Kathleen Alcalá Quotes

In this desert was my beginning. My ancestors were born here, lived and loved here, suffered loss here, and died. Eventually, war scattered us, and we have lived a sort of exile ever since. But in our exile, the stories of the desert have taken on mythic qualities. Nothing else can ever fill up the empty place in our hearts left when we departed this place. Only the deserts and the oceans, the places where the rhythms of the universe are most apparent, can assuage that ache for a few moments. ("The Desert Remembers My Name", March 24, 2000 at The Border Book Festival in New Mexico)

I have always read science fiction along with mainstream fiction. Some people look down on “genre” fiction as not true literature, but alternate worlds and points of view fit perfectly with my upbringing in the southwest, with cousins on both sides of the border. Our reality has always been alternative. Other writers will tell you it is comics that sustained them when they were young, but that’s really the same thing, except in pictorial form: narratives willing to address the “what if.” (madam mayo)

That’s what made me a writer as much as anything. I wanted to hear the endings of stories that didn’t have endings. A family member would tell a story. I would ask, “What happened?” No one would say because no one knew. So I had to write stories.

Once we lost the keys to our houses in Barcelona during The Plague, or the Inquisition or whatever other excuse was given for taking our properties, all the world was our temporary habitation. We saw each place through the eyes of the stranger seeking that pocket of refuge where we could set up shop until the next disaster turned people against us.

When children went every day to school to learn to live in a world that no longer existed.

Even the doves were in mourning. The trees seemed to sigh at her leave-taking, and the windows of each building looked, to her, like sorrowful eyes. (first lines)

Straightening the ruffles on the curtains, she could not forget it. Stirring the soup in the kitchen while Josefina bit her lips and waited for her to leave, she could not forget it. Sewing the torn lace back onto the hem of one of her daughters' petticoats, she could almost forget it, but Estela cringed every time she remembered the hurt, closed look on Zacarías' face as she tried to talk to him. (first lines)

He was now in country which he had never before explored, the land of the Tarahumara, the indígenes famous for running long distances over the rough and unforgiving terrain, often, it was said, for the pure joy of it. (p134)

Stories of the supernatural are stories of transformation, from one state to another. Love is the strongest transformational force that we know, and also the one most sought after on a daily, ordinary basis. These stories, for the most part, were not tales of alienation, which might have been expected if this was a collection of strictly horror stories, but of people searching for connections, usually to others. When our drive to connect, to transform ourselves from one state to another (unhappy to happy, unloved to loved, shackled to free) is so strong that it seems to exceed the limits of the physical world, then we may invoke the otherworldly on our own behalf. And sometimes there is a response, but not always in the ways that we expect.

This is how they took back the world - step by step, song by song.

One aspect of fantastic literature that must be noted is its political content. Starting with Alejandro Carpentier in Cuba, who probably first used the term "magic realism" to describe literature, such fiction has been used as a vehicle for conveying political and social truths that could be fatal if presented more baldly. In spite of their careful eloquence, many of its practitioners have lived out their lives in exile as a result of their work. This is the extraordinary power of the written word: that it can make dictators, surrounded by militia, tremble in their boots.

In a way, artists are messengers between worlds, bringing ideas and symbols from one to the other.

In a novel or a movie, it’s often silence that communicates what cannot be said through words.

(In terms of telling stories based on cultural differences, do you consider yourself a “magical realist”?) The term became an easy way to classify a set of writings that didn’t match up with North American expectations. I ended up writing/talking a good deal about magical realism in relation to my work. I had already read One-hundred Years of Solitude when I was in college, probably because that was when it was translated into English. I sent a copy in Spanish to my parents, saying, “Look this is just like our family stories!” And they said, “Yes, this is like our story-telling tradition.”

Fiction is all about that moment of transition from one to another state of being. If that metamorphosis doesn’t occur, the character doesn’t change. We, the readers, don’t change. This reminds me of Walter Benjamin, who observes that stories transform the storyteller as well as the listeners.