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- [00:04]
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- [01:22]
Aurora Levins Morales
There.
- [01:26]
Joanna Cifredo de Feldman
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:31]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
Greetings from Mayoway, Puerto Rico. My name is Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera. I'm a professor in the Department of Humanities at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Mayagues. This podcast, Revos Orisontes discusses cultural studies, art, thought, literature, decolonial themes with the Caribbean axis anchored here in Mayaguez. It is sponsored by the Department of Humanities and in part by the Tiegel Foundation. The co host in today's episode is Joanna Cifredo de Feldman.
- [01:55]
Joanna Cifredo de Feldman
Hi Greetings. I am Joanna Cifredo de Feldman. I am in my third year of Political Science here at the University of Puerto Rico at Maya West. I'm also the co founder of the Puerto Rico chapter of Jewish on Campus, which is now Jewish on Campus en Espanol. And I'm really excited to have this conversation with the author, Aurora Levings Morales.
- [02:21]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
Thank you Joanna. Wonderful. Today's episode, as Joanna just said, is a conversation with Eldora Levens Morales, author of Prose Poems by Palavra Press, 2019. Thank you very much Aurora for connecting with us today.
- [02:35]
Aurora Levins Morales
It's a pleasure.
- [02:36]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
Super, super. Thank you both for taking part in this conversation. Today is a day I've looked forward to for some time. Aurora Levins Morales is a Puerto Rican Askanoski writer, artist, Poet and community leader, she's the author of many books, among them Medicine Stories, Cosecha and Other Stories, Getting Home Al, among many others. I wanted to share, before we begin a little bit of my own relationship with Aurora's work. One of the most important texts of my life in the 1990s was Aurora's poem Hija de las Americas, or Child of the Americas. I don't remember if I read it in English or in Spanish first, but it was a way for me to understand things that my school and my languages and my family, my community, couldn't tell me. But it was there in those words that she wrote on those pages. And to think about the words in that poem, that they offer a method of how to think rather than what to think. And that poem is about passions and exclusion and membership. It's about what I would like to. What I would like to be in my own life. I want to be able to do that, to make my own space and to do so with words in a way that is beautiful and to make words as beautiful and as meaningful as looking at a mountainside or feeling rainfall or the sound of a river passing. And the components of that poem are what we find in another format in this book. In a moment, we're going to talk about the details in the context of the book, but I wanted to just take a moment to mention my own experience with the words themselves in the book. Pablo Picasso has said that he thought his art could influence people's lives and their thoughts and put them into a kind of spell. And I agree with that. And Aurora's work in this book as well as elsewhere has made me experience that. How words can go beyond transcend the codes and messages and ideas, how they can create experiences, experiences that may be as meaningful as love or grief. And Silt's poetic reflections make me think about that, about how we can link culture to the environment, but also to words, and how we explore our own cultural practices and our own stories, and how our beliefs shape our relationship with land and water and skies. And it made me think about the rhythms of nature, how essential those are to safeguarding our collective cultural existence. Silt Prose Poems by Aurora Levens Morales is a poetic and powerful exploration of identity, history and cultural resilience. Weaving personal narrative with searing social and cultural critique, Levin's Morales invites readers to reflect on the ways history and personal memories shape our understanding of self in the community and the environment. And before I pass the mic to Juana for her initial reflections, I wanted to thank Aurora for speaking with us today, but also for your generosity and your passion and your commitment to linking critical questions to beautiful prose and the experiences that your words make possible.
- [05:09]
Aurora Levins Morales
Thank you.
- [05:09]
Joanna Cifredo de Feldman
Well, Aurora, you start the book with a dedication to your parents, Dick Levins and Rosario Morales, who raised you at confluence of, and I quote, art, ecology and justice in a house lined with books. And I think that background that you kind of provide of your father and your mother is necessary context to knowing, to. To understanding who made Aurora and the stories that. That are. That live within you. And as you know, you. You begin the. The reading. You begin reading the book, your story. What. What most resonates with me is that it's a deeply American story. And when I say American, I say it in the most expansive use of the term of like Las Americas, that we are people who are descended from people who've crossed oceans, who are who our mixture of races and cultures and ethnicities. And of that, something new arises. And so I would love to. For you to expand a little bit about that and talk to the audience a little bit about your parents and your upbringing.
- [06:33]
Aurora Levins Morales
I love talking about my parents and my upbringing. So my mother, Rosario Morales, her family is from Naranjito in Puerto Rico, but she was born in Harlem. She was a migrant family that left right at the beginning of the Depression. And she was a writer, a visual artist, an amateur naturalist, was curious about almost anything. She. She was fascinated with women's art. She became an anthropologist for a while until she was run out of the field for her critique of Claude Levi Strauss's colonialistic racism. And she read aloud to us all the time so that while I learned how to read and write on the page, I learned cadence from her voice. I learned from her reading aloud of poetry and prose. So a lot of my writing is really meant to be spoken out loud. My father was a biologist, Ukrainian Jewish family from Brooklyn, and became a tropical ecologist, but was also at a theoretician of evolutionary biology and taught us about the complexity and beauty of ecosystems. He was a mathematical biologist. I never got the math part, but he would take me with him on field trips and, you know, I'd go out collecting fruit flies with him in the morning, and then he'd leave the microscope on the kitchen table so that we were always inquiring, what does a leaf look like really close up? I learned a lot from that about how much perspective changes what you see. And as a radical scientist, a Marxist biologist, I also learned all of the perils of asking the wrong question, asking Questions that are too small, asking questions that are constrained by assumptions. So, you know, both our parents really cultivated our curiosity and our passions. I was memorizing poems when I was 6. My parents just piled up books for me, and I began writing poetry when I was 6 or 7, I think. You know, for both of them, the house was full of books. It was full of intellectual discussions, and it was full of a really passionate love for the natural world. My mother would take me outside and point to a particular patch of the sky at sunset and say, see that little bit of pale green in between those two bright orange ones? She was constantly inviting me to notice that kind of detail about the natural world. So I grew up reading and writing at home. I didn't get a lot of that in the public school here in Marikao, but we went back and forth between Puerto Rico and New York. In particular, when my father was in graduate school, I was in New York. And I've had teachers who were really wonderful and encouraging me as a young person to take seriously my own writing and be passionate about it. I like to say that the literary neglect of the public schools up in the mountains here actually bestowed a great deal of freedom on me. By the time people got out red pencils to apply them to my writing, it was too late. I didn't care anymore about the red pencils. So I had a tremendous sense of freedom in terms of genres and what inspired me and really felt like language belonged to me and I could do whatever I wanted with it, which is a huge blessing. So I should also say I grew up in a politically radical family. My father was a leader in the independence movement. My mother was a feminist. They had both been members of the Communist Party. I came from a long line on my father's side of labor organizers and radicals of different kinds. And so for me, there was not any separation between art making and social justice. The house was full of print by various radical printmakers from different traditions. And we had Cuban movie posters on the walls and Lorenzo Mar and. And other folks. The bookshelves were full of, you know, the poetry of Bebtol Bresch, of Nazim Hikmet from Turkey, of Neruda. Mostly men at that stage of my life. It's in my teens, in my teens that I really got to start leading an explosion of women's writing. So I feel like I got a pretty extraordinary, saturated education in art, science, literature, politics and ecology. Living on a coffee farm in India.
- [11:33]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
Excellent. Awesome. Awesome. I wanted to follow up a little bit with what Joanna had mentioned about the word America. And when I read your work and when I think about Joanna and I think about a lot of things happening here, I certainly place it in the Nuestra America de Jose Marti and with William Carlos Williams as well. His kind of connections to the Maya ways are important to think about in that context, too. And I wanted to ask, though, is a little bit off of the script that we. We passed around. But in addition to the word America, I wanted to ask both in as much, Joanna as well as you, Loretta, about what is it that Puerto Rico makes possible in. In your life? And I feel like the three of us are. Have relationships with different places, different communities, and I choose to be here. I choose Puerto Rico for a lot of reasons, and I want to. And I. I feel like it's. Certain things are. Are possible here that aren't necessarily elsewhere with language, with imagination, with relationship to nature. And I'm wondering if you guys might. What does Puerto Rico make possible for your life?
- [12:30]
Aurora Levins Morales
I can say that I spent 52 years in the States, and there were places I was fond of and people I loved, and I never put down a single little route. And I dreamt of this place all the time. And it felt impossible to return for a lot of reasons. And when the time came that I suddenly saw the door open and I got here, it was as if I'd been holding my breath for half a century without even knowing it there. There were layers of assimilation that just fell away. You learn how to be a certain kind of polite or a certain kind of exaggeratedly impolite. But there's, you know, coping with the way that racism, colonialism, the dominance of that society on someone of my mixed background is just. It's a big, heavy thing. And it just slid off when I got back here. And I have felt my rootedness in this soil is making different things come out my mouth than they did in California, which is where I spent most of that time. I also grew up with a very Caribbean and Latin American sensibility. My family had close ties to Cuba. And so, you know, I grew up listening to the Nueva Cancion singers and Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanez and Mercedes Sosa and Yuleta Paja. So I always felt that I was a poet in that kinship of people writing poetic responses to terrible conditions and projections of hope in terrible conditions. So I always felt very accompanied. I. I'm not a nationalist. I'm a. Maybe a. I'm. I'm an internationalist, but I'm a continentalist. And I Very much feel myself to be Carivena and I love that. From the farm I can see the Caribbean on a clear. You know, when it's not raining like it is today and know that across the water is Venezuela and just feel myself connected to this incredibly rich, complex, crisscrossing multi region of the world. And it holds me better than any other place that I've been. You know, in the United States. Everyone was always asking me, which are you more Jewish or Puerto Rican? And it's not that people understand my Jewish identity here in Puerto Rico particularly well, but I don't feel split. I am a Caribbean Jew and I'm home and this is a mountain that raised me. Yeah, I'm sitting in the lap of my mama.
- [15:16]
Joanna Cifredo de Feldman
I love that. I love that. And I, it resonates a lot with me. I left puerto Rico in 9th grade and I'm a non traditional student. I'm 38 years old and I moved back to Puerto Rico in 2019 after being like in the States for like 15 years. And I've never, I'm just like, oh, I never laid roots. Like I always felt like I'm a Puerto Rican living in Florida or I'm a Puerto Rican living in New York work. Like it never felt like this is mine, you know. So like for me, you know, like I feel, you know, the, the we hear the term displaced a lot. I don't know what the opposite of displaced is, but that's what I feel like when I'm in Puerto Rico. I feel like it's. Yeah. Like if I immediately where I'm supposed to be and I've had like good jobs in like D.C. and New York and stuff like that. But like I rather be here and I could, I would love, you know, like I don't, you know, I'm not opposed to like going abroad and you know, living experiences and stuff like that, but I see myself building my life here. I enjoy the, you know, that people come to you. You know, when you live in Puerto Rico, people come to you because you live in the tourist destination, you know, like, it's like, come to Puerto Rico. Just let me know when you're down from Puerto Rico. Well, we'll like, you know, and so it's nice that it feels like, you know, it feels like the crossroads to the world, you know, like it feels like the where South America, Africa, North America. I feel like it's where Puerto Rico's, where it all converges. Maybe that's just my own. But yeah, I just, I love that you Know, wherever you go. Like, I've competed and represented Puerto Rico internationally, like, twice. And wherever you go and you tell people you're from Puerto Rico, people get, like, really excited. They're like, puerto Rico. Like, they start dancing. They start. They get the fit. Like, you know, like, people get really happy when you tell them you're from Puerto Rico. And I love that. We're a small island with not a large population. You know, I feel like I met a Brazilian woman at a conference, and she's like, oh, I'm from Sao Paulo and had. And in Sao Paulo, the city where she lives, is 23 million people. And she's like, well, how many are where you're from? I'm like, we're 8 million. And she's like, in May, I was. Or Puerto Rico. I'm like, no, we're 8 million Puerto Ricans in the entire world. I was like, but you have felt our presence, you know, and one of the things I love about you, Aurora, is that in your wholeness and authenticity, you are great. You are. You are. You know, I think, you know, one of the things I love about being Puerto Rican is, like, we're very talented people. That's why people know us everywhere. Like, we are a hella talented people. And, you know, you know, Tom Pedro Ibizu Campos said that as el deber de calabori cua se la Persona mas culta polas nacionalidas pequenas te ba san elagrande. And you are like the embodiment of that, you know, stepping into your greatness, you know, And I love that we get to bring you to, you know, again, this is like, we've had you come before, and I've sat in your presence and listened to you. And I love that we get to introduce you to some more of our college audience so that they know that, like, you know, like, know about you and the work that you've been doing for decades now.
- [19:45]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
Yeah. That these types of things are possible. And it's, you know, just listening Toto Arora and the notes that I've written down here, I almost can't write fast enough. You know, how perspective changes, changes what you see, you know, no separation between art and social justice. A poet in that kinship, projections of hope. And these are all just wonderful.
- [20:02]
Joanna Cifredo de Feldman
Like, that's just quote in their. You know. Yeah. You. You make me proud to be Puerto Rican and to be a Caribbean Jew. And tu grande me hace senti grande.
- [20:17]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
Excellent. And was there.
- [20:21]
Aurora Levins Morales
I. I am a believer in the democratization of Creativity and, you know, so you see me squirming a little with words like grandesa. My father was like that too. I. I believe that we all have the capacity and we don't all have the permission and that I was raised with an enormous amount of encouragement and permission. And, you know, this is not to deny. I've been honing these skills for my whole life and I know I'm good at what I do and that I have a big vision of what's possible. And that comes partly from being raised as I was and partly the timing of my emergence as a public poet coincided with big, big social movements. So I became a public poet in the middle of the women's liberation movement and anti war movements, right? So, so I was surrounded by people using art to shift how people see things. But, you know, I think that part of the gift of all this, and my mother, who was so clearly and proudly working class Puerto Rican woman, Harlem and the Bronx, really had no time for pretentiousness at all. And she, you know her, she. There's a poem of hers that's inscribed in marble in the subway system in Boston, which is kind of ironic, but it's all about being a city pigeon. Like that's who she identifies with. And so, you know, writing from the sense that everybody should have access to what I'm saying and that, that doesn't mean I'm dumbing anything down. It means I'm speaking as authentically as I can. And then it reaches the people who need to hear it. My. My mother and I were invited to do our first book together by someone who, who heard my mom reading and she was reading a few of my poems and the editor was like, ooh, these should go together. And the thing about that book and why that book made such a big impact is that people would, would pick it up and they would see themselves between the covers of a book for the first time in their lives. It was about Puerto Rican women, it was about working class Puerto Rican women, it was about migration stories, you know, the flip of the usual one. My mom being born in New York, I being born in Puerto Rico. But it was a kind of book people carried around in their backpacks until they got really battered because it opened up a space for, as you said, for other people to say, I have this in me. I can speak my truth, I can take up space. I. One of the proudest moments of my whole career was standing in a line at a pop up health fair in upstate New York and there was a woman in line in front of me, who is clearly Puerto Rican, by the way. She was cussing out the dog and the particular job, but she looked really familiar to me, and I asked her, and we were trying to figure out did we know each other from somewhere. Her name was not, you know, Maria Diaz, so it wasn't going to help us. It's not a. It's not a very common name. And then she asked my name, and she said, wait a minute. Are you Aurora Espadas? And I said, yeah. And she. But then when it settled down, I said to her, yeah, but I still feel like I know you from somewhere. And she took both my hands and she looked into my eyes and she said, it's because you told our stories. That's why you think you know my face. Parami, that's a Pulitzer. I don't need any other prize. It says I did my work, that I told the stories of my people, and particularly the women of my people, in a way that held up a mirror, that gave people a place to be proud. And I think that's true of all of my books, whether it's focused on Jewish issues, disability issues, ecology, whatever it is. I'm always trying to open up a sense of how people see themselves and what they think is possible. So, yeah, that's my response to what you said.
- [24:38]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
Excellent. Excellent.
- [24:39]
Aurora Levins Morales
Yes, I am.
- [24:41]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
And can you talk a little bit about the role of this book in your life and what was happening at the time when you sat down to begin it and what were kind of the context that gave it termination?
- [24:52]
Aurora Levins Morales
Well, I had been carrying around this quote from this US politician for years. Do something with this.
- [25:00]
Joanna Cifredo de Feldman
Who.
- [25:01]
Aurora Levins Morales
Who was arguing for. For the US to seize Cuba in the late 1890s. And his argument was that it was literally made out of particles of US soil. So it was a eco imperialist argument, you know, bestowing nationality on bits of dirt. The. The Project of Silt actually started way before I ended up writing it. I had a residency in New Orleans in 2005. And honestly, the project came out of a desire to be at that particular residency. They were inviting people to stay right by the Mississippi river, which I had been fascinated with my whole life. That river, probably starting with reading Huckpin and Tom Sawyer, but just fascinated with the history of it with all the native bites along its banks. And it was an opportunity to do a writing project connected with the ecology of the river. And I said, okay, well, the only way I can do that is from the South. I can only do that from El Caribe. I think New Orleans is the most Caribbean city in the United States. And so I submitted a proposal to do something connecting those two. This was in the spring of 2005, just months before Katrina. I then had a stroke and a head injury, and there was Katrina. And a lot of stuff happened, and it was put on hold. And then I was encouraged to apply to go again to finish it in 2018. And the residency came with enough funding for me to have somebody drive with me the length of the Mississippi river and collect feelings, impressions, stories, faces, landscapes as. As we drove downstream. I would have loved to spend months at it. We only had eight or nine days to do that in, but it just kind of erupted after that journey. I was traveling with a young Puerto Rican woman, community historian from Massachusetts, and it really came together much more powerfully than it had the first time around. That sense of what water carries, that when we talk about silt, you know, what's meant scientifically is a combination of soil and bits of fish bones and bird feathers and the debris of running water crossing land. But this is running water crossing human history and crossing cultures and crossing all kinds of struggles for better lives, you know, from farmers along stretches of the river and struggles for land ownership during the Depression, indigenous uprisings and race riots of St. Louis. It was all this stuff that the water passed through and connected into the Caribbean Sea, you know, that the what falls in Lake Itasca, the northernmost end of the river, washes up over the coral reefs in Puerto Rico, and how water is a metaphor for all the ways that we're infinitely and inseparably connected to one another. So it really started with a hankering to be in that place. And then the themes were things that I always think about. But I have to say that's been. Probably my favorite writing process, was writing that book. It felt like it just came so smoothly and deliciously, and I had not yet decided to return to Puerto Rico. And the book just felt like it's not quite done. It's not quite done. I went back to California, and then I decided to move to Puerto Rico. And suddenly I was able to finish the book. The book was waiting for my life to catch up with it. And so there's a line in there about I set out to listen to the stories of the river, and I followed it, and it carried me home. The Mississippi river brought me to Marikao. So it's really also a story about allowing myself to be transformed by the flow. It was a moment also of coming into my own with, with prose poetry in particular, which is really my most beloved genre.
- [29:15]
Joanna Cifredo de Feldman
There was something that I, that you had said earlier that I found really interesting about how by the time you started school, you had already like, developed that love for writing. And so the. Whatever kind of parameters that, that they try to place on you, like, you aren't going to be limited. And it brought me back to the question that Jeffrey asked about the liberty of being in Puerto Rico and how oftentimes, because Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican dialect, you know, like our. Our way of speaking is such a influence of like, you know, words that come from the Canary Islands and Andalusia and borrowed from Arabic and Arawak and Yeruba and English. How we like were able to craft this language that's all our own and that's really. By some of the words that you use in your writing. It's really collected. But those that jambalaya about language of words vocabulary is really reflected in your writings. I wanted to see if you would talk about that a little.
- [30:41]
Aurora Levins Morales
My mother was. My mother would read the actual English dictionary for fun. The last word she called me up to tell me about was spinifuge, which is someone who fears endings. Had a slang dictionary she collected. She collected words and phrases and just savored them. She would read Dylan Thomas and some of the other Celtic writers who have this amazing sing song flow, complete wild ways of putting words together that don't necessarily make linear sense but make deep emotional sense. So, you know, so I became a word collector. I'm also, you know, Spanglish is my first language. I was speaking both in my house. I was speaking Spanish in school, mostly English at home, but with a lot of Spanish mixed into it and bits of Russian and Yiddish and love word origins. Loved looking up, you know, oh, tamarindo is, you know, Arabic for date of India. And you know, oh, turquoise means Turkish in French. And you know, just loving the tangle of people moving across maps and making language constantly shifted. So I've never cared at all about correct English. Correct is in the eye of the editor. Correct is in the eye of the writer. I believe that my syntax in English is shaped by my thinking in Spanish. I think that there's a liquidity to how I write in English. Like I never use semicolons. I have just like comma after comma after comma after comma. I'm having a Puerto Rican conversation at the side of the road. The kind of rhythms in the language, I think derived not only from the speech of the people I grew up around, but the rhythms of the land, the aguaceros, the water dripping from the roof, the guara wow, calling in the eye, or the koki in the underbrush. You know, that it's all part of how I learned language and sound. And, you know, I read my things aloud to myself to see if they're right. It doesn't just happen with my eyes. So, yeah, I am. It's interesting coming back to Puerto Rico where, you know, there's a little bit more of the kind of nationalist purity of Spanish attitude in some quarters at least. And I cannot for the life of me remember the genders of objects. And so it's like, okay, I'm gonna stand up for trans liberation and Spanglish at the same time. And I'm just randomly assigned gender to things, and it's fine if it's not what it says in the dictionary.
- [33:34]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
That was interesting to me, too. When I. I lived in Spain for a number of years, and when I. And I lived in Catalonia, it was the real academy. Espanola, you know, in Catalonia is understood as a colonial, racist, sexist, cafe, fascist era. And then when I came here, it was kind of confusing because I. I thought, wow, these people who are leftists are talking about the real, as it were, like something positive, you know, and. But putting language aside, but what a wonderful introduction to life. What you talk about, the rhythms of the land and then learning language and sound and the way that they interact with each other is really interesting. I often tell my students that writing is an excellent approach to learning. And have you learned. What have you learned in writing this book? Were there ideas and feelings that arose that you didn't expect? And is the final product similar to what you imagined when you began?
- [34:24]
Aurora Levins Morales
Okay, let me explain something about me and writing and research. I just had to write an artist statement about how I go about my collage art there. It's inseparable for me. The creative process, the research process, the play part, the actual putting things on the page. I'm constantly pausing something in midline and going, wait, let me go look this up. My book, Remedios, which is a retelling of the history of the Atlantic world through the lives of Puerto Rican women. There's, like, probably there's places in there where there's 500 pages of research going into a paragraph of pro stoichi. It. Yeah. So my work tends to be very research dense. I talked to a lot of people traveling down the river, but I read histories of the Mississippi. I wandered all over native history, you know, from from northern Minnesota down to the Gulf Coast. I looked at the different histories of African heritage, people in different places, which Europeans were settling, where, Where. Where were the stones from in the river. Like what was coming in through the Missouri river and what was coming in through the Ohio. I did mountains of research. I talked to a lot of scientists. I interviewed geographers, biologists. Yeah. And so, yeah, I was always pulling in the pieces of the big picture I needed in order to write the thing I wanted to write. You know, for example, I spoke with a geographer who told me that all along the edges of the Mississippi river there are what are called paleo channels that are underwater, sort of gravelly places with bigger stones. I mean, underground, not underwater, where water used to run. That the enclosure of the Mississippi river has prevented the movement of water freely. The Mississippi river is used to changing course every thousand years or so, and it's been locked into a course that's good for commerce and good for the city of New Orleans. But. But he said the amount of water that seeps under the levees through those paleochannels is equivalent to the entire flow of the Hudson River. So it's a fascinating fact about land and water, but it's also an amazing metaphor for how we resist control and how we find our way under boundaries and extend ourselves across landscapes. And so I'm always doing research for what resonates and shows connections. That's like, my specialty is, where is there a connection here that was not immediately perceptible? And how can I bring that forward? And, you know, this is also connected to other landscapes beyond, you know, the. There's. My language also has echoes of Yiddish in it. My writing about the ecology of Puerto Rico and Louisiana in my current project extends to Vietnam and what pesticides and herbicides have done to the three landscapes. So, yeah, it's like graduate school when I'm writing poetry. I'm just diving into. Everything started out with native Abishnabe women in the Twin Cities. We're doing a ceremony by the river, and we were taught a song of praise and gratitude to the river, which we sang every day. We laid tobacco every day. We were so sick of Mark Twain by the time we got through his hometown. We were interested in the variety of people connected with the river in different ways. We started collecting racist small town murals of the town history, you know, where you have native people kneeling before great white settlers, including in Mark Twain's hometown. But, yeah, we touched the water every day, except at one point when the road separated from the river. And we got really cranky. We had a very hard time emotionally. We're also moving into patent growing territory and the ghosts of slavery were all around us. And so we had to figure out other ways to. To connect and get ourselves back to the river or at least find a way to speak to the river. But yeah, it was a profound experience that was emotional, spiritual, historical, artistic.
- [39:07]
Joanna Cifredo de Feldman
Can you tell, can you share with us a little bit your philosophy of ecology?
- [39:12]
Aurora Levins Morales
I grew up with ecological sensibilities that completely contradict the idea that humans are separate from the rest of the biosphere. There's not like nature and humans. We're not outside. We are part of one biosphere, one global complex being. And we're not the most important part. No matter what we think we're potentially the most destructive part. We're also the part that has the most capacity to change that. But I think that the separation between like our bodies and our environments is as artificial as like the body mind separation that people are now writing about differently. That skin isn't all that much of a barrier. A lot of stuff passes in and out of our bodies all the time. And that we are. There has been a process of cutting our ties to the ecosystems that are our ancestors, our relatives, our home, our responsibility, our kin that we need to reweave or we're not going to make it. The trouble of the world is born from the stubborn of relationships, whether it's othering groups of people so that they can be exploited without the exploiters feeling bad about it to, you know, clear cutting forests and seeing the trees as timber instead of living beings. So for me, ecology is kind of everything. There's nothing that I look at in the world that I can't think of ecologically. How is this part related to the whole? And what are the other beings doing in this story? And really I think it's our only hope is to reclaim a sense of ecological humility and relationality. There's, you know, here in Puerto Rico, you know, we've experienced 500 years of deforestation and chemical dumping and the stripping of, you know, shade forests to grow coffee in the sun and create erosion. And there's been enormous damage and yet there's still this vibrant ecosystem that if we can wholeheartedly ally ourselves with it and defend it, it will do the same for us. Cool.
- [41:38]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
Thank you. And so here we are at the University of Puerto Frico and we have a lot of students who are on the bridge between the humanities and sciences. And I was wondering if you might Talk a little bit about Puerto Rico today and what is it that a reader specifically here in Maya Oes, maybe at the Puerto Rico in my oes, can use and learn and apply from your book in their life and their academic career.
- [42:05]
Aurora Levins Morales
Pay attention to which rules you want to break and break them. Cross boundaries, looking for what you care about. Trust your instincts. You know, I'm an insider, outsider with the academic world. I have spent a lot of time as a drive through teacher. I know a lot of my work is taught in the academic world and it's a very rich place for the bringing together of people's minds. And it's also a constrained place with conventions that can limit where our imaginations are allowed to go. So I say keep one foot in the place where your mind can go anywhere and let it do that. And you know, this is a book about fluidity, about geography and human connection and transformation. How do we relate to that here? Just look around. Notice the aguacero. Where does that water come from? Where is it going to? A lot of our rain comes from Venezuela, from the coast of Venezuela. Some of it blows across the Atlantic. You know, what's. How has the soil been changed by 530something years of colonialism? How has agriculture impacted, you know, how is the exotic animal trade affecting the birds and the frogs now that we've got pythons all over the place? You know, seeing that as a whole rather than fragments. What is the whole within which we live and that we're committed to, that we're in kinship with. And the bridge between the humanities and the sciences is where I live. I think one of the things scientists need to learn from artists is how to communicate what they're most passionate about that they don't necessarily have the language for. I love sitting down with scientists and saying what are you most passionate about? What are you most worried about? What do you wish most wish that non scientists understood about your work? You know, what are you most excited about? And then turn that into something that is digestible and accessible. And I think as a poet, you know, the fact that I was taught to read scientific literature and understand it, that I can pick up a science journal and pretty much make my way through it. It gives me access to all this thinking that, you know, is we treat as highly specialized and in some ways it is. But it's not difficult to communicate. Tend to non scientists. You just have to, to change your language to do it. And so many of us who are not scientists don't have access to really exciting, interesting ideas about our world. So I think the more conversation between those communities of creativity and thought, the better for all of us.
- [44:58]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
Awesome. That's a wonderful thing. What the scientists need to learn from artists. I mean. Yes. I mean, I feel like here on campus we have a program that's called STEM to steam, which aims at. Which is sponsored by the Mellon foundation, excuse me, the Tigo foundation, that aims to insert humanistic approaches into scientific questions. And I feel like the type of work that you're doing is really an excellent bridge for that because it brings in a whole another set of coordinates and responsibilities that the scientists within traditional science. And science is almost like monolingualism. It's a place that can be even more constrained than a university. And to bring in the idea that art and that philosophy and the ethics and all of these things should be a more central part of what science does and how it can. And I think it would improve the science because it's also going to be bringing in a whole bunch of other questions and ways of.
- [45:56]
Aurora Levins Morales
But also, science is so many different things, and they don't tend to talk to each other. It's hard to talk across discipline. My father was both a mathematician and a biologist, and it was really hard for him to find math people who would talk to him because he was applying the map to something, and then, you know, biology people who didn't do the math. And, you know, he needed playmates. But, yeah, I think that we can bring in questions that can kind of expand out a focus and put it into a different context. My father started out as a geneticist, and it was my mother. He was studying fruit fly behavior in relationship to temperature and how they, you know, genetic changes. And my mom said, yeah, but what do they do when they're outside the lab? And that actually started him on his path to becoming an ecologist because he found that some fruit flies didn't change genetically. They changed their behavior. They hung out in the shade down in Guanyga when it was really hot. So the very fact of being kind of naive about the specialist training lets us ask a different type of question, because we're all storytellers. We're all telling stories about reality, about the world. Scientists and people in humanities, people who are artists, all are raw storytellers. They just need to speak each other's languages and get some harmonies going.
- [47:23]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
Tell us a little bit about what you're working on now. The hour has flown by. We're almost. We're almost out of time. Would you talk a little bit about what you're working on now?
- [47:31]
Aurora Levins Morales
Yeah, I'm kind of a 12 burner stove as a writer artist. So I'm always working on a lot of things and turning one down, turning one up and stirring and adding salt. So like a mini piece band. But I am working on a project called Ferment. I'm returning to New Orleans in October for the last part of a. A third residency there, which starts from the impact of pesticides used in the 1950s in the Puerto Rican countryside on my body. I'm fairly certain it's what caused my epilepsy and it's linked to the cancer that my mom died of. And starting from that question of pesticides and epilepsy, looking at chemicals of control, whether it's chemical warfare or pest control and agriculture and often they're the same chemicals. And expanding out from there, looking at chemistry of control in Vietnam, where my family had a particular connection to what was going on in the war there. My father was a biologist who was involved in anti war projects to support how to resist the effects of Agent Orange and other kinds of chemical warfare. One of the effects on Vieques, so Vietnamese of chemical weaponry. The effects of pesticides and herbicides, the herbicides that were used in, in Vietnam, the chemical plants where these things were created in. In one place that they were created was in New Orleans in a community that was very badly poisoned in the process. But also the fact that there are bacteria that break down these toxins in the environment. And some of these bacteria can also shift biochemistry in ways that can help to help the body to recover. So for instance, fermented foods and the fermentation that happens in compost can break down things like dial, which is what most impacted me. Neurotoxic chemicals that we don't industrially know how to break down, but these bacteria do. So I have fallen in love with bacteria bacteria. And this project is called Ferment and it's looking at the literal bacteria that, you know what happens if we shift from a, from a paradigm of how can we control the natural world and kill pests to what if we live in interspecies alliance? Bacteria. Only 1% of all the bacteria in the world har have any negative effect on humans. And there are bacteria that will eat the residues of TNT on battlefields. They can clean up the residues of war. So what does it mean if we shift our perspective towards collective fermentation, towards a cooperative relationship with what we've been taught to be afraid of. So ferment is a combination of prose, poetry and digital collage artwork work and well, I'll probably want to find a way to show some of that work once I'm done with the residency here in Puerto Rico. And I'm aiming toward creating a collection of poetry and visual art, collaborating on co editing a special issue of the Wilmer Carlos Williams Journal. And I'm really fascinated in looking at his mother as a. As a frustrated artist and a Puerto Rican of Jewish ancestry and Learning about the St. Thomas Jewish community from which her father came. But I'm always interested in the under attended to women in the lives of famous men. So yeah, I'm really interested in exploring both that part of the story and as somebody who has been chronically ill most of my life, interested in thinking about his medical Persona and poetry from the patient's point of view. I actually started writing a poem about being on his exam table. So you haven't seen that yet.
- [51:45]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
Excellent. Excellent. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for today. This has been a fabulous conversation.
- [51:52]
Joanna Cifredo de Feldman
Thank you Aurora for this awesome conversation. I love getting to know you more and hearing from you every opportunity I get. Maybe we could get you to do like a writing workshop here in Correcta at some point.
- [52:10]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
We've got a few ideas.
- [52:11]
Aurora Levins Morales
Not anymore.
- [52:14]
Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera
We got a few.
- [52:16]
Aurora Levins Morales
But a total pleasure talking with us.