Your story in this year’s Fiction Issue, “Firstborn Immigrant Daughter,” is written in the form of a letter to the firstborn daughter of immigrants. When did you first start thinking of this as the premise for a piece of fiction?
For me, with fiction, the “first thought” is invariably a first line—appearing out of nowhere, clarion clear. I’ve likened the sensation to hearing a lyric from a song that I know but can’t recall. With my novel, “Ghana Must Go,” that first line arrived at a retreat in Sweden; with this story, at a retreat in Brazil. I recently launched Sechat, an international writing workshop (named after the Egyptian goddess of writing), for precisely this reason—to offer women writers the quiet to hear their lyrics, the inspiration to write them down. So often, for women creatives, “peace and quiet” alone won’t do. We need permission and quiet, a container and quiet, community and quiet, too.
In the story, a “we” of firstborn immigrant daughters is addressing the letter’s recipient—the story’s “you”—whose situation they are assessing, analyzing, and almost embodying from a vantage point of knowledge and empathy. Why did you make this choice? Did you ever think of employing the first-person singular?
Speaking of retreats, I love to teach, and narrative voice is my favorite subject. In more than a decade of teaching second-person and first-person plural, I’ve learned the power of these voices: inherently experimental, they turn writers (back) into experimenters. I give my students Joshua Ferris’s novel “Then We Came to the End” (“we”) and Tope Folarin’s story “Miracle” (“we” and “you”), then ask them to try either voice—and the same thing happens every time. They have fun! They don’t know the rules, so they’re not afraid of breaking them. They play. Me, too. I suffer from Stage IV Perfectionism, so I edit myself mercilessly in first and third person. Second person returns me, mercifully, to Beginner’s Mind.
The mother-daughter relationship being explored here is a complex one. How did you figure out how to structure the story and tease out the various strands of the bond between any such pair of mothers and daughters?
So many mothers and daughters appear in this story: friends, cousins, fictional characters. That “you” is a compression of a massive amount of data collected over decades. In the other languages I speak (Italian and Portuguese), there exists a second-person plural: voi and vocês, distinct from tu. But there’s something lovely about the limits of the singular “you” in English. No matter how many “tu” are contained in the “voi” of a narrator, a reader is always singular. One reader may see themselves in certain sections of this story, but not in others. Another one may feel seen. But it’s always a one-to-one conversation—or exploration, just as you say. As an artist (not a sociologist), I offer observations and questions—not answers. Brown women artists are often confused with anthropologists. My work (and my joy) is to explore, not explain.
At one point, you write, “When the mothers of your friends from the New Country coo, ‘All I want is for my daughter to be happy,’ you laugh. Your mother doesn’t want her daughter to be happy. Your mother wants her daughter to be impressive.” For a girl, how challenging is it to grow up with those kinds of expectations when her peers might be having a completely different experience of childhood and adolescence?