In Cinelle Barnes’ debut memoir, Monsoon Mansion (Little A, 2018), she recounts her childhood in Milan and the dissolution of her family’s fortune following the Gulf War. A harrowing story of growing up within a family, and a house, literally and figuratively crumbling, Barnes’ fluid language is at once lyric and visceral. In 2019, a collection of essays, Malaya: Essays on Freedom, also from Little A, explored her relationship with motherhood and language while telling the story of her arrival to the US as a teenager, the repercussions of losing her naturalization benefits after unknowingly aging out of them, her subsequent experience as an undocumented worker in New York and elsewhere, her move to the South with the man who would become her husband, and the birth of her daughter.
Last year, Barnes edited the anthology A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, 2020). Collecting essays from some of the South’s most essential writers, including Osayi Endolyn, Kiese Laymon, Toni Jensen, and Joy Priest, A Measure of Belonging questions received narratives and monolithic views of this diverse—and always global—region.
EVAN FACKLER: Cinelle Barnes, it’s a privilege to talk to you. We’re the same age, but reading your work I’m struck by how insightful you are—as if you’ve experienced 68 and not 34 years of life. For anyone familiar with your story, it won’t come as a surprise that someone who has survived what you have survived and learned to write about it has found themselves swimming in the depths. What role has writing played in the process of gaining insight from your past?
CINELLE BARNES: There’s so much to say about the role of writing in my life and for my life, but if I had to summarize it, I’d say that writing has always been a creative and intellectual pursuit that’s supported my survival. In Monsoon Mansion, I included events or scenes in which I’m writing for money or as an escape: my mother signing me up for a writing contest, the private school keeping me on the roster because I could write (even though my family had stopped paying tuition), and me writing and reading to mentally escape the horrors at home. In Malaya, a few essays are about writing as a way to cope with post-partum depression, writing as a practice administered in trauma therapy, and writing as a way to unlearn lies I’ve been told and have internalized. Now that I’m writing from safer, less intense spaces, physically and mentally, I find myself still writing to discover what it is that’s at stake and how I may preserve it. There’s still that same energy to the quest and hopefully the same textured meditation in the process. While I may no longer be writing about crossfires or the Gulf War or child abuse, I think the survival mindset remains. I’m always thinking, If I’m not writing about it and if I’m not writing about it well, then I’m giving in to the crisis, whether that crisis is a cybercrime, a pandemic, or the water crisis. I write because it’s practice, and practice makes you stronger.
FACKLER: How have you been coping with the pandemic?
BARNES: We moved from a condo to a house at the end of 2019. Backing up to a creek and surrounded by wildlife, this house has really saved us from boredom and insanity. Right outside my studio’s east-facing window are two pecan trees that two hawks frequent, and on the north side are magnolias and live oaks covered in muscadine: a downy woodpecker’s favorite. Since lockdown, we’ve also acquired two annual park passes that give us access to beaches, marshlands, hiking trails, and a few lakes for kayaking. Growing up in Metro Manila and coming of age in Manhattan, I was never an outdoorsy person. But in the past ten months, I’ve learned the names of several birds, plants, trees, and fungi. Two weeks ago, I found an injured hawk at the foot of a live oak tree. A few neighbors and I were able to capture it and take it to the Center for Birds of Prey, and I’m happy to report that the hawk has regained locomotion. These past ten months have been some of the most trying and yet most playful, joyful months of my adult life. While I do not make light of all the suffering and hardships endured this year, I am grateful that it has offered me a chance to slow down, look up or out, and connect with creatures that used to terrify me.
FACKLER: In your introduction to A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South, you write about the submerged cultural codes you encountered in your move to the South ten years ago, and the many forms of dismissal you encountered as a woman of color—and, for a time, an undocumented woman of color. And yet, you’re adamant that “there is not nothing for me here. And there is not nothing for other people of color. There is not nothing for readers like you.” This anthology, you say, is an invitation to encounter this “New South” that is not not for all of us. Of course, it’s hard to miss the ambiguity, the conflict in that double negative. Who lives in the “New South?” Where is the “New South? What is the “New South”?
BARNES: Just like with any other place, the borders of the “New South” are porous, nebulous, arbitrary, imagined… That’s all of human history: people staking a claim wherever and however they want. Some writers in the collection think that there is no such thing as the “New South” (and at times I’m in that camp), while others want to recognize that recent political and cultural shifts have caused a Southern migration of young people of color–therefore creating a new, or at least renewed, population within the population. There’s also the southeastern “Black Belt” that’s greatly influenced recent historic elections, and some desire to call attention to that rather hopeful shift. Of course, the Black Belt is not new to the Black Belt. It’s just new to those who now want to recognize its identity and impact as something hopeful (and perhaps useful to their cause). I guess if we had to simplify it… there’s always been more than one way to be Southern, and to be Southern and a person of color, but that hasn’t always been recognized. Something that Melissa Febos said in an essay that I quote all the time is “The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger.” The South has always been big in that it’s got clout and influence over what happens elsewhere, but it’s been small in that it’s defined itself by what and who it kept out. And though small, the anthology was meant to do the opposite. Define a place by who it lets in, who it listens to and centers, and the depth and breadth of all that it celebrates. There’s a memoir-in-verse I once reviewed for a literary prize, and all it was really was it took words directly from a brochure from the 1904 World’s Fair, in which Filipinos were “displayed” in acres of “living exhibits.” What the writer of the memoir-in-verse did was basically take the colonizer’s poison and fed it right back to them. She put them on view, displayed them in living exhibits, and therefore pronounced them dead. So maybe if we had to name something operative about the phrase “New South” or “not nothing,” it’s that we’re taking the words of the opposition and staking a claim to the definition just as they’d staked a claim to territories that weren’t theirs to begin with.
FACKLER: I love that quote from Melissa Febos, thank you for sharing it. You’ve spoken elsewhere about wanting A Measure of Belonging to help others rethink hospitality, particularly Southern hospitality. How do you think we should see the relationship between hospitality and the South? What is hospitality?
BARNES: I’ll answer by saying that a friend ten years my senior once told me that people often confuse hospitality with entertaining. To entertain is to impress; to be hospitable is to make someone feel comfortable and welcome.
FACKLER: Place and memory form intimate connections, and your work often engages those connections. Place is not only a container for memory, but also, like a body, comes to bear the marks of events. That is, comes to be memory externalized. In Monsoon Mansion, for instance, specific rooms in your childhood home become sites and triggers of specific memories, but also the mansion itself seems to participate in events, both cloister and enabler. Similarly, the American South is both a collection of environments (I’m from Ohio and I’m always astounded by how much the landscape changes as I head out of the Piedmont and toward the sandhills and coastal plains, into what feels to me like a different world) and an amalgam of affective and ancestral memories. Have you come to any tentative conclusions about the role of place in the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, or about others? Is your engagement with place as you write conscious, or does it feel intuitive, a product of your own particular sensibility?
BARNES: I believe that when we write about place, we’re really writing about people. And when we write about people, including ourselves, it is inevitable to talk about physical sites as extensions of our persons. Perhaps because so much of my formative years were defined by how my parents interacted with or in architecture and landscape, my spatial awareness is heightened and is therefore inseparable from how I understand story and discourse. (I remember taking an IQ test in fourth grade and scoring the highest in spatial ability and visual memory. I considered becoming an architect because of this.) If you ask me to write about my husband, I can’t not mention his grandfather’s farmhouse. If you assign me an essay on motherhood, my mind’s eye can’t unsee the tidal pool at Sullivan’s Island. If you take me to the Biltmore, where the wallpapered ceiling looks like something my mother would do, I will cry. I did in fact cry at the Biltmore, overwhelmed by what you might call intuition or sensibility. I can’t shut it off.
FACKLER: One thing this anthology does so well is to demonstrate, clearly and with grace and nuance, the many ways race inflects daily life in the US, everything from visits to the DMV to apartment hunting to the experience of online dating. It’s in the polyphony of experience that a multi-textured view of the South begins to unfold. What do you hope readers of this collection take away from their reading?
BARNES: I think the answer here is two-fold. There’s a big difference between readership and reach. While I personally define my readership as the six people I trust the most (many of them also Filipino), my reach is possibly far wider than that. I know that most of the writers in the anthology write for their communities and there’s nothing more they want than making these readers feel seen and heard. As far as reach, I know that for many outside of our home cultures, this might be their first time reading these brilliant writers and poets. My hope is that this would be an introduction to their work, that people would read their books, find their published work, attend their events, and invite them to speak or read at their venues. I also want readers to recognize that the year my debut came out, 2018, only 11% of books were written by people of color, which is not representative at all of the 40% of the American population that identifies as BIPOC. This anthology was a labor of love and a sacrifice in many ways, and my hope is that it truly activates people to not just know more (because sometimes knowledge is just used as cultural and social capital) but do more, smartly, discerningly, bravely, altruistically. White supremacists are storming the Capitol. There is, like I said earlier, always something at stake when someone writes.
FACKLER: This reminds me of one of the essays from your collection Malaya where you write about one day being buried in the cemetery plot belonging to your husband’s family, an old genteel Southern white family carrying all the baggage of that particular inheritance. You write about this decision as both an act of surrender—the inevitable surrender of death, but also an acquiescence to a question your husband asked you years earlier—as well as an act of defiance. The epitaph on your headstone will read, you write: “Married into this family and told stories—stories that dragged them out of their fiction.”
It is ultimately not the job of the oppressed or marginalized to educate the privileged, and yet it’s necessary to speak and write stories that challenge the cultural fictions that divide us. The essays collected in A Measure of Belonging strike me as doing just this. How do you see these things interacting—the necessity of writers and publishers to tell new or silenced stories and the freedom of the marginalized writer to not be responsible for dragging the oblivious out of their comfortable fictions?
BARNES: Hmm, yes to all that. I think this is when wisdom, discernment, and boundaries come in. And always, just like in my husband’s family, I’m not educating or speaking for the benefit of the privileged. I am doing it for myself and for my daughter. I also know when to withhold. And boundaries evolve; the more of them you put into place, the stronger they collectively get. I also know how to replenish. I know that the view from my back porch is phenomenal. I know how to enjoy a bourbon by the fire and look at the orange-pink sunset through the trees, and not think of anybody but myself, my husband, my daughter, and our pet bunny. In December, I published a new essay with Catapult about joy as resistance. While I take writing and politics seriously, I take my joy much, much more seriously. I’m here to live.
FACKLER: In Monsoon Mansion, you write about encountering the works of Shakespeare and Milton in your English class and bringing home J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye from the school library, but it’s interesting that your connection to Filipino literature was routed through your history course. Do you think that tacit connection between literary and national history has informed your understanding of writing as a political tool?
BARNES: Oh, definitely. There’s something to commend about how the Philippine education system teaches history through literature, and vice versa. For one, one of our historical figures, Jose Rizal, was a writer. His novels, essays, and poems incited political reform and contributed to the Philippine Revolution and independence from Spain. Of course, he didn’t do it all on his own but his works undeniably led to independence from 300 years of colonization. As a student in the Philippines, you learn before the age of 10 that literature has a direct impact on your freedom(s). As a child, although I wouldn’t have been able to put it plainly, I understood that to take literature for granted was to take freedom for granted. A mentor told me once that writers have a responsibility to history, and I believe her. Sometimes that responsibility is to tell the story of a revolution, other times it is to tell the story of your daughter’s laugh. Shakespeare, Milton, and Salinger taught me how to write in English. But it was writers like Rizal, Roca, Hagedorn, and Apostol who taught me to write toward freedom–which is an ongoing work.
FACKLER: One unintended repercussion I could foresee stemming from this division, though, is a sense that, in the Philippines, there is no national literary, aesthetic tradition, only national history. Maybe that’s a facile distinction? Your own career as a writer has largely been based in the American South. Did you feel—or do you feel—as a writer that you are part of a specific literary tradition?
BARNES: I don’t mean to imply that the Philippines has no distinct aesthetic or literary tradition, that all we have is national history. I think we have many styles, in fact. I think that as a people of more than 100 dialects and languages, whose ancestors inhabited more than 7,000 islands with distinct traditions, and a considerable portion of the population living in diaspora and constant displacement, the unifying theme about our way of life and way of story is that search for freedom. The hundred or so manners of speech, the thousands of micro-landscapes, and the myriad movements all bring texture to our collective imagination and to each individual writer’s style. While we work, not just toward freedom, but work from the core that is the search for freedom, we all move from that center in different ways and at different lengths… like concentric circles. I refuse to say that there is one way of writing like or as a Filipino. Just like there isn’t one way to write like or as an American.
Cinelle Barnes is a memoirist and essayist. Her debut memoir, Monsoon Mansion (2018), tells the riches-to-rags story of her childhood in the Philippines. Most recently, she is the editor of A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South, a new anthology of essays from Hub City Press. Barnes lives in Charleston, SC, with her husband and daughter.
Evan Fackler is the Contributing Interviews editor at storySouth. His interviews, reviews, short fiction, and comic-recipes can be found at Entropy Magazine, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere.
