Reading Luis Negrón’s award-winning debut short story collection, Mundo Cruel, one is struck by the author’s daring, his at-times startling insights, and his blistering sense of humor. It is a remarkable collection, and the first translated work to win a Lambda Literary Award for gay general fiction. In his interview with Asymptote blog, Negrón talks about melodrama and monsters in fiction, homophobia in present-day Puerto Rico, and his experience with acclaimed translator Suzanne Jill Levine.
Eva Richter: Your epigraph is a quote from Manuel Puig’s “A Melodramatic Destiny.” “So then, a melodrama is a drama made by someone who doesn’t know the difference, Miss?” / “Not exactly, but in a certain way it is a second-rate product.” How does the notion of melodrama as a second-rate or even naive drama play into your short stories?
Luis Negrón: There are two ways to answer this question. One, the most obvious one, is by explaining melodrama itself: it is a drama where destiny cannot be escaped. I played with and tried to transform this notion of melodrama in my texts, but not only with the structure of them, but with their aura, the environment of the melodrama, its false and perhaps fake way of suffering. It is also important to put the stories in context. In Latin America, melodrama is king. Our music is melodramatic; our politics are melodramatic, our sports, our way or conceiving love, romantic love, all kinds of love, are pure melodrama. It is our way of dealing with most situations. This is more the case in the working class population, where access to different forms of dealing with feelings are not at hand or are simply unknown. For this reason, melodrama is abundant in the book: it shows how my characters construct whole gammas of feelings, and how they make decisions or just follow the paths dictated by their destiny.
ER: The filmmaker R.W. Fassbinder also worked deeply with melodrama. Fassbinder’s 70s films Fox and His Friends and In a Year with 13 Moons to me are incredible reimaginings of melodrama, both depicting gay relationships imploding, and I wondered about your opinion of Fassbinder in relation to melodrama.
LN: Fassbinder has always been an obsession for me. Here is a man who created what I call a raw melodrama: direct, cruel, but always close to the very basic and less sophisticated feelings, the ones that linger in the social class he portrays. Another title I love by him is Ali: Fear Eats the Soul—here his idea of melodrama is in perfect form, I feel.
ER: Who were your influences for this collection?
LN: Oh, so many different sources can be found in Mundo Cruel. My mother and my grandmother’s ways of storytelling. Mexican and American cinema from the 1940s. Jean Genet and the beauty of ugliness, Manuel Puig and his sophisticated humor, Reynaldo Arenas and his anger. Also, John Waters and, of course, Pedro Almodóvar.
ER: Many of your stories are quite funny, especially the ones toward the beginning, starting with “The Chosen One,” which centers on a young gay “child preacher” who seemingly has sex with everyone he encounters. What is the role of humor in your work? It strikes me as a sometimes absurdist humor, especially with images like the boy going on tour with his closeted lover, a Christian singer.
LN: Humor is just another way of dealing with trauma, with complication. It is also a very underclass resource for dealing with life. I did not want a funny book; I wanted a book that showed how people deal, how people find happiness, even if society at large thinks that in their life there is no space for it. Humor is very tricky. As a writer, one should not pursue a “joke” or a “punch line,” it has to evolve naturally from the story for it to work. For it to bring the reader closer, it has to place the reader in a position where they have no idea whether to laugh or cry.
ER: “For Guayama” is to me also funny, and, like “The Chosen One,” perhaps also monstrous. You said in an interview with The Rumpus that you were interested in the notion of monstrosity as a beauty that people cannot understand. What makes a character monstrous?
LN: It is no secret that people are very afraid of what they can become. Monsters are a superlative of our desires, our nature, that force that cannot be controlled, the one that we are supposed to control, like sexual desire, or any desire that exposes our true nature, that breaks any rules, that exposes what we hide, that suggests that our contract with society can be broken. That makes a monster.
ER: With the short story “Botella,” the collection takes an extremely dark turn. This story is from the point of view of a violent hustler, whose writing is an almost lobotomized drone of endless, comma-less sentences—entirely different from the more energetic, funny tone of stories like “La Edwin.” How did you work out the form and tone of Botella’s voice?
LN: The character is high, under the influence of drugs, always running, trapped, and obliged to make the decision at hand, with no time to reflect: he must react. The writing of this story had to reflect, for me, that he becomes what he becomes because in his life there is no time to pause, everything is speed. Editing is everything in “Botella,” and it was critical not to waste any word or sentence; everything had to aspire to be clear to the reader in just a few strokes. Also, I should add, here I wanted to get closer to Genet, not in style, but in his search for humanity and feeling in obscure characters, even in those where cruelty is the only type of feeling they know.
ER: Mundo Cruel depicts homophobia in a few different forms in Santurce, Puerto Rico. In “Junito,” the main character, speaking to his friend on the phone, says, “if I was you I’d get the hell out of here […] some jerk there at the rotary was talking shit about you and I said to him, bro, leave him alone, […] and then they started fucking with me, asking am I your husband, am I a trick.” Could you speak a bit about homophobia in Puerto Rico, and how, or if, it inspired these stories?
LN: Even though I work in a bookstore, went to college, and participate in the literary world and industry, I come from a working class, or no-working-at-all class. I even live in a ghetto and come from one. Most of the time, people and colleagues will say about someone homophobic that, for them, this person has no formal education, that he or she is simply underclass. That is not what I’ve experienced in life. Homophobia knows no class, and for that reason, I wanted to show with the main character of “Junito,” the parent, that even in his gray shades of homophobia, he was looking to rise from it. For love of his son and his friend. In a better society, he would not be homophobic, he would be totally fine with homosexuality. Many people draw the line between what is homophobia and what is not too easily. Writers should pay closer attention to the shades I mentioned before. Humans are not black and white, neither is human experience.
ER: What was your experience of being translated by and working with Suzanne Jill Levine like?
LN: When I got the call from Gabriel Espinal, editor at Seven Stories Press in New York, telling me they wanted to publish Mundo Cruel in English I was really surprised. And very excited too. I never thought it was going to happen. I never even tried. Espinal read the book in Spanish and brought it to the attention of the other editors.
I remember when Gabriel called me and told me he went to a New York bookstore and bought a copy of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, the first novel written by Argentinean writer Manuel Puig (one of my all-time favorites) and translated by Jill. He really loved her work and decided she would be perfect for Mundo Cruel. I was so nervous I did not recognize her name at that moment. Even though I have a copy of her biography of Puig at home and read it twice, in Spanish and in English. He told me they were going to have a meeting to discuss the details.
That is when I realized who she was and was really surprised and excited about the news. Also, I was intimidated and nervous. Jill, as many people call Suzanne Jill Levine, translated many of Latin America’s best literary works and she is very well respected. I mean, she is big.
When I got the first draft from her I was happy to see that she captured the humor, the tone, and the music of Mundo Cruel’s language. My stories were written is Puerto Rican street language, and as we know, street language can be very tricky, because it changes rapidly and I knew it was going to be a challenge for anyone, but she delivered a great first draft.
It is no surprise to say that before reading that first draft I was quite intimidated by her reputation. I can read English and feel very comfortable with the language, so I knew what I was looking for in the translation. So did Gabriel Espinal, who was a great editor to work with. Jill was going to be in New York for a few weeks, so we arranged for a meeting in the city. I traveled from San Juan just to work with her on the draft.
We met in a cafe. Here she was, Suzanne Jill Levine in front of me. We talked about Manuel Puig, about our love for his work and many other Latin American writers. Then we started working on the translation and on our notes. It was a great pleasure working with her. She paid attention, she listened and made all my insecurities about working with her disappear on that first meeting. Truly great talented people, like Jill, are always humble, that is something I always believe in. She did not prove me wrong.
Mundo Cruel in English is our book. It is impossible to detach a translator from the authorship of his or her work. I have great respect for this craft. Translators write, as someone said, the truly universal literature.
ER: What motivated some of your decisions about the order of the stories in the collection?
LN: When putting together the book, many people had ideas about the order. I listened to all of them, but I followed my instinct. For example, “The Chosen One” opens the book in hopes of showing how my literary project wanted to claim, conquer, from the start, a comfortable approach and zone for portraying even subjects that are not very usual. Others just follow a natural order, aiming to imitate a walk through the neighborhood and the experience of living in it. Santurce is, perhaps, the main character of Mundo Cruel.
ER: What are you working on now?
LN: I have a novel that deals with lack of love and all the funny and pathetic things we do to get love. I also have a memoir about being queer and poor in Puerto Rico, but with lots of humor. I am also drafting a play about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, but, of course, in my satirical style. I hope they work.
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Luis Negrón was born in the city of Guayama, Puerto Rico, in 1970. He studied journalism and has written film reviews for major Puerto Rican periodicals including Claridad and El Poeta. He has worked extensively in the queer arts community in Puerto Rico, including a founding role in Producciones Mano Santa, which has sponsored cultural and artistic productions over the last ten years. He co-edited Los Otros Cuerpos, an anthology of queer writing from Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican diaspora.