

"Puerto Rico, like all the countries of the Caribbean, is a nation where fantastic reality, the world of magic, is ever present. There are various sects of white magic, such as Santeria. It is a reality that is very palpable in our environment, and this is why there are no great differences between fantasy and reality...All Caribbean writers have this in common."

"("What is your reaction when you have finished a work?") I almost always like it immediately after finishing it. I continue to think that I wrote something quite good for a period of maybe six months or a year. But after a year and a half I begin to see some flaws in it, after two years it begins to look pretty bad, after three years it is horrendous, and by the fourth year I want to burn the book."

"I very much believe in the influence of magic and the subconscious on the literary process...I think that magic has to do with the subconscious, much as the ancient sorcerers believed. The identification of man with his material surroundings and his active participation in that world are detailed in the books of Carlos Castañeda, for example, as well as, on a different level, with the books of sociologists like Lévy-Bruhl and Ernest Cassirer, or Lévi-Strauss. The magical identification has a lot to do with literature, this alternate way of viewing the world."

"The word is extremely important. As a writer, it is my means for self-definition, the tool to express my idiosyncracies, my personality. It is also like a painter's brush which I use to depict the reality of my people."

"I have always wanted to understand certain things about myself and my life, but in order to know what I think, I have to write it down first."

"Books grow and become something else"

"I do believe in inspiration, but more so in dedication."

"All writers are unhappy with reality and so they want to build a world where things are open to change. They have created a different space where they would like to be. All writing is, in that sense, a meeting of reality but also an escaping of it."

"If the writer is trying to interpret the meaning of life, all of what he writes is autobiographical…When you write fiction, you are wearing a mask, you are dealing with magic. The novelist is like the shaman; he reinterprets the life of the tribe in terms of his fictitious characters, in order to bring out the devils. And that's what literature does."

"Literature is made of many pieces, of a reinterpretation of similar themes, of a recycling of materials. Only the mask exists, and the writer wears it to interpret the manifold possibilities of humanity that exist around him. He learns to be a writer when he can take someone else's mask and make it a part of himself and talk from that mask."

"I have the idea that people who are very repressed tend to be inner-oriented; they talk to themselves more than other people. People who have difficulties making themselves heard have usually been brought up in stifling environments. Maybe that's why I felt as I did-because I was very timid. Maybe that's why my writing is so violent, in a way."

"(Q: In "When Women Love Men" every woman who is sexually repressed would like to break those taboos and simply be sexually free.) If you read Freud or a little psychoanalysis, you know that society has to control that or there would be total anarchy. But everybody has the same desires. The important thing was that when this story came out no Puerto Rican woman had ever written about sex. My story is just a little story, and it's not Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, but I think I was trying to go in that direction."

"(Many of your stories use dolls as symbols of women's restricted lives. Were you sort of a doll in your marriage?) Yes, I was. Definitely. But in Puerto Rico most of the women of my generation were in the same situation. I was no exception. Women who wanted to change that or go against that stereotype would be considered odd or slightly crazy. The only reason they couldn't say the same about me was because I made it in the world of literature."

"There's still a fraternity of men. They admire themselves, and they admire each other's works. I think they are a little bit scared of women, too."

"A story is like building a chapel; a novel is a cathedral: That's the difference."

"Writing is a lot like sewing: You bring pieces together and make a quilt."

"I think Latina writers today, even more than Latino writers, are trying to integrate both cultures, the Hispanic and the Anglo. There is a conscious effort to include both visions, like V. S. Naipaul does in his novels: the native and the foreign, the colonizers and the colonized. There's an effort to underline the importance of the "side view" in them, of the border town. From the border you have access to more roads, and the perspective-front and back-can be 180 degrees. Spanish and English, those two opposing paths that have kept the New World divided for centuries, are beginning to merge at last into a third path. That's what these new novels are really about: a new United States, where half of the population will be Latino in the next century."

"Writing is about touching people's hearts-in Spanish we say "conmover," which literally means to move with the reader, to make the other feel. We move our bodies when we're making love, and I've always thought about writing as a way to make love: you give and receive understanding, compassion, support, advice, knowledge, and pleasure. Without communication there is no love. This is the commitment a writer has to literature."

"I don't translate my work; I write versions of it. I couldn't let anybody do it for me. We're a different self in each language, since language makes you think in different ways. I feel if I let someone else translate my work, the translator would stamp his personality on it. The translator speaks with your voice, but the soul behind the voice is someone else's."

"We live in much more flexible societies, but we have to keep testing them, pushing against the lid of the system so it doesn't crush us again. And one of the best ways to do this is to be frank about one's own experiences."

"All writing is, in essence, a translation of reality into imagination. Writing implies a passage, a transformation that brings echoes of death and rebirth."

"(On featuring Black and mulatto characters in her works) …I grew up in Ponce where all our domestic service was black. I always had a lot of contact with them, and to a degree they gave me the kind of love that my family denied me. And so I have that sympathy—or empathy—for la gente de color (people of color), and I cannot help it. However, I do not like to create archetypes. If it is possible to break down a novel into archetypes, it is not a good novel…"

"I have had many opinions in my life because I have lived many lives. Ultimately, I can say that in all of my many lives, I have tried to do one fundamental thing: I have attempted to bring self-respect back to Puerto Ricans. That has been my purpose and I have been consistent in this. I believe that if readers can see themselves in what I write, if they realize that they share something with those characters, then they can understand themselves better and they can accept themselves. And when you accept yourself, you gain self-respect. If I have provided that space for two or three people in the world, I am more than satisfied."

"(On how her writing allows readers to imagine themselves) The fundamental truth of my life, the principle that governs it, is that nobody has a monopoly over the truth. Every person is a lens that focuses reality in a different way and everybody has the right to do so. This, in fact, is an anarchist principle, for I am indeed, an anarchist. From the moment I position myself at a certain standpoint, I immediately see things from that perspective and from its opposing perspective…"

"being Puerto Rican is more than speaking and writing a language, and more than a language. It is a culture and a way of thinking; an environment; customs; food; a very complex context."

"the most revolutionary aspect of my books resides in their participation in the feminist struggle—in the search for individual freedom."

"I think that accepting biculturalism is smarter than perpetuating the unyielding Nazi, fascist idea that we can only speak Spanish in Puerto Rico and that we can only think in nationalist terms."

"These times made me search for guidance within myself, for a reason to live. This is where my literature comes from."