May, 1989. Horacio Castellanos Moya is working as a journalist in Mexico, reporting in exile on the civil war in El Salvador. His debut novel, La diáspora (released in the US for the first time last month by Penguin Literatura Random House), is announced the winner of El Salvador’s National Book Award for the Novel. He agrees to return to El Salvador for two days and attend the award ceremony at the Central American University (UCA) on the condition that the novel, which lays bare the violence of both the state and the rebels, not be circulated to the public until after he leaves.
The book is released. In a national newspaper, a reviewer accuses Castellanos Moya of being a CIA agent, as his novel exposes infighting within the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the coalition of guerrilla groups challenging the US-backed military. Six months later, as many Jesuit priests are executed by the Salvadoran Army on the UCA campus (home to Castellanos Moya’s publisher) for advocating a negotiated settlement between the state and FMLN. The army poses as guerillas, spraying the Pastoral Center’s façade with bullets and leaving a forged note on the scene: “FMLN executed those who informed on it. Victory or death, FMLN”.
Castellanos Moya remains in exile for two more years. He returns in 1991 and runs a magazine until 1997, when further violence is threatened following the publication of his third novel, Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (released in English by New Directions in 2016). “We’re going to kill your son,” a midnight phone caller warns his mother. The author leaves once more, this time with no plans of returning to live in his country of citizenship.
November, 2018. A former FMLN commander is the incumbent president of El Salvador while Castellanos Moya lives in exile in the United States. It’s the week of the midterm elections—a week in which the POTUS has run advertisements threatening an “invasion” of Central American asylum seekers, originating in Honduras (Castellanos Moya’s birthplace) and joining forces with “Middle Easterners” from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico on the way.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
12TH STREET: Your debut, La diáspora, is set to be released for the first time in the United States. When the novel was first released in El Salvador, you and your publisher faced a lot of pressure—to put it mildly. Your latest novel, Moronga, was also published this year in both the United States and El Salvador. How does the publishing landscape in your home country compare today?
HORACIO CASTELLANOS MOYA: Well that has changed, because the consequences of publishing things that were politically critical were very dangerous for publishing houses at the time. The Central American University that published my first novel was bombed many times. Not once, but three or four times the death squads bombed it. Now it is different. I don’t think there is as much open pressure against them. I think it’s part of the democratic game.
STREET: Do you think the writer has a role or responsibility to fulfill in political conflicts?
CASTELLANOS MOYA: For me, it’s difficult to have a prescription. What I think is that a writer should do what he or she feels is correct in their conscience. But that doesn’t mean—because you’re following your conscience—you’re going to write good books. For me, that’s very important. It’s one thing: your way of being a citizen; of fulfilling your responsibilities as a human being; resisting injustice, or repression, or killings. But that doesn’t mean, because it’s a good cause, it will make your books better. It’s not related; the talent and the discipline and the will to write novels is not an attribute of only good people. There are big assholes that have written great books.
STREET: In an interview, you once said, “The challenge for the writer of fiction is this: to submit ideas to the pressure of the inherent laws of the narrative text. Anything else is propaganda, regardless of from where or against whom it’s written.” Do you ever find it difficult to stay faithful to those “inherent laws?” How do you avoid writing “propaganda” when dealing with political topics—ones on which you surely have your own opinions?
CASTELLANOS MOYA: Well, first I try to put my ego inside the drawer. So, in that sense, it’s not me. I agree with great writers like Proust and Naipaul that the writer who is talking to you right now is not the same person who writes the books. For me, the whole challenge—in my way of narrating—is to go into how the characters feel reality. Feel the world around them. Not to judge from my point of view, but to try and go into that man or woman, try to just leave myself out of everything. I don’t know if that’s possible, but I try to do it and that’s the way I write.
STREET: Some of the storylines in your novels, such as The Dream of My Return (released in English by New Directions in 2015), seem to overlap with what you have previously revealed of your personal history. Do you ever include scenes from your life in fiction, exactly as you remember them?
CASTELLANOS MOYA: No, I always distort them. It’s like a principle for me: The beginning of a scene is real—but then there is a twist, and it changes. Otherwise I don’t feel comfortable.
STREET: Do you think there’s an inevitable fictionalization when we process memories of historical events through writing?
CASTELLANOS MOYA: In my case it’s inevitable because I don’t feel comfortable writing autobiographical books. You know, talking about my life as it is. I don’t get the form. I need to channel whatever has to do with my life through a novel. Writing about historical events is writing about historical events as they were felt by the characters, not as they happened. I don’t have any way of writing a novel that has to do with historical events that says, “This is the historical truth.” I am a bit suspicious of historical truth.
STREET: You’ve spent most of your life in exile from your country of citizenship. How have you found this has affected your writing and relationship with the country?
CASTELLANOS MOYA: I think you bring your own country in your memory, and each country you live in contributes to your memory—to what you write about. You are not a kind of reporter of actual reality, or what is current reality; you are someone that brings your own memories to the events that become the raw material for fiction. So, in that sense, I think that to be outside of the country has been positive. In a small country, it is easy to get involved in different groups and to see just part of the thing. When you are out, you see the whole thing because you have distance, you have perspective. So, for me, it has been positive.
But there is one problem—one problem that could happen. And that’s about language. Because language is alive, it moves, it talks—literally. If you are not there, you have the advantage of trying to get a more universal castellano (Spanish), but you could lose the music of your own country. How do you keep the music of the language? That could be a big problem for a writer that has been in exile for many years, if he or she comes from a very small country. In my case it’s not that difficult because Spanish is all around. It’s not Polish or Hungarian; it’s something that you can easily hear. But that’s a risk—a risk of losing the sound of how a language moves.
STREET: Over the last decade, you’ve lived mostly in the United States—first in Pittsburgh, and now in Iowa City. How have you experienced life in the US?
CASTELLANOS MOYA: The experience is something that I dealt with in my last novel, Moronga. The whole novel takes place in the United States. And what I show is that, even though you have a rational understanding of how another culture works, it is not easy to integrate, because you bring your own values, you bring your own way of seeing the world, of seeing things around you, and at the beginning it’s hard. Of course, if you are from Central America or Latin America, the United States is not that far. Because American culture has been propagated there since before I was born. So, you don’t come to anything new, completely. But it’s different if you go to very, very different countries. I spent six months in Tokyo and two years in Frankfurt—then you see how your culture is so different. Here, it’s easier to integrate, in the sense that you are used to seeing through television and films how it is.
STREET: In your third novel, Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, your speaker, in the spirit of Bernhard, is quite critical of the kinds of culture the population consumes—especially TV—and how little it seems people read. Do you think there are political consequences to this kind of cultural consumption?
CASTELLANOS MOYA: Well, if you think about the kinds of leaders that countries are electing, you’d think there are some consequences (laughs). It’s not only here in the US, or even Brazil or Europe, but all around. I cannot say clearly how it works because I am not a political scientist, but instead of creating more critical thinking, this influence of TV, of computers—of whatever—does the opposite: not to think, just to have passions about politics. People think that you have to hate the people that you hate and support the people that you support. But the level of debate is very low in many places.
STREET: Do you think the way in which we consume culture has the potential to devalue literature, the written word?
CASTELLANOS MOYA: The problem is not with literature. The problem is with the written word. It’s not that people don’t read novels as they used to, or that people don’t read papers as they used to. . . I had some kind of experience walking on the subway in New York and other cities. You see how people are (taps fingers against phone) on their phones, but they’re not reading their phones. They’re scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling (laughs). It’s not a problem of literature. It’s a problem of, “What’s the amount of attention people can devote to reading after so many hours a day of doing that?” That’s the problem for me.
STREET: For a number of years now you’ve been teaching at the University of Iowa’s MFA program for Spanish Creative Writing. Did you see that article in The Chronicle of Higher Education a few years ago, “How Iowa Flattened Literature“?
CASTELLANOS MOYA: I read it, yes.
STREET: What did you make of the author’s argument? To summarize, briefly, he pointed to funding the International Writing Program at Iowa received from the CIA in the sixties—as a means to supposedly recruit writers from abroad and combat communism through popular literature—and claimed that this influenced the instruction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he attended in the late 90s. According to the author, there was at Iowa—and still is, in workshops created around the country in Iowa’s image—an overemphasis on “sensory” fiction as opposed to historical “novels of ideas.” Do you think this argument carries any weight today?
CASTELLANOS MOYA: I think we are living in different times. Of course, you see the International Writing Program is funded half by the university and half by the State Department. So that means, obviously, there must be some kind of political criteria for the authors they invite. But I think that political criteria changes depending on the government and depending on the country [of the visiting writer]. I don’t think it’s the same kind of polarized situation as during the Cold War. During the Cold War the two sides were very, very clearly defined. Now it’s a little bit more complicated.
STREET: It seems to be a fairly common criticism today that the writing coming out of workshops is somehow predictable. There’s even a term for it: “workshop-y“. What do you think accounts for this perceived predictability?
CASTELLANOS MOYA: Well, Spanish workshops have a very different situation than English workshops. Because, I don’t know if that—what happens to the literature—comes from the workshop; it seems more related to the market than the workshop itself. What are the markets expecting of these writers? I think the pressure of the market is quite intense for [English-language writers]. In our case, I think maybe we are a bit more free of that pressure (laughs). We know that we are not writing for royalties.
Castellanos Moya’s translated works are available via Biblioasis and New Directions.