Puerto Rican author Jaquira Díaz is best known for her award-winning memoir, “Ordinary Girls.” Now, her debut novel, “This Is the Only Kingdom,” explores similar themes of Latino and queer identity and resilience.
The story begins in a version of the real-life Humacao housing project Díaz grew up in: El Caserío Padre Rivera.
“[The residents] were removed from their ancestral homes, and they were displaced there,” Díaz explained.
The novel, at first, follows two teenage residents of El Caserío, Maricarmen and Rey, in the 1970s. Then, the book jumps ahead to the ‘90s where it follows Maricarmen and her daughter, Nena.
“They're surviving the aftermath of a murder but also by colonialism itself — how this family and the community are affected by this,” Díaz said on Connecticut Public's "Where We Live."
A content warning to readers that the story gets dark — opens darkly actually, with the discovery of a body.
That is not the only violence in the novel, but Díaz is not gratuitous. Each physical or verbal blow has a purpose in the greater web she weaves of a mother and daughter over two decades on the island, and beyond.
The language
“This Is the Only Kingdom” is an English-language book, but Díaz selectively and frequently peppers in Spanish throughout. One recurring example is the use of “camarones,” or “shrimp,” to reference the police — explained only by context clues to non-Spanish speakers.
“The language for me happens very naturally and organically, because I'm bilingual,” Díaz said. “My first language is actually Spanish, and so oftentimes when I'm writing in English, it feels like a kind of translation, like I'm translating certain parts of not just language but also culture.”
In one scene, teenage Nena greets a friend of her mother’s with a Spanish-language phrase to greet elders with an ask for a blessing. Any Spanish speaker could use it, but Puerto Ricans are perhaps most famous for it.
Díaz writes in a particularly relatable exchange for any formerly teenage Puerto Rican: “‘Bendición,’ Nena said softly to Don Carmelo, not really sure what she was supposed to do, since he wasn’t a priest or a relative.”
“There were moments that I felt there is no translation that could do this phrase justice,” Díaz said. “There is no way that I can translate this and get across the meaning or the tone or the feeling of what this phrase means in Puerto Rican Spanish.”
The music
Music is playing throughout the novel, even if you can’t hear it.
While music was definitely a character in “Ordinary Girls,” it’s salsa, specifically, that takes center stage in “This Is the Only Kingdom.”
“The book was inspired by a true story that was passed down to me about a man named Rey who lived in our neighborhood, El Caserío Padre Rivera,” Díaz said. “Back in the day, a musician, Pedro Conga, wrote a song that was a tribute to Rey. So everything, in a sense — the way that I found out this story, the way that it was passed down to me — began with a song.”
Each chapter title is a salsa song, which might tip off some of the biggest fans of the genre on what will happen in the coming pages.
“I wanted the chapter titles and the salsa songs to be thematically connected so that, if you know something about salsa, you understand that there's a theme that echoes in the salsa song and the chapter,” Díaz said.
Despite the subtle scoring, Díaz said she is not a musician, though she did study music as a child and “I think as a teenager, I did identify as a musician very strongly.”
The identities
A large part of the novel centers on a couple of the characters' sexualities.
“That I think was the first thing I knew I would write about,” said Díaz, who has written about her own queerness in “Ordinary Girls.” “I knew that this novel would be in some ways a very queer novel that had a very queer storyline and that had an intergenerational conversation about queerness in some ways.”
The characters readers follow in part one of the book are all shown or implied to be straight. It’s in part two where things in the community, and the world, change.
“We have [Maricarmen’s] daughter, Nena, and Tito who are a different generation, who are teenagers in the early ‘90s,” Díaz said, “and the world is different for them.”
One is unapologetically queer, and the other seems to be hiding their queerness from even themselves. In that, Díaz tackles the internalized homophobia that one can experience — hating oneself but not always others who identify as queer.
“I definitely wanted readers to experience what it's like for the same community to treat people like they're a part of the community and then suddenly, when they find out someone is queer, they turn their backs on them — in part because this is true. This is reality,” she said. “This happens not just in Puerto Rico, but in the states.”
Díaz, who grew up in both Puerto Rico and Florida, wrote from experience.
“You come out, and then, there are people who accept you and people who don't, and it was very scary to come out to family when you were a teenager in the early ‘90s,” Díaz said. “I thought there is no way I can ever come out to my family.”
But she did, and her characters exhibit that same bravery by the end.
This is an excerpt from a larger conversation aired in this episode of Connecticut Public's "Where We Live."
