Bessie Flores Zaldívar’s first young adult novel is set in 2017 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras Freedom follows 18-year-old gay poet Libi and her mother, grandmother, and brothers Maynor and Alberto as they navigate the months leading up to a highly anticipated—and historically contentious—presidential election. As Libi tries to understand her queer identity and how it might affect her relationships with her friends and her politically divided but loving family living in a conservative culture, she also wrestles with her fears about Maynor’s dangerous political activism. In a conversation with PWZaldívar reflected on his immigration to the United States, the relationship between poetry and prose, and how cycles of violence and oppression manifest across time, cultures, and continents.
A large part Freedom is based on your own experiences growing up in Honduras. Why did you decide to write a young adult novel rather than a memoir?
That’s partly because some of the key points of the book are fictional. But I think beyond that, I didn’t want to write a book that could be used to answer the question, “What was it like growing up queer in Honduras?” because that is such a complex and diverse experience. My experience of growing up queer in Honduras is so different than other people’s and I didn’t want to create something that would then just be used as an anthropological device. I’m a writer. I love writing novels. I love the craft and the work that goes into imagining things and creating a story. And even though so much of it is heavily based on my life, it’s a novel and I wanted it to be treated as a novel. Sure, it’s commenting on real events and conditions, but it’s still a story that uses the kind of craft and imagination that other novelists use to write their own works.
What insights, if any, from the current political landscape did you draw on in telling this story?
While I was working on it FreedomI kept thinking, “How am I going to write this?” The 2017 Honduran election was such a big deal. The reality of the book changed in ways I don’t think the characters could have ever imagined.
I grew up in Tegus, and when I was 12, Juan Orlando Hernández and his right-wing government took power. As a queer person, that was a really big turning point in my life. From then on, the place I knew completely changed. Now it’s election year here in the US; Hernández was convicted of drug trafficking in June, and there was just an assassination attempt on a US presidential candidate. When I left Honduras in 2017, I was trying to leave all the political violence behind, and now I’m here in the United States and I see it happening in a different way.
How did your experience emigrating from Honduras to the United States influence how you dealt with Libi’s own inner conflict about whether to stay in Tegucigalpa?
I came to the United States as a student two or three months after graduating high school in 2016. It was an election year, and the Pulse shooting happened just before I immigrated. That was something I thought about a lot when I wrote Freedom because I moved here at a really strange time as a queer Latino person.
People who have never dealt with immigration sometimes treat the issue of immigration as if it were a simple matter. And it is not. It is so deeply personal. When I first started writing, I often thought I was writing Freedom from the perspective: “If I could go back in time and know what I know now, would I make the same decisions? Would I emigrate again?” And that is an unanswerable question; the answer changes every day. Sometimes I am quite confident about my decisions and sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake.
I like to ask people who have read Freedom whether they believe Libi emigrated or not, because that’s never explicitly stated in the book. When I first submitted the story to my agent, Beth Phelan, she said, “I’m really glad she decided to stay.” And when my editor, Rosie Ahmed, read it, she said, “I’m really glad she decided to go.” I’m constantly changing my mind about that decision. The reader can make that decision with her.
In addition to Libi’s first-person perspective, you also included third-person chapters from other characters in different time periods. What were you trying to convey by adding these perspectives?
I wanted the reader to experience the grief and sadness that comes with what our main character doesn’t know. As an 18-year-old, you feel like you know so much, almost everything. But then we have these complex characters like Libi’s grandmother. I think it’s hard to understand where the older ones are coming from when their political views differ from ours, and so I really wanted that character to be able to tell a little bit of her own story. And there are things that Maynor knows that Libi never learns. But I wanted the reader to get a sense of the things in between, the things that we can’t possibly know, because I think a lot of things, like forgiveness, only come when we approach them in a way where we remind ourselves, “I only know what I know.”
What is your relationship to prose and poetry and how do these two media overlap in Freedom?
Poetry often feels like a window into a moment in time. We can make beautiful connections and comparisons in that small window, but ultimately it’s still a poem. You’ve barely started reading and it’s over. In the book, Libi’s poetry does exactly what it wants, because it speaks to an audience that already knows what it’s talking about, people who are in the context of the events. But a foreign audience would need more detail; Libi’s art would have to reframe everything that’s happening.
A novel seems to be a really good place to answer questions, especially questions that you don’t have answers to at the beginning. And sometimes you don’t come out with an answer, but maybe with a little more understanding. I think that’s good enough. One of the questions I asked in Freedom was about my relationship with my grandmother. Like Libi’s grandmother, mine is a seamstress. I had a lot of questions about what would have happened if my grandmother had found out about my sexuality when I was a teenager rather than now that I’m an adult. She found out recently and it turned out fine, but when I wrote the book she didn’t know. I was really scared. I think in some ways I was trying to play out this little simulation of what would happen if she found out, because then I could decide how she reacted. But I still tried to stay true to what felt authentic to the character.
How has your debut experience been so far?
I wrote Freedom over a three-year period in my early twenties, so my relationship with the book itself has changed enormously. I had to sit with it for so long before anyone else got to see it, so I’m sick of it – I’m sick of reading it, and I feel very different to the person who wrote it. But early copies have arrived to people who seem to appreciate it and are noticing the things I wanted to have noticed, so I’m very proud and pleased with how it’s turned out. I had so many anxieties that I’ve dealt with a little better in the last few weeks. As we get closer to publication, I feel a deep sense of calm.
You have a contract for a second book with PRH. What can you tell us about it?
It will be very different than Freedom. I’m close to finishing it. It’s a magical realist story set in the United States and Honduras, and it’s about heritage, particularly the heritage of being Latin American: what does it mean to come from the incredibly violent encounter of multiple cultures? What does it mean to come from a lineage, a continent, a culture that was born in the wake of colonization?
Freedom by Bessie Flores Zaldívar. Dial, $19.99, August 27, ISBN 978-0-59369-612-5
