Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa is an American writer who was born in Puerto Rico and later moved to New York City.
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If you aren't willing to fight for your work, no one else will either. If you feel you have an important story to tell, you have to be willing to go to the wall for it. That said, no one is perfect or infallible. All writers, no matter how successful, have much to learn. The day we believe we have nothing more to learn is the day we start stagnating. It's important to find people who understand your universe and support your vision. It's important to keep honing your craft, keep growing with the changing times. It is as important to listen as it is to raise your voice.
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Like most of us, emerging writers will only succeed through hard work and the humility to accept that they don't have all the answers. My advice is this: read, read, read. The artists who came before you worked really hard, paid their dues and solved problems as they went along. Some of them died never having received the honors they so merited. You have the benefit of their work. Study them. How did they create believable and compelling characters? How can you tell a story when your narrator is unreliable? How can the setting enhance the lives of the characters you have created? How do you choose which details to include and which to omit? How can you find fresh and evocative language? These are all important questions when writing your story. Don't try to reinvent the wheel when there is so much help out there if you only learn from those who took this journey before you. Instead, study them carefully, decide what you like and don't about every novel you read. And keep writing and keep reading. In the process you will find your own voice and, perhaps, become the next new literary genius.
If you can put your ego aside, rejection can help you grow a very thick skin, which you will need to defend your creative universe. Chances are that no publisher is holding his breath waiting for your work to make him immensely rich. There are too many variants in the publishing world and most of us don't have the juice to command instant literary stardom. If you do, that's fabulous. Congratulations. But for the rest of us, we'll need to be strong and believe in our vision enough to withstand the naysayers.
Eventually, I came to understand how liberating fiction would be. I would be free to let my imagination soar. I could include the stories of my family and add to the many stories I was given by friends and students who shared their lives with me as well. Fiction gave me the freedom to adjust, invent, build bridges, raise my figurative voice and superimpose a structure on the images I had been collecting all along. It gave me permission to omit the extraneous and sharpen the essential. I could inhabit my characters' thoughts, explore their innermost feelings and tell their stories from various perspectives. I could experiment with language, both English and Spanish, using the rich vernacular of my youth, in both the Bronx and rural Puerto Rico, creating a bilingual, bicultural, biracial world. I had a whole set of tools at my disposal that would allow me to tell many stories my way. In fact, I could write metaphorical narrative of the Afro-Puerto Rican journey from 19th century Africa to colonial Puerto Rico to contemporary urban America, something I knew had never been done in American letters. In a sense, I could become the storyteller for all of them, a modern day griot of Afro-Puerto Rican tradition. For years, I had been a receptor, collecting stories and holding them in trust. Now I knew why. Seeing my work within the framework of narrative fiction, was like pushing aside a curtain and seeing the world for the first time. Writing this novel became my primary goal.
I came from an Afro-Puerto Rican middle class family that was hard-working and very proud of its heritage and personal accomplishments. So the images of Puerto Rican gangsters, loose women and heroin addicts that were paraded in the media had nothing to do with my reality. Some of our people did lead those lives, but they weren't the majority in my community. The negative images that were ascribed to us all incensed the adults in my life who were too busy providing for their families to raise a potent political voice. As I grew older, I realized that the stereotypes were not just offensive but dangerous as well. Regardless of my experience, those images persisted, shaping the cultural perceptions of my community. I still meet people who can't believe I'm Puerto Rican because I speak English so well or, as I was told lately, insist that I couldn't possibly be Puerto Rican because Puerto Ricans are white. Those stereotypes and racist caricatures are out there still. It's my job to keep creating new and authentic images for our community.
My characters’ strength, whether in private or public spaces, comes from community and from the overriding faith and inner fortitude that comes from African religion and traditions. This belief system informs their daily lives and is the core of the endurance that has helped them survive through the brutality of enslavement. For instance, the presence and guidance of the ancestors is integral to their faith. This system of belief supersedes their daily reality of violence and limited agency. They share their belief with their black communities, and in this way, the private belief system becomes public. But beyond that, white characters begin to gravitate towards that system when their own fails them.
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In my experience, Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets was the first novel that addressed the existence of the Afro-Boricua in the U.S., and it was an incredible achievement at that time. But even with all its merits, that novel represented one version of our reality. The totality of the Afro-Puerto Rican life experience and community, like any other cultural group, went much further and was a much more complicated construct than could be addressed in one novel. I found that, in general, the black characters created by the media were treated as addendum rather than central figures. Theirs was a world of supplementary existence rather than one of primary agency or universal humanity. The media images of Latinos were olive-skinned, stereotypical, and absent of any of the dignity and humanity of the world I saw around me. I wanted to break that stereotype and start from the beginning, in Africa, because I wanted to write about the entire journey of my people from West Africa to colonial Puerto Rico to urban America.
We need to keep telling this story, and many others, because they explain who and how and why we are here today. The problematic part of these stories is not that we have had centuries of suffering and trauma. The problem is that the storytellers, usually not us, have told only half of the tale. Yes, we have been enslaved, abused, and violated. But, more importantly, we have, not just survived, not just endured, but thrived. We found a way where there was no way.
I trust my readers to make the connections that interest them. I am a fiction writer and therefore, I have a lot of latitude. I can bend time, moving historical events like natural disasters from one decade to another, in the service of my narrative. Some interpret my work as being grounded in the Latin American school of magical realism. That’s fine. Practitioners of traditional African religions recognize themselves in the symbology of my work. That’s fine too.
I love the African proverb “you’ll never know what happened on the hunt until you speak to the lion.” I think many readers realize that, for the most part, the story we have gotten has been from the perspective of the conquerors. That is why is it so important for us to tell our own stories. What we have been taught has been distorted, one-sided, self-serving, and incomplete, at best. I think readers are thirsty for another narrative, one that feels more authentic and truthful.