Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The book won a Medal in Nonfiction from the California Book Awards, was a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and was long-listed for a Carnegie Medal in Excellence in Nonfiction. It was named a “Best Book of the Year” by TIME, People, NPR, Vanity Fair, Boston Globe, among others. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.
Namrata Poddar writes fiction and nonfiction, serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli, and teaches literature and writing at UCLA. Her debut novel, Border Less, is a Silver Medalist for Best Regional Fiction from 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards, a finalist for Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award and Feminist Press's Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, and longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her other writing across genres has appeared in several publications including Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Progressive, and The Best Asian Short Stories. Find her on X, @poddar_namrata, and on Instagram/Threads, @writerpoddar.
Race, Power & Storytelling
NP: The Man Who Could Move Clouds (TMWCMC) is such a layered memoir: it’s a memoir about the narrator and her mother’s temporary loss of memory and understanding the world in its aftermath, it’s about migrant life here in the United States, and as I see it, at a deeper level, it’s a memoir about indigenous approaches to knowledge, ways of understanding and being in the world, faith, spirituality, and alternative modes of healing, erased by European histories of conquest and colonial rule, more specifically in Colombia. What was your biggest motivation in writing this book, especially for the North American market?
IRC: I don’t know that I set out to write to the North American market on purpose—my writing in English and my being in the United States has come from forced migration—but I do look at that fact as coming from the circumstances of my life, and therefore the circumstances that surround my writing. The book was an important one for me to write. I feel much of my career has been devoted to thinking about what gets lost in translation, and with this book, I was trying to salvage something from those fires. Writing can be so personal. You were asking about motivations—I think my main motivation was in wanting to understand how it was possible for my mother to lose her memory, and then for me to lose my memory too. I wanted to write about the in-betweenness of having no memory, ancestral memory, and the internal and external pressures we experience to forget or erase certain things, whether because they’re too hard to carry, or there’s a political pressure to erase ways of life, thinking, or being.
NP: Before your memoir, you published an award winning novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree that The New York Times book Review called “a beautifully rendered novel of an Escobar-era Colombian childhood.” As an author can you share more about your relationship with writing fiction versus nonfiction? Does one form of storytelling come easier to you? Do you have a preference for one form over the other? Why?
IRC: I love them both! They are each difficult in their own way. Fiction frustrates me with the infinite-seeming number of choices I can make, and non-fiction with the finite-seeming number of choices I can make. They’re very different forms of meaning-making. But in fiction, I have found that the moment you write a sentence the number of choices narrows. And you write and go down this increasingly narrowing path, but the surprise in the writing can come when you are able to see a new choice where there seemed to be none. In non-fiction, you start out limited by the story as it has happened in real life, and the power of invention comes from making language out of restriction—possibly reaching for the metaphorical, the philosophical, or otherwise, in order to make the meaning you are seeking. I truly get so much joy out of both.
NP: U.S. publishing is well documented to be disproportionately white, and as a recent report by PEN America’s reiterates, the publishing industry is “a very monocultural industry, very much dominated by a single race.” Given this context, can you share what the process of writing your memoir and birthing it for a North American readership was like? How did you confront the challenges with form and translation—not only with language but also with indigenous modes of knowledge and being—that BIPOC inevitably face when writing and publishing in the West? Were there moments of complete frustration? Any pleasant surprises?
IRC: I loved working with my editor, Margo Shickmanter. We had conversations early on about how to approach this problem—that I was writing about and from a culture that she wasn’t familiar with. I knew that her thoughts and comments and questions would be a helpful guide for me to think about what a white audience might be wondering and thinking about, and we decided that we’d just have a nuanced conversation about each edit, and consider together whether an edit could make the text lose its focus. I wasn’t writing to explain myself to a white audience, but I was writing to understand and celebrate my upbringing and all the traditions that surrounded it. And there are also many things that I share with Margo—a love of dark humor, the morbid, empowered female characters—and having that common ground was important too. Margo is such a sharp editor, and her eyes on the book made it better, and I am so grateful to her. I’d say I was more involved with this book than in my first when it came to publicity and marketing. I wanted to make sure that we were talking about the book in the right way, and everyone at Doubleday was so helpful in that regard. My advice to any emerging writer worried about this is to invite your editors and publishers to a nuanced conversation, as you might know best what is authentic and right for the work.
NP: One could say TMWCMC centers Nono, the narrator’s grandfather, a renowned curandero, and his relationship to the subsequent generations of his Colombian family. And while I agree the memoir is about intergenerational ties, colonial history and decolonial thinking, I read the narrator’s story to truly be about the narrator’s mother, Sojaila. I wasn’t surprised to see the memoir end on the phrase, “I remember my mother.”
Sojaila is one of the most powerful and refreshing women “characters” I have read in contemporary American literature. As a memoirist, were some of your challenges in writing a story that centers your mother to the degree it does?
IRC: Thank you so much! That is so kind of you to say. Luckily my mother is a very extroverted person and she absolutely loves being the center of the story. She is a powerfully self-aware person too, in that she doesn’t represent herself as heroic, or good, but a flawed person who keeps trying to be good. I think that is a gift to a nonfiction writer. When we seek to write about family, we want to be able to get the whole, complicated, glorious person down on the page. When my mother talks about herself, she doesn’t leave things out to make herself look good, for example, and so that makes my job easier. I really admire her and our relationship is probably the most important in my life. I imagine I will be writing about her in one way or another for the rest of my writing life.
NP: One of my favorite moments in the memoir is when the narrator asks: “Which is the higher order? Is it to remember or to forget? Languaging or unlanguaging?” I’ve never experienced amnesia but I meditate religiously and I know what you mean via a lens of Yogic psychology. Throughout the memoir, the narrator expresses a certain blissfulness experienced in amnesia, in a life lived without the mediation of memory, yet this memoir (like every memoir) is a testimony to the author’s memory and to “languaging” as is your book’s last line. To return to your question then: as a writer, which one is the higher order for you? Is it language or non-language? Why?
IRC: Thank you for that beautiful question. I think the higher order is non-language. Language will always be an imperfect tool. But how beautiful to spend one’s hours using a blunt tool trying to communicate a true thing?
NP: What are you currently working on?
IRC: I am working on fiction! I can’t say too much about it yet, but it’s been incredibly energizing to switch to fiction. I have been loving changing point of view, and generally feel like a kid at a candy store, losing my mind over all the options newly available to me.
Sources:
PEN America “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing”
