Books / Fiction
Interview: Yara Rodrigues Fowler
Championed by cultural critic, Olivia Laing and Bristol’s own Nikesh Shukla, Yara Rodrigues Fowler comes to Bristol’s Spike Island this month in the first Novel Writers event of 2019. She will be discussing her debut novel, Stubborn Archivist, which looks at growing up between cultures, finding your space within them and learning to live in a traumatized body. Eleanor Pender caught up with Yara to talk about being published and what it means to be a ‘stubborn archivist’.
How does it feel to have your debut novel out in the world?
It feels powerful. A printed book commands such authority. This still takes me by surprise, it’s been a word doc or piles of paper (or just a feeling) for so long.
is needed now More than ever
Stubborn Archivist is a novel ‘of growing up between cultures’. Is this a subject that you’ve explored before, one that has always run through your writing?
Stubborn Archivist is the first big thing I’ve written. I know that everything that I ever write will be about the Brazilian diaspora in the UK. I can’t see a world where I would make anything else (why should I?). Relatedly, my writing is a lot about sex, sexuality, bodies and sexual violence, and I think I always will. To me it would be impossible to write about these things without also writing about colonialism, whiteness and how the imperial relationship between Europe and the Americas has shaped gender and sexuality as we experience it now.
Acclaimed Brazilian debut novelist, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, is appearing at Spike Island.
Family, and particularly older female relatives – mother, grandmother, aunt – figure strongly in the novel. Was your own family a blueprint for the route you took?
Yes, and no. I wanted to write about the world of white upper class Brazilians living in São Paulo. I wanted to capture their experience of class and race politics and also of the political rifts that exist in that class – specifically with regards to the military dictatorship of the 70s and 80s, and the current resurgence of oppressive right-wing fascism in Brazil.
My own family certainly belong to this world, but the characters in the book are inventions. (Real life would have been way too complex and strange for fiction, in this case.)
Telling the story of the older women was necessary – for us to understand how the protagonist got to be where she was, experiencing the world as she does.
We ascribe such importance to knowing a character’s name but the protagonist in your novel has no name. What led you to make this choice?
There are so many reasons for this. On the one hand, I wanted to preserve this sense of being so close to the protagonist that it’s impossible to look at her from the outside, almost.
On the other, I also wanted to protect her, to hold back and not let her be entirely known by the world. Throughout the book we know people say her name wrong, and her name is the site of her self and her hypersexualisation also. People are always claiming her name for her. To keep parts of her private, outside of the gaze (and grasp) of the world was an act of kindness, and of resistance on my part. As Caetano Veloso says on the last page: ‘you don’t know me at all’, and there is a freedom for her in this.
Lastly, the book is about the untranslatability of things. Names I think are particularly untranslatable. So I didn’t attempt it.
Identity runs through the heart of the novel. What does identity mean to you and how has Stubborn Archivist helped you process it?
I guess identity means loads of stuff – what does it mean to be this me, in my body, in this world, why is it like this, who shares this experience, how did this come to be? But identity is a bit useful if it ends at describing an experience or a person. It shouldn’t only provoke us to ask for better representation on TV, in politics or at the top of organisations, although this can be important. It should lead us to notice the political forces that caused, and continue to cause, things to be the way they are. For example, identity should make us ask – How did imperialism and capitalism lead to our experiences of race, gender and class as we know them? And then – how can we take these systems down, and rebuild the world?
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m working on my second book. It’s going to a bigger novel, set between London and Brazil again, but this time the Recife in the North-East of Brazil. I was given a grant by the Society of Authors to go to Recife in December 2019, for which I’m very grateful.
Yara Rodrigues Fowler will be discussing her debut novel, Stubborn Archivist, at Spike Island on February 28. For more information, visit https://www.spikeisland.org.uk/programme/events/novel-writers-yara-rodrigues-fowler/
Read more: Interview with Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of one of 2018’s most acclaimed debut novels.
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