Welcome, La Bloga Readers, to a conversation with Professor Frederick Luis Aldama (The Ohio State University) who has just published Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands. This small but mighty book is a transnational collaboration. Chicana writer, Denise Chávez, author of The King and Queen of Comezón, describes Long Stories Cut Short like this: "This collection of tighter tales where life is a daily balancing act asks, In what language do we articulate desire and need, love and hate? You choose. With polish and skill, the tale is told first in English, then in Spanish. Each version pains and swirls like carnival lights that form a backdrop for a living circus of souls. Aldama stuns, surprises, and delights. This is no small feat. He is a linguistic trapeze high-wire artist and delivers verbal theatrics, the likes of which will stay in your mind and heart for a very long time."
Amelia M.L. Montes: Thank you so much for being with us on La Bloga today! This small “packs a punch” collection of flash fiction is a
transnational, multi-genre, collaborative celebration. Tell us about all the various collaborators
for this project—how you brought them together: Mapache Studios graphics, the recruitment of Ana María Shua to write
the excellent forward, Jaime Hernandez’s cover art, etc. It obviously took a Latinx village!
Frederick Luis Aldama:
It takes a Latinx globalopolis, Amelia.
That is to say, we’re a hemispheric community. We are knitted together on a global
scale. And, as such, we are working
together to actively transform the world—from this collection of flash fictions
to the ever vital fractal crystalizing of language and culture, to our reaching
across national boundaries to help nourish our familias and communities.
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| The Spanish translation always follows the flash fiction pic. Graphics art by Mapache Studios |
Jaime
Hernandez’s cover art captures this hemispheric sensibility beautifully. He chose some of the characters that appear
throughout the fiction/graphic fictions—from X-Box videogamer and cholo cyber-punkers
to romancing abuelos and philosophically musing infants and Kurt Cobain Latina
listening teens—and drew them springing superhero style out of a map of the
Americas. He captures in one flash of
the eye, the great variety of who we are—and our superheroism in a world that
constantly threatens to crush us.
From the moment
pen touched paper with the first super micro (nano) fiction—“When she woke up,
the hunger pangs were still there,” an homage to the great practitioner of the
form, Tito Monterroso and his “Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba
allí”—I conceived of this as an intertwining alphabetic and graphic fiction work. I
reached out to my compadres in Chile, Rodrigo and Fernando of Mapache Studios,
because their extraordinary talent, but also to infuse a perspective of Latinx
identity and experience from those grown in a shared hemispheric soil, but
differently nuanced. For instance, the
story “Cell 113”/”Celda 113” they bring to bear their trademark exquisite line
work and clean inking to expand in our imaginations what it means to be
incarcerated as a Latino: the story is
told from the perspective of a US Latino thrown in jail for some stupid mistake
and the drawing is set within one of Pinochet’s jails where so-called dissidents
(workers, students, activists) were tortured, murdered . . . disappeared. The alphabetic text together with Mapache
Studio’s art creats an expansive experience—one that mirrors our Latinx
community where distant and proximate memory and physical experience tie us all
together.
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| Each English flash piece is followed by the Spanish -- seamless |
There’s Tito
Monterroso and there is Ana María
Shua. She’s taken the flash fiction form
to a new level of refinement, both in form and content. She’s a master of concision whereby the
careful selection out of words—the
sculpting down from that block of marble to its bare minimum for our
imagination to go somewhere new—also reshapes how we encounter philosophy,
biology, physics, journalism . . . She takes what some might consider the high
brow and off limits and anchors it in the everyday—and with a quick punch. She’s an inspiration to us U.S. grown Latinx
authors who seek to make new the
reader’s perspective, thought, and feeling about the world we live in.
Amelia M.L. Montes:
The Prelude is very filmic—flashes of scenes that then can be connected
to longer pieces in the three sections following. In your earlier drafts, is that how you
originally conceived the book? I’m
interested here in the process of crafting text.
Frederick Luis Aldama:
Thank you for this question and sharp observation, Amelia. From the get go, I did conceive of Long Stories Cut Short as clusters of
stories that capture the triptych of life:
beginnings, middles, ends. While
the structure mirrors our journey through life from beginning to end, each
flash fiction that makes up the sections take on different perspectives. For instance, in “Lexicon,” the infant Latina
muses: “I learned how to read before I
could speak. I apprehended the world
through its material manifestations, its signs.
Later, black scratches and blank spaces will tell me of the absent
world. Lexic: Greek for ‘word.’ And also for ‘speech.’”
When I conceived
of the Prelude, I wanted to include a series of one-line flash fictions that
not only pay homage to Tito Monterroso, but as you so astutely identify, they
at once mirror this triptych structure of the whole book and they drop suggestive nibbles (micro themes) for our minds to
recall and envelope as we move through the immersive prose-graphic fictions
that more fully flesh out the complex spectrum of Latinx experiences and
identities that fill out the rest of the book.
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| Frederick Luis Aldama reading his book. |
I’m pretty
certain that this is the first bilingual flash fiction/graphic fiction book
conceived and published as an organic whole. As I mention earlier, each of its three main
sections interrelate and build a total tapestry of the Latinx experience in and
through our three main phases of life. I
did this to add further depth and scope to each story, so that each one would
stand on its own as an individual entity while also creating a total net as
woven into the others. Put otherwise, in
a performative way, each story is about very different Latinx subjects as they
interrelate to a larger, hemispheric experience as a whole. It’s the ontological and epistemological case
of the particular within the communal and the communal being expressed within
the particular.
Amelia M.L. Montes:
With each section, “Beginnings,” “Middles,” “Ends,” the ‘filmic’
narrative pans across many lives, many moments cutting across class, gender,
sexuality, and culture, culminating in a woman’s defense of how she has lived
right before she dies. You call it, in
your “author’s note,” a “format to give shape to the triptych of life.” Tell us more about your decision to end this
triptych with a woman’s defense.
Frederick Luis Aldama:
Amelia, you are clearly the ideal reader of Long Stories Cut Short—or better, a “lector complice” as Julio
Cortázar calls such an engaged reading subject.
As you so astutely identify, there’s a sense of a camera panning across
the stories as a whole and that drops us incisively into each of lives that
make up this whole. In the story, “A
Long Story Cut Short” that concludes the section “Ends,” we meet an ABUELITA we might all recognize. She’s superheroic strong in ways we can’t
even imagine, deciding that she won’t have a better life but by strategically
marrying an Irish American wannabe
cowboy (Andrew) from her neighborhood, she might give the next generation a
chance. It’s not out of love that she
marries. In a racist world where all is
foreclosed for a Latina, she deliberately seeks to reproduce with someone who
will give the next generation lighter skin, and with this, more options. She’s fierce.
Yet, she is filled with an internalized prejudice. She grew up in an L.A. chock full of movie
stars, films like Gone with the Wind,
and popular print media like LIFE—social mirrors that normalize whiteness. As she takes in her final series of breaths,
we see how in late adulthood, she awakens to the vacuousness of the American
Dream. “Andrew proved to have nothing in
him. Never was worth more than the price
of a photograph of John Wayne.” And in
death, she fully lives life. And while there’s a certain irony in her
experiencing the rich textures of a full life in death, her last breath comes from a place of strength and not
regret.
Amelia M.L. Montes:
Unlike most fiction works written in two languages where, say, the
English is clearly separated from the Spanish, in Long Stories Cut Short, there is a seamless flow between the
two. Tell us about this flow.
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| Students and Professor: Aldama's Latinx Pop Culture Course at The Ohio State University, December 2016 |
Frederick Luis Aldama:
Much like the placement of the graphic art pieces, so too did I conceive
of the move from English into Spanish as fluid and expansive. As the English story ends, the story in Spanish
begins—and without the interruption of a page break. It reflects how those in our Latinx
communities move back and forth seamlessly between the two in all variety of
ways. In this way, they capture how we
exist as a multilingual and multisensorial hemispheric community. And, the seamless flow between the two
languages erase this sense of privileging one language as the “original” over
another as the “duplicate.” We struggle
with this in our everyday existence, no?
The experience of the stories is expansive precisely because of the
seamless layout between English and Spanish.
And, while they clearly share the same DNA (characters and content), I
purposefully created them as an organic whole whereby the Spanish story worlds add to the English and vice versa.
By Frederick
Luis Aldama
Forward by AnaMaría Shua
Illustrations by
Mapache Studios
Cover Art by
Jaime Hernandez
University of
Arizona Press, 2017
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