May 9, 2018
http://therumpus.net/2018/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-quintan-ana-wikswo/
Sara Rauch of the Rumpus writes about my novel SCAR: “Reducing this novel to a plot summary doesn’t do it the justice it deserves: the book aims to explore the experience of mixed-race folx, queer sexuality and erotics, and gender dis/enfranchisement; the characters are haunting, and the prose provocative.
Wikswo, who grew up queer in the South, spent ten years on an NEA fellowship visiting sites in Virginia where hate crimes have taken place, taking photographs and re-examining their histories. Her methodology—which includes the use of segregation-era cameras, and no digital manipulation—allows for uncanny images that capture the complex and contradictory nature of history. Placed alongside her revelatory text, Wikswo’s photographs help create an aesthetic that is fluid, gothic, and electrifying.
We spoke via email in early February, delving into the facets of trauma, family lineage, and her creative processes”
EXCERPT: (click here for full interview)
Rumpus: As I read A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be, I couldn’t help but think that everything in the book (characters, narratives, nature, inanimate objects) seeks to break boundaries, which got me thinking that in order for something to heal cleanly it must often be re-broken and set right. Even though the novel takes place in the 1930s, the story feels like an apt metaphor for the current state of affairs in America.
Wikswo: This is the very phenomenon of trauma—fragmented sensory and cognitive data that loops and loops until the fractured pieces find resting places in the self. Post-traumatic stress disorder is the experience of breaking over and over again. In my experience, the ability to survive is not about sustaining a single wound and then healing it; we are required to survive the initial wound, and then each re-wounding, and then accept the fact that healing may or may not occur. It’s a surrender, and also a resistance movement.
There’s no question for me that if healing is to happen, pain is the path to get there. Pain is necessary to build strength, endurance, tenacity, stubbornness. Pain and discomfort are not the enemy—the enemy is the pressure inside that suggests that they will win in the end.
American culture—especially since the 1950s—celebrates comfort and ease. That’s success. That’s making it. That’s being rich, and powerful, and never having to be bothered by anything whatsoever. I set A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be in the 1930s because it was between wars, it was the Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl, and a time of exploring ideas like socialism and the New Deal and anti-poverty work.
After WWII, people returned from a destroyed world and wanted never to suffer again. We ran to distraction and escape and superficiality of consumer commodities, where the goal is comfort at any cost. We need the opposite now—a willingness to suffer for a higher reason, to acknowledge pain, to commit to creating and sustaining and enduring existential discomfort.
There is a beautiful legacy of liberation organizing by free blacks and enslaved people, queer folx, women, Indigenous resistance workers, whose sight lines guide us not to navigate away from trauma but face it with courage and change and restitution.
A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be is set in the 1930s but we are in a time loop where it’s clear that as a country, we are walking over exploited bodies at every step. The book is about how the bodies, minds, and souls of mixed-raced women and women of color are the first to be punished for existing—and how we can navigate this reality to reach a place of agency.