The Black Warrior Review Fiction/Prose contest winner “Videoteca Fin del Mundo” by Ava Tomasula y Garcia is a difficult but rare read.
On first read, the story—or essay—felt incomprehensible, but as I forged ahead, the gist of the piece became clear: she is talking about how terrible things go on every day all around us, specifically the abuse of migrant workers who are then swept up into deportation centers, and how the “intolerable” becomes tolerable in our every day life, and how that fact is intolerable.
She’s saying that when we really think about it, the way this country uses, abuses, dehumanizes, and discards migrant workers is an ongoing apocalyptic disaster movie that we all sort of accept it as an every day thing as we, enjoy our “hot water, [our] clean air, [our] free right of movement, [our] microwave, [our] strawberry jam on bread this morning” (9).
She raises the question of how some of us want the impossible, a world without borders, while others of us see that as the apocalypse. She suggests that wishing for a world without borders is contradictory, since it’s akin to being “anti-systemic,” (14) and the system of the body is what keeps us alive. As impossible as a world without borders is, she contends, it’s the kind of world world that the very rich enjoy, so it’s not so impossible, after all (15).
If you want to read it, you have to purchase it the magazine, but a great interview with her is published here.
Is this a story? No. The narrator has a problem, but it’s an abstract problem about the “dissonance of the everyday” (9). The first four paragraphs are all meditation and no action, something any fiction writing workshop would tell you not to do.
The only action that occurs is in the fifth paragraph when the narrator wades “through strawberry hydroponics fields” (11). There is some action in relating facts about how undocumented works spray strawberry crops with “fourteen million pounds of pesticides a year,” and how migrant workers emerge out of “poisonous cloud[s] of gas that that was “used to kill people in World War I” (10). It’s footnoted. These are facts. Not fiction.
As always, when I read a difficult text, I am thrown into a decades-old meta debate.
What is the purpose of writing difficult texts? How difficult is too difficult? Does the writer know how difficult this is? Do I want to write like this? Should I? Do I want to work this hard to read this? Should I?
Also, why did these editors publish this as a piece of fiction? It reads more like an Avant-garde non-fiction essay. It’s the contest winner for the fiction/prose category, and it is, after all a work of prose. But they have a nonfiction category. Why didn’t they give it the award for non-fiction?
Obviously, they published it because that’s the kind of magazine they are. They like densely written, thought-provoking work that pushes on the boundaries of form. All of their stories, essays and poetry isn’t this difficult, as in the case of Scott Fenton’s “Possible Origin Stories for an Aspiring Boy Wonder,” which is just that, a series of paragraph-long origin stories. It’s playful and accessible on the surface, but yields more with each pass, which is my preferred reading mode.
But reading Tomasula y Garcia’s story/essay is a much different experience than reading this blog post. The hard work of tracking her words creates a certain pleasure, a certain convergence of many thoughts in a single blow that when unpacked at the same time, transport you to a new, dreamy, nightmarish, soulful place.
Flannery O’Connor once said, you write a story to say something you couldn’t say any other way.
In the end, Ava Tomasula y Garcia wrote her essay/story this way because she wanted readers to experience it in just that way and no other, a devastating and beautiful meditation that might wake us from a nightmare long enough to do something about it.
Most literary magazines submission guidelines tell you to read their magazine to see what kind of work they publish.