Credit, Ramdom House
caption,
Javier is celebrating his first birthday in the United States
Item Information
- Author, Carolina Robino
- Scroll, BBC News World
9 hours ago
They awaken the desire to hug, comfort and protect him.
The protagonist of “Solito”, the memoir of writer and poet Javier Zamora, is a 9yearold boy who embarks on an impossible and terrifying journey. A journey no one should take.
At this age, Zamora left his hometown in El Salvador with the aim of coming to the United States to join his parents who had gone before him: his father fled the civil war, his mother a few years later to meet her husband find in search of new opportunities.
His grandfather accompanied him to Guatemala, but Javier, known as “Chepito”, had to travel alone, crossing Mexico and the Sonoran Desert with other migrants who were taking the same route. Many stayed on the road. They were arrested, died or simply disappeared.
The crossing was supposed to take two weeks, but due to a betrayal it took nine. “Solito” talks about what happened in those 49 days and what relationships were formed on this journey.
It is a text in which devastating details mingle with passages of breathtaking beauty. A book deemed important, necessary and unforgettable by critics.
Read the key excerpts from the BBC News Mundo interview with Javier Zamora:
“For the first time I felt alone, lonely, alone, lonely, really lonely”… Let’s start with the sentence that gives the book its title and that reflects a very desolate loneliness. How did you feel as you described the child you were?
I remember when I wrote that sentence, it came out like this the first time, I didn’t make any edits to it. I think it marked a moment and sort of summed up what I felt while working on the book, which is like an acknowledgment of what happened to me, what I suffered, something I’ve only come to accept after a long time had to.
I came to the United States at the age of 9 and did not begin writing this memoir until I was 29. It was 20 years before I dared to remember and walk past the male shield of a Latino man who is so macho that he believes that if you don’t think about something that happened, it will just disappear.
Credit, Ramdom House
caption,
In El Salvador, Javier was a star student and won a national calligraphy contest.
But it happened. And writing freed me and helped me heal.
Of course, I didn’t choose the title, and when my agent suggested it to me, I didn’t like it one bit.
Maybe it was because I was in the middle of therapy and not quite ready to face the bleakness. Which was too big.
In fact, when I think about the title, I don’t think I had one, but three loneliness.
The first was growing up without my parents. Without my father who will go first when I am 1 year old and without my mother who will accompany him when I will soon be 5 years old.
The second happens when my grandfather, who accompanied me to Guatemala, returns to El Salvador and I feel very alone because it’s the first time in my life that I don’t have anyone around.
And the third was when after surviving with all these migrants mainly Chino, Patricia and Carla who became my family we arrived in the United States and got separated. You go, I’m left without you.
Incidentally, it is very paradoxical that the book ends with the meeting with the parents and that an enormous joy goes hand in hand with a loss that hurts so much.
Yes. This is probably the loneliness that has cost me the most. It’s the one I hid, that I forgot for 20 years until I started writing Solito.
It’s about losing those who literally carried me when I couldn’t walk, those who saved my life.
And though there is so much desolation, the book is full of tenderness. Were you aware of that when you wrote it?
Yes, I did that consciously.
It helped me a lot that in 2017, two years before I started writing Solito, I published my first book in the United States, Unaccompanied, a collection of poetry.
I was 27 years old and reading it again in the middle of my therapy made me realize how sad all the poems were about my father during the civil war in El Salvador and about my life in the United States without it papers and crossing the border.
And as I recognized the anger and resentment these verses evoked at myself, at my parents, at the United States, I realized that I was deceiving myself and that there was much more than this trauma.
When I decided to write my memoirs in prose, I made a point of being more loving to myself and to the migrants I traveled with.
It’s also my way of criticizing what journalists wrote back when the border crisis was happening and they seemed to have discovered that there were migrant children.
As one of them, what I read hurt me, these reports that reduced us to a statistic or to the profile of a suffering person, a poor person who needs help.
I knew that wasn’t all, that we didn’t have to suffer for 24 hours. There are also tender moments, funny moments, pure joy, the food, like tasting the tacos, and many other things that I hope were captured in the book.
In fact, one of the most emotional moments in the book comes when the immigration police stop you and force you to lie on the ground with your extremities stretched out and you pretend to be Superman and fly. It’s a heartbreaking picture. Is it real or a literary license?
I am convinced that this happened.
I think it’s the technique my brain used to dissociate, so I didn’t want to be lying on the ground with soldiers pointing at us. I preferred to fly or play with the lizard that appeared at that moment and that I named Paula.
Credit, Random House
caption,
Javier Zamora lives in Tucson, Arizona with his wife. “Solito” is his second book
By doing that, going beyond the scene, I’m walking.
And I know what happened, and it’s true, because even today, when I’m in a situation I don’t want to be in, like having a conversation with my wife that I don’t like, I’m like, ‘Ah , look, look at the bird, look how it flies.
It’s something that never goes away, something I learned through trauma as a child and will always be remembered.
I understand that the first scene you wrote is the boat leaving Guatemala to reach Mexico. And although it expresses the kindness of the way your comrades take care of you, it describes a brutal situation with details rarely mentioned in the press, in which there is only talk of shipwrecks or those who manage to crossing the coast and being arrested or cornered…
I began writing the book as a traditional memoir, as a 29yearold man, a poet, reminiscing about the worst nine weeks of his life.
But even as a writer, I was bored with what I was writing.
On those days, my therapist suggested I think about what would happen if I connected with the kid I hadn’t wanted to talk to or put myself in their shoes for 20 years.
We are talking about the year 2019 and there was still very little understanding in the newspapers of what it meant to emigrate to the USA. They only talked about the traveling caravans or the beast, mostly in trucks or freight trains.
But that wasn’t my story or my path. And nobody wrote about these boats, which are still in service.
It was something that made me despicable. And as I started to write, this chapter came to mind, which I almost compulsively wrote without stopping.
It was a tough experience, but writing in the present tense helped me remember many things, such as the smell of the sea mixed with gasoline and sweat. Or the dizziness and vomiting of those who walked with me and how the wind gave us back what they had vomited and we were all soaked. Or even the man who screamed because he was afraid of the sea and couldn’t swim, and who really, really scared me because I couldn’t swim either.
Were you afraid of dying or more afraid of not reaching your goal of not meeting your parents?
I don’t know if I cognitively understood the concept of death at that age, although like all humans I certainly had that intuition.
But seeing adults so terrified gave me a great dread, a dread that you don’t forget, that frightens you.
You could say that the book parallels the crossing like a maiden voyage, where you name many things you learn or that happen to you for the first time, from tying shoelaces to discovering new countries and foods you haven’t known before trying to expand his attraction to Carla…
Yes, beautiful things happened to me on this journey, but looking back I realize that I didn’t have a childhood, that I lost it on the journey. And that’s sad.
Credit, Random House
caption,
Javier Zamora signs his book of poetry Unaccompanied (Unaccompanied)
There is one particular scene that marks this: I try my first cigarette and the men who accompany me tell me to look for powdered gasoline. As a joke. Because I was naive and didn’t know it didn’t exist.
To her, that smoke was all it took to make this 9yearold boy feel more of a man or more powerful. Yes it works. But that moment also marks the end of a childhood phase of what I was and what I would have been if everything that happened afterwards hadn’t happened.
It’s something very complex because at the same time what happened shaped me and made me who I am.
Maybe because I feel like I didn’t have a childhood, that’s why the best compliment anyone can give me when we meet is to say that I look like a child.
As in every migration story, the coyote is a main character in your book. But you say he was a familiar figure to the people of your town, like a “good coyote,” which sounds counterintuitive.
Yes, that’s a point that a lot of people might not understand, but back in the 1990’s, a lot of these people that we called coyotes thought they were actually helping other people, like me or others who were fleeing a war or after the war to join their families in the United States.
And in the eyes of the people, those coyotes were doing a good thing.
And while a lot of what happened to me was a coyote’s fault, I agree. Yes, they did a good thing.
It works a bit like an economy. The work was there and someone had to do that work.
But today the market has grown so rich and good that it has become a monopoly dominated by cartels that buy and rent coyotes. There are no coyotes that don’t belong with you.
The immigration infrastructure has changed exponentially for the worse. That is why more and more migrants are dying.
Neither Salvadorans nor Americans, you prefer to be called a migrant, don’t you?
Yes, yes, I have used that word before and asked you to use it, but now I try to use the term survivor in many of my lectures and interviews because I believe the word ‘migrant’ has been distorted in such a way that … In the United States, at least, it got very negative.
Let’s finish talking about love. The relationships formed on your journey are full of it. After writing so much about pain, don’t you feel like writing about love?
Oh yes, it’s true that there might not be that much love in my poetry, but I see my prose, this book, as a big love letter to the four of us. I always hope that you will read the letter or hear from her and that we will meet again.
And what I’m writing today, that’s like the second part, my life in America, I think will be even harder to read, but it’s also a love letter, this time to my parents, who had me then 18. , and the also suffered a lot.
Credit, Random House
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Shortly after this photo was taken, Javier’s father immigrated to the United States before the El Salvador civil war.
What happened was very difficult for her. My father says he will never forget the smell I smelled when we met again. He cried a lot about it.
He read the book, but my mother couldn’t get past the first chapter.
And do you know what impact it had on other migrants?
Funnily enough, in the three years I’ve been touring with my book of poetry, I’ve never spoken to migrants about my work.
But with “Solito” it’s different. It was wonderful that reading was accepted by children or that adults came up to me and said: “I was a migrant child too.”
It’s scary that many tell me that they crossed the same month and year as me and that we were in the Sonoran Desert at the same time. For a long time I felt like I was alone with this trauma and that I had suffered more than anyone else. And that’s very toxic because you don’t care who’s next to you anymore.
But it’s not true. We are not alone. We are many.
Right now, as we speak, it’s certainly a kid from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, or El Salvador crossing the border. I hope they also know that they are not alone, that they never were.