Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler is a story that takes place in Britain and Brazil, following an unnamed narrator as she navigates her ethnic and cultural identity and a sense of belonging to both cultures. While the novel is narrated primarily from the from the point of view of the protagonist, other female voices, members of the narrator’s family, also narrate their stories to create a wider picture of a family. Stubborn Archivist is one of those novels that you can’t easily put a label on: to some Stubborn Archivist may be a #MeToo novel while to others it’s a mother-daughter story or a bicultural identity narrative; the undeniable link is, of course, the female protagonist whose voice comes through beautifully. The novel ends mid-sentence, perhaps indicative of the unfinished nature of her life story. We spoke to Yara Rodrigues Fowler about her brilliant debut and the ways it pushes the boundaries of storytelling. - Sumaiyya Naseem
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Mariner Books, 2019
Congratulations on your debut! What was the publishing process like for you as a debut author? Were there challenges or surprises that came your way, especially considering the distinct form of your novel?
Thanks! The publishing process is wild. I knew absolutely nothing about publishing when I was writing. I formatted the book as if it was an essay or a blog post (I didn’t know any different!) and my UK editor had to explain how line breaks work and the difference between m and n dashes (one is shorter and the other is longer; neither is a hyphen). One copywriter added full stops across the whole manuscript! But I’ve had brilliant editors who have loved and protected the form of the novel. Pilar Garcia-Brown, my US editor suggested putting a different chapter at the start of the US edition, so the book actually exists in two different versions—which I think is very cool and reflects the oral, fragmentary spirit of the text.
There’s an intricate combination of prose and poetry in the novel. What does the novel form mean to you as a writer who is pushing the boundaries of how the form can serve the storyteller?
It means so many things. I suppose it’s a way of disrupting the British Realist Novel, which was a tradition I was strongly and consciously writing against. The British novel has been a tool of colonialist domination (think Rider Haggard, Dracula, Jane Eyre). and I wanted to intervene —textually—in that domination. I wanted to create a novel that held back details—that was too stubborn allow for the domination of its subject—and that was a testament to the inevitable incompleteness of the histories that survive.
Stubborn Archivist also draws from a more brazilian orally and poetically-driven story-telling form, and the Latin American tradition of blank space (la pagina en blanco). Rather than have an unreliable narrator draw attention to her unreliability this text draws attention to its textuality. It asks—what am I? who put me together?
The British realist novel actively buries these questions : it’s authoritative beginnings and endings are offered as proof of its completeness; and its realism invisibilises its textuality—it does not want us to ask ‘who put me together?’ and so on.
Also my style is just partly just the way that people like me—who grew up on msn messenger—write. Line breaks do a lot of our punctuating. Plus when you write in two languages you realise how arbitrary a lot of grammar and spelling rules are so I have a healthy disrespect for them.
One of my favorite things while reading a novel is the precise moment the title becomes clear to me. To me, Stubborn Archivist represents the protagonist who is “archiving” these different moments in her life that have informed or influenced her bicultural identity. What was your thought process behind the title?
It’s her archiving her memories and her family’s stories. And in doing that she’s also archiving violence: from her own experience of a violent partner, her mother’s experience of Brazil under the military dictatorship, to the violence that one of her ancestors may have enacted on an indigenous woman. In each case the textuality is different, but in all the in narrative (or archive) is disrupted by silence: her own ptsd interrupting what she can and can’t remember, her mother’s fading memory of Alfredo, her grandmother’s rendering of a story of rape as a child’s bedtime story.
Blank space is incredibly important to the form. I wanted to show damage violence does to our ability to speak of violence. I was influenced by dicatorship-era student newspapers in Brazil, which used to print blank pages where they had been censored, and when that was banned, printed recipes. And again, this takes us back to the inadequacy of realist novel for my purposes. I needed to create something zig-zagging, interrupted, full of silence.
And archiving is about translation: I am of course, as writer, also an archivist. I have chosen (stubbornly) not to translate from Portuguese and to break with the novel form. In both cases I privilege migrant, Latin American—rather than European—readers and traditions.
Lastly I suppose the readers are also archivists.
The bicultural identity narrative of the protagonist intrigued me in terms of the Brazilian British subculture it explores. How did your own Brazilian British identity informed the ethnic and cultural identity of the characters?
Being Brazilian, and Latin American, in the UK is quite different to in the US. I didn’t really think of myself as Latin American or Latinx until I graduated university. I didn’t know any other Brazilian kids growing up (and I grew up a couple of miles from the most Latin American neighbourhood in the UK, Elephant and Castle). That’s because it’s a population that’s grown hugely in the last 10 years (in fact it’s got five times bigger)—so when I was growing up there wasn’t really a collective sense of what it meant to be “Brazilian British”—just a brazilianness and britishness that didn’t quite fit together. Now we have several anti-gentrification campaigns (Save Latin Elephant and Save Latin Village) and some brilliant artists (Joana Nastari, Luiza Sauma) and a bit more of a scene.
The family in Stubborn Archivist is white and middle class—so in this sense their experiences are quite similar to my own (and different from most Latin American migrants in the UK who are more likely to be in precarious employment and housing). I was keen to think about not only how the protagonist experiences violence partly because of her gender and ethnicity but also how her family—right wing white upper class Brazilians from Sao Paulo—participate in Brazil’s society, which is very much still shaped by slavery. At the end of the book her tia, Ana Paula, begins to talk about Dilma using the kind of language that Bolsonaro supporters use now. I was trying to tap into that important right wing movement, and connect it to the past. The protagonist’s Britishness, and her mother’s British passports, are also huge parts of how they experience the UK, something I also tried to bring out in the text.
Your novel depicts the complications of the Brazilian British experience for a woman who is trying to find her ‘self’ in the world. She’s facing further challenges as a survivor of sexual violence, and her lifestyle is affected by Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). Why was it important for you to shape the character this way?
I was very concerned with showing the body in space. Everything sort of comes down to that: gender, migration, sex, sexuality, healing, IBS. That’s why the language is very literal and focused on the protagonist’s body. The process of healing is a reconnection and reclamation of the body. A (re)inhabiting of the body and desire. At the end of the novel what we see if her step-stepping into her own gaze, forming her sexuality on her own terms.
There is a sadness (and a hopefullness) also in her sexual naivety in the middle of the book—people who have experienced sexual violence when they are young are often denied the chance the be sexually naive; towards the end of the book we see her stumbling back onto the dating scene almost like a teenager.
The IBS was important because I wanted to talk about a woman’s body in a way that moved away from the second wave feminist idea of woman=womb/vagina etc (which I find essentialist and boring). I wanted to show how gender is experienced and constructed in the contradiction between her ‘exotic’ sexualised appearance and her unsexy disobedient bowls.
In Stubborn Archivist we don’t know the name of the protagonist, but that’s not the only information you withhold as the author of the text. There are many silences throughout and they inform the narrative as much as the details that are explicitly written. There can be many interpretations for this, but is there a particular reaction that you favor? And was it important for you to craft the narrative this way?
I guess I’ve covered this above.
I’ll just add to this that it was important to me not to show a rape scene. I wanted to create a text where the reader must believe the protagonist, a text that protects her privacy, and where the reader’s focus is directed at how much they don’t know, and to the causes and effects—rather than spectacle—of violence.
We’d love to read more of your work! Is there something you’re currently working on?
Yes, I’ve just been shortlisted for this award for my second book, which is a work in progress about two Brazilian women living in London. It moves between London and Recife, in the North of Brazil, and between the present day and dictatorship-era Brazil.
Especially now that Bolsonaro is in power I feel that I have to write about talk about democracy, violence and climate - and keep telling stories of resistance and joy.
Who are some of the female writers and artists whose work you admire?
The two books that have changed my politics (and writing) this year are both co-written by two women.
Revolting Prostitutes by Tony Mac and Molly Smith. It’s a brilliant book, by two sex workers, about work, capitalism, borders and sex work.
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Barbara J. Fields and Karen Fields. A book about what race is (hint: not a biological reality!) and how it was created—it’s centred on the US and now I want to read more race theory from Brazil.
Fiction-wise: Zadie Smith, Anna Burns, Toni Morison, Elza Soares, Anne Carson, Sandra Cisneros are women I’m always reading.
What are you currently reading?
I just read Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, which I loved. Another book about violence and archive.
About
Yara Rodrigues Fowler was born in 1992. She grew up in a British Brazilian household in Balham, South London, where she is still based. She has an BA from Oxford University and an MA from University College London, and is a trustee of Latin American Women’s Aid. Stubborn Archivist is her first book.
