Valeria Luiselli: "We believe we are educating the children when, in reality, the children are re-educating you"

BarcelonaAfter a breakup, the protagonist of Principi, mig, fi (Angle/Feltrinelli; with Catalan translation by Elisabet Ràfols Sagués), travels to Sicily with her teenage daughter and a tile from a mosaic depicting the god Proteus that her grandmother "stole" from a site. With a wealth of mythological and classical references, the mother seeks to start over and establish a new bond with her daughter. The writer Valeria Luiselli (Mexico City, 1983) is also the author ofLos niños perdidos (2016), in which she recounts her experience as a translator for migrant children in New York, Los ingrávidos (2011), andDesierto sonoro (2019).

The narrator's daughter is a teenager. And you don't conceive of the relationship as a refuge or a peaceful place, but rather the daughter, in some way, forces the mother to confront various issues.

— Yes, the relationship I explore is not unidirectional. One often thinks of family legacy, education, or family memory as something that comes from top to bottom, in a linear and vertical way. But the reality is that relationships are much more fluid, multidirectional, and complex. One believes they are educating their children when, in reality, the children are always rewriting your history, re-educating you. Undoubtedly, this particular girl makes a very active imaginative effort to take the threads of family stories and weave them in a different way.

Sometimes it feels like the girl sees more clearly, in a sharper way.

— I think so. The mother is so preoccupied with two or three questions that obsess her: how do we start again? Where and how do we rebuild life? And how do I manage to be a mother on my own? These two big questions generate such a strong gravitational center that the mother cannot look any further. It is the girl who can look further, towards a more distant horizon.

The trip to Sicily begins after a family breakup. They are forced to create a new bond because the stepbrother disappears, the stepfather disappears... and they look for a new place. But perhaps the "place" is not a house, it is not something physical, but rather a bond.

— Yes, the mother is looking for a different way to reimagine this bond. She says at one point: "Now that we have lost our gravitational center, we are like two planets adrift, orbiting each other, trying to find a new order."

They go to an island, Sicily, and the landscape is very present there. And then there is the volcano, which is erupting. It's as if there were something catastrophically latent, a constant threat.

— Sicily is a fascinating borderland. First of all on a tectonic scale: it is, literally, where the African and European plates collide. Beyond metaphor, it is a physical reality that manifests in a complex archipelago of volcanoes that determine a very particular topography and climate. There is also this feeling of impending doom. If you live surrounded by seven volcanoes, the imminence of a possible outcome becomes normalized. By the way, I went there to record the sounds of the volcanoes, winds, and tides for the audio version of the book.

There are many shared rituals between mother and daughter: playing chess, reading together, treasure hunting... There is a claim for shared time.

— I think they learn to be together in a very intense way. What the mother doesn't know how to do is play. Even though the daughter proposes different ways of playing – possible imaginary scenarios –, the mother doesn't give in. She doesn't do it until a moment comes when she says: "Okay, I accept your proposal, let's play".

There is the tile of the god Proteus, a piece from the past "stolen" by the grandmother from a site. Why Proteus, precisely? This god capable of changing shape and predicting the future.

— Proteus is a fascinating mythological character, a bit cunning, who slips away and cannot be caught. He is a secondary character in the pantheon, barely mentioned in Ovid's Metamorphoses. But for me, he is the figure that best explains the creative process, especially writing: he is capable of seeing the past and the future with total clarity, of seeing the beginning and the end – which is what a novelist most desires – and yet, when the writer tries to catch him, he slips out of their hands.

The history of the piece is also interesting: the daughter wants to return it to the original site. But then comes the reflection that the material of that Roman mosaic does not come from there either, but rather from distant places.

— The daughter understands that there is no ultimate origin of things, but only narrative layers. She realizes that, although the mosaic was in that town, the stones perhaps came from Tunisia and the glass from the Levant. Where does history really begin? How far can we go in our understanding of the past? The girl carries out a deeper excavation and understands that stories are layers upon layers.

That's why he resorts to the Roman writer Pliny the Elder?

— Pliny the Elder is an exemplary observer. He set out to look at the world as if for the first time. He tries to observe through natural elements and not through deities. Pliny is the great cataloger, the encyclopedist of nature. It would do us a lot of good, nowadays, to recover this eagerness to gather observations in the face of a world that overwhelms us and that we do not understand. We do not have Pliny's eye or ear to organize this chaos. We need to learn to observe and listen again. We must slow down and look beyond the web of information.

The book's title speaks of "beginning, middle, and end." But the mother's life is in full process of dismantling. There is a very real reflection: she is in "the middle arc," the point where children arrive and parents leave.

— It is a very complex vital moment, the intermediate space between childhood and old age. It is a sad place of observation, where we see those who preceded and sustained us leaving. Whether by real death or by the slow fading of faculties. The beginning of the novel has an epigraph which is a conversation between the narrator, her mother, and her daughter. The narrator asks: "What are you afraid of, mother?". And the mother replies: "Of losing clarity, of losing my mind". The novel is narrated from this place: understanding this fear in the older generations and seeing it as a possible reality in ourselves, with compassion and attention.

You also talk about omens and premonitions. Have you reached any conclusion about what they really are?

— Premonition is a form of time travel; not in the literal sense of H.G. Wells, but as a particular state of mind. It comes from a keen observation of reality. Emily Dickinson has a poem that says premonition is "that long-shadowed fore-erring thing that the Sun sets on." Before the Sun disappears, we see its shadow. It's the perfect metaphor.

Have you ever mentioned that we live in a feeling of imminent catastrophe.

— Yes, long before us other generations have lived this feeling of the end of the world. But the catastrophic attitude serves no purpose: surrendering frees us from responsibility, absolves us of duties towards the world. We must break free from this paralysis in order to act.

The narrator says: "I miss the present more than the past." Is there a kind of nostalgia for the present, perhaps for moments with her teenage daughter?

— Exactly. It is recognizing, emotionally, that time is ephemeral and that the present is so fleeting that we cannot capture it – that Proteus that escapes us –. The only thing we can do is "notice it". Being able to notice the beauty of a moment and be grateful for it is a gift. Paying attention to it to prevent life from passing us by without realizing it was there.

You have written the novel in Spanish and English. What is it like to write in two languages at once?

— At home we speak both languages interchangeably. They are the two languages in which I exist. When I have a good day, they help each other. If I get stuck in one, I try the other and find a new way. As for the book, the two versions grow together, like two trees with the same roots. It's writing twice, yes, but one language contaminates the other in the best sense. Perhaps an idea would never have occurred to me in Spanish if I hadn't found it in English first, and vice versa.

Do you speak Spanish with your daughters?

— I speak in Spanglish. And they have helped me a lot with the novel. In fact, I suggested to my eldest daughter that I put her as a collaborator on the cover.

Really? How old is it?

— She is sixteen now, but I have been writing this for six years. She was my advisor. I used to ask her: "Can I read this aloud to you?". And she would tell me: "No, Mom, a twelve-year-old girl would never think like that". She asked me difficult and good questions. When I asked her if she wanted to be in the credits, she told me: "I've thought about it better and no, because if the critics say bad things about you, I don't want it to affect me".