Pay attention if:

1.You were a teen goth.

2. You’ve always felt an affinity for birds.

3. Sometimes you burst out cackling for no reason.

Over tea in Ann Arbor, I sat down with writer Gina María Balibrera to talk about her debut novel, The Volcano Daughters. Spanning decades of 20th-century world history, Balibrera’s novel chronicles the intertwined lives of Salvadoran sisters everywhere from the coffee fields in El Salvador to the literary salons of 1930s Paris. The deep history, the glamor, the sisterhood of it all: I ate up every bite of the book and licked the platter clean.

Our conversation was equally enthralling. With the exception of my rowdy puppy who wanted a bite of my scone, it was the best book club meeting I’d ever attended.

Stephanie Wong (SW): El Salvador, as a country, takes such a prominent role on the global stage of The Volcano Daughters.

Gina María Balibrera (GMB): As I researched this book, over many years, I did become aware of the international implications of the history of the country. There were US interventions, land grabs, the coffee trade, indigo, the railroad, the Good Neighbor policy, and anti-Communism.

Yet, in such international conversations, there’s a huge cultural and artistic world in El Salvador that often gets eclipsed. Here, there have always been poets, there have always been painters, there have always been all kinds of artists. And so, while writing, I was thinking about the ripples that these artists have made in writing the cultural myths of the place; as well as what kind of art has historically been supported, versus what kind of art has historically been subdued by the powers that be. And what I found was defiance: Artists were trying to engage and trying to tell their own stories, apart from national narratives.

SW: You’ve written this novel with a Salvadoran American sensibility.

GMB: I have a limited perspective as a Salvadoran American, as someone who didn’t grow up in El Salvador. It was and is my father’s country. And he also came to San Francisco as a child. I didn’t visit the country until I was in college.

So there are different layers of limited perception that I had to burrow through to be able to write the book. For example, there are lacunae within the historical record of the country. When I went to visit the archives there, many things hadn’t been preserved. They were lost in fires and to mold.

Following the massacre in 1932, there were lots of pronounced efforts to erase this history. And it also wasn’t something that my relatives talked about, either, so I had to kind of dig through that.

Moreover, Spanish is not my first language. I didn’t grow up bilingual, so there was a lot that I had to learn and dig into. For example, I’d have to ask, I’ve heard this swear word a lot. What does it mean? And how do people use it?

SW: It’s not just people and places who have their own stories in your novel. I wanted to talk about objects! You highlight a major art movement with celebrity sightings, but in El Salvador, you also have a whole bevy of mostly female makers who cherish the material world and what they make from it.

The novel has a whole treasure chest of cool objects that show up: the watch, the spider pendant, for example. What do they mean?

GMB: Consuelo, one of the protagonists, is a sensualist in many ways. She’s petulant and bratty and demanding, but also deeply wounded and confused and, moreover, has been abandoned and abused and derided. No one’s rooting for her or for her sister.

Still, she finds comfort in beautiful objects and the idea of opulence—something that is sinister and sparkling. Consuelo is on an exacting, precise aesthetic quest. She has a fiery heart that is like an arrow. She’s on a quest for beauty and the desire to make something lasting, to make good art that communicates something. Despite all the other crap in the world, this is what keeps her moving.

It’s also how she presents herself to the world. There is a lot of confusion about her origins—they’re constantly scrutinized. And so, she decides that she’s going to make herself inscrutable by adorning herself opulently and mysteriously. That’s why she’s got this spider around her neck.

In some ways, I was inspired by the 14-year-old goths of my youth. There’s a certain desire to distinguish yourself as a young teenager, and to communicate something to others that can recognize it. Growing up, my best friend and I would visit all the thrift stores on Haight Street in San Francisco—Aardvark’s and Held Over and Wasteland. This was the ’90s before fast fashion really took over secondhand—it was all the good stuff, all the old stuff, and still cheap.

Some of the objects we found became talismanic, a guide to some other self: elaborately beaded cardigans, this green velvet cape from 1910 that my friend would wear with boots. We wanted to communicate something about our perception of the world, while we were still exploring it. This kind of expression through clothing is what the women in Surrealist circles famously did during the 1930s—and we see Consuelo doing this also.

SW: Oh my God, yes.

GMB: The tactile pleasure of silk stockings and velvet! Consuelo and Graciela don’t have headphones they can put on. They escape into the night to hang out with their friends and talk about art and make art and make out. This is their way of creating their own world.

Some of these objects do that work: They create the art that Consuelo and Graciela might make one day.

SW: This novel is such a rich text for the 20th century, but it’s also such a rich tapestry of girlhood. You can tell that these girls love being girls. And they love being girls together.

GMB: We are not meant to be girls alone in this world!

SW: There’s another girl who shows up in the novel: la Yina. Who is she? Is she God in the Bible?

GMB: She’s the writer! And also a flip flop.

This book was written over many, many years. There were many different iterations. A lot of the dramatic rewrites had to do with finding the container in which I could tell the story. With omniscience in fiction, for me, there’s always a feeling of sheepishness. After all, I am not Salvadoran; I’m Salvadoran American. I didn’t grow up in the country. I’m not a historian. I’m not from a coffee-farming village in the western part of El Salvador; I’m from San Francisco.

The ghosts had to school me: correct me, laugh at me, and help me. And put me in my place.

SW: I thought the ghost bits were super funny. I had myself a little chuckle every time Yina popped up.

GMB: Thank you for saying that! Parts of the novel are funny. It’s such a heavy and troubling history, but not entirely dismal. Humans laugh all the time.

In the novel, laughter is a part of communal life. Our carcajadas build on one another. They rise to the sky. Birds came up for me a lot when I was writing the book: They showed me collective womanhood, women cackling, gossiping, storytelling, migrating. They’re limitless.

SW: Women are birds.

GMB: What kind of bird would you be?

SW: Aspirationally, a seabird. Like, a tern. A cool bird.

But in Australia, there’s a bird called a frogmouth. They’re round and have wide beaks. They look like a mix between an owl and a frog. I think I’m that guy. What about you?

GMB: I know my mom is a hummingbird. She’s full of beans and big ideas. She’s working very hard and moving quickly all the time.

When my son was a little baby and we moved him to his own crib, a family of owls settled outside of his window. It felt supernatural. He had his own baby guardians with a mama who would come. When we were putting him to bed at night, they were waking up—being cute, hanging upside down. And they were always on the branch right outside of his window.

In Mesoamerican creation stories, owls appear as guardians, as beings who ferry you across a liminal state, out of danger. They’re always observing and watching. They’re gathering information. And they’re communicating. 

Featured image: Gina María Balibrera. © Charles Amyx