By Melissa Nunez, written January 2023
In all my languages I have found there is no word for you. Although most vowels are the
same, no matter where they sit on your tongue, and life goes on, I’ve noticed, and tries to
drag one along with it. But my bags are not packed. – “New start”
Elizabeth M. Castillo is a British-Mauritian poet who writes in a variety of different languages under a variety of pen names. Her work has been featured in publications and anthologies across the globe such as FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art and Poetry Wales. In her writing Elizabeth explores the different countries and cultures she grew up with, as well as themes of race and ethnicity, motherhood, womanhood, language, love, and loss. She self-published her bilingual, debut collection Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras in 2021. And we are excited that Elizabeth had poetry accepted to Yellow Arrow Journal, Vol. VIII, No. 1, KINDLING, coming out in May! Thank you for thinking of us in February when journal submissions were open.
Elizabeth engages the writing community with a confidence and open-minded grace that is admirable, and she energetically supports and promotes other indie authors. I was delighted we were able to coordinate a video conference despite a 12-hour time difference while she was spending some time in Mauritius. We had a conversation about the versatility and power of poetry, the lure of languages, and even connected over the homeschooling experience.
When did you first fall in love with poetry?
When I was a child, I loved Edward Lear. My parents would buy Victorian (and Edwardian) poetry, limericks, and silliness—I can still recite many of them now. That is where my love for the musicality and playfulness of words comes from. When I am writing poetry, I find that the syncopated rhythm from those early (think Rudyard Kipling) poems sometimes comes back to me. I also feel that I discovered poetry a second time, for myself, when I was a teenager. I was quite a depressed teenager even though I didn’t realize it at the time, we didn’t have that kind of vocabulary back then. I would write all my heartbreak and misunderstandings into poetry and that is when poetry became therapeutic for me. Now, as an adult, it is a mix of both. I can play with poetry, or it can be a help to me. I think poetry should be whatever you need it to be as a writer and as a reader.
Who are your favorite women writers?
Warsan Shire is the kind of poet I would love to emulate. Ada Limón is absolutely fantastic as well. There are several other inspiring poets I have discovered through social media, like Nikki Dudley, Melissa Hernandez, and Mary Ford Neal. I actually have a fangirl story here: I boosted Mary’s first book so much, out of pure love for it, that she acknowledged me in her second book!
As for nonfiction, Ariel Saramandi is an excellent Mauritian essayist. My relationship with Mauritius is a complicated one because I had a difficult time living here, but it is the biggest part of my heritage. I also grew up all over the place so there is that diasporic feeling of belonging/unbelonging present. Reading Saramandi’s work has given me an extra push into exploring that side of my reality and discovering more of what it means to be Mauritian, from the southern hemisphere, a woman of color, a writer of color, a linguistic minority, and all these things. Her writing is so impactful. You read her essays and you need to pause after each section and breathe before coming back to it.
How can I show them
what it is to talk;
how to cut the thoughts down to
word-shapes,
and coax the heart, and tongue, into
speaking?
Conditionals, perhaps?
The language of what could never be,
or what might have been. – “Paris, mi-octobre”
Writing on identity and heritage, especially in relation to the diaspora, is becoming more prevalent. I have been exploring my own connection to heritage, history, and language (trying to develop my Spanish and dig even deeper by researching Nahuatl) fueled by that feeling of unbelonging that you mention. Why do you think these stories are so resonant?
I follow some people on social media that post about Indigenous languages like Nahuatl and discuss the origins of words and what has been misused or appropriated. I feel like these resources are so important because otherwise we are shooting in the dark and there is this massive gap in identities. I am not someone who feels we need to just erase all of the literary canon so far and everything, but there is such space and such a rich diversity of stories that I believe people want to read. We are tired of reading the same perspective in poetry, at least in my case. I’ve picked up some of the acclaimed poets, especially North American poets, and there are one or two that I’m like, “Yeah, this is a banger.” But then there’s another poem about sitting in the woods looking at birds, and another on the same, and then at the country house looking at birds. First of all, who lives that life? Second, that is not what I want to read. It is not what makes me excited and inspires me to read and write. It is not what makes me feel seen and heard, what gives words to my experience. I believe a lot of that representation is found in these cultures and in these emerging voices like the ones platformed by publications like Yellow Arrow [Publishing]. So, it is exciting to see, whether it is an educational YouTube account, or a writer, or an essayist, these voices getting the attention not just that they deserve but that the world needs. It is what readers need.
Although I am not fully fluent in many languages, I am drawn to the musicality of different accents and sounds in different tongues. Do you ever switch languages in your poems after they’ve been drafted for the sound?
When I have worked in a language, when I work in Portuguese, or Spanish, or French, or Kreol, it is because the poem has come to me in that language. I don’t touch that because in some cases it’s not my first language or the language I am most comfortable working in. If they appear to me like that then I am not going to scare them away. I have, however, switched some poems into English. I have been working on a chapbook on motherhood and daughterhood (experiencing motherhood with mental illness, parentified children, and all that kind of thing) and I felt like I needed to focus more on French, but for some reason my muse isn’t a fan of La Francophonie. I would put things in French, and it would just feel so unnatural. Even though they were beautiful, they were just not working and so I would have to put them back into English.
Ya no soy aquella florecita- / I’m no longer that tiny little flower
En muchedumbre me converti, / I’ve become an entire horde,
En selva entera, ¡ten cuidado! / a whole jungle, but watch your step! – “Aquella florecita”
Do you have any favorite words that you often use, or have felt drawn to including in a piece?
I’ve spent some time in Chile (in fact my Spanish is Chilean more than anything else) and I love the sound of words in Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche which are the indigenous tribes of mostly the south of Chile. Pichintún, which means “a little bit,” is in one of my poems. I say “pichintún of miel on my lengua,” which is a little bit of honey on my tongue. I love the word muchedumbre. I just think that it sounds like what it is. Even cajoncito is a word that I absolutely adore, the way it just rolls off the tongue and the way it just almost looks like what it is. Or maybe I’m just being a bit of a linguist about it. . . .
In a language workshop you led (through Crow Collective) you talked about writers being able to respectfully incorporate languages in their writing even if they are not native or fluent speakers. What advice do you have for those learning new languages and navigating the full context of usage without that experience?
There is such a fear nowadays of getting things wrong, of being seen as culturally appropriating or disrespecting something. It is a good consciousness to have but it mustn’t become a fear because then we don’t do anything. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging a mistake and apologizing for missing the mark on the meaning or context of a word. We are all learning and without this mindset we are promoting the opposite of diversity. We would all just be gatekeeping experiences until everybody is fluent or everybody has lived every experience and that is not possible. On the contrary, language and culture are fluid. They mix and they change as they encounter one another and that is the beauty of it. Just look at English and how it has evolved because so many people are speaking it all over the world. If you approach a new language with that humility and awareness, that it is something separate from you or related to you in whatever limited context, then I think that you can’t go too far wrong. There must be a respect, an admiration, and an understanding for it. The attitude should not be one of taking things and using them for personal gain, especially if you are operating from a place of privilege yourself, but rather handling them with respect and honor. That is what makes the difference. It might seem like a vague answer but that is my approach. The ability to acknowledge mistakes and say, “Hey, I messed this one up,” or “I didn’t understand it,” is underrated and gets you very far in life.
Do you have any tips for learning new languages or favorite resources to share?
Move to the country that speaks it and don’t speak your own language to anyone. Put yourself in the middle of the village . . . but no, that’s not always possible. As a language teacher I would say you find the medium that you enjoy. If you are very musical, plunge yourself into music and look up music interviews in the language. That is how I came to Spanish. I used to listen to Gloria Estefan and Shakira and look up the lyrics. I would use my knowledge of French to understand what I could and then translate the rest. That was literally my first start with Spanish when I was a teenager. If you are literary, look up short stories. Find something that you love and enter the language from there. Then, you will keep loving it when it gets tricky. Some languages, for example if you are a native Arabic speaker and you are coming to a Latin-based language, might require a couple of language classes (whether it is through an app or one-on-one) so you can get your head around the different language system. But many of us, I think, have some knowledge of most of the languages we want to speak and coming into it from a point of pleasure, of interest, of engagement will get you very far.
Come, fresh tears spilled into the clean laundry, come,
those few, thrilling seconds I hold myself underwater in the bath.
Come, sweet, bewitching intensity, step this way,
total disregard for consequence. – “Gathering my children to me”
Do you have a favorite poem that you have written or one you find the most fun to read?
I do. Well, favorite is difficult. It depends on the time of day really. I love the final poem in Cajoncito, “I thought of you today.” That poem just fell out of me. There is such catharsis in it and there was such catharsis from writing it. It is a happy-place poem. When I read it, I am very relaxed. I love “Gathering my children to me,” which actually doesn’t get much rep, like no one has ever said they love it. That is a personal favorite because I thought it was very clever when the idea came to me. It is very fun to perform because it is basically me telling all my faults to get in line because they have made a mess of where we are, and we have to leave. A poem that was written as a joke that everyone seems to adore and so I’ve come to love as well is the opening poem, “Can I send you my poems?” It was meant to be an absolute tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating piece because I am so dramatic and feel all-the-things-all-the-time. It was meant to be that, and then I read it to my husband. He was like, “That’s excellent.” He is not in any way literary so for him to enjoy it was something. And when I shared it with other people, they also said it was good. There are a handful of shorter poems as well that are very personal and very precious to me, but I never read them. They still carry a bit of a sting, so I actually avoid them, but they mean a lot to me.
What advice would you give to those writing through grief/loss?
Keep writing. Until the pen and your heart are empty, just keep doing it. Let it all out. If you are in any way task-minded or outcome-minded, try your hardest to put that aside and just write. Don’t edit, don’t think of where it is going or what you can make of it. This can be hard because we don’t have that much time in the day and we want to be productive, to earn something, to publish something. But just keep writing and don’t think. Write and write and write and write. At some points it might feel like a hose that has a hole in it. You know there is water there and it is building up, but it is just coming out in drops. Or if there’s some big tangle, a good way of untangling it is just to shift your perspective. In a lot of my poetry, in many of my pieces from my new chapbooks I am working on, I have shifted the perspective and the speaker. I have written as myself outside of myself where I put my story from someone else or I have made my narrator male instead of female. I have also shifted the time frame and rather than after the loss I’ve written from before the loss. So, if ever it feels like a tangle, shift where you are standing and see if that helps. Sometimes that little shift suddenly brings the whole thing out. It is amazingly cathartic to the point where, for me, if you can read the poem, a personal poem that is a piece of your heart, and you feel nothing except enjoyment of your work, then you’ve got it. You’ve done it. You have achieved the goal. It is very satisfying to see something written literally laced in tears that is now just a great piece of writing.
I am running out of languages to grieve in. – “Saudades”
As a fellow homeschooling mom, I was excited to see that mentioned in your author bio. How do you feel homeschooling has affected your writing perspective or voice?
It affects my writing—full stop—because who has the time? A lot of homeschool moms tend to get the reputation of wanting everyone else to jump on the wagon with them, but I’m like, “No. Please don’t. You will fall off and hurt yourself. I’m barely hanging on to the wheel!” The choice to homeschool is a very personal one that every family must decide for themselves. If you do not have 1000% conviction to do it, do not do it. Writing and poetry take a lot from me. It is not just five or ten minutes; it takes time to sit down and work. One of my convictions in this life choice is that everything that comes outside of it is always something extra. Time spent on one thing is automatically time taken from something else. My only sort of barometer was that if my writing was in any way affecting my children, if they felt they were being deprived of me, then I would have to rethink what I was doing. At no point has that been the case. On the contrary, my daughters have blossomed seeing me write. They love to come and sit next to me when I’m writing with a pen and paper and write their own stories. Other times they will say, “Oh, mummy, can we write this as a poem? I want to write a poem about my little sister because I love her so much.” If anything, it is somehow joined into the homeschooling life of being creative and taking time to contemplate things. My creative time benefits them and I’m a better mother for it because it keeps me sane. I think homeschooling obviously adds to your workload as a mother. As a mother who suffers from anxiety and depression, I have times when I struggle with my mental health. I’m also fairly convinced that I have ADHD along with being severely dyslexic. It is already a lot to deal with, and I talk about it a lot in all those poems that come out as “What am I doing? Why did anyone trust me with kids?” If I had all my ducks in a row, then maybe I wouldn’t be able to write or feel the need to write about motherhood and daughterhood.
Writing also gives me such an intimate relationship with my children. It is incredibly inspiring to see the world from their perspective. I have a poem that is going into my new chapbook called “What My Four-Year-Old Tantrumed.” It is literally what my four-year-old shouted when she was having a tantrum and brushing her teeth. It was so poetic. It started with, “I just want to be in the dark and brush my teeth.” And I thought, “Yes, don’t we all.” It just went on and it sounded like a poem, and I mean terrible mother of the year award, but I was outside the door furiously typing what she was saying while she was having a tantrum. It made a great poem! I think these experiences definitely influence voice because you write about real things, which cycles back to what I said about wanting to read about reality. I know that is what I want as a reader. If I’m not going to read about reality, I want to read fantasy or science fiction. When I read poetry, I want to read something I can relate to, something that feels like “Yeah. Totally. That chick gets it.” All off these things can only happen when they are informed by reality, which is kids who are stroppy and tired and pushing your boundaries and have far more energy than should be legal. That definitely influences my poetry.
And finally, to bring this wonderful conversation to a close, what would you pick as your personal mascot?
I think I would probably be some kind of frog or other creature that stays very still and then moves around a lot and then stays very still again. That is literally me. I’d love to say something graceful and wondrous like a dolphin but that doesn’t fit. You know what? It would probably be an Octopus. It comes out, turns all these brilliant colors, and is odd and amazing but probably prefers to be in a hole somewhere pretending to be a piece of coral. An octopus, definitely.
Elizabeth M. Castillo’s bilingual, debut collection Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras is for sale on Amazon, and her debut chapbook Not Quite an Ocean will be published by Nine Pens Press in 2023. You can connect with her on Twitter and Instagram as @EMCWritesPoetry or on her website elizabethmcastillo.net.
Melissa Nunez is a Latin@ writer and homeschooling mother of three from the Rio Grande Valley. Her essays have appeared in magazines like HerStory and Honey Literary. She has work forthcoming in Hypertext, Scrawl Place, and others. She is a columnist at The Daily Drunk and a staff writer for Alebrijes Review. You can follow her on Twitter @MelissaKNunez.
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