Sheila Maldonado: The Poet as Pariah
Sheila Maldonado is a Manhattan-based Honduran-American writer and English instructor. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and won a Creative Capital award as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She has served as an artist-in-residence on Governors Island for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and as a Cultural Envoy to Honduras for the U.S. State Department. She currently teaches English for Borough of Manhattan Community College, and as a teaching artist has led residencies for Teachers & Writers Collaborative and National Book Foundation. She holds degrees in English from Brown University and Creative Writing and Poetry from The City College of New York.
Sheila Maldonado may have made history as the first person to ever request a Zoom call at midnight. And yet, as we began to speak, just one night owl to another, about isolation, shitty work environments, generational deja-vus, LatAm politics, and love, it felt as though I was catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen in ten years. (A friend who, rightfully so, is tired of no one giving Honduras either its proper credit or grief). Maybe it was the hour, or maybe both of us had forgotten about the edible we’d snuck in before the call. Nonetheless, I found it to be one of the most honest and heartwarming conversations I’ve ever had with a stranger. Something about this pandemic has brought out, in a general sense, a very cathartic and genuine voice within us all; though I’m sure Maldonado was ahead of the trend, seeing as she confessed that she’d made the choice to drop out of society long before the mandates.
Maldonado’s most recent poetry collection that’s what you get is a culmination of past tonterias, personal statements, reflections, and strategically placed “my-kus”, or, as she might say, “an incomplete, complete thought”. She joked, more than once, that if she’d ever translated the book, the title would have changed to “por pendeja”. To say Maldonado’s unapologetic authenticity is refreshing would be a gross understatement. Her decision to go against the grain, the belief of having to earn a place or thing in this country after migration, a belief many who fit into our demographic share, is just a sliver of what makes her, and her poetry so powerful. Her example is a testament to the generations of kids who saw their parents go through the strains of immigration and over-exploitation. Her work is not only the start of a conversation, but the start of a critique, a new tone of voice bringing fresh style and unorthodox form. We’ve been working together on this interview for about a year, and I can honestly say, it was well-worth the wait.
Marisabel Rodriguez: In this case, I’m going to have to start with the title. “That’s what you get” usually precedes “I told you so,” the term no one loves to hear but everyone loves to say. Your poems don’t necessarily seem directly confrontational, but more internally confronting a lot of opposing forces and norms. Who, or what, are you speaking to?
Sheila Maldonado: Mostly I’m speaking to myself or the narrator, that is a version of me. I grew up with a harsh inner voice that I can never really let go of. Perhaps it is Catholicism, or the conquest, or my mother. It is funny at this point. But you know – painful.
The ‘that’s what you get’ could be addressed to you the reader, of course. Especially a reader who expects certain things just from reading my bio. What if you didn’t know my bio? How would you react to these poems? I mean, do you even read poems?
It could also just be addressed to the publisher who asked me for this book and waited so long for these poems. I made him suffer so.
MR: I have to be honest, I found it hard to define the way I’d categorize your voice. I want to say working class, but let’s be real: it’s much, much deeper than that. You write for those who live and own their truth, for a whole generation of immigrants who rewrote and broadened the “U.S experience.” Your choice of language, revealing intimate experiences, all screams “capitalism and aesthetic be damned.” I’m wondering how you came to find this voice; I think in popular culture terms, I’m asking for your villain origin story.
SM: I don’t know about aesthetic be damned. We all have aesthetics. We come from worlds and conversations. I don’t live in a vacuum. No writer does. I am in New York and read and was exposed to poetry in school and in the world around me. I have been here all my life except for college. My father loved poetry growing up in Honduras and gave me a sense of that. He loved old-fashioned romantic Latin American poems and I admired his love, but the poems he liked, I did not necessarily [like also]. I liked listening to him, but as I grew up I was exposed to other poetry. In college in the early ’90s, I read Sandra Maria Esteves, the Nuyorican legend since the ’60s; saw Willie Perdomo and Paul Beatty read in the 90s too, in that time when Nuyorican Cafe was re-surging. I started grad school the same semester 9/11 happened, and was taught by Elaine Equi, reading New York school poets like Frank O’Hara from the 50s and Ron Padgett from later on. All of this conversational and or spoken word work, all informed by the city. I am from a history of New York poetry, I’m in conversation with that.
My villain origin story: I’m an American brat born to immigrants from a place that is either invisible or maligned. I am an unknown de facto colony bastard. I am from some real shade, some real shame, not a lot of pride. No one knew where or what Honduras was growing up, so it was hard to say I or my family was from there without a ‘where?’ or ‘what?’ in response. Then when it appeared in the news it was a place where so much fucked up shit was happening, Iran Contra, so many hurricanes. It was either run from that or be that sad, shady thing. Either way, don’t talk about it. I talk about it in my own roundabout way. Mostly I have to be me, whatever that is. On the page I can be anything, but there is something of ‘me’ there.
MR: Don’t laugh, but I’ve only been to New York twice in my life. And yet, all the people I’ve known from the city have this extremely unique quality I can’t quite describe. I want to define it as Limitless Pill-level street smarts, but even that is completely missing the mark. It’s an awareness, a calmness that fails to shake with chaos. How would you describe it?
SM: Superficial neurotics. Fashion masking crises. Beats holding up very delicate things. Some days my clothes are better than me. I wish. Some days my hair is better than me. Looking good, feeling empty. Looking terrible, feeling worse, still funny as shit, the funniest. Walls, armor, protection. Fear. The streets are all wonder and fear. One of my friends calls me Shield.
“I’m an American brat born to immigrants from a place that is either invisible or maligned. I am an unknown de facto colony bastard. I am from some real shade, some real shame, not a lot of pride.”
MR: You also mention gentrification a lot, you mention the cafe’s you mention switching laundrymats, and these things, to you, become political, I believe you described it as “trading communion for convenience”, but I know this is not new. How does it usually play out, physically, and in inner dialogue?
SM: I think the smallest things are political. I choose to write about small moments cuz everything is in them. Aesthetics are in them. I’m not really sure what this question is asking honestly, something about gentrification perhaps. Yeah it is bad. Except for the Highline and the Highbridge in NY which are renovations and revisions. The old is not discarded, it is made new or given new life. A remade ruin. I’m into that. I’m trying to be that. I don’t know if that answers your question.
MR: I see the essence of gender (if that’s even the word I’m looking for), specifically in “Ode to the Mammogram” where you imply that women’s health, or perhaps addressing hyperfemininity in general, isn’t quite your comfort zone. How has this experience been for you? What’s something you’d say to young girls today who’d identify similarly to you?
SM: I think there are many uncomfortable people, women, girls; yes, still. I think my ‘narrator’ speaks in this way that reflects their unknowing, the fact that they know they don’t know. I do like to reflect doubt and insecurity, because many people feel that. I feel that. I still move forward in the world, the days continue whether I don’t know something or not, whether I want them to or not. I like a narrator that does not know everything about being a woman or a person. I don’t offer answers. I am a mirror; I write as a mirror. You interpret what you see in it.
MR: You also talk about sex, about your vagina. How do these thoughts come into play based on the previous implications about your self-identified tomboy-ness, your demeanor?
SM: I think the thoughts are play. My vulva poem is one of a million pussy related poems in the world. So many people have been doing that one. I think I might have heard a line of Lana del Rey’s; something about “my vagina tastes like cherry coke”. I don’t even know much of her work but heard that at a party and then the poem started from there. But I feel like many women write about vaginas and have fun with it. I would hope so. Please have fun with your vaginas. Also with your vagina poems.
MR: Reading “and still I lay” felt very validating to me. It speaks to the 20+ years my mom cleaned houses, speaks to the multiple times in my life I’ve worked 3 jobs, speaks to our community coming home with braces, bruises, limited mobility, exhaustion, and still waking up for work the next day. Right before the finale of this 5-page poem, you write “they all kept saying/your xenophobia/and productivity/are gonna kill you/lay//when you tell me/write ‘resist’/what I read ‘is rest’/and lay”. I know how I feel about it, specifically juxtaposed with the “they’re stealing our jobs” haiku that natural-borns love to circulate, do you feel like going off on a tangent for a minute?
SM: “and still I lay” is my longest poem cuz it meant a lot to me. A lot of the book is meant to be funny and then takes a turn because things do get serious. I never want to be over-serious about anything, but survival is worth some seriousness. I think a lot of what I write and how I write is about survival, how to survive this world, love, family. I don’t know if i make it most days. Focusing on the absurdity of things helps: humor, being ridiculous. The poem is, of course, jumping off Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t have it in me to rise, many days’. I wanted to mock “Still I Rise”, but I couldn’t do it in the end. It became about the real ways in which doing nothing is a kind of protest, just refusing to participate in this world. There was some manifesto a friend told me about, “The Right to be Lazy” by Paul Lafargue that is ancient and anti-capitalist that seemed along these same lines. I tried to read it, but it was long and I gave up. I know what that old socialist meant though.
I have chosen this not-money-making path with poetry, and I feel like I’m a pariah sometimes for it. How dare I, as a child of immigrants, not toil for all the pretty things? How can I not want a house and a family and all the ‘American Dream’ trappings? Nothing has ever been as it was supposed to be. That’s all right. I know the TV and the internet tell you different, but it is okay to retreat from these things that you didn’t totally imagine for yourself, that some outside source told you you wanted.
MR: I’m noticing a lot of Latine themes (duh) like religion, finding familial function in dysfunction, frequent use of the word ‘alien’, and being a woman in this culture. New York, from what I hear, contains a lot of CentAm and SurAm diversity; do you think the demographic in any way helps lessen the weight of these burdens, or is it the complete opposite? What are some of the most evident similarities and/or differences between the way the above-mentioned list of components operate in NY vs LatAm?
SM: I didn’t grow up with many Central or South American people that weren’t my family. I did see some here and there. My father hung more with Hondurans because he was new to the country. Mama was too, but she did not hang at all. I grew up in a most remote ghetto, Coney Island, with the Black and Puerto Ricans cuz they’re butt naked, streaking through the ever murky streets of the urbanized areas blasting out the speakers is the hip hop hysteria (Google it). [We did: it’s a line from ‘Verses From The Abstract’, a track from A Tribe Called Quest’s second album, The Low End Theory.]
I went to a school on the border of the last ghetto before Staten Island and ‘Russian Jewish Heights’– which is Brighton Beach– and above was Big Italy Bensonhurst, in the 80s when Yusuf Hawkins was killed. So I was Puerto Rican, my mother got confused for Russian, and my father for Arab. I don’t know what my brother got confused for.
There are Central Americans in Long Island, mainly El Salvador. They have been around a little while, probably since the 80s. My family came in the 70s. The majority of Hondurans in New York are probably Black, Garífuna. I don’t think all are Garífuna. I believe they came to NY first. If people knew Hondurans, they did not think I was that because a Honduran was Black to them. South Americans were more in Queens, like Colombians in the 80s. We used to eat at a restaurant called ChibCha. My parents were more Spanish than me. I was Grindia, what my father called me, gringa india. They made fun of my Spanish and I laughed at their English. Then I became a teenager and it sucked. We were really different. I was a 60s hippie ghetto princess and they were kind of self-hating and harsh, they thought they were funny. New York makes it all a mashup of prejudices and pain. Lots of joking and bullying.
I don’t know what it is like in Lat Am except for when I went to visit Honduras every 2-3 years with my mother. I almost died the first time (I’ve said this before, probably trying to get a scholarship,) from dysentery. I was a weak American baby. I never took well to it, except for one time when I was a teenager and hung with my brother’s girl cousins and went to Copán.
Now I am a thoroughly rodent style New Yorker. I’m surviving these apocalypses here. It is my Copán, my deteriorating city of the Maya Empire State.
MR: In “it was the year of the erupting tenements” you write “Our rents moved to/the vigesimal system of the ancient Maya./We were hired to play versions/ of ourselves like Hawaiians,” can you describe this version of yourself? What, if any, are the benefits of this version? What is the cost of this transaction? What’s the ideal version of yourself, the most authentic?
SM: I just described it there. I am a virtual Hawaiian who runs away to the forest. Read the poem. The poem sez it better than I can again. I wrote it in the before times of course, at the request of the awesome Joanna Furhrman:
MR: The “my-kus” entries read like thoughts one might scribble in a notebook whilst en route to work, the “incomplete, but I’ll go deeper later” thoughts that when you get home you realize were already complete. Like two minute songs you wish were longer but can’t imagine any differently. How did you decide on their placement, and what function do they serve as part of this series?
SM: It was a back and forth trying to figure where to put all those little thoughts. I love the haiku form, so does my editor/publisher who is also a writer, Joe Pan. One of his many books is a whole book of haiku so we dissected those little bits a lot actually. I have general themes and ideas in the book that never really make up full sections. I can never figure out how that works, how people divide their poetry books that way. So many of my ideas and themes bleed into different poems. I resist categories, but needed some way to organize. The my-kus became dividers between loose categories that had terrible names in my head like love crap or political shit.
I love the brief thought. It can feel very complete. It is like a facebook status or a tweet besides being like a haiku. I love taking pictures too, so the brief text feels like a quick moment or revelation captured. I think it might be what I do best. If I can’t get out a whole longer piece I can approach it with haiku, and I do have a few longer poems in the book that are made of mainly haiku or haiku-like stanzas. It is a form you learn as a kid in school cuz people think ‘oh, it’s short, it’s easy to teach,’ but it has to have some impact or weight. Real haiku doesn’t give it all away, it conveys. It never overstates. It is concerned with economy and helps you to not overwrite, which I think a lot of people do and which I am doing now.
MR: You dedicate this collection of poems to your mami, and you’ve chosen to write about her, your relationship with her, her relationships with others. In “Leaving Coney”, you write “she said I would age fast/cuz I am so sentimental” and it made me think of America Ferrera’s character in SuperStore, where she says “See, we [latine parents] don’t really need our children to like us, we just break their spirit so the world doesn’t.” I think about my relationship with my mom, how she’s always telling me exactly what I need to hear, never what I want to hear, the shared experience so many of us have: your mom bringing you cut up fruit after a fight as apology/peace, all the unorthodox ways in which Latine moms love us and show our love for us. How has your relationship with her changed over time? Is there something, a specific dicho, or a ritual between the two of you that you hold really close to your heart?
SM: Well, I’m old now so I understand her way more, have more patience– I think I just generally try my best to see her as a person. You can’t do that as a kid. I don’t have kids but I am a teacher and I see how dehumanizing that can be, how students don’t see you as a person but as a means to an end, a grade, their survival. Adults are there for children in all these ways, they do depend on us but when everyone is grown there is another understanding. There is also, thankfully, distance. You can maintain one in order to understand a bit better.
It was super hard growing up, I really felt like we were from not just different times but vastly different times. I felt like she was from the 1800s or some such. Sometimes visiting Honduras felt that way, like they were way back in time and NY was so modern. But there was a lot of catching up everyone did. The internet helps with that and doesn’t. My mama is internet savvy in this way that I could have never imagined and it has changed her and reinforced some of who she is. It is hard to really make the generations before understand what it means to have been without that connection, that mirror of the whole world. The world has changed us. I can remember how difficult childhood was but this is another time, I do have agency and I am the adult now: as scary as that is. It’s pretty bizarre, really.
Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collection one-bedroom solo (A Gathering of the Tribes / Fly by Night Press). She is a CantoMundo Fellow and Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She teaches English for the City University of New York. She was born in Brooklyn, raised in Coney Island, the daughter of Armando and Vilma of El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras. She lives in El Alto Manhattan. @shelamal
Marisabel Rodriguez Ramos is a graduate of Loyola University New Orleans. She has a BA in English, with a concentration on rhetoric. She has interned for the New Orleans Review, Object Lessons, and is an editor for the Chestnut Review. Outside of interviews, Rodriguez’s writing tends to lean more towards academia, specifically sociology and religion. She is currently writing a book on Latine culture and spirituality.