Hypertext Magazine asked Ananda Lima, author of Mother/land, “You write fiction as well as poetry. Why did you navigate to poetry, rather than Prose, to write Mother/land?”
By Ananda Lima
I think there is something about how close the work was to my life, and also about all the complexity in the material in Mother/land: the emotional complexity as well as the social context of writing about myself as a mother who is also an immigrant, living in the United States in this particular time. There were these small but significant tender moments with my son, and there were these big things, like America and how my son, and even I, were a silent part of it and its history now, like so many before us (something I would never have imagined as a child growing up in Brazil.) There were these two major personal shifts, these changes in my identity, both which happened as an adult: immigration and motherhood, and the way that motherhood changed my experience of immigration (making it feel more real and permanent.) There was this life-changing, huge love happening at home, contrasted with the increasingly, openly hostile environment outside, tied to long-running institutional factors entrenched in what America is. There was my own history and lineage in Brazil. I felt that all of that was part of the same story. And I wanted to say it all, and have it all together. I knew that for me prose was too constrained to do what I wanted to do. Poetry had the tools and space I needed to tell this story.
Part of how poetry helped was that it has this more visibly multi-modal nature. Like in prose, there is a verbal component (the words themselves.) But in poetry, there are more visible meaning-making elements that are not verbal too, such as the arrangement of words on the page. This non-verbal component includes something I love working with: the line break, which interacts closely with words but is not itself verbal. I am also a photographer, and I appreciate how much can be said without words. I also feel that what you express non-verbally is different in nature from what you can articulate in words. I love how poetry allows a combination of the verbal and the non-verbal, how they closely interact and can support or be in friction with one another in creating meaning together. For example, a line break (which is a visual break, or sometimes an audible pause, but is not verbal) can multiply the verbal meaning of a line. Take this line in Erica Sánchez’s poem “Amá”:
In my hand, I hold a bird
of paradise
First, you have a bird, which then gets transformed into a flower, in the revision created after the line break. But line break can also be a breath, a space for openness and pause, or a factor in the visual impact of the poem (often many of these things at the same time). Here is another example in “There are these moments of permission” by Camille Dungy, a poem about a mother having a moment for herself while her child sleeps (read the whole poem here.)
Between raindrops,
space, certainly,
but we call it all rain.
I also feel that both because of its bimodal nature and the different expectations we have of poetry, there is more space for openness. A poem does not have to make a closed argument or resolve plot points. There is space to build with association and to build with blank space, together with words. And I feel that in this open space is where I get to say so much more in poetry, with fewer words. The space allows for the reader to think both verbally and non-verbally. To intuit and feel. Because, for me, the poem is more open to extending beyond what is explicitly on the page.
Of course, there are many writers out there that do wonderful things with prose, essays that bring their own openness, fiction that extends far beyond what it says in the essays or stories on the page. But for me as a writer, poetry is how this material lived in me. Poetry is what allowed me to “say” even the parts I knew were true but didn’t know how to say purely in words.
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Ananda Lima is the author of the poetry collection Mother/land (October 15, 2021; Black Lawrence Press), which is the winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, The Common, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is also the author of the chapbooks Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019, winner of the 2018 Vella Chapbook Prize), Tropicália (Newfound, forthcoming, winner of the 2020 Newfound Prose Prize) and Amblyopia (forthcoming, Bull City Press – INCH micro-chapbook series). She earned an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. You can visit her online at AnandaLima.com.
Mother/land, winner of the 2020 Hudson Prize, is focused on the intersection of motherhood and immigration and its effects on a speaker’s relationship to place, others and self. It investigates the mutual and compounding complications of these two shifts in identity while examining legacy, history, ancestry, land, home, and language. The collection is heavily focused on the latter, including formal experimentation with hybridity and polyvocality, combining English and Portuguese, interrogating translation and transforming traditional repeating poetic forms. These poems from the perspective of an immigrant mother of an American child create a complex picture of the beauty, danger and parental love the speaker finds and the legacy she brings to her reluctant new motherland.