Valeria Luiselli, 36, is a Mexican-born author whose most recent novel, Lost Children Archive, unfolds during a road trip taken by a couple and their two children (“boy” is 10, “girl” five) from their home in New York City to the Mexican border. The backdrop for this poetic and innovative title is the plight of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America who flee their home countries to seek asylum in the US, travelling across Mexico on the roofs of freight trains known as “La Bestia” (the beast). The book was inspired by Luiselli’s work with young migrants in the US, where she currently lives, and recently won the Rathbones Folio prize for 2020.
Was the intricate structure of the book – a novel within a novel, Polaroids, lists – there from the start?
Definitely not; there are many things that I don’t know when I begin a new project. First of all, I don’t know if it’s going to be in Spanish or English. I began working on the book in 2014 and I tried both languages for about a year – making notes and false beginnings, going back and forth between the two, unsure which one would work, and one day it just happened in English. I do think that when you’re writing in a language you’re writing inside a literary culture and so in English I’m having a conversation with the English writers that have formed me as a reader, modernist poets from Emily Dickinson to TS Eliot and Ezra Pound.
You approach the trauma obliquely...
I had been volunteering as a translator for [migrant] kids in US [immigration] courts, so I was listening to a lot of brutal stories about institutional violence and discrimination, and it was all very overwhelming and frustrating, and for a while I was kind of just translating all of that directly on to the page and it was going nowhere. I wasn’t writing a novel that I was convinced about at all. It seemed unethical and I wasn’t doing anything good for the cause and so I stopped writing for a while, for many months actually. I wrote Tell Me How It Ends instead [a nonfiction account of the issues she encountered] and then once I’d done that I felt the freedom to go back to the novel.
How do you feel about American Dirt, the migrant crisis novel by US author Jeanine Cummins, that triggered an outcry and accusations of cultural appropriation and exploitation?
I didn’t read the book; I received it with a letter asking for a blurb [a recommendation] and I didn’t know the author so I read a little bit and I found it uninteresting. It’s just a very commercial book that was wrapped like a literary novel, so it received attention from the literary community and sparked a very necessary conversation. The conversation needs to be had constantly though – I don’t think, for example, that an American writer is not allowed to write about Mexico.
Your book investigates the loss of innocence for children… at one point there’s a discussion between the parents about the suitability of listening to The Road while they drive with their children and they settle on Lord of the Flies instead…
I think that children should not be overexposed to versions of the world that shock them into fear because that does no good, but it’s also no use to try to keep them in complete ignorance of the world. It’s about a balance. What is most important is to give them emotional and intellectual tools to articulate narratives around injustice that make them feel that they can imagine solutions, or that they can articulate things with a sense of history. I mean, the police brutality around the Black Lives Matter protests has definitely shocked my daughter [who is 10]; her older brother who is in his 20s is out there in the protests and she’s very anxious about him getting hurt. [Luiselli has two stepsons from her previous marriage.]
You moved around a lot as a child…
My parents both worked in NGOs when I was growing up, and we lived in different places. For five or six years my father was a diplomat, so we went to Korea; he was asked to open the first Mexican embassy in the new South Africa because there wasn’t an embassy there during apartheid. I went to boarding school in India.
What kind of relationship do you have with Mexico now?
It’s complicated. I mean, my heart is half there. If someone asks me where I’m from I always say Mexico but I haven’t lived there for more than maybe 11 years, and never for more than a couple of years at a time, yet I feel, definitely, a deep connection, a sense of complicated belonging, my family is there, my very close friends are there, I mean, I see it from afar with worry and with pain, and with love and I think, eventually, I will return there.
What books are on your bedside table?
I always read in such a mess, too many things at the same time. At the moment I’m rereading Rita Segato; she’s a really interesting Argentine feminist thinker and the book is called The War Against Women. A couple of friends and I are mentoring young translators who will translate it from Spanish to English. Then I have The Souls of Black Folk by WEB Du Bois. Also, a brilliant novel called Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch and a book of photos by Dorothea Lange.
Which novelists do you most admire?
Anne Carson, Samanta Schweblin, Cormac McCarthy, JM Coetzee.
What are you working on at the moment?
A sonic essay about violence against women in the borderlands: the idea is to record many different layers of history and forms of accumulation of capital and violence related to it, from mining to bonded labour to factories and industrialisation processes to surveillance technology and deportation. I’m working with a producer as well as with a sound artist and musician who I met because he read my novel and reached out to me to work on a project for a Laurie Anderson concert/reading series. We joke that he’s like the father in the Lost Children Archive, but only in the sense that he has been working on a project called the Encyclopedia Sonica for 25 years, collecting the sound of everything.
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli is published by Fourth Estate (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
This article was amended on 21 June 2020 to clarify that Luiselli and friends are “mentoring young translators” to translate The War Against Women into English. The answer to the last question was also expanded to provide further context, including to correct the title of Anderson’s project to Encyclopedia Sonica, not Sonic Encyclopedia as originally stated.
