“There’s a reason that most people who go through the kind of traumatic events exploited by AmericanDirt choose not to write their stories as thrillers. Writing about past trauma is often a means of self-preservation,” writes ingrid_rojas_c
Photo: Amazon There is one thing Latinx writers tend to hear about our migration stories: They are too tragic. Too hard to wade through, too hard to digest, too complicated. The implication is that, if we want our stories to be read, we should produce work that’s more marketable, entertaining, and light.
There’s a reason that most people who go through the kind of traumatic events exploited by American Dirt choose not to write their stories as thrillers. Traumatic events have to be survived in the moment, and for many years after. Writing about past trauma is often a means of self-preservation. Thrillers are at cross-purposes with this: They require oversimplification and demand a source of exhilaration. I have yet to meet someone who finds their own trauma exhilarating.
Think about the worst thing you’ve ever lived through, and then imagine returning to it, diving into it again and again, over the course of years. That is what it’s like to write about past trauma. It is difficult to dwell down there, where it feels like you’re running out of air, where it feels like you might drown. The pressure is too high. The deep end, my friend the poet Tongo Eisen-Martin calls it. Trauma is a bottomless place, and I’ve spent my time down in it.
Most books about migration are heavy because the experiences are heavy. They are not thrillers, because how could we, after actually living through the pain and fear, find any thrill in it? If we include violence, it is there because we have weighed the risk of spectacle against the importance of not looking away.
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