Your story in this week’s issue, “The Ghosts of Gloria Lara,” features characters whom many readers will be familiar with—Yunior and his family. The story starts in 1980, when Yunior is an eleven-year-old in New Jersey, having emigrated from the Dominican Republic. Why did you want to return to this time in Yunior’s life?

I’ve always been struck by James Baldwin’s oft-quoted claim that “every writer has only one tale to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.”

Whether this is true of me only time will tell, but there’s no question that throughout my writing “career” I’ve returned again and again to the eighties—a lonely, turbulent decade for me personally, and a historically important decade to boot. Who among us is not haunted by a particular time in our lives? Well, maybe some people aren’t, but I am powerfully haunted by the eighties for so many damn reasons.

On the one hand, I suffered a lot of desolation and dislocations in the eighties for reasons that are too numerous to get into here, but, by visiting versions of these agonies onto Yunior, I’m able to think them through in ways that are generative to me as a person and an artist. Claude Lévi-Strauss insisted that animals are good to think with. Well, literature is also good to think with—and, more vitally, to feel with.

I also wanted to return to Yunior’s stay on what he thinks of as cancer planet because I feel as though I ain’t done justice to this gutting experience. No matter how often I write about that time, something of that harrowing period escapes me. In Yunior’s fictional biography, his stay on cancer planet was on one hand calamitous, marred by a complete dissolution of his family: his father’s departure, his brother’s cancer death. In other words, his deepest losses. And yet cancer planet was also the beginning of Yunior’s grownup life, his moving away from his family/neighborhood crater and into the wider U.S. world of books, of college, of his first artistic stirrings.

A lot to untangle and, therefore, the compulsive revisiting.

The political background in the Dominican Republic enters the story almost immediately. Yunior is listening to the news on the radio with his mother, or hearing his father respond to what he’s reading or watching. His father is a supporter of the D.R.’s various right-wing regimes. His uncle—his mother’s brother—was a radical leftist who was killed shortly after the family moved to the U.S. How much does Yunior grasp about the situation in the D.R.? What do you want the reader to understand?

Growing up, I had a lot more awareness of the political situation in the D.R. than Yunior does. He has no interest in the D.R., really, just wants to become a white American as quickly as possible. But it’s amazing what we pick up through our relations, whether we want to or not, and Yunior’s bond with his mother insures that he cannot simply turn the page on the D.R., that he cannot white it out and, by extension, he cannot white-out what’s happening throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

The eighties were turbulent times in the lower hemisphere, to put it mildly. We had U.S.-backed torture regimes and civil wars and guerrilla insurgencies and right-wing counter-insurgencies and political strife of every kind. Sure, the eighties also saw the rebirth of democracy throughout the region, but what a slow, agonizing, incomplete gestation that was. The aftershocks from those last colonial massacres were still fucking everything up in the eighties (not that those tremors have subsided much).

For a lot of the kids I grew up with, the eighties were MTV and John Hughes movies and Atari and “Miami Vice,” but for those of us who came out of the open veins of Latin America and the Caribbean our vision of the eighties was a lot more messed up, a lot more horrifying. What I heard on Spanish-language news was a world away from what English-language news was showing.

This is part of what I was trying to depict in the story. Yunior might be desperate to be an American cyclops, to shut his homeward eye and focus only on the country he’s desperate to be accepted by, but he is too immigrant for such a cognitive blinkering (too sensitive, too). In spite of his acculturation fantasies, Yunior’s contact with his Colombian neighbor, and his experiences with his father’s cruelties and his revolutionary uncle’s death, means that the hemispheric imaginary, the ghost-colonial imaginary, possesses him, for better or worse.

On February 27, 1980, a group of Colombian guerrillas seized the Dominican Embassy, which was throwing a party to celebrate Dominican Independence Day, and took the attendees hostage. Yunior becomes obsessed by what’s happening in Colombia, and by the guerrillas themselves. When did you first think that this situation might form the precipitating event for a story?

I learned about the siege on Spanish-language news the very day it started. For Dominican news, it was the story. I was more obsessed with the Iran hostage crisis at the time because that was an American problem and I was desperate to be in conversation with America, not with the Dominican Republic or Colombia. But, because I was a curious kid and because the whole thing lasted for two months, I ended up learning more about what was happening in Colombia than I might have otherwise. I was really struck by the fact that there were female revolutionaries in the mix and asked one of my teachers about it. For the life of me I cannot remember what her answer was, but sometimes the fact of the question is as important as the answer.

Anyway, that Embassy siege stayed with me. In fact, when I wrote my novel “Oscar Wao,” I kept trying to wedge that in, along with Trujillo’s rumored attempt to assassinate the President of Venezuela. Never worked out—until now.

The family has a Colombian neighbor, Mr. Longo. A few years later, his brother Wilson—or Mr. Wilson, as Yunior’s mother calls him—joins him, together with his son, Alberto. It’s the year that Yunior’s older brother is being treated for cancer, his father is mostly absent, and his mother is worried and distracted, but she becomes close to Mr. Wilson, who had been a teacher in Colombia. When you started writing the story, did you know that this friendship would blossom between the characters? Did you want to write a love story, of sorts, for Yunior’s mother?

You hit upon the key ignition point. My own mother is nothing like the mother in my stories, but growing up there were a lot of Dominican moms of that particular generation who married once, disastrously, and then spent the rest of their lives single, without another consolatory or redemptive romance—a type of viejamona. I always wondered what it would be like for someone like that to take even the most tentative steps toward romantic intimacy. And it was only when I combined that idea with the Embassy siege that everything really took off.

Side note: while I was working on the story, I listened to a lot of the albums and singers popular in the Dominican diaspora during the fifties and sixties. Songs of love and heartbreak for a generation who often knew too little about the former and too much about the latter.

One night, Mr. Wilson drunkenly mistakes Yunior’s house for his own. Yunior and his brother, fearing a burglar, confront him, with Yunior’s brother brandishing one of the guns their father had left behind. How hard was it to orchestrate that scene—did you know who would end up where? Did you always know there’d be a gun?

I grew up in the D.R. and the U.S., two countries that suffer no aversion to firearms. Truth is, among the many inaccuracies in my fiction are how few firearms I actually depict.

When I started charting out the story, I was desperate for a scene in which Longo incorporates himself into Yunior’s household in the worst way possible. Unconsciously, maladroitly. And I wanted the sons to react to this intrusion in the worst possible way, which would then bring out what is hidden in Longo.

The gun became a shortcut, a way of manifesting that particular history of suffering.

That’s the sorcery of guns; they can summon all the repressed and obscure violence of their users’ pasts. It is through our weapons that our unhealed wounds speak their hideous demotics most fluently.

And, in a story about oppressive government violence, the appearance of a gun seemed inevitable.

It isn’t until partway through the story that we find out the significance of the title. Gloria Lara de Echeverri was a Colombian politician who, in 1982, was kidnapped and eventually murdered. In the story, investigators believe that a leftist group Mr. Wilson had once supported was involved. Yunior doesn’t learn the full details until years later, long after Mr. Wilson has left the neighborhood, and the country. He’s never been able to forget the sound of Mr. Wilson’s scream. Do you think it’s ever possible to forget the trauma of being tortured? Will Mr. Wilson’s life—and even his son’s—always be marked by this?

In truth, I don’t know what to say. The optimistic part of me wants to believe that all who have suffered such tremendous violation can regain themselves, can heal, if only in part, by beauty, communion, compassion, bearing witness, justice, love. The legendary resilience of the African diaspora to which I belong gives me hope. My friendship with the writer Thomas Kennedy (rest in peace, my brother) gives me hope—he worked for a very long time with Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (R.C.T.) in Copenhagen, which is now called the Danish Institute Against Torture (DIGNITY), a collaboration that inspired his finest novel, “In the Company of Angels,” about a torture survivor seeking to reclaim himself. The courageous efforts of the Colombian Truth Commission, which helped inspire this story, give me hope. And, of course, my extended family, which includes a victim of torture, gives me hope.

But I also know that our societies have not made it easy for those who have suffered torture to attain the necessary help they need, much less provided the space for them to bear witness to what they have suffered. Inge Genefke (the founder of the R.C.T.) once said, “Half the world’s population . . . live in countries where the governments condone torture.”

The emotional impact of the polarized and bloody politics of the Dominican Republic and Colombia during the sixties, seventies, and eighties is felt thousands of miles away, in New Jersey. Was that always your intention in writing the story?

I’m sure you’re familiar with Elaine Scarry’s work on torture. She writes, “It is the intense pain that destroys a person’s self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe.”

Torture, Scarry argues, unmakes the individual. Under torture, time and space and self collapse. One might argue that the same happens to societies which are haunted by legacies of torture. There is nowhere and no when that is safe from that trauma, from this terrible time-travelling, universe-crossing horror. You might leave the country behind, you might not even know the relevant history, and yet the ghosts of those crimes will find you nevertheless.

You recently started a Substack, called StoryWorlds, which you describe as “Reflections on fiction and worldbuilding, on diasporas and elsewhere.” How often are you posting? What are you hoping to do with the platform? Does writing the Substack posts feel different from writing fiction?

To be honest, this is something of an experiment. I’m a private person by nature, never had a blog, never felt tempted by the compulsive confessionalism of our social-media moment. And yet I keep being asked by people who cannot take writing workshops with me to share some of my insights about writing. Given how little I write and how often I fail at writing, I am surprised anyone would ask me about writing, but people continue to do so.

Important context: I’ve been a teacher for nearly thirty years and despite having had opportunities to focus on my super-slow writing I’ve never been able to do only that. Why? I guess I am possessed by the Maya Angelou imperative: when you learn, teach. Slow writer or not, the truth is that I do know a few things about writing, and recently it dawned on me that I’m fifty-four—if I’m going to share what little I’ve learned, now is the time. And so I’ve been on the ’Stack talking about my odd writing techniques and philosophies in the hope that they will help somebody—that at least one person might feel accompanied in this lonely journey we call writing.

I recently noted in a post that writing is a faith-based initiative. So, equally, is teaching. I might not have a lot of books to my name, but for the time being I do have faith—in literature, in reading, in learning, in my African diasporic communities, in justice—and my Substack page is the tabernacle where my faith expresses itself, and where I wrestle with its limitations. Perhaps this experiment will amount to little more than a bunch of bizarre scribbles signifying nothing, or perhaps it will be a record of my covenant with the word and the world. ♦