Патриша Грейс Кинг рассказывает о создании сборника «Те, кто исчезает» на фоне гватемальской гражданской войны

Patricia Grace King’s exceptional debut story collection, “Those Who Vanish,” inhabits the borderlands between history and memory, personal losses and political violence. Set during Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil conflict and its aftermath, King’s stories follow a fully realized cast of characters—North American aid workers, Guatemalan families and exiles haunted by disappearances, lovers navigating cultural divides—as they attempt to make lives in a country riven by civil war. Part of what makes this collection so affecting is its author’s refusal to reduce history to abstraction. Her stories illuminate the fallout of political upheaval by centering civilians trying to go about their lives with dignity despite knowing they or the people they love might be abducted or shot in the street without warning. The result is a book both deeply compassionate and uncompromising in its portrayal of the devastation caused by decades of political violence. In this interview, Patricia Grace King discusses her years living and working in Guatemala, why fiction offered a more powerful vehicle than nonfiction for exploring her experiences in Central America and the challenge of balancing historical fact with narrative urgency, along with the writers who helped shape her approach to portraying conflict, memory and belonging. The author and I conducted this interview via email. “Those Who Vanish” is set during and after Guatemala’s decades-long civil conflict. What first drew you to this period of history? As a little kid, I had these fabulous, glamorous hippies for uncles and aunts. So involved were they in protesting the Vietnam War, some actually moved to Vietnam and stayed there for years, working in refugee camps. My mother kept a big map of Vietnam on our kitchen wall in North Carolina, with pins showing where they were living. It’s one of my first memories. Later, of course, these aunts and uncles came home, and I loved them. I idolized them. To some extent, even then, I absorbed their anger about the havoc the U.S. was wreaking on the other side of the world. By the time I got to college, the civil armed conflicts in Central America—and the role the U.S. government played in them—had become, in a way, another Vietnam. I knew kids from my school who’d gone to Central America for semester-long programs and came back politicized. This intrigued me. I visited Guatemala for the first time in 1989, and I loved it. I went back to live there on two separate occasions, in the early 1990s and early 2000s. So I witnessed this period of history—the last decade of Guatemala’s internal conflict, and the first years of aftermath—firsthand. What compelled you to approach this period of history through fiction instead of nonfiction? Working in Guatemala—as a member of the NGO Witness for Peace, then as the director of a language school—I’d already read so much nonfiction about the country’s history and politics. Both jobs involved hosting groups of delegates or students from the U.S. who came to Guatemala on learning tours, in order to understand better what was happening or had happened during the armed conflict, and how to lobby our government when they got home. For them, I had to be equipped with facts and statistics. But facts and statistics will take you only so far. They seemed useful just up to a point. What moved people more, what I saw make an imprint on their consciences, was spending time with people in Guatemala. Going into their houses, eating with them. Spending part of a week in a returned refugee settlement. Having to take a twelve-hour bus ride or to hike all day long, in some cases, just to reach them. Hearing people’s personal stories—even when the stories were so brutal, some of us broke down and cried. Writing about Guatemala, I wanted to approximate in my stories what those immersive experiences were like. Those face-to-face meetings—encounters with individual people—that made the abstract more concrete. Some forms of nonfiction can do this, too, but I’m personally drawn to the process of fiction-writing. As Zadie Smith says, that process begins “as a consciousness out in the world: looking, listening, noticing. A kind of awareness, attended by questions. What is it like to be that person? To feel what they feel? … Can I use what I feel to imagine what the other feels?” Some of these stories—“Dogs in Guatemala,” “Rubia” and “Adiós and Adiós,” for example—feature protagonists whose lives, it seems, might have parallels with your own life in Guatemala. These young American women fall in love with the country, with Guatemalan men, but they know, like the natives in the government’s crosshairs, their lives are at risk. How much did these stories draw on events you or people you know experienced? Many individual anecdotes came from “real life.” A friend of mine really did lose two family members to a death squad who disappeared them off the University of San Carlos campus. Another friend, working for an NGO in the 1990s, found a half-circle of human teeth placed at her door. My husband and I survived an armed break-in at our place of work. I watched Guatemalan and U.S. colleagues fall in love with each other and then navigate cultural strife. And of course the political setting of Guatemala in the late twentieth century is very much drawn from “real life.” I keep putting quotation marks around that phrase. In Guatemala, events that seemed to me like they should’ve belonged to the world of fiction were, in the strictest and bleakest sense, true. During the years of armed conflict, 50,000 Guatemalan civilians were forcibly disappeared, in other words, abducted and almost certainly tortured and murdered. Never heard from again. Another 200,000 civilians were killed by their own military: about three percent, then, of Guatemala’s whole population. But such facts, though staggering, are hard to take in. They don’t really get at the story. Or they don’t for me. So I tried writing fiction about different people who lived in this place and time. I made up the people and their personal struggles, almost completely, while the setting remains factual. How did you balance historical details and your research with the narrative demands of short fiction? (In other words, each story truly is a story, not a thinly disguised history lesson or political meditation.) My political beliefs and my interest in Guatemala’s history—and the history of U.S. involvement in Guatemala—undergird these stories, for sure. These stories began, however, from a different locus of interest. It’s the characters and their personal problems—and the psychology, the inner life, behind those problems—that served as my jumping-off point. Each story began with a basic curiosity about why a person behaves as they do, why they make a particular choice. Why would you marry someone who seems like such a terrible fit but then never face it? Why do we naturally extend pity to dogs instead of to other people? Or I’m intrigued by certain dynamics. Activist parents so ferociously committed to the political cause, their child suffers greatly for it. Two women whose lives would be much easier if they were friends but who are mutually repelled. It also seemed fun, from a fiction writer’s perspective, to set these stories in Guatemala, or somewhere in the contact zone between Guatemalan and U.S. culture. This added new layers of tension. New places where people could misunderstand each other or their environs, new ways a character could make a mistake or run into danger, which all makes for a good story. From the outset, did you envision the stories as interconnected, or did the larger architecture of “Those Who Vanish” emerge gradually? I had no idea what I was doing at first. The first story I wrote was “Dogs in Guatemala,” also the first in the collection. I started the attempt soon after I left my last job in Guatemala, in 2005. Until then, the only writing I’d done as an adult was academic. Making the transition from academic to creative writing wasn’t so much a leap as a plod. I worked on this story for years. When it was finally published in 2009, it felt like a first baby step. But I still had no concept of trying to build a collection. For five or six years, I was just writing stories. They were all set in Guatemala, but I don’t know how intentional this was. At some level I was just working out my feelings about Guatemala: how much I’d loved and sometimes hated to live there. What it was like to be a gringa there, knowing how responsible my own government was for fucking over this other country. Expecting people to hate me for it but finding they mostly did not. Finally a friend in my monthly writers’ group asked, “Have you heard of linked story collections?” I don’t think I had, but she said: “Setting can be a way to link stories. You might think about that as you keep writing these things.” I became a bit more deliberate, then, in thinking of these different pieces as contributing to a larger whole. But I wrote them so slowly—I was meanwhile teaching college full-time, trying to write two different novels, and moving to a new country—that this collection took twenty years total to build. That sounds shocking even to me. These stories move fluidly between intimate domestic spaces and sweeping historical events, often in the same story. “Day of All Saints,” the longest story in the book, comes to mind with its braided narratives of present and past. How do you decide when to zoom in and when to pull back? My instinct is to pull back for the broader historical stuff. In “Day of All Saints,” events that came straight from history include how many subsistence farmers in Guatemala moved from the highlands to the new cooperatives in Ixcán; why they were targeted by the military during the internal armed conflict; how those settlements were attacked and destroyed. It’s a history I heard over and over again, from different tellers, in my work with Witness for Peace and later at the language school. In both cases, I often translated the oral testimonies of survivors from those communities. I’ve read a fair bit of historical nonfiction, too, about those communities and the massacres there during the war. It’s horrific, and too much exposure creates a numbed-out reaction in me. Maybe in most of us. At the same time, that history is integral to Martín, the protagonist in “Day of All Saints,” and to his family and to who Martín has become. It needed to be in there, but I didn’t want the history piece to come across as just summary, or as “just” history. I wanted to ground that history in the story of these characters. When I figured out who Martín’s grandma was and fell in love with her feisty, resilient, still-angry voice, she seemed like the perfect conduit for telling the historical side. When she narrated what had happened to her family in the Ixcán, it was no longer “just” history—history in the abstract or general sense—because it was an element of history that happened directly to her, that radically affected her life. So, for broader-strokes history, I let it come through a character’s narrating voice. This allowed for some summary without feeling impersonal, I hope, because it’s narrated from within a very particular space. Individual characters—and their particular spaces and lives—seem to call me to zoom in closer to them. Guatemala’s armed civil conflict remains less familiar to many North American readers than other twentieth-century conflicts. What do you hope readers learn—or perhaps unlearn—through these stories? Given the flagrantly anti-immigration stance of the Trump administration—the refugee ban, the gradual destruction of the United States as a place of asylum for political refugees, the abuse we have seen ICE agents enact against immigrants and people who stand up for them—it seems more crucial than ever to remember, or maybe learn, that many of the world’s conflicts that drive desperate people from their shores to ours are conflicts that the U.S. government had a hand in starting or funding or supporting in tactical ways. The links are painfully clear between U.S. foreign policy and Guatemalan citizens leaving—or fleeing, or being forced out of—their country. When the CIA overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954 and replaced him with a military dictator more amenable to U.S. business interests in Guatemala, they helped start the thirty-six-year internal armed conflict which ended in acts of genocide by various, consecutive military governments against their own citizens. Meanwhile, for most of that time, the U.S. trained and funded Guatemala’s military. It’s the ugliest of ironies to think that some of the people who come to the U.S. in flight from a country we’ve hurt like this are the same people the current administration wants to punish for fleeing in the first place. Were there any writers whose work influenced your approach to portraying conflict, memory or faith? Isabel Allende and Barbara Kingsolver. Toni Morrison. Carolyn Forché. None of them shy away from their political anger, but they’re equally invested in making art, in telling the best possible story. “The House of the Spirits,” “Animal Dreams,” “Beloved,” “The Country Between Us”: they take the almost-unbelievable, almost-unimaginable events in our world and cause us to believe, to imagine. What are you working on now, and are some of the themes in “Those Who Vanish”—identity, memory, loss, political violence—ones you continue to grapple with in your new work? That’s a great list! Those will probably always be issues I grapple with. My worldview—my interests, or even obsessions—have been so shaped by my family heritage and personal experience of international activism. Also by my deeply conflictual relationship to home, which for me is both the American South and the Mennonite Church. On which note, yes, I’ve got a couple of novels well underway: one set largely in Guatemala; the other in Appalachia. In both of them, as in most of my work, I’m interested in questions of belonging, and how we draw those lines. How we can cross them, too. “Those Who Vanish” By Patricia Grace King University of Pittsburgh Press, 288 Pages Christine Sneed is the author of three novels and three story collections, most recently, Direct Sunlight (stories). She’s also the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up, and her work has been included in publications such as The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the Midwest, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and the New York Times. She lives in Pasadena, CA and teaches for Northwestern University and Stanford University.