INTERVIEW WITH PAQUITA SUÁREZ COALLA
Editorial CAMPANA, United States

1. When did you begin writing and why?
I write out of necessity, and always have. It wasn’t until I arrived in the United States in 1994 that I began to write with the consciousness of a writer. The main reason, as I’ve often said, is that in Spain—where I received my undergraduate and doctorate degrees from the University of Oviedo—I lacked models that acknowledged as literature what I wanted to write. Women’s literature was scarce and undervalued; the world of people from the countryside (of which I am one) was normally seen in literature from the outside; and Asturian, the language in which I spontaneously began to write in New York, was a language that was looked down on and that fought, and continues to fight, to be acknowledged as a language.

2. And all those models that seemed not to exist in Spain… did you find them here?
First of all, I have to say that the physical distance from my country helped me begin to write without any complexes. From the beginning I found a lot of literary works and writers, mostly women, with whom I immediately identified, and who encouraged me to write. I was fascinated by the phenomenon of Chicano literature, and there was an author, Tomás Rivera, who completely influenced me through his work …And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him. I remember that when I read his book for the first time, in the early nineties, I thought: “I can write stories like these.” Without realizing it at the time, I’d found a literary model. It wasn’t until years later, after having written So I Won't Forget, that I realized the choral voice of temporary workers who work the harvest in the Southeast of the United States is very similar of the collective voice of the peasant women reflected in my work. As I wrote, I wasn’t aware of Rivera’s influence, but the coincidences exist. Aside from books like this, I was hugely influenced by the meetings of the Tertulia de Escritoras Dominicanas, directed by Daisy Cocco de Filippis, where I began reading what I was writing. The atmosphere of a tertulia was completely different from any literary atmosphere I was familiar with, and it not only gave me confidence, but more importantly, it helped me understand that the concept of “universal literature” didn’t fit in with what I’d been taught. Getting to know the Cuban writer Sonia Rivera-Valdés, with whom I later became great friends, was a pivotal point in my career.

3. Where was your work first published?
Until now I’ve only published in Spain, more concretely in Asturias. The first book I published with Editorial Trabe, in 2001, was a book of testimonials of peasant women from Asturias all born in the first three decades of the last century, and which is titled La mio vida ye una novela (My Life is a Novel). The book was very well received in Asturias, and there’s now a second edition. In 2003, I published the collection of stories Pa nun escaeceme (So I Won’t Forget), that’s coming out now in Spanish in Campana, and, in 2006, the anthology of Latino writers from New York, Aquí me tocó escribir, all published by Trabe.

4. Can you explain your decision to write in Asturian?
It really wasn’t a premeditated decision. I’d spent years writing in Spanish, stories connected to my childhood in the countryside and, suddenly, spontaneously, I began to write in Asturian. I realized that Asturian allowed me to depict the rural world I’d been raised in more authentically than in Spanish. I work a lot with oral histories, with the voices of people—concretely women—and Asturian predominates. After the first story—“Consejos”—all the other stories of So I Won't Forget came out with an ease that astonished me. It was a book I wrote very quickly because it is so personal and connected to my feelings.

5. What is your connection to the literature written in Asturias in Asturian?
I don’t consistently follow the literary production in Asturian, mainly because I can’t buy the books that interest me and are written in Asturian until I go to Asturias in the summer. I have good relationships with the writers—for example, Berta Piñán, Esther Prieto, Antón García, Marta Mori, Consuelo Vega, Pablo Antón Marín Estrada…—but I’ve never stopped to think where I belong within the group. Paradoxically, I consider myself a New York writer; the stories I write in Asturian I owe in great part to my life in New York.

6. What do the book of stories So I Won't Forget and the book of testimonials La mio vida ye una novela have in common?
It’s the same world of women peasants that I grew up with, and with which I greatly identify. I wanted to give voice to this collective that is systematically ignored and silenced, and that has contributed to making the rural world what it is, that has served consistently to sustain the nuclear family in and out of the house. Women have always worked in in the countryside of Asturias, sharing tasks with men, and have been solely in charge of running the household and raising the children. When the men began to work in factories, the railroad, or in the mines, the women had to take on a good part of their work in the fields, and, without negating what the men did, the women worked harder, with no acknowledgment whatsoever. When the men would get home, they would go to the bar to have a glass of wine or play a game. But for the women there was never any rest. At the end of the month, the men would receive a salary that all to often they kept for themselves. The women never received anything for their work, and the retirement stipend they’d receive from the government would be the only financial compensation they would have in their whole life. Too little and too late.

7. Your childhood world in Asturias is always present in your stories. Do you write from nostalgia? Would you have written the same way if you’d continued to live in Spain?
I don’t think that I write out of nostalgia. Its more as if I write with a healthy lucidity that being at a distance gives me. It’s possible I would have written in the same way had I continued to live in Spain, but from a different perspective.

8. There seems to be an important testimonial element to your work. What are the boundaries in your stories between fiction and reality?
I write about what I know. About my people, my family, things that have happened to me and to others, but I give more importance to the essence of the story than to the details. And that’s where fiction comes into play, because I invent the details when I don’t know them, or prefer not to use them for literary reasons.

9. What do you set out to do with your writing?
I don’t want to seem pretentious, but I wouldn’t be lying if I said that I set out to create consciousness, or at least share my own consciousness. I write from my identity as a woman who belongs to the peasant worker world, and this is reflected in my stories. I want to write about that world because it has hardly been done, and I want to do it with a voice that doesn’t necessarily fit in with the acknowledged literary canon. I want to give a literary identity to my land and my people. That’s why I always mention Grullo—the town in which I was born—and my mother, my grandmother, my sister, my neighbors, and I often use their real names, because if they do read the stories, I want them to recognize themselves and know that their personal stories will not be completely lost.Since I was young I’ve felt a fascination for that extreme realism that plays with the limits of truth and fiction, and that makes you think that what’s being told is true. During my school years, the tradition of realism in Spanish literature was talked about—referring to the Poem of the Cid, but I was under the impression that what was really valued was a type of imaginative literature, populated with fantastic, indefinable elements, and of which the French epics were considered a prime example. The concept of what literature is hasn’t changed much since then in Spain. I remember a story, I must have read it when I was six or seven years old, that took place in Grajal de Campos, a town of Leon where I used to go spend summers with my family. The story mentioned a competition of galgos [racing dogs] that was going to take place in Sahagun, a town near Grajal, but more urban, where many people from Grajal would go to participate.We were familiar with the image of the greyhounds roaming around the town, and we’d walk to Sahagun every Saturday to go to the market. The idea that the world I knew was part of that story produced an enormous satisfaction in me, and at the same time a fascination that I’d never feel when reading the stories of, for example, Alice in Wonderland. We all like to hear about what is ours, and those who continue to defend the idea of universal literature according to traditional canons don’t realize that the references of that literature are so narrow and limited they no longer work.

10. What projects are you working on now?
I have a book written in Asturian—The Day They Took Us to the Movies—that will soon be published by Trabe. I also have an anthology of short stories that is being translated into English, So I Won't Forget. For the past year and a half I’ve begun a diary about my daughters, three and five years old, that I think is turning into a book. It is titled "It Looks Like a Rainbow," and although I originally wrote it so as not to forget the things they did or said at that age, its also a reflection on motherhood and, once again, on my childhood, analyzed now from the point of view of the mother I am now. I’m also writing other stories in Spanish, but this is a very new project so I’d rather not to talk about it yet.