A Big Solitude: A Conversation with Giannina Braschi

One of my favorite things about my copy of Giannina Braschi’s first book, Empire of Dreams, is a section from the brief author’s biographical note on the back jacket. It goes:

Before settling in New York, [Giannina Braschi] lived in San Juan, Madrid, Paris, Rome, and London. “In each city,” she says, “I did the same things in different languages. I read lots of books, studied lots of literature, listened to lots of music, smoked lots of cigarettes, drank lots of wine, shopped for lots of clothes, and walked lots of streets. Most of all I rocked a lot—from east to west. But only in New York do I write. And only in New York do I dream of empires.”

Like Braschi, I have had an itinerant relationship with cities, and I felt a rush of recognition when I read her words. It ends up being the first thing we talk about—the idea of New York as an ongoing encounter where an ever-wandering can take root—and how captivating and strange this desire is, to “dream of empires.” Born in San Juan in 1953, Braschi settled in New York in the eighties and has been a figure in the Nuyorican poetry scene since. Empire of Dreams begins: “Behind the word is silence. Behind what sounds is the door.” What I am always puzzling over in her writing and thinking is how it declares questions with such aplomb, a poetics of salvage that doesn’t look for an elsewhere but decides to build with broken, ruined, sometimes ugly things.

I found my copy of Empire of Dreams in a favorite used bookstore, Grey Matter Books, in the fall of 2020. Right outside the bookstore’s doors, ducks quack away for the warmer months in a large, fenced patch of grass. Every couple of days, one of the ducks (always the same deep golden-brown one) is somehow stuck outside the enclosure and quacks in distress at his companions on the other side, who follow him as he runs from one end to the other. Once, after the bookstore staff and I failed to direct him back inside, the staff-person called the owner of the building (and I’m guessing the owner of the ducks) to figure out how we could help him, and we learned that he routinely escapes and embarks on this prank. No one is sure how or where the duck escapes the fence, the owner told us, but he always finds his way back in once no one is watching or fussing and he gets bored.

I share this duck-and-bookstore anecdote only because it seems like an oddly fitting companion to Braschi’s own writing on space: borders are played with, people are hoodwinked, revelry erupts suddenly, a poem becomes a play, a creature appears stranded but knows its way home in the dark. We spoke over email, and then over the phone, about the city we both love, about books as architecture and as characters in a play, about loving objects and being loved by them, and—embarrassingly, delightfully, briefly—about The Bachelor.
—Sarah Ahmad

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Sarah Ahmad: New York feels like ur-city to me, in so many ways. I moved here for graduate school in the fall of 2015, and I now realize what an odd, intense time that was to enter the States, in terms of what was about to happen politically while being intensely in love with New York. Do you have any specific memories about inhabiting or encountering it?

Giannina Braschi: New York is overwhelming, but it’s so strange how it can make you feel calm in the chaotic. The people and the skyscrapers, even though they’re so incompatible—there is a harmony to it all. I’m fascinated by the relationship of the masses to the skyscrapers. How the masses humanize the skyscrapers and how the skyscrapers dehumanize the masses. And how they tolerate each other. Without getting along at all. It’s so extreme here, and I might be a person of extremes because I feel good here.

SA: I know what you mean. I was trying to explain it to my brother, now that I move between Northampton and Brooklyn—if I’m away, I’m like Superman when he’s close to Kryptonite, longing to touch my home planet again. Was that feeling instant for you when you came here when you were younger?

GB: Yes, it was that way from the beginning. I came to New York when I was a child with my mother and my grandmother. We stayed in one of those hotels on Central Park South, a Helmsley, I think. I remember walking in the streets and thinking, I’m going to live here. I’m going to live here because there is something that makes me feel good here.

SA: Do you know what it is about the city?

GB: I think it takes you out. Out of your family.  It takes you away from remembrance. It takes you away from roots. You can invent your own structure here and (re-)invent yourself. It is a place of solitude, big solitude. In the emptiness of the city, in the void it creates, you can create.

SA: “Big solitude.” I feel that in my bones. How does your relationship to New York land in your writing?

GB: People and objects build on the energy of each other. If the design of things takes on a strange shape and a structure worthy of being noticed catches my eye, they inspire me to build new ways of shaping and modeling the architecture of my thoughts. New noises create new values, contrary to what the philosophers say. Poetry makes new noises and new shapes with new values. And poetry also makes new noises with old values. The enormity of scale and rarity of shapes in cities give structure and music to my mind—to change the architecture of poetry.

SA: I love what you say about the relationship of your work with architecture, about new noises creating new values, and the way people and objects respond to each other. I’m trying to think about the kinds of architectures and inhabitable spaces books create for us in my own work, and really admire how brash that confrontation is in your writing. What is your relationship to form as a poet and writer?

GB: My books select their own form because I am in a different stage with each one, and my feelings transform the shapes of my thoughts. I avoid at all costs the repetition of myself. I don’t use the same methods of analysis. My methods are created with each new book. A new style is born with different features—different breeds of animals that I can’t control at the beginning but which I must understand and then shape their becoming—by reading each line, under the lines, meticulously. It always amazes me how sometimes what I think is inessential—and dismiss—turns out to be central to the editing of a fragment. Or a scene. It might be its base, its foundation. Experimenting, I arrive at the forms I create. And when something doesn’t work, I don’t rewrite it. I create another thing.

SA: Is there a way of thinking about architecture and form alongside each other that has been generative for you?

GB: The shapes of the fragments are in relationship with the buildings I see from my windows every day. Also, with the objects I have in my house, especially those that transform into other things. I think of Ovid. How he got those shapes through a metamorphosis of the body. I give shape to ideas. I embody them in an experience that, when I read them in philosophy, they don’t have. The experience, I mean. I make the ideas accessible because I give them body and shape. And I make them beautiful. Through experimentation I transform the shape of things until I get the prototype I want.

SA: I’m curious to hear any thinking about genre that has felt particularly stilted for you or particularly full of possibility?

GB: I am interested in the creation of a genre. Not in the creation of a literary movement. Nor in being a part of a generation. Genre is based on space, not on time. Genres create prototypes that can last for centuries. Like the creation of the prototype of tragedy by Aeschylus. Or pataphysics by Alfred Jarry. Their future is pregnant with thoughts. A new genre creates a space that future generations can enter and write—in that model, in that prototype—a new mode of thinking.

SA: In Empire of Dreams, and across your writing, there’s a deep engagement with theater, a sense of theatricality and performance, like a new mode of thinking or the creation of a prototype. What’s the importance of theater in your work and thinking? What makes your thinking reach for it?

GB: Dialogues, contradictions, exclamations, interjections, poetic licenses, fines, red lights, green lights, grasshoppers, fresh starts and stars and horoscopes inform my theatrical experiences. Theater in the sense that it is a community of characters speaking in different tongues and tones and pitches. Theater in the sense that there is mutability and transformation and that where you start is not where you end. There is progression and growth in each one of my books. They are spiritual movements of the heart through the stages of life. How one learns through tears how to laugh and acquire wisdom. The relationship between poetry and theater in my writing is the relationship between my interiority and the confrontation my interiority has with the world. Theater happens as a tension that is sung to express the contradictions of life. The jubilation one feels after getting rid of all those tensions is also theater.

SA: On that note, I wonder: if you were to imagine Empire of Dreams or your other books/collections (Yo-Yo Boing! and United States of Banana) as characters, as people who came knocking at your door or appeared on a stage, how would you describe them? How would they speak to each other? What story about your thinking do they tell together?  

GB: I like that you are talking about the books themselves being performed as characters—that is beautiful. Why not. I think that’s the way they should come—as multitudes—as crowds—as swarms—invading the space—expressing their views—without any kind of reservations. They themselves are the unity of contradictions in different moments. Each book captures an era—and marks the end of that era and the beginning of the next. Empire of Dreams is the Reagan era. Yo-Yo Boing!, the Clinton era. United States of Banana, the Bush and Obama eras. Each book misappropriates the cultural and the political—and speaks from the point of view of people who don’t belong to any system, and yet they misunderstand and explain the agony of existence better than the household names that are part of the system. I’m looking at the movements of a society at different moments in which the political is viewed through the cultural. The cultural always takes prevalence over the political. Here the foreign invades the native. The plural overrides the singular. United States of Banana ends with characters knocking on the door of the White House, just as they had knocked on the door in the end of Plato’s Symposium. They enter drunk and full of joy, exhausted of sorrow and pity for oneself and of that sadness that is an in-between feeling with no gladness—no gratitude for the living and no generosity. My characters are very generous spirits who laugh and cry at the same time and speak in different tones and pitches when they laugh and cry. They are not small souls who follow economical standards but large and generous spirits who believe in the ecumenical. Creativity starts where nothing works. There—where nothing works—my characters invent a new beginning.  

SA: I love how swarm-like the visuals of the theater are in your body of work. One line particularly stuck out to me—when you say, “The plural overrides the singular,” in the context of the cultural and the political. In my own writing and thinking, I feel like I am deeply beholden to the singular, which I am understanding as the subjective, the I. But what your answer makes me think of is a kind of new objectivity, the kind formed from outside the system. How do you think of subjectivity in your writing, or in art? You said earlier, “my feelings transform the shapes of my thoughts,” which makes me imagine that form is where your subjectivity shapes itself, rather than necessarily content—though of course those are entangled. 

GB: I think you’re right. I’m thinking of a transformative subjectivity; my subjectivity is captured in the form. I think they’re related.

SA: I’m thinking of Empire of Dreams, which is a deeply private book. I loved that rupture in your author’s bio so much, and I love that the subjectivity is kind of hidden in the labor of the construction.

GB: Yes, the first part, “Assault on Time,” is private. But the second and third parts, “Profane Comedy” and “Intimate Diary of Solitude,” are public. Characters multiply as the scenes advance, and they’re all about the multitudes, the plentitudes, the plenitudes. All about the masses. The clowns, buffoons, drunkards, shepherds, fortune tellers, and other archetypes are in the streets. The happenings happen in the public sphere. But, yes, you’re right that it’s about construction. I’m not interested in the finished product, truly. I’m not interested so much in the captivity of completion because I find language sometimes like a skyscraper, where it’s a memorial. I like fluidity—language rising to the level of the thinking, the thinking going beyond the language—and this is not a complaint. The Romantics complained about matter not being able to capture the spirit, but I know matter has to capture the spirit, it must. I want to see the thinking, the process, how it moves, how it goes.

SA: Can you tell me about your writing process a little? I’m trying to picture how the crowded world appears from your mind onto a page.

GB: I write by hand on yellow pages. And I don’t write every day. I only write when I’m inspired. It’s not that I’m denying what Picasso said, that “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” But it’s not just about working, it’s about creating, and that’s the hardest thing to get to.

SA: It takes me a long, long time to feel like something is ready to leap from my mind onto a page. I was speaking to one of my mentors, Jake Slichter, about going through a period of not being able to write anymore, about having this project I wanted to work on but being unable to begin, and he asked me: if I gave you an empty plot of land and I told you here it is, do something with it, what would be the first thing you would do? And instantly I said I would measure it, in order to know it fully, slowly. I’m curious: what would your response be?

GB: I would walk around it. I would make it mine. I would run and jump. I would rock from side to side. I would really look at it. I would stare at it many, many hours. I would make that land feel like it were a part of me, make myself a part of the land. It’s the only way I can do it, and I do the same with writing. What I write is something I feel is mine, and that’s part of my thinking on subjectivity. I would do that to the land. I have all these objects in my house. They love me, and I feel they love me, and I love them.

SA: I feel like I have a similarly intense relationship with my objects. When I move somewhere, I have to unpack instantly because I’m not okay until I have them around me. I want to get to know the walls of my home—and I love old homes—I want to touch the old plaster walls, peek behind the radiators, for every corner of my home to be intentionally crafted. If, you know, a square inch of wall is empty, it’s because I want it to be empty. I find such a joy in how deeply I know it and love it—and like you said, how deeply it knows me. I’m so intrigued though, given that you have such a love for objects, about your relationship with skyscrapers, which feel so unnatural to me, so hard to have a relationship with. Can you tell me more about it?

GB: I have always been fascinated with architecture because my uncle Jose Firpi was a modernist architect in Puerto Rico, and he fed me with these ideas since I was very little. And then when I came to New York, I was looking at the shapes. It doesn’t need to be a skyscraper. It needs to have a strange shape. It needs to do something, metamorphose into something different. I have a chair designed by Ian Stell that becomes a lamp. I read Junkspace by Rem Koolhaas, and he said that it seems when you walk through the streets of New York, the only thing that is alive is architecture. I think it’s not just that it is alive, but it is the only thing allowed to live. What is the difference between a skyscraper and a pyramid? They are both mausoleums in a way, and in that sense, I don’t like them.

SA: When you drew that connection, between skyscrapers and the pyramids of Egypt, I was also thinking about what you said earlier about transforming objects, and something that seems so dead to me about skyscrapers in some way is that they are incapable of transformation.

GB: Yes, death as being incapable of change.

SA: Who do you see, in contemporary literature, as being your accomplices or fellow creators? Who are the other revelers you join in creating a new way of understanding creativity?

GB: I have had many kinds of libraries in my life, but the ones that stay with me are philosophy and drama. And poetry of course—it is the foundation—but I’m interested in taking poetry out of poetry. I read what is not poetry because I want to get out of it, to find new ways of writing poetry.

SA: I love that. I’m very embarrassed to confess this in this place, but I watch The Bachelor and in this new season, right at the beginning, before the thirty women have even met the bachelor, one of them is having second thoughts about whether she’s ready for a relationship. She had an engagement that was recently broken off, and the day the women are about to meet the bachelor is coincidentally the day her wedding had been originally planned for. So she’s having a really hard time, and in a talking-head, she’s sharing how she’s having second thoughts and didn’t think this would be so difficult, saying, “This is when I should be walking down the aisle.” She ends up deciding to leave, and one of the things she says is, “I mean, I had everything planned—to the last flower.” And I was so moved, so broken to see her break down in that moment, and I loved that small poem. I had everything planned—to the last flower, it reminds me of what you’re saying, poetry taken out of poetry.

GB: That’s America: planning everything to the last flower and losing it all precisely because you didn’t allow for the random to happen—a poem even where there is no poetry.

SA: Earlier, you mentioned Plato’s Symposium, which is (among other things) a conversation on the nature of love and the nature of literature, and the role of truth. That feels like a frustratingly generic statement about frustratingly abstract ideas, and gives away my inexpertness on the text. I’m going to use that as a route, though, to end with asking you about the role of love in the space of the cultural that you fashion in your books. Love, as an idea, as part of and against a system, as political. How important is it to you in how books live in the world and in the hands of readers?

GB: Well, we know that truth is not in fashion. With fake news, truth is almost anathema. But I believe in truth and in love. I love how in the Symposium we hear a statesman, a lawyer, a comic playwright, a tragic poet, a philosopher. Different branches of learning in conversation with each other. That is culture. And I’m drawn to the crowd of revelers who enter at the end of the Symposium after the speeches have ended. They have not participated in the dialogue. They don’t belong to any field of knowledge. They enter to celebrate after what has just happened and at the beginning of what will be. To me, those are the fascinating people who I think are capable of finding new meanings in life at this point. The anonymous ones who enter hungry. The ones who are capable of learning now. The ones who were left out. The leftovers. Those are the ones capable of finding new meanings now. Because they didn’t belong to any field of knowledge. They are not specialists. But they yearn for what has not been yet defined and categorized in fields of knowledge. Those are the people I am working with to create a new way of understanding creativity.

SA: I wonder how (and if) translation might configure into this as well, as another form of love.

GB: Love is what is new—so old and necessary—the old god that interchanges values, meaning, sentimentality, food, and languages. I would only translate if I loved the book. I owe to translations my culture. I don’t see why to read the original is better than to read a translation if the translation really delivers the experience. Yes, translation is a form of love because it is an emulation. When you translate, if you love, you emulate. There are poems that you want to learn by heart. When you learn them by heart, you make them part of your experience—part of your memory—and you can even confuse them with your lived experiences. And not only that, when you recite them at night, before you go to bed, with your eyes closed, as a prayer for life, through your lifetime, you see how the meaning of that poem, so intimate to you, is transformed by your lived experiences, and you acquire different understandings of the poem and of yourself through life.

SA: In a panel I went to as a young undergraduate, the incredible novelist Hisham Matar quoted at length from Ovid’s Tristia, where Ovid addresses his book and gives his book instructions as it returns to his home, from where he is exiled. I had cried as if I was already experiencing a similar estrangement. One of my mentors and professors, Aracelis Girmay, had asked us all to memorize one poem by heart for our workshop and recite it to the class. It was such a great feeling that I had forgotten about, because I grew up learning things by heart and reciting them throughout my schooling in India. When I was in sixth grade, my mother chose the poem “Poetry” by Pablo Neruda as the one I should memorize for a poetry recitation competition at my school. What are some of the things you remember by heart?

GB: I memorized The Waste Land when I was young. I remember how I felt when I first read it. I don’t feel the same way now, but then, it was like hearing an incredible innovation, something from the Greek tragedies, like Sophocles, but condensed in a small space. I liked the condensation and intensity, and I also liked the anonymity of the people talking. You don’t even know who they are, those voices that appear. And like I said about Plato’s Symposium, I like the people who are knocking on the door, after the dialogue has ended between the specialists, and then the crowds come knocking because they are avid to enter, and when they enter, they dance.