Your story in this week’s issue, “Predictions and Presentiments,” is drawn from your forthcoming book, “Beginning Middle End,” which is coming out in July. The audio version will incorporate sounds that you and your team recorded in Sicily, where both the piece and the novel are set. How would you compare the creative processes of writing and recording, and the experiences of reading and listening?
Recording sound and listening attentively have been an integral part of my writing process for a long time now. My book “The Story of My Teeth,” for example, took shape through a series of audio exchanges with a group of workers in a juice factory in Mexico. I’d write weekly installments of a story, and they would record themselves reading it out loud and giving critiques. They’d then send me these clips as well as ideas for how to continue the story. Some years later, I wrote “Tell Me How It Ends,” an essay about the U.S. immigration system, which was born from my work listening to, transcribing, and translating the testimonies of undocumented children in deportation proceedings. And, for the past five years, I’ve been working with my team on “Echoes from the Borderlands,” a sonic essay that works like a twenty-four-hour road trip along the U.S.-Mexico border. We’ve recorded hundreds of hours of material—sounds as subtle as that of the wind blowing through a saguaro forest, and some as strident as Border Patrol interrogations or rocket launches in Starbase, Texas.
“Beginning Middle End” is particularly attentive to the sounds of the natural world. The sonic version of the novel layers narrative and soundscapes that were recorded with binaural mikes, hydrophones, and geophones. Over the past year, we’ve collected field recordings from Sicily and the Aeolians: sea sounds, underwater currents, winds, volcanoes, fire, dust storms, rainstorms, church bells, fish markets. They are not meant to illustrate or enhance the narrative. Rather, they constitute a kind of emotional undercurrent.
I think that sound is a powerful antidote to the shallow and fleeting nature of our attention and of many of our contemporary experiences. We can’t really consume it the way we consume so many other things. We can’t really scroll through sound the same way we do images. Sound, attentive listening, allows us to be emotionally rooted in time, and that’s an ability that precedes writing. If we are not present in time, paying attention fully, it’s hard to write anything that is truly meaningful.
The story and book center on a mother and her young daughter. The mother, eager for “the chance to begin again,” brings her daughter to Catania, a Sicilian city that sits at the base of Mt. Etna. Why did you choose this location as the backdrop for the narrative?
There are several reasons why this piece, as well as “Beginning Middle End,” is set in Sicily. Some are political, some are geographical, and some have more to do with mythology and early philosophy.
Geopolitically, Sicily has been at the center of historical trade routes between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. It has therefore been conquered by everyone: Carthaginians, Arabs, Greeks, Normans, Phoenicians, Vandals. It has belonged to everyone, and everyone has belonged to it at one point or another. And all of that is still present, still visible in the layers of its cities and its ruins. Sicily still occupies a central space in the contemporary migratory landscape: eighty per cent of all maritime migration from Africa to Europe arrives in the region. Even though Sicily is such a small island, it’s an incredibly complex and diverse place.
Geologically, Sicily is also where the tectonic plates of the African continent meet and collide with those of Europe. Beyond how symbolic or not that may be, it has some very real implications. The Aeolian archipelago, off the coast of the main island, has one of the world’s densest concentrations of volcanoes: Panarea, Stromboli, Vulcano, among others. The sounds of Stromboli are like nothing I have ever heard: it “exhales” every twenty or thirty minutes, and it sounds like a gigantic whale. Vulcano is much quieter: it hisses and whistles in an almost ghostly way. I would love to be a vulcanologist in a future life. In the meantime, I try to listen to and record volcanic sounds, and to write about them (or with them). They are very present in the novel.
Lastly, I have been going to the same little town in Sicily every year for over a decade. The more time one spends on the island, the easier it is to understand why it was in Sicily that Empedocles’ theory of the four elements—fire, water, air, earth—was born. And I can almost confirm what many Greek and Latin authors have claimed in the past: the winds of this world are all born from the caves of Aeolus, on Stromboli; that an entrance to Hades is probably in one of the cracks on the island of Vulcano; and that on some nights, off the coast of Catania, it may still be possible to spot the cyclops Polyphemus.
The mother, who’s an author, is searching for “a way into a new form of motherhood and maybe even a way back into writing,” and she ponders what “makes a good beginning” in each context—in life and in literature. Why are these things so inextricably linked for this character? And what do you think makes a good beginning?
There is no general rule for a good beginning. I love the beginning of Musil’s “A Man Without Qualities,” for example: “A barometric low hung over the Atlantic.” Or Dostoyevsky’s deceivingly simple first line of “Notes from the Underground”: “I am a sick man.” Or Juan Rulfo’s space-time-bending beginning in “Pedro Páramo”: “I came to Comala because I was told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Páramo”—where the importance of “came” instead of “went” and “here” instead of “there” doesn’t become clear until much later in the book.
These three beginnings have nothing in common, yet they are all perfect in the context of the stories that unfold. But that is the thing with beginnings: they are susceptible to becoming re-signified over and over again, depending on the twists and turns that a story later takes.
When you are still in the early stages of constructing a story—whether in life or in literature—a good beginning is probably one that opens possibilities, rather than narrows them. But in literature, like in life, you never know if a beginning is good or not until much later; sometimes not until the story is finished. It’s a type of knowledge that comes only with hindsight.
At a fish market, the pair come across a sign, in Sicilian, that translates into: “If you are born a tuna you can’t die a swordfish.” The daughter pushes back on this sentiment, citing her great-grandmother, whose disposition changed radically as she began to lose her memory. When did you first hear this Sicilian saying, and why did it stick with you? And, to the daughter’s point, what do you make of the relationship between memory and identity?
I love that old proverb. I heard it for the first time from an old fishmonger, Fortunato, who used to have a little store by the port in a place called Castellammare del Golfo. I used to buy fish from him often, and he said it to me one day, rather off-handedly, and it stuck. I agree and don’t agree with the proverb. I do think time changes us, sometimes profoundly. And in old age, as a person loses their memory, it may seem like their very essence is disappearing. When someone close and dear to us goes through a process like this, it feels as if we have already lost them, and that we have to grieve for them even before they have departed.
This is something that “Beginning Middle End” deals with at length. In the novel, the narrator is in the “middle” of her life, observing her daughter articulate complex memories and carve out a place for herself in the world, while at the same time witnessing her mother lose grip of her memory and her sense of place. She tells her story from that difficult vantage point where life and death meet, where arriving and leaving come together, where the beginning and the end become visibly and irremediably linked.
Proteus, the Greek sea god, is depicted on a precious heirloom, a mosaic tile, that has been passed down the family’s maternal line for several generations. How did you learn about Proteus and, of all the mythological figures, why did you choose to incorporate him in a story?
I think I first encountered Proteus while reading Alice Oswald’s “Dart,” a book-length poem that works like a sonic cartography of a river. The poem ends with the image of Proteus, a sea shepherd and also an oracular god who can see not only the future but also the distant past. But he doesn’t like to reveal information, so he constantly metamorphoses in order to escape his curious captors. He’s not a very popular god in the Greek pantheon, and in fact, by some accounts, he may even have been a mortal.
In any case, Proteus made his way into this piece, and into the novel, by sheer insistence. After I encountered him in “Dart,” he kept reappearing in other books I was reading. He appeared as the “Old Man of the Sea” in Steinbeck’s “Log from the Sea of Cortez,” which I was reading for a project; then he appeared in Pliny’s “Natural History,” which I was reading for research; he appeared, again, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I was teaching at the time. So I gave up and said, “O.K., fine, I’ll write about you.” And once I brought him into the novel, everything—the bits and fragments I had been accumulating over the years—started falling into place. It was as if Proteus’ metamorphoses allowed for the novel to be a fluid, shapeshifting book, but at the same time one that finally had a coherent internal logic: it became a road novel, a mother-daughter story, a family saga, a piece of climate fiction, a rewriting of myths from a less heavily-patriarchal perspective. But more than anything, for me, it became a novel against the feeling of the end of times, and a novel about how fiction is a way to come to terms with change and constant transformation. ♦
