A few years after Valeria Luiselli began writing Lost Children Archive, her third novel and the first she has written in English, she broke off to write something more urgent. For months, Luiselli, who was born in Mexico and lives in the United States, had been volunteering as an interpreter for undocumented child migrants appealing for asylum in the US. It was heartbreaking and hard, and none of those she helped to find pro bono lawyers has, in the years since, been given permanent leave to stay. Luiselli’s writing stalled and in a fever she wrote Tell Me How It Ends, a non-fiction account of the terrible plight of these children. “I couldn’t think or write about anything else. That book was personal testimony to what I was seeing.”
What she was seeing was this: traumatised children who had entered the country, unaccompanied, aboard La Bestia – “the beast” – a network of freight trains on the roofs of which half a million Central Americans ride annually. It is terrifically dangerous. Those who don’t fall on to the tracks risk death from exposure, overhanging branches, or rape and violence from smugglers, thieves and police who attack people onboard. “There is a saying about La Bestia,” writes Luiselli. “Go in alive, come out a mummy.” But of course, “children do what their stomachs tell them to do. They chase after life, even if that chase might end up killing them.” If and when they finally reach the US, they fall into the hands of immigration officers known to shout: “Speak English! Now you’re in America!”, and a new nightmare begins.
The act of bearing witness would, ultimately, become the driving force behind the novel to which she returned. Lost Children Archive, longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction this week, started out as an angry screed, overly didactic and too bogged down in politics. What it became, in its final iteration, is a wonderfully subtle story in which the experience of migrant children is filtered through the delicate, funny, effortlessly poetic account of a family’s road trip from New York to the Mexican border, in which the central couple’s marriage disintegrates even as they strive to document the disintegration around them.
There are many memorable lines. The narrator kisses a man who isn’t her husband before reprimanding herself. “No, he’s not interesting, he’s just beautiful, and his beauty is of the most vulgar kind: indisputable.” Of the experience of migrant children, she says: “A child refugee is someone who waits.” The narrator and her husband, both writers, are engaged in answering the question “What does it mean to document something, an object, our lives, a story?” And its corollary, “What does it mean when those lives go undocumented?” But then there is their five-year-old daughter chanting from the back seat of the car and in distant echo of her parents: “The point is, the point is, the point is always pointy.”
The point is, as Luiselli herself came to realise, “fiction needs to breathe,” and so while Lost Children Archive is a deeply political novel, as long as she was “using it as a vehicle for my own rage, stuffing it with everything from children’s testimonies to the history of American interventionism in central America” – she laughs at this failed attempt – “it just wasn’t working. There’s a different way of assuming a political sense in fiction, I think.”
Fierce political engagement is something Luiselli identifies with the female line of her family. Her grandmother had nine children and devoted herself to helping indigenous Mexican communities, while her mother moved to Chiapas for a few years to join the Zapatistas. Luiselli herself grew up largely outside Mexico – her father was a diplomat and her mother worked for NGOs – and now, post-divorce, lives in New York with her 10-year-old daughter, 20-something niece, and a mother who drops in all the time. “It’s a matriarchal house,” she says. “My daughter came down the stairs one day, not long after her dad had moved away, and said: ‘OK, I get it mum; this is the all-woman house now.’” She shrugs. “Maybe!”
Because of her peripatetic childhood, Luiselli felt a strong compulsion to write her first books in Spanish, largely as a political act. She had learned to write English before Spanish and her Spanish was, by the standards of her generation, odd. “It was kind of stiff; it didn’t have the inflections of people my age, or of Mexican Spanish generally, which is very playful and streetwise, almost like rhyming slang. And I was never able to play those language games. I spoke older Spanish.”
After a period spent in South Africa, where her father opened Mexico’s first embassy in the country after Nelson Mandela’s election, Luiselli went to a boarding school in India, an idealistic place that offered young people scholarships to promote world peace. It was attended by around 200 teenagers from 90 countries, Luiselli says, and “we were expected to do a lot of social work. I think that experience, early on in my life, meant that academic expression was always linked to a deeper commitment to the community around me.” She returned to Mexico for college, before moving to New York to attend graduate school at Columbia University and begin work on her first novel, Faces in the Crowd (in Spanish Los Ingrávidos).
Novel-writing, says Luiselli, is not something she can detach from her everyday life. She was married to the Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue, and it seemed natural to incorporate the end of a marriage into a novel, completed in the aftermath of her own. When she went back to look over the journals and notes that informed Lost Children Archive, she saw that the germ of the story had been there from the outset – “a story about children and parents; children listening to the stories that their parents tell them”.
The combining of “the most quotidian, banal, everyday scenes” with the horror of unaccompanied minors at the border was not, she says, a strategy to help readers identify with the action, but merely a representation of the jumble of life as it is. One of the worst expectations of fiction, she says, is that it be “relatable”.
“I find that, I’m sorry, bullshit. Something is good because it really speaks to me; because it really forces me out of myself, to take an imaginative step outward and into another. But that idea of relatability is very much in the culture of teaching literature. The other idea is that something is good because it teaches empathy. The bar is so low! If you’re going to devote your life to something as questionably useful as literature or art, I think there’s a commitment that you make to understanding others, their minds and souls, as a minimum standard.” She pauses. “That said, maybe it’s true that we have to work from the bare minimum because it seems like it is difficult for a lot of people to imagine being in someone else’s life.”
Faces in the Crowd tells the story of two characters in Harlem who feel themselves to be slowly, inexorably, disappearing. In her second novel, The Story of My Teeth, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, Luiselli combines traditional storytelling with some of the avant-garde devices that reappear in Lost Children Archive – photos, documents, even an intervention by another writer, all of which, as the New York Times review noted at the time, make it a “porous” book born of a “shared vision”.
Luiselli is hostile to flat representation, nowhere more so than in the treatment of migrants, or other victims of trauma. When she lived in Mexico, she says, she held unfashionable views about the popular novels based on the drug wars there, “most of which reproduced the violence. I had a political sense that it was parasitical,” she says. Torture porn. “Yes.” And the same goes for the representations of migrants.
“Stories are told in a way that is never humanising of the people involved. It’s either ‘numbers’, or ‘surges’, or ‘masses’, or ‘caravans’. Or it is the absolute victim kind of story that completely others them – it’s not a person with agency. I’ve spoken to many mothers who decide to immigrate here, seeking asylum, and they have very strong politics. And the way that they are political is never understood or coded into the narrative. It’s always about this poor mother who had to leave; it’s never her decision or her agency. Even when there’s an attempt to humanise, it goes overboard in terms of victimisation.”
In Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli recounts the story – tenderly, unhistrionically – of a teenage boy whose asylum claim she helped elucidate for the court, and who had in his possession a rare item: evidence of his persecution in the form of a police report he had filed in his native country, detailing the risk he was at from gang members who threatened him, shot his best friend, and followed him home from school. (The police did nothing, at which point he decided to leave.) This piece of paper assumes talismanic properties for the boy and, writes Luiselli, “he unfolded it gently, slowly, treated it with the same careful precision a surgeon might”, before offering it to her as proof he isn’t lying. Then he puts it back in his pocket “like a lucky charm”. In the flatness of her delivery, the horror of the boy’s story becomes somehow more vivid.
If there is one benefit of the Trump administration, she says, it is that “comfortable liberal people have woken up politically. Sometimes it feels a little bit late, particularly with immigration, because the Obama administration was not great. But I do see in the younger generation a more committed political engagement that goes beyond Twitter ranting and into building organisations.”
Luiselli herself is involved in running a fiction workshop for young female asylum seekers in a detention centre in upstate New York, a tricky task given the legal pressures on them. (Nothing they write can risk contradicting or complicating the account they first gave to officials at the border, a stricture she has circumvented by having them create a zine and work on “collective writing”). The thoughts one is left with after reading Luiselli – the horror of being lost and alone; wondering how would my child fare out there in the desert? – come together in her latest novel with this overarching question of how to preserve that which has been lost. “It is a novel about documentary form and the politics of that. It is about who is included and excluded.”
It is also about the value of fiction itself. “Sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know,” writes Luiselli in the novel. “And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge that may ever accumulate.”
• Lost Children Archive is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. Valeria Luiselli will discuss her novel at the Southbank Centre, London SE1, on 19 March at 7.30pm (tickets £12).
