Gabriela Garcia on ‘Of Women and Salt’ and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
Gabriela Garcia’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Tin House, Zyzzyva, and the Iowa Review, and she’s been anthologized in The Best American Poetry in 2019. It’s no surprise, then, that Of Women and Salt, her debut novel, was so highly anticipated; it was praised by Roxane Gay for its “precision and generosity and beauty,” and described as a “fierce and powerful debut” by Teresa Marie Mailhot.
The novel traces a broad arc across time and distance, zigzagging from a cigar factory in 19th-century Cuba to early 2000s Miami to a detention center in Texas in 2014. The intergenerational narrative tackles immigration, addiction, and sexual trauma with ambition and a poetic voice. ELLE.com caught up with the author about her interest in nonlinear storytelling, the complexities of Latinx immigration narratives, and how to write about male violence without centering violent men.
How does your background as an organizer influence your writing?
A lot of the stuff I was organizing around shows up in my writing because those are the things that I’m interested in and thinking about frequently. For example, in this book, the chapter that’s set in the detention center and a lot of the stuff around immigration developed from the work I was doing with women in detention.
How does your poetry influence your fiction?
I write a lot of poetry, and it’s definitely influenced my fiction in that I think really carefully about sentences. I think a lot about sound and rhythm. The best thing I ever did for my fiction was to take a poetry workshop and read a lot of poetry. I’m always thinking about rhythm and music in my writing. And then particularly with this novel, I was really interested in taking on a lot of different styles of writing and a lot of different voices, a lot of different tones. Poetry has been a good segue into thinking about voice and style in the way that I did with the novel.
Along those lines, Of Women and Salt sometimes reads like a story collection rather than a novel: the perspective and stylistic choices shift drastically with each chapter. How do you navigate those POV decisions as a writer? Is it instinctive, or calculated, or some combination of both?
I knew I wanted to write something that wasn’t a linear novel, and I knew I wanted something that radically shifted in terms of style and voice. I’ve always really admired writers who are able to write in many different styles. I really wanted to challenge myself to do something similar within my own novel, and I wanted the perspectives even within one character to shift to interplay with the different narratives. There’s a part where Jeanette is descending into her addiction and the writing is a lot faster and in first person. I wanted those style choices to reflect the content. I don’t know if there's a particular perspective or voice that comes easier to me. The challenge sometimes was just to figure out tone—if it’s too close to the character then it can come off feeling sentimental. I was really thinking about the emotional tone when I was figuring out the different voices.
The last line of the first chapter, “I was afraid to look back because then I would have seen what was coming,” seems to encompass one of the major themes of the novel: that trauma might allow us to remember the future. How did you conceive of the relationship between trauma, memory, and inheritance in the book?
I was really thinking about the forces that can shape each of us that we can't always see. And how we're shaped as much by the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves as the stories we might not even know. So that's what I was thinking about in terms of how the past and the present function. And then I think part of that line, too, is gesturing towards the fact that a lot of these silences that exist, particularly with Jeanette and her mother, or these truths that can't be spoken, end up having these really intense consequences. So I was thinking about how going to some of those painful places is sometimes necessary.
Of Women and Salt takes place over a long and fractured chronology, but it’s focused on the Obama years as a period of mass deportations. That’s something a lot of white liberals glossed over during the Trump administration, and that a lot of people would rather forget now that Joe Biden is president. How does it feel to be releasing this book now, after Trump has left office?
I don’t know that it feels different necessarily in terms of releasing a book. I think what was interesting to me has been hearing people talk about the detention center chapter and how it feels really timely, which is interesting to me because it takes place during the Obama years and I started writing it before I ever had any inkling that Trump would be president. I think oftentimes what people think of as timely is, like you said, what white liberals have discovered in the moment. A lot of what I’m writing about is still happening now, was happening during the Trump years, and was certainly happening during the Obama years. I think the biggest shift once Trump was president was really the widespread media attention that some of these issues got. It was really hard at the time to get any mainstream media attention on these things. And I think my fear is that the same sort of thing will happen now, and it does seem to be happening now.
You’re a keen observer of social strata, and the ways race, class, and identity shift across borders and across generations. For example, Jeanette, a second-generation Cuban American, seems to be more invested in solidarity with Ana and Gloria, who are from El Salvador, than is her mother, a Cuban immigrant. Can you speak a little bit more about this aspect of your work?
Yeah, I think all of these issues that I’m constantly thinking about are going to bleed into my work in some way. And certainly with Jeanette and her mother, and with Gloria and Ana, I was thinking in part about the frustration that I sometimes have about how Latinx identity is portrayed as a monolith. Growing up in in a city like Miami that has a lot of Latinx immigrants from all over Latin America, it was always really clear to me that these kinds of class and racial divisions existed. I wanted to explore that on a lot of levels—in Miami, in Cuba. I wanted to speak to the truth of that reality.
One of the major recurring themes in Of Women and Salt is male violence. All of the central female characters either experience it or have reason to fear it at some point in the story. How do you navigate what violence you show, and what you imply? And do you think it'd be possible to write a book like this—a female intergenerational narrative—without that topic?
What I wanted to do in this novel is portray the difficulty of navigating violent, male-centered societies, but at the same time not to center those men. So all of the voices are the voices of women, and a lot of it is about the relationships between women, rather than really going deeply into the relationships with these men. Part of that, maybe, is that I grew up in a very matrilineal family in which my mother was a single mother, and most of my aunts and the women I grew up around were single mothers, and they really relied on each other. And so that was something I was really interested in.
I’m always thinking about what to show and what not to show, and what feels gratuitous and what is needed. There are times where I’ve skirted writing about something because it feels uncomfortable, or I just don’t want to go there. And I’ve had really great teachers who pointed to some of those moments and said “No, you need to write the thing you're afraid to write.” Also, I wanted to show these men who are terrible and violent in a lot of ways, but also the complexity of some of those relationships. Jeanette talks about the difficulty of leaving this relationship that’s confusing at times because Mario will show compassion in some ways and then be really violent. Or Dolores is married to this man who she politically aligns with in a lot of ways, who is fighting for things she believes in, and at the same time within his family is behaving in this really toxic way. I wanted to show some of the difficulty in navigating relationships, and why women stay, or why it’s not easy to escape male violence a lot of the time.
I noticed you frequently focus on the aftermath of violence, especially sexual violence, and the long chronology of that experience. Do you think the story can ever stop being about that?
I think the characters are shaped by a lot of different things—certainly the aftermath of some of these traumas that they’ve experienced, but I also wanted my characters to feel fully realized beyond that trauma. With Jeanette, in many ways her life is shaped by that trauma and also by so many other things: her curiosity about Cuba, her relationship with her cousin. I think when you experience trauma it is something that colors a lot of your life, and that can reshape you in really intense ways. But your life continues on a daily basis and you’re so many other things. These characters have a lot going on, and there are these simmering traumas, and these simmering tensions, and these aftermaths of violence that are playing out in their everyday existence where they're throwing a Thanksgiving party or whatever and concerned about decorations. And I feel like that is true to life.
Books are another recurring motif, starting with the novels Antonio reads aloud at the cigar factory where Maria Isabel works. These books seem to function both as sources of inspiration and as a kind of “opiate of the masses,” designed to keep the workers’ minds as busy as their hands. Why did you settle on literature as a central theme?
Like I said, I was thinking a lot about stories when I was writing this book, and I felt like the novels in the early chapter were a kind of opening into that conversation. Those are actual books that were read to workers during that time, and all of the correspondence is based on real stuff I unearthed when I was researching. I think what I was struck by in part when I was doing that research was how most of these novels, most of these writings, were by European white men. And I was interested in whether there was the possibility of reclaiming some of those words, or whether that’s not even possible. That felt like an entryway into thinking about the whole book, and how stories function within the book, and who stories belong to, and how they’re passed—who has the authority to even decide what stories are told.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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