The Human Spirit in the Language: Interview with Francisco Goldman

I met Francisco Goldman in the summer of 2022, outside a cafe in the San Miguel neighborhood of Mexico City, some blocks from the apartment he shares with his wife, their daughter, and his wife’s niece (who lives under their care). Months before, I’d written a review about Goldman’s latest novel, the Pulitzer Prize-finalist Monkey Boy. He was an author whose books I’d loved immoderately for years, an author whose best lines I cherished and could recite word for word, not misplacing even a dash or a comma. I decided to approach the review as if it were a conversation with Goldman that I’d never get to have. “I wish I could ask Francisco Goldman,” I’d even written, to begin one of my lines. Then, less than a year later, he was there across a cafe table: his unruly silver curls, his raspy, wisdom-stricken voice, his boyish smile. It’s so good to meet you! he said to me, in a tone of unmistakable, adamant sincerity—a tone I recognized instantly, from the many hours I’d spent in the good company of his prose.

Goldman is the author of seven books: five novels, and two works of nonfiction. He is also the author of a corpus of journalism that spans over forty years, keeping a steady eye on violence and corruption in Central America for close to half a century. Per- haps it is possible to say that Goldman himself expresses the polyphony of the Latin American writer in general: a writer so fervently committed to documenting political horror, but also a passionate writer, melancholic and philosophical; a writer who turns on themself, haunted by phantoms, images, and dreams; a writer unafraid for their language to lapse under the weight of feeling; a writer who cannot help but tell a love story.

We have spent more time together since that first conversation two summers ago, especially since I moved back to Mexico City this past August. I went with his family to see the Dia de Los Muertos decorations in the Zócalo, and another time to the Mu- seo de Arte Popular, the five of us moving diligently from room to room so his wife’s niece could complete her homework assignment. He has given me, a young writer, much of his time. And he has never once made me feel like I am imposing. Each time we get together, he asks about my love life, my writing dreams, my life in Mexico City. He is a supremely generous man, with a large and storm-tested heart. From his books, readers know he has lived through enormous political and personal devastation. From being near him, I know such devastations haven’t led him to shutter himself from the world. The Francisco I know now— the summation of his writing and his person—makes me remember, for some reason, the words James Baldwin wrote about his friend, the painter Beauford Delaney (though I could never claim to know Francisco the way Baldwin knew Delaney): “An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken, but I never saw him bow.”

For this conversation, Francisco and I spoke in the living room of his apartment in Mexico City. It’s a large apartment, lovingly cluttered with books and children’s toys. We spoke for hours, pausing now and again to drink mezcal from small clay cups. (The bottle of mezcal was a gift to Francisco from someone in the film industry interested in making a movie from one of his novels.) I’d brought ten questions for Goldman, written down in the olive-green notebook where I usually write my poems. But after reading off my first question, and receiving Goldman’s first answer, I closed the book. I wanted to let the questions arrive from a place of need, as they so often do in Goldman’s own writing.

Sitting on the living room’s large sofa, I tried to store some arbitrary details from the evening in my mind: the upright piano with faded wood, the night-blue bowl of spiced nuts on the dining room table, the picture of Gabriel García Márquez with a black eye that hangs in Francisco’s small office (the black eye, Francisco tells me, was Mario Vargas Llosa’s doing). If I forget these details, perhaps one day Francisco will cease being a person to me, and become—instead—an author again. We can leave so many things in literature; almost everything, besides ourselves.

Ricardo Frasso Jaramillo: Do you remember the first time you stepped foot in Mexico City?

Francisco Goldman: Of course I do. I’ll never forget. I took a very early trip here to Mexico City, though it wasn’t like being in the city, really. I’d wanted to take my U Michigan buddies to Guatemala. Three of us. And we drove through Mexico City. We hadn’t planned to stop there. But the day before, on the road somewhere, we’d had some aguas de melon, aguas obviously made with very bad water, because we all immediately fell very ill. We had to stop and stay the night in a motel, on the outskirts of Mexico City. That was my first experience here. My fever was so strong…I remember hallucinating. I hallucinated this figure, a mystical figure sitting at the edge of my bed. A ghostly figure, who began to tie my muscles and limbs into strange, twisted yoga forms. So that’s my first memory of Mexico City. But it doesn’t count, really. [Laughs] Mostly hallucination. Though I do really vividly remember the floral, chemical, polluted sky. And the toll booths.

Years later I was a young freelancer living in Guatemala City and trying to write fiction. This must’ve been around ’83 or ’84. I had no way of getting paid for my articles. At the time I could write two articles a year and live on that. I mean, I was poor. I was staying in my late aunt’s apartment, right above my grandparents’ house. Other young freelancers—from El Salvador, Honduras, from Nicaragua—would come stay at my place if they needed to be in Guatemala. And if I needed to do a piece in one of those countries, I could go stay with them. It was a great little arrangement.

Anyways, I’d made friends with John Burnett, the now famous NPR correspondent. Well, back then he was just a young AP stringer. I needed to get up to Mexico City to get paid; there was no way to wire money to Central America at the time. And John had his own reasons to go up there. It was a very terrifying time in Guatemala. We were at a party together one night, and just a block away from us this guy, a Peace Corps guy, was murdered. Because this Peace Corps guy was very white, and very tall, black-haired, just like John, a rumor spread that it was John Burnett they’d wanted to kill. He was so scared. He said, Let’s get out of here! So we went up north together, from Guatemala to Mexico City.

I’ll never forget crossing the river into Mexico, being able to stand on the opposite riverbank and shout taunts at the Guatemalan army soldiers across the water. We were young, and foolish. I remember drinking my first Corona beer, after all those months and years of drinking Gallo. We drove up the country, through the matriarchal town of Juchitán (John wanted to do a story about that place), up the coast of Veracruz (where we heard the legendary Grupo Audáz play on the beach), then finally to the entrance of Mexico City. And well, I’ve never fallen so head over heels with any place on earth.

I consider it the best arrival of my life.

RJ: It was so different from everything you’d lived before. The life you’d made for yourself in Guatemala City.

FG: Well, you know, wartime Central American cities had their glamour. [Laughs] But they were really spartan places. There weren’t nice bohemian bars, or places to hang out at night that weren’t sordid. There were no great movie theaters. The cultural life was pretty restricted, you know? So coming up to Mexico City was unbelievably glorious…it seemed to be the most romantic, vibrant city on the planet. Which of course, it was. It is.

RJ: You moved from the U.S. to Guatemala, then from Guatemala to Mexico. I want to know what you think of the expatriate writer, the condition of a writer living outside their country.

FG: Well, I never really considered myself an expatriate. My family is from Guatemala, so much of my youth took place in Guatemala. The formative years of my life, formative to this day, were the 1980s in Central America. Much of the time, from 1979 to the Panama Invasion, that’s where I was. Everything I am, everything I became as a young adult, not just in political ways, but very personal ways, literary ways too, comes from that time in Guatemala. It’s where I received my education about life. I can never think of myself as an expat because, well, where is my real home? Expat from where?

I guess I do think of myself as an immigrant, an immigrant to Mexico. I’m going to be a citizen. I have my permanent residency. I have my family, my children. I was widowed here, that is married once and widowed and married again. It is the only place in my life that has ever really felt like home.

There are other places. New York, which was my home for chunks of time…I don’t know, I’m kind of indifferent to New York. I’m fine being there. I was about to say I’ve never really loved it, and then I realized, of course I love it, so many friends who I love are there, how could I not? That’s why I keep going back. The immigrant culture, especially some of its more recent aspects, the Guatemalan bike messengers, and of course Jackson Heights, Roosevelt Avenue, it just excites me to be around all that.

Part of me has an intense love-hate relationship with Massachusetts, it’s had its claws in me forever. I love the New England literary tradition. Moby-Dick. Hawthorne. The submerged old spirituality, the darkness. The wildness. A relationship to nature. The legacy of the original peoples, so present there, their languages always speaking to us through the names of so many places, towns, rivers. A relationship to the supernatural. Henry James, too: a sense of class, of the old Protestantism. It’s a tradition that’s really in rich dialogue with my experience as a Guatemalan. Henry James, for example… I think of my mother as a Henry James character, kind of, young mestiza from Guatemala abroad in Boston instead of Europe, you know, her complicated life, the way she overcame her mistakes, I don’t know. The ridiculous Guatemalan class regime, which my mother fled but never quite freed herself from, Henry James does speak to that in some way.

RJ: That makes sense to me when I think of your sentences, too. These elastic, many-claused sentences which turn on themselves, to describe an elastic and many-claused world which turns on itself.

FG: I hope so. That’s all I really like to do: write sentences. Sometimes I have to remind myself that writing a novel is more than obsessing on sentences. Sometimes I wish it was only sentences, really.

RJ: Would you consider yourself a sentence writer?

FG: Totally, when I’m really in the work, at least. This new novel I’m working on now, this New Bedford novel…well it’s funny, I’d been sort of down on myself after writing and rewriting the first fifty pages for a year. Writing and rewriting them, and really loving doing so! How can you possibly keep writing and rewriting the same fifty pages over and over again and see them constantly change, constantly get better, get richer? How can you rewrite them twice a month, and still find new elements? I feel like such a loser sometimes…like, how is this all I’m doing?

But it’s funny. Digging into my sentences, working on my sentences…while you’re obsessing over the sentences, your subconscious is working on the book. Your subconscious is making choices. A book begins with infinite possibilities. And your subconscious is feeling its way ahead, beginning to lay down an architecture. Eventually I come to see these tunnels, tunnels of narrative which are beneath the language itself, or tunneling forward from it.

When this finally happens, you feel excited! You feel the book is going somewhere. Otherwise, you just feel pathetic. Although, it really is pathetic, I guess, how much I love going back and reworking those sentences. [Laughs] I can’t believe it, sometimes I really can’t. I just think to myself: really? Again?

RJ: You are writing your eighth book now. I want to know what’s changed, and also what never changes, across the arc of a writing life. And can you tell me about some critical moments in your life as a young writer?

FG: It doesn’t get easier. It is all the same as it ever was, in a way. Well, you know, my first two published pieces sold to the movies! I was this young, single, twenty-six year-old in New York. Man, I just blew through that cash. I was so stupid. It was crazy. It was such an adventure. Jane Fonda bought the rights to my first nonfiction Guatemala piece…

RJ: Damn…

FG: Yeah, so I was flying out to L.A. to write this script for Jane Fonda. I was hanging out with Jane Fonda when Jane Fonda was at the height of her fame. I’d never met someone so intimidat- ingly, fabulously beautiful. I could hardly speak to her. But we would sit together and I’d write the script in her office. It was crazy! She was so nice to me. I have to write something about that someday…

I remember 1986 very well. I don’t leave Central America that year, at all—a stretch of over a year when I didn’t leave once. An editor and later publisher, Morgan Entrekin, asked my agent if I would be interested in doing a collection of short stories. And she said, I don’t think he’s writing any short stories. I think he’s just gone—well, I think she just used that unfortunate phrase, forgive her for it—gone native, you know? [Laughs] No one can pull him out of there. He’s lost, obsessed with the war, with politics, with Central America. He’s angry. Angry at the U.S. Angry at everything. But he does keep saying he wants to write a novel. So, Morgan gave me a contract. A very modest contract, but a contract. Sight unseen: here’s $10,000, go start your novel.

I took the money to Madrid. I holed up in Madrid and tried to begin my novel. But I didn’t get anywhere, I was just trying and trying. I used to go to that wonderful cafe, Cafe Manila on the Gran Vía…it was right near where I was staying, in the Malasaña. I lived six months there, then went back to Guatemala. I’d spent all my money, and had nothing to show for it—just a bunch of false starts. Back in Guatemala, we couldn’t live in my aunt’s old apartment anymore, any of us. A death squad had done a fake assassination attempt on me and my friend and roomie, Jean-Marie Simon (she was the most important human rights investigator in Guatemala, and an extraordinary photographer) right outside on the sidewalk. So, we moved to an apartment-hotel in the city center.

RJ: I want to hear more about your political anger. I want to know how it shaped your early language, your early sense of yourself as a writer.

FG: First the most obvious: anger at the U.S., the not-so-hidden power behind so much death, injustice, suffering, behind so many lies. Trump didn’t invent the lying fuck U.S. politician, believe me.

But years passed, and I also began to experience a different kind of political disillusionment. A more meaningful disillusionment, one that made me uncomfortable, that, at first at least, I struggled with. If you think about it, Roberto Bolaño, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and I are pretty much the same age, give or take. We were the generation—unlike the writers before us— who experienced or witnessed the betrayal and the waste of the revolutionary movements, the “guerilla” movements. The movements that had so excited people, that had formed some of our early convictions and hopes, and that people had felt so romantic about. None of us knew each other then, but if you look at the first works we were writing, that disillusionment is so present. I’ll never forget one trip I took to Mexico City, I think in ’89. I found Horacio Castellano’s novel La Diáspora somewhere in a second-hand bookstore on Calle Doncellas, published by a small university press, the Jesuit University Press in El Salvador. It was the first time I’d ever read a Latin American writer of my own generation. And it was just…the bitterest, angriest, most betrayed book about the revolution in El Salvador, about young people whose idealism had been totally trampled. Being that it was Horacio, it was also hilarious, a little demented. Well, I was feeling just the same. I felt like, this guy is my brother!

Political violence as a solution. Disillusion with that. Among other things, it elevates violent fuckheads, the authoritarian types (who like to go around in uniforms) into leadership positions, over the idealists and smart people, you know?

That was our generation. A small generation, people born between ’53, like Bolaño, and ’56 or ’57, like Rodrigo. It’s a narrow window, really. People who hit the ’80s in their twenties and thirties. It was a thin generation.

I’ll give you just one example of what I mean. I was sitting in a cheap hotel room in Mexico City where a Guatemalan guerrilla friend, a subcomandante in Guatemala City—indigenous, gay, too, as it happens—was staying. The hotel was on Calle Luis Moya… that’s where I got the name for that character in The Long Night of White Chickens. He had a valuable package, let’s say, that he needed me to take back to Guatemala, hidden in my suitcase. A package that I was going to give to another guerrilla who was going to come to my apartment door and say a password. I was going by plane. He was going back by land, over the border. I re- member the desolate mood in that hotel room. He’d been meeting with the guerrilla leadership, and he hated them. They lived in fancy houses, they were mostly white, or middle-class mestizo, Guatemalans, hypocrites and mediocrities. I remember he said the only way the guerrillas were ever going to get anywhere is if they got rid of the Mexico City comandantes. He’d bought a bunch of little plastic hair bows and ribbons to give to the young girls in the guerrilla and refugee groups he’d be passing through headed back to Guatemala City on foot. Eventually, I had to help him escape into exile. I hid him in my room, went to an embassy to try to get him asylum.

RJ: Maybe “meaningful disillusionment” is not something to be cured away. But I wonder what you feel can bring us out of the bitterness the world inspires. Can the language itself?

FG: You know, I’ve read Moby-Dick before, as a young person, but rereading it now I just think over and over: why isn’t this pleasure, this visceral pleasure in the concrete richness of language, in the immense human spirit behind this language, part of my reading experience all the time? I can just dip into Moby-Dick anywhere, at any place, and feel like I’m floating. I feel like I’m starting to levitate. True pleasure! Language should always give us this. If you read Ulysses, it’s the same. I’ve never read anything like Moby-Dick. I’m besotted with it right now. It’s really been the thing that’s kept me going these last couple horrible months, months I’ve been up in New York, teaching and away from my wife and my kids, trapped on late night subways. I carry my copy of Moby-Dick with me. If I can just read five pages, I’m in heaven. I’ll show you my edition! It’s so great, so compact, it’s like a little Bible. The pages are so thin, you can slip it in your down jacket pocket. It’s amazing.

RJ: You remember so much from so long ago: the versions and publishers of books, the names of streets and cafes. I’m amazed how the details have stayed with you.

FG: Ha, I guess so. Sometimes what is furthest away is somehow easiest to remember. And it’s the close stuff that gets me. Though that’s all kind of changed now, now that I’m a parent.

RJ: You have a five-year-old daughter. Maybe it is a good time to ask you about the experience of being a father, how it’s altered your life and your writing.

FG: Being a parent, your care for the world changes. You become a friend to the world, you want to help create the kindest possible world for your daughters to grow up in. But you know, it’s just so scary to be a parent, which is what has most shocked me. You’re always anticipating where the danger might be, and how you can protect your kids from it. You walk with them on the street and all the while you’re looking up at the sky, wondering what might fall. It’s gonna drive me mad, really. [Laughs]

But also, it’s just marvelous. I mean, to watch them learn the world. Azalea’s learning to read right now. Through her I get to watch language take shape. She’s learning the alphabet, beginning to learn the letters, and learn how to put them together. She’s in love with books. And she has the most extraordinary memory. She loves the Greek myths. The children’s versions of the myths, which we read in Spanish. One night we were reading Theseus, and the light in the room was too dark, so dark I couldn’t see the letters. But then she goes: I know it! And she just recited the whole two pages. She didn’t even get a comma wrong! I couldn’t believe it.

RJ: So much of your life takes place in Spanish, while so much of your writing takes place in English. It makes me wonder if you ever translated anything.

FG: Yes, I did once! Just once. It’s a long story. So let me tell it to you as a story.

I was always in love with the Latin American Novel, the novelists I’d first discovered because my mother was a Spanish teacher, because she used to get the magazine Latin American Review delivered to our house every month. We lived in a small house, so the dining room table was her work desk. I would sit there and read whatever I found in the magazine: Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy. Many others. Then there are the novels I found on the “New Books” shelf, in the reading room of the little, dreamy public library in my town. Heartbreak Tango, and The Obscene Bird of Night. My mother was crazy for Gárcia Márquez. And me, too, all the way back then, and then even more so in my early Guatemala years, when I was trying to be a fiction writer and a journalist, just as he had done. He was like a riddle I needed to solve, which was how, out of an experienced violent reality, one can produce such radiant fiction, out of such darkness, such light.

Well, some years later, in New York, I’d come to know Alice Turner a little bit. She was the fiction editor of Playboy. And she had just bought two García Márquez stories from Doce cuentos peregrinos. Okay, this may be a bit controversial to say, but it’s true: I’ve seen people ridiculing The New Yorker online for rejecting those Gabo stories. Look what idiots they were! they say. But the truth is…they were really bad translations. I don’t know what happened to Gregory Rabassa [García Márquez’s first major English language translator]. I don’t know. Something happened. I can’t say what, exactly. Anyway, one day Alice Turner said to me, Francisco, I don’t know what these stories I just bought are even about…has García Márquez totally lost it? I read the translations and thought, This is weird, this doesn’t really sound like Gabo to me. Well, let me see the Spanish originals! I read the original versions, and they were amazing! Then Alice said, Well, can you translate them? I told her I’d never translated anything before. But I told her, Okay. I’ll try. And I told myself, Okay, I can do this. And what I’ll do is I’ll just try to imitate Rabassa.

RJ: The old Rabassa.

FG: Exactly. Rabassa, when he’s right. And you know, he never translated García Márquez again after that. Eventually, when the book of stories came out, the great Edith Grossman translated them. What an extraordinarily wonderful woman Edie was. Rest In Peace, querida Edie. What a life force. But I did translate those two stories. Oh man. I mean, it was crazy. When I didn’t know a word I’d call my mother. [Laughs] I never translated anything again. That’s it… I just don’t have the patience, or probably the skill. But it was such a thrill. I mean, he’d just meant so much to me. And then to meet him years later, here in Mexico City…

RJ: You met Gabriel Gárcia Márquez?

FG: Yeah! A lot. I went over to his house quite a few times, over in Pedregal. It’s a cultural center now, next time they have an event there I’ll take you. Well, after I first moved here to Mexico City, I became very close friends with Gárcia Márquez’s best friend, the writer Alvaro Mutis. He was like a father figure to me here. And I was friends, too—we’re still good friends to this day—with Gonzalo, Gabo’s son. Well, I wouldn’t have called him Gabo back then…

I put off meeting Gabo for as long as I could. I was too shy to meet him. But eventually, Alvaro and Gonzalo forced me into meeting him. I woke up that morning with aphasia… that’s how terrified I was of meeting him. I arrive that morning to the “long-awaited meeting,” and I can’t talk! I can’t say a word. [Makes wordless wheezing sounds, and then laughs]

But Alvaro and Gabo, they put on such a show that afternoon. They were just phenomenal. They spent hours reciting corny Latin American poetry, poems they’d been made to memorize as high school boys in Colombia. They still remembered them. They had so much fun, just reciting old poems to each other, cracking each other up. Then Gárcia Márquez started reciting Gárcia Lorca, and talking about his poems, explaining Lorca’s greatness. It was amazing…what literary minds. But they were also just hi- larious old friends. I’ll never forget Alvaro getting up to go to the bathroom, and Gabo looking at him and saying, Ha look, you’re getting old! Tus nalgas se están cayendo! [Your ass is drooping.] They were so funny together.

RJ: Do you remember words or lines from the books you love? Like Mutis and Gabo reciting Colombian poems. Or like your daughter who recites the myth of Theseus. Who are the writers and the books you most carry with you now?

FG: Not in that way, where I can recite them perfectly. Maybe because I’m quite dyslexic, I don’t know. But there are certain things. Near the end of Beloved. Paul D is with Sethe and he quotes his friend Sixo talking about the woman he loves: “She is a friend of my mind…It’s good when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” I love that passage so much. And what comes just after, when Paul tells her, “You your best thing, Sethe,” and she says, “Me? Me?”

And in 2666, when Ingeborg is about to die and she and Archimboldi are looking at the stars. And she says that light was cast millions of years ago, we’re surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory is there above us, shining on the mountains and snow around us…

There are so many writers I love. Too many to try to mention. My friends [Alejandro] Zambra, Yuri Herrera, Valeria [Luiselli], Rivka Galchen, her last short story in The New Yorker is the best story I’ve read in ages. Rachel Kushner, her new novel is mind-blowingly great. Just to name some writers I’ve read very recently. I was just sent Dagoberto Gilb’s new story collection [from City Lights Books], it’s fucking great, what a master, seriously. Can’t wait to read my friend Colm Toibin’s new novel, also Joe O’Neill’s, Claire Messud’s. Damn, so much good stuff out there right now. How do you get any writing done?

And, well, Natalia Ginzburg…she is the writer who I’ve kept closest to me over the last several years. She’s like a teacher to me. She’s half Jewish, but brought up more Catholic than anything, like me. And she wrestled with it, really wrestled with it all. I learned so much from her. The way she says that we are one hundred percent who we are, not half this and half that. How who we are can’t be described with tags and labels in those ways. Honestly, I sometimes get it mixed up: what she actually said, and what I’ve been able to say because of her. She also writes about how in her conscious daily life being Jewish doesn’t really come up in any way…until she’s confronted with anti-Semitism. Then, she says, I feel vulnerable. I feel attacked. And that sense of vulnerability and attack gives her a sense of solidarity with other victims of vulnerability and attack. Because she feels she could be a target. And because hate is just wrong. Who’s gonna defend hate? That’s what makes the United States so bewildering. For lots of people in the U.S., a part of their identity seems to be comprised of whom they hate.

RJ: Ginzburg has meant so much to you, both as a writer and as a person.

FG: Yes. Her incredible incredibly lucid honesty. The way she spoke about the wars in Palestine, for example. I really learn from her. I come from the wars in Guatemala, which was certainly my formative encounter with what came to be officially recognized as a genocide. My own sense of this modern world we live in, my moral and political sense of it, was formed by being in Guatemala during the years that tens and tens of thousands of people were massacred and murdered there, among the other horrors going on. I was living in Guatemala, I was close to it, and so, yeah, I’ll never get over it. For me, to paraphrase Natalia Ginzburg on Palestine, it always comes down to this: given the choice between military might and poor defenseless shepherds, you’ll always find me on the side of the shepherds. She was criticized for saying that by people who wanted to insist the situation was more complicated, but that’s the fundamental truth of it. The Guatemalan slaughter and the slaughter in Gaza are two faces of the same misuse of power, of the same inhumanity and cruelty. American imperialism was and is behind both, not that the Israeli and Guatemalan governments and militaries didn’t and don’t have their own murderous racist subjugating agency. Mass killing of women and children can never be a legitimate political solution to whatever existential danger it is you believe you face. Those U.S.-backed Guatemalan massacre-justifiers, genocide-deniers also claimed to be fighting for their survival. They still do to this day.

Two faces of the same expression. And you know, Israel stepped in, too … in Guatemala. When U.S. arms support for Guatemala was eventually cut off by the Democratic Senate— Guatemala was a hideous pariah state; its massacres weren’t a secret, the repression wasn’t a secret, so the funding was cut off— well, who stepped in to fund them? Israel and Taiwan. U.S. allies. And before them, Argentina and Chile.

I also think I should say that I know there are so many people who fully identify as Jewish who feel just as strongly opposed to what Israel and the U.S. have done over there. Of course, there has to be a ceasefire in Gaza now, and the remaining hostages have to be freed. By now, that’s pretty obvious. The international court was right to accuse Netanyahu, and also the Hamas leaders for their massacre of October 7—a lesser crime in number of victims but not in horror and cruelty.

RJ: This leads us to the territory of another question I’d wanted to ask you: what is the political responsibility of a writer? I think my generation is struggling over this question now in some critical way.

FG: The political responsibility of writers? I don’t know, I think for me, the mandate is just to be humane. Write with your heart. Write honestly, and write well. Write bravely, however you personally define that. Don’t let other people impose their agendas on you, dare to make fun of whatever intimidates you, be funny if you can but not mean, that can be so liberating. It’s about making people think about what it means to be alive, think about it, see it and feel it in hopefully a fresher, deeper, maybe enlarged way. Maybe!

RJ: Maybe it’s good enough to think “maybe.”

FG: Anytime anybody is going to be uncompromisingly committed to making something as beautiful and humane as a novel can be—that has political impact somehow. You don’t need to know how, exactly. You just know that, somehow, it’s against the bad, right? It’s against the deadening overwhelming mediocrity and inanity of so much else in the world. Because what constitutes the bad, really? Deadness of emotion. Cynicism about all idealism. Tolerance of or indifference to human cruelty and suffering. Those are the things we think writing can oppose. Not always, but on the whole the art we love usually does.

You can certainly love books by authors whose politics, as far as what you think you know about those politics are anyway, you wouldn’t agree with. [V.S. Naipaul’s] A House for Mr. Biswas, for example. It’s one of the most moving novels I know.

RJ: I want to ask you for advice. I’ll cloak it by saying, what advice would you give to young writers?

FG: Read things that are really exciting. Some people say read ev- erything. I’ve tried to “read everything” but I can’t do it. People say read bad books because you’ll learn from the bad books. I say read exciting books. Read things you love.

And experience things. Experience life. But you’re here in Mexico, so I don’t need to tell you that.

Francisco Goldman, 2024

Ricardo Frasso Jaramillo is a poet and writer from Philadelphia. His work has been published in The Believer, The New York Times, and The Rumpus. His interview with Justin Torres appeared in ZYZZYVA 126.

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