Interview / Jennifer Givhan
Editor Lauren Brazeal Garza: Jenn Givhan was kind enough to offer an account of her her wrenching and often heartbreaking fourth book of poems, Belly to the Brutal. During our interview, Givhan generously touched on ideas of motherhood (and how it changes time itself), generational and carried traumas, what it means to be haunted, and the process of writing as a means of spiritual survival
Your most recent collection, Belly to the Brutal, explores ideas of lineages of trauma and how trauma can be inherited. Can you tell us more about what inspired you to speak to this important topic within the collection and/or individual poems?
When I was a new mother time didn’t make sense. It stretched, it stuck. It grew ponderous. Heavy at times. Gauze thin at others. Motherhood is a time machine. Now that my children are teens, I feel the weight of their matter pulling me, stretching the fabric of spacetime toward their centers of gravity.
Rooted in my Mexica culture, my work explores cyclical existence, emphasizing the intricate relationship between women, children, nature, and the spirits that inhabit spaces between time and language.
All of these hidden or underbelly experiences speak of what travels through the cells, the inner workings, what’s in the DNA, what we pass on in the unspoken as well as stories.
My work delves into the unspoken, the omitted and forgotten, the buried and record-struck. I’ve long advised writers to say the damn thing—and I try never to shy away from the unsayable. Secrets in our house and my mother’s house and her mother’s before that meant a girlchild harmed and I’ll never abide by keeping things hidden that need to be bloodlet and the poison pulled out. I’ll never be shamed or harassed into silence. And yet—we can make omissions as writers for the haunting spaces they create in their wake—the sense that what once lived there has moved on—narrative, memory, or pain. Louise Glück says that “deliberate silence” is “analogous to the unseen… to the power of ruins… [which] inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied.” Something of their spirit is still intact in the work. The ruins of what might have been linger. Even that which stays buried can be redeemed.
All of this relates, for me and my poems, into what we carry through the DNA. Wounds through the womb.
Our genetic memory carries tales of trauma and triumph, passed down from our antepasados, connecting us in ways both tangible and intangible. Scientific revelations suggest we carry trauma in our genes, echoing our ancestors’ experiences. The language of our lineage can bind us to our past for better or worse, as Sandra Cisneros and Gloria Anzaldúa have expounded in their seminal works. For some, societal discrimination against ancestral languages has led to cultural disconnection and rootlessness.
The fact that we actually carry trauma in our DNA haunts me. It expands horrifically like an imaginative bomb in my brain… to think of all the world’s horrors within us, claiming us, and not letting us go, and that this is cellular, in the blood…
But there is a saving takeaway. As sociologist Avery Gordon in Ghostly Matters argues: “The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, something against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition.”
The key word here is transformation. When the ghosts of our past or our ancestors’ pasts come to us, in means that something needs to be done, something needs to change.
In our poems, as in our lives, we have the marvelous ability to transform reality, as well as to see the transformative reality that already exists (around and within us).
So while our genes carry our Ancestor’s trauma, we must also be echoes of their joys. I have started trying to capture this in Belly to the Brutal, but I sense the next journey of my poetic path is to keep capturing the joy onto the page.
In this collection, ideas of wounding, being wounded, and the wound are woven in almost every poem in this collection. These manifest both as physical, psychological, and spiritual injuries. Can you speak to how this theme developed?
As writers, perhaps more than average folks, we likely have a deep, abiding sense that in some way, we’re already all broken. Or, we’ve all been broken at some point. And that the narratives we’re writing and revising and recreating in our poems draw from that foundational fracture. As Leonard Cohen sang, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
In my poem drafts I tend to write the same beating heart over and over. Cheryl Strayed calls it the second heart and writes about getting down on the floor to pull this second heart from one’s chest onto the page. I think of “The Two Fridas” by Frida Kahlo, each with a heart, one broken.
Tony Hoagland calls the flood subject or foundational fracture one’s “mythical wound.”
Kim Addonizio writes in Ordinary Genius, “I had discovered the thing I wanted to keep close to me for the rest of my life, and if I did that, my tutelary spirit would watch over me, would teach me what I needed to know… This is your genius: your own profound desire to write.” Desire will only get us so far. It’s when we put our “ass to the chair,” she says, that our demons will show up. The demon, then, for some of us, is whatever holds us back from writing the thing we’re meant to write. That keeps us scrubbing floors both literal and metaphorical rather than sitting down at the keyboard and, as Hemingway famously said, bleeding.
Addonizio’s demons resonate with my own, which spew venom in my ears, even after publishing five full-length collections of poetry and two novels; my demons taunt: I’ve been writing the same damn poem over and over—I should be more political. No, wait, I should really be more personal. But somehow universal, and not narcissistic. I’ve been accused of confessing. I should be more esoteric. I’m lost. I’m floundering. I cannot scratch my way out. To hell with it, I give up.
Except, for me, giving up has too often meant more than never writing again.
So writing has been survival.
I must continue writing.
And what almost invariably comes is my deep mythic wound, in whatever form: Heartbreak that stems from my first love having a baby with another young woman—when I’d lost our baby to miscarriage.
No matter what else I write. The mythic wound often finds a way of needling itself through.
I’ve healed again and again. I write myself into healing again and again.
But the second heart that continually needs excising every time I begin a new project is this: I wanted to become a mother and couldn’t. And then I could.
After struggling for years with infertility, I adopted my son when I was twenty-three years old—this was seven years after the traumatic experiences at the Clinicas de Salud with my high school boyfriend.
In my life, I transformed my reality.
Later, I wrote a novel about a young woman who gives birth to a stillborn—and then comes to believe that a baby doll she names Jubilee is the daughter she lost. The story was inspired by Reborns, dolls that are created to look just like “real” babies, and that can be custom ordered to look just like children who have grown up or passed away; they are “reborn.” Reborns fall into the uncanny valley and are often described as “creepy,” though I see them as a beautiful transformation.
When I couldn’t have children, when my body wouldn’t cooperate, when the lines wouldn’t transform into a pink cross, or when the pink cross did appear but then the bright red poppies began their painful stain, I made myth. I became a mother in my poems and my babies were alive and the blood flowing out didn’t mean dead.
When I adopted my son and I had no idea what I was doing and felt like a body snatcher like a thief like an imposter and his colic-stressed body and his sleepless-helpless body kept us both in perpetual dreamstate and I was afraid always he’d wake some day and scream You’re not my real mother, instead, we created myth. We became mythical, to each other. In our mutual need. The myth of motherlove carried us; it carries us still, through thick reality, through thick reality we learn each day to love.
Whether I have a story or poem or spark in mind when I begin writing, every journeying onto the page begins for me as a plunging downward, into the heartgut or through it, and there I must begin digging.
I don’t know if the wound will ever heal. But I’ve created so many beautiful things from it that even if I die with this hole in my heart, it’s a hole that’s sprouted whole ecosystems that’ve fed those I’ve loved.
An overarching theme in The Account Magazine is the act of offering “an account”—of bearing witness, or carrying and offering testimony. How do you see the poems in Belly to the Brutal interrogating these ideas?
Most of my work deals with the monstrous in some way. Belly to the Brutal grapples with monstrous motherhood. Mothering through mental illness.
Sometimes the monsters don’t need our slaying, but our compassion—our empathy and understanding. Sometimes the monsters are not monsters but captive to the dark power wrecked upon them. Sometimes, they need us only to witness. To see them.
This newest collection was about extending that same compassion I give outward monsters to myself. Seeing the seeds of trauma grown into violence within me—and forgiving myself. But first, I had to bear witness.
And it was damn painful at times.
Of writing monsters, Karen Russel writes of having empathy for them: “Poor motherless thing. Look at it looking.”
I wanted to show how even mothered things can be accidentally mothered into violence that needs rooting out. How machismo culture, how the violences enacted upon girls and women… how that can all contribute to unintentionally passing those on as norms. And how one mother needs to be brave and self-aware enough to stand up and say, Basta. Enough. To stop those cycles of violence from repeating.
So the mother at the end of my collection births herself anew, as Frida Kahlo in her visceral painting, birthing her own damn self. And in my collection, the mother does it when she births her daughter and realizes that she has a chance to remother herself alongside her daughter.
In bearing witness to my children’s lives, I was able to witness, again, my own childhood and my mother’s struggle from a new lens that lent me empathy and grace I couldn’t feel when I was hurting within it.
Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices.
Her newest poetry collection Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press) and novel River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Publishing) both draw from her practice of brujería. Her latest novel was chosen for Amazon’s Book Club and as a National Together We Read Library Pick and was featured on CBS Mornings. It also won an International Latino Book Award in the Rudolfo Anaya Latino-Focused Fiction category.
Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, Ploughshares, and many others. She’s received the Southwest Book Award, New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize.