Set in 2017 Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Bessie Flores Zaldívar’s debut YA novel Libertad follows 18-year-old gay poet Libi and her mother, grandmother, and brothers Maynor and Alberto as they navigate the months before a highly anticipated—and historically controversial—presidential election. As Libi struggles to understand her queer identity and how it could affect her relationships with her friends and politically divided yet loving family living in a conservative culture, she also wrestles with her fears over Maynor’s dangerous political activism. In a conversation with PW, Zaldívar reflected on immigrating to the U.S., the relationship between poetry and prose, and the way in which cycles of violence and oppression appear across time, cultures, and continents.
Much of Libertad is based on your own experiences growing up in Honduras. Why did you decide to write a young adult fiction novel as opposed to a memoir?
Part of it is because some of the big points of the book are fiction. But I think more than that, I didn’t want to write a book that would be used to answer the question of, “What was it like growing up queer in Honduras?” because that is such a complex and varied experience. My experience of growing up queer in Honduras is so different from other people and I didn’t want to create something that would then just be used as an anthropologic device. I’m a writer. I love writing fiction. I love the craft of it and the work that comes with imagining stuff and making a story work. And while 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 making commentary about real-life events and conditions, but it’s still a story that uses the sort of craft and imagination that other fiction writers use to write their own works, too.
What, if anything, did you draw from the current political landscape to tell this story?
As I was working on Libertad, I kept thinking, “How am I gonna write this?” The 2017 Honduran election was such a big deal. The reality of the book has shifted in ways that I don’t think the characters could ever imagine being possible.
I grew up in Tegus, and when I was 12 years old, Juan Orlando Hernández and his right-wing government took control. As a queer person, that was a really big demarcation in my life. That’s when the place I knew completely changed. Now it’s election year here in the U.S.; Hernández was convicted of drug trafficking in June and there was just an attempted assassination on a U.S. 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 seeing it happen in a different way.
How did your experience emigrating from Honduras to the U.S. inform your approach to Libi’s own internal conflict about whether to remain in Tegucigalpa?
Two or three months after I graduated from high school in 2016, I came to the U.S. as a university student. It was an election year, and the Pulse shooting happened right before I immigrated. It was something I was thinking about a lot when I was writing Libertad because I moved at a really weird time as a queer Latin person.
People who have not dealt with immigration sometimes treat the question of immigrating as if it’s a simple thing. And it isn’t. It’s so deeply personal. When I first started drafting, I often thought that I was writing Libertad from the perspective of, “If I could go back in time and know what I know now, would I make the same choices? Would I immigrate again?” And that is an unanswerable question; the answer changes every day. Sometimes I feel pretty confident about the choices I made, and sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake.
I like to ask people who have read Libertad if they think Libi emigrated or not, because it is never explicitly stated in the book. When I first submitted the story to my agent, Beth Phelan, she said, “I’m really glad she makes the choice to stay.” And when my editor, Rosie Ahmed, read it, she said, “I’m really glad she makes the choice to leave.” I change my mind all the time about what that decision is. The reader gets to make that choice with her.
In addition to Libi’s first-person-present POV, you also include third-person chapters from other characters during different time periods. What did you want to convey by adding these perspectives?
I wanted the reader to get to experience the grief and sadness that comes with what our main character doesn’t get to know. As an 18-year-old, it feels like you know so much, it feels like you know almost everything. But then we have these complex characters like Libi’s grandmother. I think it’s hard to understand where elders are coming from when their politics differ from ours, and so I really wanted that character to get to tell a little bit of her own story. And there are things that Maynor knows that Libi doesn’t ever get to find out. But I wanted the reader to get a sense of the things in between, the stuff 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 mediums intersect in Libertad?
Poetry often feels like a window into a moment in time. We can make beautiful connections and comparisons in that little window, but it’s ultimately still a poem. Almost as soon as you start reading it, it’s over. In the book, Libi’s poetry is doing exactly what she wants it to do because she’s speaking to an audience that already knows the things she’s talking about, people who are in the context of the events. But a foreign audience would need more specifics; Libi’s art would need to reframe everything that’s going on.
A novel feels like a really good place to answer questions, especially questions you don’t have the answers for going in. And sometimes you don’t come out with an answer, but maybe you come out with a little bit more understanding. I think that’s good enough. One of the questions I approached in Libertad was regarding my relationship with my grandmother. Like Libi’s grandmother, mine is also a seamstress. I had a lot of questions about what would have happened if my grandmother had learned about my sexuality when I was a teenager versus now that I’m an adult. She only very recently learned about it, and it turned out fine, but when I was writing the book, she didn’t know. I felt really scared. I think that in some ways, I was trying to play out this little simulation of what would happen if she learned, because then I got to 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 Libertad over a period of three years in my early 20s, so my relationship with the book itself has changed tremendously. I had to sit with it for so long before anyone else got to see it, so I’m tired of it—I’m tired of reading it and I feel very different from the person who wrote it. But early copies have been reaching people who seem to be appreciating it and noticing the things that I wanted to be noticed, so I’m very proud and satisfied with what came of it. I had so many fears that I’ve become a little better about in the last few weeks. As we’re getting closer to publication, I’m feeling a deep sense of calm.
You have a second book contracted with PRH. What can you tell us about it?
It’s going to be very different from Libertad. I’m really close to finishing it. It’s a magical realism story that takes place in the U.S. and Honduras that’s about legacy, specifically the legacy of being a Latin American person: what does it mean that you come from the incredibly violent meeting of several cultures? What does it mean to come from a lineage, a continent, a culture that was created from the process of colonization?
Libertad by Bessie Flores Zaldívar. Dial, $19.99 Aug. 27, ISBN 978-0-59369-612-5
