Interview between Jamie Figueroa, author of “Mother Island” and Rey M. Rodríguez
Chapter House’s Storyteller’s Corner had the pleasure of interviewing the Institute of American Indian Art’s own Jaime Figueroa, who recently published, “Mother Island – A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico” a memoir in essays put out by Patheon Books. Myriam J. A. Chancy describes Figueroa’s memoir as “re-assemblage collage fragments of the author’s memories from childhood to the present to create a receptacle in which she can recollect, recognize, and claim what it means to be Boricua.”
Figueroa is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer (Catapult 2021), which was short-listed for the Reading the West Book Award and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, was an Indie Next pick, a Good Morning America must-read book of the month, and was named a most anticipated debut of the year by Bustle, Electric Literature, The Millions, and Rumpus. A member of the faculty in the MFA Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Figueroa has published writing in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, McSweeney’s, Agni, The New York Times, and the Boston Review, among other publications. A Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) alum, she received a Truman Capote Award and was a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Scholar. Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio, Figueroa is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico.
Most importantly, Figueroa is another reason why IAIA is such a unique place for writers to find their voice and then express it to the world. She meets students where they are and then elevates them to heights they never knew possible. What follows is a wide-ranging discussion of who Professor Figueroa is, why she wrote the book, and the power of writing to find peace and forgiveness in the darkest places.
Jamie Figueroa. Thank you so much for being here and for your willingness to be interviewed. Please describe your experience with IAIA, and how important it has been in your life.
The Institute of American Indian Arts celebrates the arts and brings the whole experience of the student forward —- where they're from, their family, their community, generations before them, and how all of that is in the room, too, as a student learns, creates, remembers, imagines, and writes. It all gets to be acknowledged and included as necessary. So, in that way, it revolutionized higher education for me, which I needed, when I transferred to IAIA as a thirty-something undergraduate in 2009. At that time, I didn’t believe art, creativity, and the college classroom all went together.
Given IAIA’s unique history and because it is a Tribal Arts College committed to its mission, it takes on how education had been weaponized throughout Indigenous communities across the continent, as well as touches on the impact in immigrant communities. Professors align with a mindset where teaching and learning is a life-giving, life-supporting way of sharing, which benefits all. Learning is a lifelong practice. Knowledge is power that can destroy or liberate. What we learn and how we learn it can recover a people and be a revolution.
In my undergraduate BFA classes, all generations were present. While the majority of students were Indigenous, not all were. There were a variety of perspectives, from a multitude of tribal nations. There was incredible diversity represented. I felt like I had a real invitation to connect with aspects of myself that had never been fully acknowledged. Being able to actively recover and begin a lifelong practice of rematriation—cultural practices, language, knowledge—and work on generational repair ultimately led to me going to Puerto Rico for the first time to study for a month in my mother’s hometown of Rio Piedras. From there, I was able to take my mother back to the island. She hadn’t been back in nearly 50 years, since her troubled departure as a child. IAIA made that possible for me—specifically my undergraduate mentor, James Thomas Stevens.
I was taken seriously as a writer. I was mentored by faculty and visiting writers, phenomenal writers funded by the Lannan Foundation. I had small classes, and conferences where they would talk about ideas with me, and about my planning, visioning, and execution. They helped first with stories that I had already written, and then helped me develop new stories, and then helped me get things published. I learned how to do line edits. I had input on my poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. I attended national writing workshops, presented at conferences, and read widely. My professors, all professional writers, invested in me and my education. It was such a gift and unlike most college experiences, unlike all my own previous college experiences. I felt such a deep devotion to continue to stay engaged in the community and give back in the same way that I was given. I began to teach in 2011 as an adjunct and have continued in some capacity to this day fourteen years later.
I waited for the MFA program to start in 2013. I knew that it would encourage my voice, support relationship-building, collaboration, and co-creation. I knew that it would be the kind of place where I would thrive. The first semester was mostly acclimating to a program in its first year, and then the next three semesters as things evened out, I just read and wrote like I was on fire. I'm still pulling from material I wrote during that time. I graduated in 2015 from the first graduating class. Like any program, it's had its ups and downs. That’s to be expected. I know very well, from my personal experience, from all the colleges and universities I have attended as a student, and also taught at, that there is no other place in the country like it. I know how special we are, and I don't take that for granted. I look at students who come into the program as my future colleagues. I take them and their visions very seriously. I love the opportunity to work with each student as a mentor. Together, we are able to completely shape their education around their specific goals and needs. As was done for me. This is decolonizing education in motion.
I feel you have always been a writer because you were always writing in notebooks. What is the importance of journaling?
I have been writing ever since I was small, ever since I could hold a pencil. It moved through me, I didn’t have a choice. It was always consistently there, but it wasn't a daily practice. In my late twenties, I converted my love of writing and reading, and my desire to be a writer into a daily arts practice. It was the only place in my life where I could be completely, brutally honest about myself. How did I receive myself? How did I receive the world? This made me slow down, pay attention, and notice concrete, sensory details. It made me curious about what was behind and beneath what I was thinking and feeling. It felt like it was a greater experience of being alive. I typically would complete a notebook a month. The wide ruled, or college ruled, 70 sheet spiral bound cheap, cheap notebooks. Nothing precious. First thought, best thought.
My notebook is always there to capture the challenges and joys of my life. I notice and I notice myself noticing. It’s micro and macro. I had so many notebooks at one point that they were everywhere—under the bed, in the laundry room, in boxes behind furniture, in the bathroom closet, the linen closet. They were taking over.
There's another part of the practice besides writing, which is reading through notebooks and studying them--looking for repetition, harvesting them for poems, essays, character sketches, and story starts. I reread asking, what are my obsessions? What are the things I keep returning to? And for decades, it was very much about identity, core relationships, experiences with my mother and my family, un/belonging; a sense of place/displacement. Going through those notebooks, rereading them, I also cataloged them—one grouping was from 1997 through 2012. I had them in order and I had sticky notes on topics/themes. I combed through those notebooks with all my attention. And then there came a time where it was like, okay, I have reread these notebooks. I’ve had the experiences; I've read and reread about the experiences. It's no longer me. It felt like snakeskin. It was time to shed all those detailed moments and years, all those stories and remembering of relationships.
Yes.
I was working through so much in those years fifteen years of becoming an adult. There came a time when I was ready to let it go. It needed to be released, and I wanted to do it in a ritualistic ceremonial way.
I went up with some comadres to Coyote, New Mexico, to burn them. There were so many—a funeral pyre! Burning so many notebooks is akin to cremation. All those trees compressed in those pages, forests, and the fire has to be so hot and it has to burn for so long to get through that forest of stories. And that's the thing that I wasn't prepared for. The fire was not big and not hot enough, and we didn't have enough time to go through all of them. It was ceremonial. It was a beginning.
I had to find creative ways to release those notebooks over the years. I did an installation piece at CCA in 2013 where I had Cuban music playing, and I was on a stage. I was rolling up pages from my notebooks with recycled confetti paper inside as if I were rolling cigars. Mimicking when cigar workers, women primarily, would be told stories as they were rolling in Cuba during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. And so, I was rolling, using the pages from my notebook, and then I lined these old cigar boxes with pages from my notebook, and then covered the art with my own collaged art. When I finished a box, I would stand up, walk out into the audience, and then hand it to someone. I would go back onto the stage and continue to roll again. And so I tried to find creative ways to engage art material with pages from my notebook. And ultimately, I was able to get through most of them. Some of them I had to end up recycling, but it was quite the task.
Wow! That's a lot of notebooks, I mean, that's impressive.
As I talk about it, I feel self-conscious about all of the trees that were sacrificed for me to write on paper. That’s serious. I also think of a sister-friend of mine who is a writer, was a writer, who passed unexpectedly a few years ago. I have a bin of her notebooks and journals. I think about the physicality of it. How it continues to take up space even when we no longer do.
Yes.
The artifact of it, the object of it, and how heavy it is, how it takes up space. It's helpful for me, for my creativity and imagination to take up physical space. Right? Because it's such an internal experience. I’ve got to make good on my relationship with all the trees though. It’s sort of sacrilegious for someone who deeply relates to trees as kin. I need to do some serious planting (more than the little I have done) or donate to those doing it. There’s got to be a balance.
Yes.
But the merging of the scene and the unseen. It's also evidence—evidence of a life.
Hmm, yes the physicality of just writing, My mamacita taught me calligraphy.
Oh, wow!
I love handwriting. The movement, the dance of it feels more embodied than being on a computer. A direct line to the heart. And what it reveals about the person doing it. The art of reading handwriting, like reading palms.
I love handwriting. Are you a writer who handwrites your first draft? What is your process?
Yes, I feel such a sense of freedom. A notebook is where you're trying to land your ideas initially, especially with the beginning drafts. At a certain point, I'll switch over to the computer. But with beginning drafts, shoot—PRE-drafts—and whenever I'm feeling trapped by what I've created on the page... Or my inspiration is running low, then I’ll get in my notebook, where anything and everything goes.
I can imagine more fully there.
Let's get to the title of your book. Why, Mother Island?
Although not the original title, my editor Concepción de León, did such a great job of plucking it out of the manuscript. It had multiple meanings and was short, like any good title.
There are all the ways to think about what Mother Island means, right? It means the connection with the Mother Island, Borikén. But also, how my mother and I were an island in rural central Ohio. How my mother herself was so isolated from her own culture and language and became an island unto herself. How a larger sense of a divine mother, the connection with this source, that transcends even our individual and unique origin stories. And so, it became apparent that it had a multitude of meanings, which I loved.
And then there was the subtitle, which seemed so obvious once we got it right. That was important, A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico.
During an IAIA writers’ residency, many of the speakers spoke to the idea of joy.
You have a quote in your book by Zadie Smith that says, “. . . Joy is such human madness! The writer, Julian Barnes, once said, it hurts as much as it's worth. What an arrangement! Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal?” And I'm just curious why you picked that quote. It's contrary, to what people ordinarily think about joy.
Yes, I think somehow, coming from a lineage of trauma— institutional, governmental, historical, and familial trauma—that joy feels like it’s something that must be earned. It feels labor intensive, the demonstration of it. It’s also so vulnerable, to finally feel it only to be terrified it’ll be taken away, to find yourself bracing for when to surrender to the all-encompassing experience of joy.
When I think about being on the island, when I think about being in Loíza and dancing Bomba, in the place of my ancestors—where they survived grueling labor and made art in community on their very brief time off, music and dance—that lives in my cells as joy. It’s my inheritance. No one can take that from me. When meeting other Puerto Ricans—I met so many other Puerto Ricans on book tour, incredible—and being in conversation with them, the joy was undeniable. The laughter, the joking, the movement, the musicality of being alive, the real expression of a joyful engagement with life that can be accessed everywhere, anywhere, all the time.
Growing up, I also felt morose. Sullen. Perhaps it was because I was so sensitive and was overwhelmed by feeling everything. But for some reason, I think there was this disconnect, from my own culture and experience, and the island. Being a poet, growing up during my teenage years, and being an artist, put me in a place of deeper thinking and feeling, I don’t know if I realized joy was an option?
Later in my life I discovered that the true expression of the presence of ancestors, and what they deeply want for us is our joy, is a sense of our joy. Slowing and considering it more fully, I think being in my notebook and creating art was a quiet kind of joy. Reading brought me into an expansiveness that must be a version of joy. Being in the forest, staring at the sky—day sky and night sky… Now that I think about it, it’s coming to acknowledge all the various expressions joy can have. Coming to claim that fullness of heart and spirit and authentically name it for ourselves.
I love that. Yeah, I love that concept of our ancestors being present. Maya Angelou talks about this idea that whenever she was about to speak, she would conjure up all her ancestors and how much love they felt for her.
Ah, yes. La Reina. Angelou. I love her so much. She’s a literary ancestor.
Let’s move on and talk about the challenge of being vulnerable in your writing in the book. How do you wrestle with saving a little bit of yourself and at the same time connecting with the reader? How did you reach that balance?
Well, you know a few things. It's always a moving target, and it’s different for each person. But, in creative nonfiction, there needs to be an intimacy that's cultivated with the reader, so that the reader feels they are on the inside of the story with the writer. And so how do we create that, right? We have to give ourselves away. But we're very much choosing when we give ourselves away, and how, so we don't give it all away, all the time.
I had to be fierce on the page with what I wanted and needed to name regarding my mother, regarding the U.S. Government, all those things regarding the Latine culture that has a hard time including Black and Indigenous people. It's changing, but this consistent overlording of old Spanish rule is pervasive and ongoing. Calling out all these things and these traumas—and also, where is there the beauty? As I define it? I had to continue to balance it out, especially with my ex-husband, my sisters, I had to be clear about what is mine to tell about those experiences, and then what belongs to them, is their privacy. And so, it also becomes an ethical question around the stories I need to tell that involve other people. I worked very hard to have my truth and not indulge in exposing others. I have to be fully human even in my critique of another. I have to be so generous in the complexities of others even as I complain about them.
These are some of the things that I was thinking about when I was writing. I know it can be really hard to tell our own stories and to be that vulnerable on the page. But the thing about being that specific and sort of explicit about a moment in time is that it then becomes accessible to anyone. Those who had a similar experience, or the total opposite experience, but still felt a deep resonance because of the specificity, right? We know this about writing. And so, I knew that I had to go into those places. Some of them are easier than others. That's just the nature of it. But I always knew when I was making the choice. There were a couple of places where I wrote things down and I was like, Oh, God! Do I? Do I really want to do this? Then I thought, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and go for this here. It’s essential for the story, for where the narrative has to go. The reader will trust me more because I'm willing to expose myself in this way. I’m not going to be selfish with my truth. But there are still a dozen things I would never put on the page and share with the reader, and that's for me. I took out an entire essay about my sisters. I cut whole sections about other family members. There’s so much about my mother that I did not include I was taking care, great care of others and myself.
And I love how you handle memory. You are very honest that what you described could be remembered by someone else differently.
Yes, Anaïs Nin said, “We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are.” As a woman of color, as a Latine woman from the Caribbean diaspora, as a mixed-race woman of Black and Indigenous heritage, I am told that my perspective isn't accurate. It's not included. I’m gaslit. There is also speaking back to the ongoing force of colonization and the overculture which try to dictate what truth is and what reality is. I also wanted to acknowledge that while I have my truth about events that happened in my life, others who were there will have their own truth and memory of it. Both are true and both exist simultaneously. I do not seek to silence others just because I’m sharing what it was like for me. We have to grow our capacity for multiple truths to coexist, especially as writers. This is one of our fundamental tasks.
And then, to also speak to the nature of memory, that memory and imagination are very intertwined, and that memory changes as we age. We tend to think that memory is
neat, orderly, and stays the same. But it's chaotic, it's associative. It's always in flux. So when you're writing creative nonfiction and can't remember exactly if your grandmother had blue shoes or red shoes, we have to consider that we're getting at truths that are beyond these sorts of facts. We're getting to deep emotional truths. Yes, we must strive for accuracy, of course. But if we can't arrive at that, especially within generations of trauma, when the brain is seriously affected, challenging what people may or may not be able to know, what then? That doesn't mean you don't write the story. It doesn't mean the story is not worthy of telling. So how do you do it? My response was I'm going to do it anyway. And, I'm going to be transparent about how I'm trying to put all this together.
I thought that was great, just because of the honesty of it. It brought me into the story. I want to talk about the joy that you found in speaking Spanish. It's clearly a Latino issue in terms of how much Spanish you speak.
When I'm speaking Spanish, I'm a totally different person. I'm really ridiculous. The way that I put things together. The way that I say things is very unusual because of my limitations, but there have been certain points in my fluency where I relax and just feel like a deep need, some deep foundational need that's being met and that feels nourishing. That's kind of beyond words, just that being awash in it and the experience of it. How whole cosmologies are represented in language and the vibration of language. You know?
I feel similarly in Taíno, in my dive of what's underneath the Spanish, right? And I’m trying to write poems in multiple languages. It becomes this trans-like state where I'm beyond what I know and yet it's invoking something that is very deep within me that I'm related to. So what does language provide? I was listening to a First Nations woman speak on the BBC about a year or so ago on reconciliation and Indigenous perspectives. One of the things this Cree woman said about her language was that she didn’t have a lot of fluency at all. It's a privilege to have the time and resources if you're not in that sphere in the day-to-day. It's really hard to have the time and the capacity and the bandwidth to bring that language forward. So she had low expectations, which I loved. It wasn't that she was going to learn the language and become fluent, or even that she was going to learn these phrases so that she could engage them on demand. Just saying one word of Cree for her made her so happy. And I thought. Whoa! That is a really different orientation. One that would be of benefit for sure.
Yes.
Yes, what it's like to have it in my mouth, just to hold it on my tongue. Like a pagan sacrament. The way that my ancestors did, just to have that one word that I know. A vibration that links me across space and time. And I often forget that it can be that pure and that simple. That holy and embodied. For me it’s “karaya,” which means moon in Taíno. That one word and all its dimensions of meaning is a prayer. That one word alone is a practice.
Wow, that's great. Okay, 2 more questions, because I've taken a lot of your time. So the probably the hardest one will be. How did your relationship with your mother change as a function of writing the book?
Interesting that you think that this is one of the hardest questions. It's one of the questions that's easiest to answer. There is a freedom that I now feel in my separation from her. I've realized that my mother is an entire universe that I will never fully comprehend, and I am a complete universe, outside of her universe, that she will never be able to fully see, relate to, and comprehend. I don't hold anything against her. I don't need anything from her. Writing the book has built that compassion in me. It built the capacity to fully forgive and release.
And there are many layers to that, you know. It's not just a one-time thing. It sometimes takes years and years of practice to keep doing it when different things arise, right? But also, for the longest time I wanted and needed her to be something different, which I'm sure she felt about me, too, and that has gone as well. And so, it just feels like I’m saying to her—thank you, enjoy your life, be blessed.
As I've gotten older, I'm much quicker to forgive, because life is so short. And we make mistakes, and we don't understand them. You know there's a mystery to all of that. Well, there are certain things you just can't forgive, and I'm like. No, I think everything is forgivable. It's important to forgive because then you remove bitterness and resentment.
Forgiveness is so powerful when finding joy and love.
It's more about coming to peace within ourselves. Sometimes people think forgiveness is the same as excusing behavior. Or forgiveness is re-entering the same situations again. Neither one of those is true. We can forgive and have strong boundaries. I can say I’m not going to have that experience ever again. I forgive you, and also, your behavior has shown me that you're not someone who will be in my inner circle or in my life, but I don't hold things against you.
I agree with you, Rey, that it can create resentment and bitterness which can erode us internally. It can chip away at our health and well-being—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. So how do we come to a sense of peace and ease with people and events? By seeing them as more fully human, as you mentioned, and I think sometimes it's just releasing—releasing the burden of holding the pain. Constantly opening ourselves up to receive what we truly want. I forgive and love my mother, and she's not a part of my life, nor will she be part of my life. It's not to punish her, and it's not to hold anything against her. It's just that I learned. I learned what I don’t want to be in relationship with. There are ways in which we have to find our particular way of forgiving that is authentic and that frees us but also keeps us from being harmed again in those same ways, especially by the same people.
So I just wanted to thank you for your generosity of time and wisdom. I know when I was growing up, I would have never been able to read a book like yours. It wouldn't have existed. I've been reading a lot of Latina memoirs, and I wish I had read them when I was younger. They were not available, and they were not written. So I just feel I've gained so much as a person and a man. I was talking to my wife yesterday, and I wish I would have had these books earlier. You grow so much as a person.
You do. I think the art of writing and the art of reading helps deeply enrich our lives and who we are. It's just fundamental for me.
James Baldwin talks about how through reading, he learned that he wasn't alone and through that he found his joy.
Yes.
And the importance of love.
Yes, let's end on that, Rey.
Yes.
James Baldwin and Maya Angelou… and gratitude to all the trees.
Yes! Thank you so much.
Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participated in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute of American Indian Arts’s MFA Program. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review.
(She/Her/Hers)
Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer (2021)
Mother Island (2024)
MFA-CW Faculty, IAIA,PhD Candidate, Visionary Practice & Regenerative Leadership, SWC
Podcast interviews:
Writing Latinos
https://www.publicbooks.org/jamie-figueroa-on-mother-island/
Big Books, Bold Ideas
"When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us." ~bell hooks
