There is a saying: You are never you when you travel. I would imagine even less so for an exile, for instance. Tell me about this you that you’ve grasped in Spanish, as well as in your languages of exile, English and Swedish. How do you create room in a landscape for these different lyricisms?

The fact that I could not talk about my experience with other people forced me to invent a you through my writing. This you is an unsettling force that helps me to emerge anew from any hostile, dislocated, nomadic, dimension of life.

I remember once that a friend recommended that I see a therapist just to release the emotional experience of dislocation. I went a few times to this therapist, but I could not open myself. I couldn’t trust the ‘ear’ of anybody else. I didn’t believe — even if I told my story — which was much more complicated than I admitted to myself — that I could find that kind of empathy within it. An expatriate first looks for empathy among those who are not like them, and then we are ready to take the next step: to open ourselves with our most terrible secret; that is, we look at those who are not in exile with resentment — because they feel and sense — while we, the exiled, are always out of place.

We are not in exile because we chose to be in exile, but because we were pushed or born into it. The indifference to our reality translates into a nationalism or an exaggerated sense of solidarity with conational hostility against outsiders. Sometimes it takes years before we are ready to ‘come out.’ And in my case I invented a friend in my writing — without being completely conscious of it, of course. I needed a friend so badly that I had to invent this you to survive. It was clear to me that this you became a form of survival, and that it could fulfill some of my emotional needs.

It was in Michigan that I wrote the poem “Prologue.” Writing that poem was like summarizing the last fifteen years of my life, and it was the end of my crying. I saw with clarity what was going on in my life and how the next few years would develop. I did have the opportunity to choose despite all the adversity. I decided if I would be the expatriate I was becoming, I would profit from it, do as much as I could to survive. I was also terrified by the fact that the tools I needed to write were disappearing and there was nothing I could do to keep to the old ‘possessions’ like my culture, my language, family traditions, and people I thought I loved deeply. Suddenly I realized I could survive. Not only that, I could also create and invent whatever I needed, including friends. My writing could evolve into something more valuable. I could create very sophisticated tools to communicate. Poetry is my most firm and unconditional love and faith.

I finally accepted that writing had taken the place of a relationship for me. I was always very bad at handling my relationships. In some way I was always better at expressing my complicated self in writing than in speaking. Verbal communication was never my strength, even if I managed – barely – to hold some public positions at some periods.

I was in exile for many years in Sweden; this you helped to deal with that reality. In the U.S. I don’t feel that way, I feel like an expatriate but it is funny how this you has evolved into ‘something’ very sophisticated in my writing, something that is not a painful part of myself but a good companion and listener.

Both Exiliana and House rest on a solid personal voice. Are you looking forward to expanding beyond autobiographical wellsprings in your new works?

Autobiographical writing is a period in the life of a writer; I found that I woke up as a writer very late in life. I wrote extensively nonfiction, articles and essays. I do a lot of translation and only now, after fifteen years of writing, would I say I’m comfortable with writing fiction.

Sometimes I thought that I should have started with fiction long ago. Poetry was necessarily the first thing to come out of me; I don’t think I will ever stop writing poetry. My new poetry comprehends historical events. It is also more a product of imagination than autobiographical, unlike my first two books. I also commit to other projects such as anthologies, translations, and a novel in which I include other characters than myself.

How much of an uncompromised political voice can you appreciate in poetry aesthetics?

I happen to be one of those writers who believe that the role of a writer as politically neutral is nonexistent. At some point, any serious writer will be in the middle – whether deliberate or not – of a political dilemma.

I can appreciate good poetry from Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, or others who didn’t need to define themselves in terms of political standpoints… Ultimately, I would imagine that the quality of a writing will survive or surpass any past or current political need.

Whether apathetic or unfelt, an individual sensibility is necessarily molded by collectivity and history. Your thoughts? For someone like you who believes that writing can serve a community, how would you keep the strings between both ends delicate yet taut?

This is so simple. We are one, the collective consciousness and the individual. We are alone and create alone, but we go out into the world, and bring with us our own experience. We “stamp” it in our collectivity or community.

I believe a writer is an eye, a pervasive eye that sees the reality that surrounds us, as well as the impression it makes on our souls. It reacts — or does not react — by putting it on paper. Many may decide to take a step forward and become active in changing certain realities. Other writers withdraw themselves into isolation and writing. There they try to recapture some of the truth they have experienced.

Personally, I see myself as a part of a community. I like to be alone, too — I enjoy the music of the silence and the hours I spend alone in contemplation. But I do need an alternative, the noisy interaction with others — with a world that I can and sometimes cannot understand. We have discussed so much about art only for the sake of art, but I don’t believe that a person, who has a great amount of talent, can be unconscious of the responsibility for those talents. If talents can only be individuals’s hands, the collective consciousness would not be able to appreciate its truth. I don’t think we partake of community so as to avoid being alone, but rather to extend our reach — to return to ourselves as if to return to the primitive sense of ourselves. It is like a dance, some people know how to do it, some people don’t. Even if you master technical skills, you need a contact with the environment, just as you need contact with yourself.