Hanging By a Thread: Johanny Vazquez Paz Explains “I
Offer My Heart As a Target”
JANUARY 1, 2020https://lit.newcity.com/2020/01/01/hanging-by-a-thread-johanny-vazquez-paz-explains-i-offer-my-heart-as-a-target/ BY TARA BETTS
Johanny Vazquez Paz sat in her
quiet classroom at Harold Washington College shortly after reading at the Miami
Book Festival, where audience members, including Richard Blanco and Joyce Carol
Oates, came to hear Paz read from her latest collection, “Ofrezco mi corazón
como una diana,” or “I Offer My Heart As a Target” (Akashic Books, 2019). The
book was chosen by Rigoberto Gonzalez as the 2018 National Poetry Series Paz
Poetry Prize winner. This collection is part of Paz’s growing body of work,
which includes four previous books.
Paz’s name may be familiar from her hosting of
the Guild Complex’s Palabra Pura series, which featured Latino poets from
across the country. She coedited the earlier anthology “Between the Heart and
the Land / Entre el corazón y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest.” We
talked about the painful origins of her new award-winning book, ties to
homeland, duende, artist Gamaliel
Ramirez, and the powerful women who inspired her.
Please talk
a little bit about how the book came together.
It’s a funny story. The book is not funny. It’s
a depressing book. Last May, I remember it was at the end of the semester. I
was in Facebook, and you know they have these advertisements, because they know
what you like, and I saw this Paz Poetry Prize advertisement, and Paz is the
last name of my mother. All Spanish-speaking countries use both last names.
Yes, you
take your mother and your father’s surnames.
Exactly. Vazquez is my father’s last name, and
Paz is my mother’s last name. That’s the name I was born with, because back
home you use both last names, and that’s my writer’s name. Then I clicked to
look at the information. I couldn’t believe there was this contest for writers
who write in the United States that write in Spanish and live in the United States
and this is for me! The name of the award is Paz because of Octavio Paz.
Absolutely.
I used to joke and tell my friends, “I have a
Mexican uncle named Octavio.” After awhile, they’d say “Octavio Paz is your
uncle?!” No, because in Puerto Rico, supposedly all the Pazs are related.
Vazquez is a common last name, but Paz? There are not that many, and they could
be “de la Paz” but just Paz? There are not that many. So, I’m like, “Oh my god,
I have to do that.” Fortunately, they allowed some poems that have been
previously published in magazines or something like that, not in a book. I have
to do this because the due date was in two weeks. I already had some poems. I
didn’t have a manuscript. I got this big feeling that I had to do this, then I
realized that the contest is not every year. It’s every other year, so I needed
to do it this year because I didn’t want to wait. And to top it all off, I was
going to Spain when the semester was over. So, that’s why so many of the poems
are on things going on in recent years. The first poem is about the killing of
the women of Juarez.
Yes. You
wrote it to Elina Chauvet, creator of the Red Shoes (Zapatos Rojos) project.
Yes, she came to DePaul, and they invited me to
an event with her. I started writing that poem, but never finished it. I had to
deal with the shoes and she really inspired me, and I found a great ending for
the poem. That event was about violence, sexual harassment, and things like
that that have been going on—the topic of #MeToo, the violence against students
in Parkland, and things like that. The event was supposed to be for survivors
of violence. When I got the information with the list of participants, there
were poets and women who were going to talk about their experiences. I thought,
“I’m in the wrong group.”
Why is that?
I grew up in a house where there was a secret. I
knew something was going on with my father, but I was always afraid to ask what
happened because my mother would get sad and cry. My parents were divorced, but
there was this big secret regarding my father. Then when I was eleven or twelve
years old, there was a problem. I don’t know what happened. My aunt sat with us
and said “After your mother went through all that with your father…” My mother
looked at her and said, “They don’t know.” I’m the youngest of four daughters,
so I was twelve years old. None of us knew. At that moment, I found out my
father had mental health problems, and he tried to kill my mother when she was
pregnant with me. He stabbed her like seven times in the stomach. My aunts said
you were a miracle. The doctor said you were a miracle. The priest said you
were a miracle. Everybody thinks you were a miracle because of how she was
stabbed.
You
survived.
I survived! You know, they didn’t think either
of us would survive, but my mother always wanted to keep that from everybody.
In my previous book, you can tell certain things had to do with that, but up to
this point, it’s hard for me to talk about that because my mother didn’t want
anyone to know. She wanted us to be treated equal. She didn’t want people to be
“Oh, that’s the daughter of the man who…” because it was in the news. Because
of the secret, I looked through my mother’s things, and I found a newspaper
clipping. He turned himself in to the police after he did that. She didn’t want
us to have that cloud. When my son was little and he did something, I said,
“Oh, that kid is crazy.” And she said, “Don’t say that!” because she was always
afraid since my father was schizophrenic and supposedly it’s inherited, it could
happen to one of us. So, the second poem “The Daughter of Violence” is the
first poem where I talk about what happened.
That poem
stood out aside from the book’s title “I Offer My Heart As a Target.” There’s
all this wounding, whether it’s someone wounding another person or someone
wounding themselves, and how do you carry that hurt and heal.
Exactly. I never thought of myself as a survivor
or a victim. Then in the last few years, other things happened. The stories of
sexual harassment, of the violence, of the killings, and I realized that’s me
every time I see a story in the newspaper. I think “That could have been my
mother…” It just sort of hit me in the face. I think that’s why some people
don’t understand why when you’re sexually harassed you don’t say anything, and
then twenty years later you’re talking about it. It’s hard to process and
realize “Oh my god, I went through all those things, too.”
Yes.
When I was reading about Bill Cosby, that
happened to me once. A guy gave me a pill. Things like that, and I’ve been
through sexual harassment so many times that you think this is normal. Men are
like that. You just have to say no. All the times that I felt uncomfortable,
all the times that I was a little girl in my Catholic school uniform. I walked
by and men were masturbating in a car. It happened to me for a whole week once.
I lived up on a hill and the school was on the same street, and it was a busy avenue,
so how did I stop that? I had to get up an hour earlier and leave early. So
many times. I was on a bus once when I was very young, and I felt something
here [touches her shoulder] and then I turned and I had a penis there.
I’ve heard
of that happening. Other women have told me similar stories. It’s shocking to
think one, that happened, but two, if it happens and you have no place where
you can tell that story, where do you put it? I think people bury it and put it
away, then something brings it back.
For me, I realize. If I see a man sitting in a
car, I cross the street still to this day. Those things don’t happen that much
now. I guess that’s the good thing about getting older because it happened to
me when I was young and in my Catholic school uniform. And with #MeToo, all
those stories… Almost every job I’ve had, something has happened. So, I said
I’m finally going to write about this. I wrote a bunch of new poems in two
weeks. I always have poems that I never finish or I don’t like, and I worked and
worked them. I kept telling my husband, “I don’t think I’m gonna make it.”
Something inside of me said, “You have to do it.” You have to send this to the
Paz because it has the last name that is my mother’s, but I don’t want to show
that book to my mom.
Why is that?
I think she would not like that I told her
story. In my previous book “Sagrada Familia,” it seems to me that we always
pretended certain things. You always pretend to be a happy family or you
pretend to have more money than what you have. You see, my mother was here with
me until the other day, and just to go to Walgreens, she puts on makeup and
dresses nice. Ma, in Chicago, nobody cares. Nobody looks at you, but in Puerto
Rico, they do. In Puerto Rico, you can find people you know in different
places, and she always wants to look presentable. She is from a big family with
little sisters who all had husbands who were successful as attorneys, and
things like that, and she felt bad because…
Of what
happened?
That, and she didn’t have a husband, and the
husband she had was loco. Because of that, my mother became a businesswoman,
and financially, I could tell that we were doing better every year when I was
growing up. When I was little, we got a repossessed home that she fixed. She
bought a condominium. All by herself, she did that. Still, I think as someone
from her time, that’s not good enough. What’s good enough is to say “I have a
husband that is this and that…”
Yes, that
was the expectation. Also, if you work hard for so long, relaxation probably
doesn’t seem normal. You’re used to being presentable all the time, and
presenting a certain way.
Yes. We have had so many bad things that have
happened in the last few years. My husband was ill. We both had surgery in the
same year, so there was the poem about the scar, and then the hurricane in
Puerto Rico. My mother lost everything. She had to come to live with me. I had
a sister who passed away in her thirties, a long time ago. When I won this, is
it a reward after all the bad things? I didn’t know that the worst was gonna
come after winning, which is when my older sister got cancer and passed away in
May.
I’m sorry to
hear that.
Yes. So, it’s even a bigger tragedy to my
family. I don’t have anything to complain about in the sense that I’m alive.
I’m fairly healthy. No one is one-hundred-percent healthy at this age. I have a
job. I have a nice place. I have a husband, but I don’t know, my family is such
a tragedy with all these deaths and the violence. I don’t know the whole story.
I wish I could go to a doctor that could give me a file on my father. But my
mother, it’s still hard for her to talk about it. My mother never talked bad
about my father. We used to go and see him. My grandfather would pick us up. My
grandfather on my father’s side wrote poetry. I write poetry because of my
grandfather.
Who is your
grandfather? Can we find his stuff?
No. I do have his poems, but no, no one famous.
I didn’t like to go to those visits because it was boring. My father would
hardly talk to us, but there was a poetry book and I grabbed it. He saw me
reading. My grandfather said, “If you like that, you can take it.” I still have
that book, and the author dedicated the book to my grandfather. That’s how
everything started for me with poetry, but my mother wouldn’t go with us to
visit our father. She never talked bad about him. I think she understood that
he was ill. When he died, we went to the funeral, and I made her tell me a few
things. But my older sister, the one who just passed away, she remembered
things. You see, I don’t. I never lived with my father, not one day.
They say the baby of
the family ends up having a different version of the family’s history than the
oldest child.
Exactly, but my sister remembered that he would
lock her in the house, all the windows and the doors. The neighbors would help
her escape out of the house. To this day, my mother doesn’t want anyone to know
about this, but I got to the point where I was thinking I’m not a real writer
if I don’t write about this. I think I was ready for my mother to pass away to
start talking about it, to not offend her. It really inspired me to write a lot
of things about pain and abuse. The poem that’s the title of the book does
that. Instead of making me feel good about myself being a miracle, it made me wonder
why did you save me? I’m nothing special. Why? Then I liked to read Freud, and
I think I went through the phase of trying to save men. You know, I would like
the guy who was doing drugs or whatever, and try to save him as if I was trying
to save my father.
You realize
and dig a little deeper, and realize I’m trying to fix this thing that’s not my
job to fix.
They say that sometimes you look for the father
figure, and sometimes that father figure was someone with problems, because I
couldn’t save my father. The second part of the book is about immigration. For
me, it’s been very painful to move from my homeland and the people I love. The
only thing about Chicago is you can write little sad poems because of the
weather or whatever. That’s the one thing I’m grateful for about Chicago. All
my books, I wrote them here.
It’s a good
climate to write in because you don’t want to go outside and play. You want to
have a nice hot cup of something to drink. You can wrap up in your big sweater
at the desk and just write.
I know. That’s why I was saying that. Chicago, I
like the cultural things. I went to school in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Chicago is
so interesting because it still has all these neighborhoods. You describe
Humboldt Park in one poem.
“The City That I Love.” In my first book, I have
a Humboldt Park poem with the phrase “that we build ourselves an island” to
feel like you belong.
You leave
one island that’s always been home, and then how do you deal with that? It’s
not emotional exile. It’s exile from a physical space.
What’s happening with Trump and all that… It
truly makes us feel that they don’t want us here. With the hurricane, he said
bad things about Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. No matter what, no matter how
much I study, how much I do. Are they always gonna look at me like that? Like
I’m a second-class citizen. We don’t want you here. Lately, we feel as much,
and I’m Puerto Rican. Imagine if I was Mexican. We’re building a wall because
we don’t want you here.
When I think
of stories of immigration in American literature, it’s a recurring theme that
comes back again and again. It doesn’t matter if it’s a white ethnic group,
black people during the Great Migration, Latino people from different countries
and communities, or any other group, because Mexico is a part of the larger
North American continent, and usually they are stories about people who move to
change their condition. What is more human and American than that?
A lot of them are moving away from violence.
Exactly.
They’re not all Mexicans either. At the
beginning of the year, my oldest sister got cancer for the third time. When she
was young, her uterus was removed.
She had a
hysterectomy.
Yes, and she had colon cancer, then pancreatic
cancer. I spent the whole summer in Puerto Rico. I not only feel that my sister
died, but Puerto Rico died for me too.
It’s a
different place when your people are gone.
No, they’re still trying to recuperate from the
hurricane. I got to see. I think that killed her. Pancreatic cancer is hard to
survive, but I know the stories, and at least they last two or three years.
Within months, she was a skeleton. It was horrible. I always thought when I
retire, I’m gonna go back, but now I don’t know. Right now, I think it’s going
to take me awhile. My other sister died in New York and it took me at least
fifteen years to go to New York after she died. I used to feel like New York killed
her.
Which says a
lot. Is it the stress? The environment? What is it doing to people?
She had a stroke in her thirties.
That’s very
young to die of a stroke.
Yes, she was not ill, and she was almost a
vegetarian. She didn’t have any illnesses. All these stories…
When you sit
down to write and put together a manuscript, you start to see what was on your
mind at the time when you made it. Right? People see a book and the cover and
say “That’s so wonderful. You have a book out.” They have no idea what went
into this.
Exactly, this process of bringing pain out. Even
your heart is a target.
You rip
everything out and put it on paper. Here it is. I was thinking about the
artwork from Gamaliel Ramirez on the cover. So much of his work looks like
innards or something ripped from the body…
That’s another death that I went through because
he was a good friend of ours. He was living in Puerto Rico. My husband and I
would always go and see him. My husband and Gamaliel shared the same birthday,
and they always celebrated together. He died the year before my sister on the
same day. Can you believe that? And my sister died the day after her birthday,
which is May 19. The previous year I was in Spain, and I told you I was going
to Spain for a vacation when the semester was over. We were there, and we found
out that he died.
That was
recent.
That was last year. I’ve been worried. My mother
is in her eighties. I was always worried that my mother was going to pass away
soon, so I’ve been saying to my husband I have to go every Christmas thinking
this might be the last Christmas that she would be here. It’s a big tragedy for
my family because we lost the only sister in Puerto Rico who was taking care of
my mother. My mother has been saying that she wants to die in her place. We had
to take her out and bring her to the United States because now there is no one.
My other sister lives in Tampa, and I live in Chicago. When someone young dies
like that, you’re like when is my turn. That’s the first poem in the book.
Now, that
you say that, you quote Lorca and Poe in the beginning of the book. It had me
thinking about duende.
Some don’t understand. They should read Lorca’s “In Search of Duende.” Can you
talk about what duende is
for you in this book?
Do you mean the muses?
When I think
of duende, I
always think of being close to the dark, grief and loss, but somehow wending a
way through with a level of fervor, grace or style.
Since I started writing, I feel like my life was
hanging by a thread because of my story. The writing helped me to express that.
My family had a secret so that I’m close to the dark. A lot of friends of mine
that are not writers ask “Why don’t you write happy poems?” I am a person who
comes to work and is married, and the other is the poet, and the poet is always
sad because she cannot be a poet twenty-four hours. I’m a part-time poet
because I have to go home, cook and grade exams and papers. The poet telling
me, “Stop doing that! Take care of me!” and I can’t because I could be really
sleepy, because if I get the muse, I cannot even sleep.
The poet
realizes that there is some victory in being able to tell the story.
Yes. For me, most of the poems are sad. When I
read Rigoberto Gonzalez’s introduction, he was more positive than I thought
someone who reads the book would be. There’s one part I couldn’t believe, read
it.
“She has
lived to tell her tale.”
Imagine I went to Catholic school. All this God
and things they put in my head. And Rigoberto is telling me that I lived to
tell the tale.
The joyous
part is you get to tell some truth that people need to confront. It’s not just
sad.
I don’t think so. Even at the end of the poem, I
say it’s a miracle that we survived. Sometimes, in poetry, you are trying to
find people that feel like you. I see young people every day probably who are
hiding things because you don’t go around telling your problems to people. When
you are young, you feel like your life is horrible. You’re very egocentric, but
then you read something and you realize there are other people who feel more pain
than me. What am I complaining about? We are the same on some level, on the
emotional level. All the feelings we have. When you find a novel or a poem, you
are connected. The first novel that I read when I was young was “Nada” by
Carmen Laforet. All the families are messed up. In a way, it gives you hope. I
started describing things and writing a novel in my head and thinking about how
it’s better when you write sad stories. I’m always interested in people who are
weird and different. Two normal people are boring for a story.
I’m also
thinking it helps you build empathy. If you see someone is different from you,
you want to understand them better.
That’s, for me, the problem with the world. Some
people want other people to be like them. The same race, the same nationality,
the same religious belief. If you believe in God, or The Creation, or like I
like to call it, La Creación, the feminine, you have to believe that God wanted
everyone to be different. Even if you’re brothers and sisters, you look different.
I love when people are different from me.
If we were
all the same, it would be so utterly boring.
I know. That’s why so many people are racist.
“You speak another language…” That’s another thing that I suffer here. I think
if I stay quiet, if I keep quiet, nobody can tell I’m Latina.
That’s
another kind of passing, yes.
That’s what I’ve been through in the United
States. When I came from Puerto Rico to Indiana University in Terre Haute, I
opened my mouth, and I had the accent which was worse than the accent that I
have now, plus I was in Indiana, they would look at me like I’m an alien. A lot
of people couldn’t deal with it. If you want everybody to be like you, you’re
not realizing that The Creation didn’t want that.
I keep
thinking people should be better listeners. When I hear someone with a
different accent than me, I want to pay attention so I understand them better.
To turn off completely is unfortunate. It’s like someone who refuses to read a
book because it’s not about them.
To this day, I don’t like to talk too much
because of things that have happened to me.
Linguistically,
people discriminate based on how you sound.
People think you’re not intelligent.
Even though
you’re a college professor.
I know two languages. You only know one. Do you
think that makes me smarter than you? They treated me like that. Like the doctor
that talks to my husband and is taking care of me, instead of explaining things
to me, he’s looking at my husband.
That’s
paternalistic, like your husband is your caretaker.
Yeah. He grew up in Chicago, and you can tell
English is his first language. You can tell people are surprised that I know
certain things.
I was
excited to see that there were women I wasn’t familiar with that you mentioned
in the book—Angelamaría Dávila, Gloria Fuertes, and Vanessa Droz because
they’re notable writers in Spanish-speaking cultures. Could you talk about
these women?
Vanessa Droz is from Puerto Rico and she’s from
what I know. Gloria Fuertes is one of the most famous poets from Spain. Last year,
they had a big celebration of her in Spain. Throughout literature, women were
kind of ignored. Now, they’ve been discovering some of them. Angelamaría Dávila
was a poet from Puerto Rico. She died young. She was one of those performance
poets. She was a black woman with big hair. All my generation of Puerto Rican
poets, from the island, she’s better known in Puerto Rico, we love her. She
liberated us. She had bad words in the poems. Poetry was mostly sonnets. She
broke with a lot of that.
When I hear
about poets from Puerto Rico, I always hear about Julia de Burgos, but they
don’t talk about more contemporary poets. Or when I first heard about your work
it was in the anthology “Between the Heart and the Land.” That’s a huge gap
between de Burgos and that anthology.
Well, I’m surprised that you know Julia de
Burgos even. Puerto
Rico, we’re a colony. That’s the problem. Some
Latin American countries, and some Spanish-speaking countries, think, “Oh,
they’re U.S.A.” and then the U.S.A. thinks, “Oh, they’re Latinos or Hispanics.”
Unless there’s some sort of course on Caribbean literature specifically, we’re
not included. When I went to graduate school at UIC, there were two semesters
of Latin American Literature. There were no Puerto Rican writers included. Most
of the countries have an embassy or a consulate that promotes culture, we don’t
have that.
What’s one
thing that you want readers to glean from this book?
The biggest message that I have is about
violence against women and abuse. The thing that has hurt the most with #MeToo
and all the violence is that people still blame the woman. So many cases that I
read, and you can read comments to the newspaper now. It tears me apart. Always
blaming the woman, blaming someone, instead of asking what are we doing to our
young people? Why are guns so easy for them? Why are people not getting help
for mental health?
“I Offer My Heart As a Target”
By Johanny Vazquez Paz
Akashic Books, 96 pages
By Johanny Vazquez Paz
Akashic Books, 96 pages
Tara Betts is
the author of “Break the Habit” and “Arc & Hue.” Her interviews and
features have appeared in publications such as Hello Giggles, Mosaic Magazine,
NYLON, The Source, Sixty Inches from Center, and Poetry magazine. She also
hosts author chats at the Seminary Co-Op bookstores in Chicago’s Hyde Park
neighborhood.
