Claudia Hernandez would prefer that I suppress superlatives from my descriptions of her work. I’ve done so except for “great epic” in reference to Slash and Burn. The following interview was conducted in Spanish over email during the summer of 2021. I have also excluded all the jokes about what it would have been like if we would have done the interview in person.
Special thanks to Emma Warhurst for translating this interview.
Slash and Burn is one of our great epics. Even the creation of the novel has the hallmarks of an epic – I remember that you told me it took you many years to write it. Tell us about those years. How did it all start?
It started with a simple question: So, who lost? The two sides who fought against each other in the civil war were in two separate squares in our town, celebrating the end of it, and both sides were claiming the victory. I was sixteen. For the first time I could ask about the civil war out loud, and I started to. Around that time, there were many, many people returning from the mountains, from hiding and from exile, who were kind enough to tell me some of their experiences and connect me with others who also shared details with me. With some of them I had a single conversation, but with others I had several over a period of time. There were also people who knew that I was interested in the subject, and brought me stories that they had heard and new contacts who could verify them. Twenty-five years later, that initial question still hadn’t been answered, and many more questions had been added. I carried on gathering observations, information, pieces, telling the people who asked me about this project that I still hadn’t found something that would let me know that I’d got to the end of the story, or a format that would allow me to tell it. Until, one afternoon, the daughter of a woman I was interviewing made a comment that made all the pieces fall into place. Then I sat down and started to write.
What did the daughter of the woman you were interviewing say?
She said that her mother had finally accepted defeat.
I remember you telling me about the in-depth interviews you did, and saying that sometimes you had to transcribe what you had recorded at the interviewees’ houses and immediately delete the recording. Tell us about those in-depth interviews.
Regardless of how much time might have passed between the war and the interviews, the people I was speaking to were afraid of being identified and becoming victims of retaliations because of what they shared with me. They asked me again and again if anyone would find out their names, or if anyone other than me would hear the recordings. They were so concerned about anonymity that they even asked me not to include any details that might identify them as informants. To give them peace of mind, I offered not only to keep their identities secret, but to destroy the recordings too. I noticed a considerable difference in the quality of the details that they gave me after I made that promise, and also in the warmth of the relationship that we had. With some of the women, it took me a long time to build enough trust for them to speak openly. There were some who insisted on being there when I deleted the recordings, and there were also some who wanted to check the transcriptions and the chapters of Slash and Burn once the printing proofs were in to make sure that none of the details they had given me were there. It didn’t seem like an unfair deal to me – they were putting themselves at risk to share with me (and the readers) the most valuable thing they had.
It reminds me of what Svetlana Alexievich says about how the people she interviewed in her oral history books reacted. But the difference is that Slash and Burn is a novel. When I read it for the first time, I hadn’t met you yet and I didn’t know anything about the interviews you had done. Our friend in common, the author Gabriela Aleman, told me that I had to read Slash and Burn and so I read it without asking many questions. From the first pages, the style of the prose is striking. I have described it as geometric and even hyper modernist, but I don’t think you agree with those descriptions. Where does this style come from?
It comes from the people who were kind enough to speak to me. What I knew about writing wasn’t enough for me to put across not just the information that people had shared with me, but also the experience of having spent time with them. Faced with the question of how to tell their stories, the answer was to tell them the way they told them themselves, led by their emotions, without distinguishing between past and future, exploring details that ended up being tunnels that led to other places and other people, trying to explain to themselves why they had done what they had done, attempting to understand what came after surviving, their stories complementing each other. The style is a tribute to them.
I remember that you once told me about concentric circles as structures in your novels. Tell us how that works.
You have a very good memory … When we spoke about that, I was writing the last part of this triad of stories of women in wars, Tomar tu mano, which has just been published by Laguna, like the others. I told you then that Slash and Burn follows a mother and how she responds by facing up to the conflict, that El Verbo J looks at a daughter whose reaction is to flee, and that the third book would focus on a wife who freezes when faced with the same phenomenon. I was telling you that, in contrast to the women in Slash and Burn, whose conversations gave me the sense of ink that goes outside the lines and runs into the tiny cracks in the paper, making them visible, the women who contributed to Tomar tu mano had something different in common: they all focused on one incident as the centre, cause and explanation of the many things that went on to happen to them. The result was a figure who was recalling the vibration that forms concentric ripples when a stone is thrown into water. Once again, it seemed appropriate to me to tell the story in the way that the participants tell it themselves.
Another striking feature in Slash and Burn is the use of the future tense. It sometimes seems to be a way of talking about destiny. Even in the first few pages, the destiny of the residents of a town is mentioned. Did this use of the future tense come from the interviews too?
You notice everything! That detail in particular comes from mixing Karl Jaspers’ Über das Tragische and Maxim Gorky’s socialist realism.
It seems to me that there is a big stylistic change between the stories and the novels. In Tomar tu mano there is an extreme impulse to take away, to do without, and see what is left, an impulse that I share. Tell us how you view your stylistic journey.
My books up until now are a product, as I mentioned, of a community experience, and a reflection of the way that we talk and tell stories in El Salvador. I think that the difference between the first stories I published and these latest books – other than the length – is to do with my age; I wrote the first stories in my twenties, while I wrote the Slash and Burn–El Verbo J–Tomar tu mano triad in my forties. I suppose that because of that the short stories are told from the point of view of fascination and from a androcentric perspective, always with a touch of humour.
With the triad I had the feeling that the story, the way I was writing it, was failing both the people I had been speaking to and the time in the country’s history that I was talking about, that I connect more with the female perspective. So I decided to combine it with other genres and resources in order to open up space where they could flow. If you look at them carefully, all three follow story archetypes. You already mentioned that Slash and Burn contains a lot of tragedy and memoir. I should also say that there is a deliberate intention to go against the rules of screenwriting so that, although it’s by contrast, that form of writing is there too. Tomar tu mano is the opposite, in some way – although always with the plot of a story and always hybrid, it is closer to cinema in terms of style.
Now that I am in a new stage, it’s clearer to me that my stylistic journey is the result of seeing the stories as problems and the writing as the solution.
Sometimes when I read a novel I can easily identify the author’s literary influences—
It must be because of the powerful weight of memory that is present. It’s difficult to compete with that.
—In your novels I don’t find that easy to do. Could you share with us your literary influences?
Well, in my hybrids you have to look in several drawers. For Slash and Burn, Robert Walser would be first on my list. You’ll also find Gorky, Jaspers, Tarkovsy and Carrière. For Tomar tu mano, think of Unica Zürn most of all. For El Verbo J, which pays homage to the telenovela, look to Algele Selke and Gunnar Ekelöf. And always – always, always – Marguerite Duras and traditional stories.
Claudia Hernández is the highly acclaimed author of five short-story collections and two novels, the first of which was Slash and Burn, published in Spanish in 2017 and in English in 2020. Her work has appeared in various anthologies in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Israel and the USA.
Mauro Javier Cárdenas is the author of American Abductions (Dalkey Archive, 2024), Aphasia (FSG, 2020) and The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press, 2016). Twitter: @IneluctableQuak
Emma Warhurst is a translator, editor and author. She has an MA in Spanish from the University of St Andrews and an MPhil in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge.
minor literature[s] 