Language as Rebellion: Yuri Herrera in Conversation with Daisuke Shen
Yuri Herrera | Season of the Swamp | Graywolf | October 2024 | 160 Pages
To read a Yuri Herrera novel is to read a guide on how to set fire to the world and still come out alive. His newest novel, Season of the Swamp, moves like a strange fever—golden stopwatches keep hidden time for fugitives in attics, a piano weeps inside the theatre, and cigars rolled in the thousands in a small backroom later give birth to revolution. In New Orleans, beauty and devastation converge to form a mirror of the human heart—and so it is that our story follows how the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez came into his own during a two-year exile in the city.
Herrera, who teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans, spoke with me over Zoom about the process of destruction and rebirth of the self, language, and creativity, as well as writing’s synonymity with risk. Finally, our ears are able to see, our eyes able to listen, our souls able to dance, and we perform these impossible movements made with our impossible faith that we’ll rediscover the places we once called home.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Daisuke Shen: To start off with a general question: what do you think made you want to write about this topic?
Yuri Herrera: Well, I'm never sure of the next thing I'm going to write about. I am actually never sure if I'm going to keep writing. There’s always a certain amount of doubt after finishing a book—I don't want to feel the need to keep producing. I hate the idea of being a “productive” writer. I want to follow whatever life and books and nightmares bring to my plate.
When I came to New Orleans, I didn't really have the story of Benito Juarez in mind. His exile is present in all his biographies, but it's not that widely taught, and not present in how he’s been mythologized in Mexico. When I arrived, a friend who was living here told me they hadn’t found where Benito Juarez lived, and it was only at that moment that I realized he used to live here. But I didn’t actively think about it. I did other things instead. I wrote Transmigration of Bodies and a children's book. I just kept doing other stuff.
You know, if you stay for so long in one place, you begin to see the nasty parts of a city, which is a very important part of the truth of any city. And I was able to—well, I don't know if it's the proper way to say that I was “able”—but I saw that nasty part closely.
So even after several years, I still felt that I did not fully understand the city. I had this sensation that I was just scratching the surface of New Orleans, because it's such a complex city. Eventually I realized that there's never a moment in which you feel you understand it completely. I think it would be really sad if you ever felt that way about a place or a person. It's better to feel that you are constantly discovering. So I said, “What I'm gonna do is use precisely that instability that makes this city so complex, and use it in the book.”
Benito Juarez is an ever-present figure in Mexican history. I thought that this was an opportunity to explore this and my relationship with the city. Because even if you're speaking about ghosts, you're always speaking about yourself—about your neighbors and about your own history. So I thought that I could talk about all these things—a city, myself, Mexico, and Mexican history—within one story.
DS: As you were talking about being okay with not arriving at perfect understandings, I was thinking about how this book often feels like a flurry of images or scenes. Who we focus on in our cast of characters changes throughout. What is it about language and history that made you feel that it had to be told in this way, rather than as a straightforward narrative, so to speak?
YH: We can think of language as a set of rules, as a matrix that imprisons us. And a lot of people look at language in terms of a dictionary, in terms of language being a sacred and unchangeable thing that must be enshrined. What art does, what literature does, is exactly the opposite. It disrespects that aspect of language, and in disrespecting it, it enriches it, bringing lived experience to the world of language. When thinking about how we create our own literary code, our own literary language, we must not only bring what we have read in the classics and in the canon or whatever, but we must also bring what we have seen in all places: in our families, on the streets, and in graffiti. Language is fragile and unstable. I like that it is affected by reality, affected by history.
That aspect was important when thinking about this book, because it is a city that—and I tried to say this at the end of the novel—is built on a swamp. It's a place where its “basement,” you could call it, is always moving—and that includes its history.
This is not a clear-cut, airtight story, but rather one about atmosphere and a certain set of conditions that creates certain stories that create certain individuals that create certain tragedies. The challenge was to reflect that in the language, which is something that interests me. It's difficult, but I always try to do that—use language as an organic part of the story, and not just a tool to tell the story. What I'm using here are a bit of my own feelings, a bit of my research on the city and on Juarez’s life. But also there is a moving part, which is the Spanish language that I use—the Mexican language. The Mexican language, like New Orleans, is not a rigid thing. It keeps changing, and I have to try to keep up to date with it, you know, going back to Mexico, talking with my friends, talking, talking with a lot of people.
DS: What you said about the Mexican language not being a rigid thing—I was thinking about that when Benito Juarez is thinking about the word “lagoon,” and he says it in his head in Didza: “yelha.”
YH: Didza is a variant of a better-known language called Zapotec. Usually people refer to it just as “Zapotec,” but the Zapotec people distinguish between different variants of the language. So apparently, Didza was the one Benito Juarez spoke.
DS: That's really interesting to know. It made me think about how I tend to return to Japanese whenever I'm anxious or frightened, or feeling vulnerable. The Japanese word will come to me, but the word in English will not.
In terms of finding oneself inside of a foreign language or making meaning in a language that doesn't maybe feel intimate: I'm wondering how writing allows us to connect back to those deeper parts of ourselves, even while we might worry about losing the specific dialects we speak.
YH: I think that’s something that you mentioned before, this part in the book in which he says that “Creole is like French, but better.” And I made a point of putting that there, because, you know, Creole is a creation of this region. It’s not strictly French. I was talking a few months ago to a Spanish literary agent, who said to me, “Louisiana is a place where the French language was lost.” And I said, “No, this is the place where the Creole was born.” This marginalization of Creole has been ongoing. There are a lot of people that try to “correct” Creole, and now and then come these French teachers that try to teach “correct” French—as if Creole were a mistake. Yet to adapt and enrich and transform a colonial language to a place makes speaking the language of the colonizer not a curse. Creole speakers know language is not unchangeable. It’s not something that imprisons us. We can use it to tell a story of how language is unable to remain a stagnant thing. In that sense, I always think of language as an opportunity for rebellion.
Language can be used to oppress. It can be used to deceive. But the great opportunity that we have as writers is to understand language not just as a thing that exists within a single sentence; it’s something that includes connotations. And every speaker inhabits a language with their own set of nuances and conformities, of ironies toward the world that inherits this language.
DS: I also noticed how much race and class plays a part in the manuscript. Doing some research on Juarez’s life after I read the book the first time, I saw that his wife was upper class, and that her family actually hired Zapotec people—Benito Juarez included—as servants. And then, he meets Thisbee—is that how one pronounces it?
YH: You know, it's funny that you say that, because Thisbee Martin is the name of a woman who actually existed. Part of my research was reading the newspaper (as it has now been digitized) from the day Juarez arrived until the day he left. And I saw this piece about a free Creole woman named Thisbee Martin who was arrested for helping an enslaved person escape. And I thought, “Oh, this is going to be one of the characters.” In my mind, I have always said it as “This-bay,” but everybody else says “This-bee.”
DS: I also read that same paper, and was fascinated to learn that the first Spanish-language newspaper, El missisipi, was made in New Orleans back in 1808. Both Thisbee Martin and Benito Juarez occupy very interesting places in the novel as the racialized “Other,” which creates a strong sense of connection between them. Benito Juarez is uncategorizable. An officer first mistakes him as Black before asking, “Wait, what are you?” And then the other exiles are like, “He's Mexican.” It becomes this thing of not being able to categorize oneself: He's Mexican, but he's also Zapotec.
YH: Categories can help empower people within a certain community. When you assume that you are not just a lost person in a lost place, you can become a part of a certain category, whether it's a racial category or a political category. Like when people say, “No, I’m not an illegal, I'm a migrant.” There’s a difference between those two categories. Whether you say that you’re Black or you’re African American, there are differences with that. And you know, New Orleans is a strange city. Or maybe it’s not a strange city, but a particular city in the national imagination. It’s a city that people define by the opposition between Black and white—which is something that does exist, and is very important—but it is also a city that has never been just that one opposition. It has had very different migration patterns, you know, for different reasons, some of them horrible reasons.
That was important to me when I was thinking about Benito Juarez arriving in this place—that he was in a place with no place for him. This is something that I have felt here, even though I have been extremely privileged and well-treated by the city and at work and by friends. But I have felt many times that I exist outside of the easy categories. When I arrived here, I had a couple of friends: Paul—whose name I use actually in the novel—and his wife, Sonia, who are Black. And I remember they sort of adopted me when I arrived in the city, and they would bring me to parties, and Sonia would introduce me and say, “Hey, this is my friend, Yuri. He’s white.” And then she’d say, “Well, no, no, no, he’s not white…He's Mexican, but he's also Russian?” (Yuri can also be a Russian name). And I would laugh and say, “No, I'm not Russian!”
My experience is just a tiny example of what I imagine someone like Benito Juarez could have experienced 170 years ago. He was even more of a weird individual; he didn’t even speak English. It could have felt to him as if it were a different planet. This story is not about a person discovering a different planet; it is a person discovering himself on a different planet, discovering things about himself in a different place.
I think we should always try to look at the world as if we were looking at a new planet. Science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction are big influences for me. Thinking like that helped me to imagine his loneliness, and his fascination with what this city that was so extreme in every way was doing to his body. Because everybody agrees that Benito Juarez went back to Mexico a different person, and that’s why he almost immediately became the leader of the liberals. People say that it had to do with his relationship to Melchor Ocampo, who was one of the most important intellectuals of the time, but I’m sure it was what this world of heat and music and alligators and fires and sex did to his body and his conscience. I think our political conscience goes through joy and through tragedy and through the sensuality of the world, not just through a certain almost esoteric acquisition of a critical conscience.
To go back to what we were talking about before: I think being an uncategorized person is something that allowed him to not fall into these opposites, but to create his own understanding of the world.
DS: Thank you so much for all of that. I was thinking there's one line in the book that says, “Reason doesn’t only come in the way of books or it comes in the way of firepower.” [Pause]. Sorry. I take really long pauses, and I don’t like to say anything during that time. So just in case you think that I'm no longer speaking…
YH: No, I appreciate telepathy.
DS (cont.): I guess knowing that you also have a political science background, I wonder in regards to political interest or praxis, if you think literature is lacking in political participation? Maybe that’s not the right question for right now?
YH: No, we're having a conversation. There's no right or wrong. I have thought a lot about this. I actually just—I feel bad about it—said no to being a keynote speaker for a university event. They asked me to speak about democracy and violence—what they are, and what their roles are, and how this could be an oxymoron. But it's actually something that is happening right now: supposedly “democratic” states are extremely violent. I have also been asked several times to give my opinion about the elections.
And even though I’m not doing the keynote thing, I kept thinking about it. And in the same way, I’m still thinking about the election a lot, but I decided—I don’t know if I decided or it’s just something that has happened—not to keep giving my opinion all the time. Because I think this is a political problem: a lot of the time, we don't reflect and we don't analyze, we are not willing to actually engage in—even if it’s heated—discussions. Or we have just substituted heated discussions for really childish fighting. And this has to do with something more concerning, which is that we live in a time where we have access to more information than ever before, and that information does not translate as knowledge. I think knowledge is not just gathering information. It goes beyond the archive. We have created this humongous archive, and we don’t know what to do with it. This is not just a problem of how we deal with technology. It is a political problem. It is a problem for how we listen to each other, and when we are not going to listen, we are going to fight. And there are a lot of good reasons to fight, but how do we understand when to fight, you know?
DS: I think that it also makes it hard for people who might not have a political consciousness yet afraid to ask questions.
YH: There are a lot of people offering political consciousness as a prepackaged thing, instead of people reflecting and building one for themselves. They treat it as disposable. Like, well, if this doesn’t fit, I'll find a new one on the internet tomorrow.
DS: It’s been interesting to see young people getting interested in Communism or Marxism, but because it is packaged, as you said, in a sort of surface level way, it makes it hard to deeply investigate.
YH: Very often, politics is not seen as a critical tool, but as a set of solutions. And Marxism isn’t a set of solutions, it’s a way of criticizing, of understanding certain historical and economic processes.
DS: I guess my follow up to that would be that your writing also doesn’t aim to provide a set of solutions. But I’m curious to know what questions your writing is interested in.
YH: That’s a really difficult question. Because the thing is, I think that the answer to that is an ongoing answer. What is my writing? It’s something that keeps changing, not only with each book, but with each time I write a new thing, even if it’s just in my notebook. So this book, in retrospect, is trying to find a different core in the stories we are taught and what deserves to be told. Who are the protagonists that deserve to be at the core of these stories? Very often, it’s just armed guys doing horrible things who are memorialized as heroic. And I think one thing that is important to me is to challenge that core—or not even to challenge that core, but to think outside of that core, and to think that there are other, different cores. You can create this system of stories, and systems of thinking that are not dependent on that core. And this not only gives you different stories and different protagonists, but a different attitude towards language. Because if you are not subservient to a certain establishment within storytelling, of what is worth telling, in a specific language, then you are free to find other ways of approaching storytelling, with different kinds of plots, with different kinds of protagonists, with different language. And even if, in the end, you don't renounce the tradition, I think your work takes on a different texture. And texture is not just a superficial thing. Texture is something that gives you a different experience of literature. So. Yeah, thank you. I feel that I keep getting lost in my answers.
DS: No, I just have a lot to think about. And I guess the reason why I took a while to first off, like, type up those questions. I really don't like to ask stuff for the sake of asking, and I don't want to ask you questions or ones that you've heard before.
YH: Oh, yeah, by the way, I read the poem you sent me. I have it here open in front of me, and I liked it a lot, and I immediately sent it to my friend. That way of ending the poem, “The blood-covered meaning of that is blood covered misery, that is happiness.” In a way, it's a little bit of what we are talking about right now. Language is history. Language is experience. It's memory. No, it's a way of reclaiming memory. It's a way of reclaiming our ancestors, our experience, but also it's not just nostalgia—it's a path forward. This has to do with other things that we were talking about before. It can be liberating—you don't have to be hostage to the versions of reality that come within a rigid version of language.