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  • Zee Edgell’s Home Within: An Interview
  • Zee Edgell (bio) and Renee H. Shea (bio)
SHEA

Festival of San Joaquin seems to be both a continuation of your earlier work and a departure. How do you see it?

EDGELL

I suppose it is a continuation of some of the themes, and it is dealing with women’s issues, but it is a departure in that it’s the first time I am writing in the first person and about different people—people I feel I know but from a different cultural group.

SHEA

Was it difficult for you, a black Creole, to write from the point of view of a Mestiza?

EDGELL

No, it was a surprising thing. I suppose because I had grown up so close to Mestizos all my life—through my father’s business associates, living next door to them, and my godmother is a Mestiza—I seemed to fall into it quite easily. Even though I had to do a lot of reading and checking facts and so on, I found that it was much easier for me to assume the persona of the character in the first person.

SHEA

Why? I would think that writing in the third person would be easier.

EDGELL

You would think so, but it was an incredible discovery for me because I always thought that if I used the first person, I would be tempted to “talk” about myself. Of course, the person in the novel reflects my emotions and experience, yet not my direct experience. It just didn’t work in the third person. I tried that initially because it was what I had done before. One day I was sitting down, and the opening lines just came to me. It felt right, though I didn’t trust that voice and thought, “How am I going to sustain this?” But the voice never left me. It was so liberating to know that I could enter into a character like that without the direct personal experience.

SHEA

So you knew the character of Luz Marina ahead of time even though you had been trying to write about her in third person?

EDGELL

Both Luz Marina and Doña Catalina. I had been trying to write in the third person about both of them, but it was just not coming together. What happened was [End Page 574] that I had about ten versions of chapter one, and it was all like a big jumble. Nothing was working.

SHEA

Did you know all along that it would be an interweaving of a chronological narrative and memory?

EDGELL

Yes, I always knew it would be a forward story and a back story: the forward one would be Luz Marina’s attempt to establish some kind of life and the back would be her memory, her past, because what interested me is what a woman does when her life falls apart. But the trouble was that the structure wasn’t right until I realized I had to tell it in first person. I knew a lot would be internal because Luz Marina would have to have those moments that were intense in the present, and at some points the present and the terrible past would converge.

SHEA

What about those very poetic dream sequences? Are they intended to link the forward narrative and the memory?

EDGELL

Maybe. I didn’t think about it like that. I have been told that they are poetic, that they have the cadence of poetry, but I didn’t sit down and say, “Now, I’m going to write poetry.” Actually, my mother told me the story about the wedding dress. She said she heard a story like that about a wedding dress that blew away. I fictionalized it, and, of course, it’s also symbolic.

But it is in the dreams that I can show Luz Marina’s culture, especially the Mayan side of her, so in the dream she can fly through the Mayan ruins, over the jungle. There is also the clash of cultures: she lives a Mestiza life, but she has her Mayan life as well.

SHEA

How much of the novel is fact? I...

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