5 Questions for Cleyvis Natera

Abstract

5 Questions for Cleyvis Natera Michelle Johnson (bio) In Neruda on the Park, Cleyvis Natera's debut novel, a young lawyer seeks a new path after being fired from a top law firm while her mother schemes to stop a development project in their predominantly Dominican neighborhood in New York City and her father makes plans for the couple to return to the Dominican Republic. Q: A book of Neruda poems reappears throughout the story. Why Neruda? A: Pablo Neruda is a beloved and polarizing figure in literature. I have always been fascinated by his work and the strength of his position as a cultural phenomenon. He wrote some of the most beautiful poems I've ever read, and the strength of his art is reflected in its resonance to this day, forty-nine years after his death. Neruda believed that art—especially poetry and literature—should be accessible to all members of society, regardless of class or education level. He was known for standing up for the rights of marginalized people against unjust governments. Yet he admitted to sexually assaulting a woman—a fact that is often dismissed or conveniently forgotten when we celebrate his achievements as an artist outside his country of birth. In Chile, there has been resistance whenever there is a movement to erect structures in his honor. My debut novel, Neruda on the Park, introduces readers to Nothar Park, a fictional neighborhood in northern Manhattan comprised predominantly of a Dominican immigrant community on the cusp of great change. The gentrification that has altered neighborhoods all around New York City has somehow missed this community. The plot revolves around how my two main characters—mother-daughter duo Eusebia and Luz—react once the gentrification of the neighborhood arrives. While Luz, a young upwardly mobile lawyer, sees the coming change as inevitable, her mother, Eusebia, sees it as an opportunity to resist. In Neruda on the Park, there are several characters who deeply love Neruda's work. Luz's parents, Eusebia and Vladimir, credit the love poems of Neruda with salvaging their struggling marriage by enabling them to articulate emotions they were unable to say aloud to each other. Likewise, Neruda's work features prominently in a budding love affair between Luz and Hudson, the developer of the luxury condominium her mother so vehemently opposes. When Luz has an opportunity to help Hudson name the new structure he is building, she naturally proposes Neruda on the Park since the poet was responsible for saving her parents' marriage and enabling her family to make the fictional neighborhood of Nothar Park home. But there is also something more nuanced at play with the use of Neruda's poetry throughout the novel—Neruda on the Park, as a construction, is the looming threat against safety for vulnerable members of this community—most notably the women who take center stage in this narrative. Central themes in my novel include womanhood and trauma, so I thought Neruda would serve as a solid departure point to allow for conversations about how we, as a society, deal with toxic figures who have contributed stunning and important works of art. Q: This novel, with its multiple conflicts, is a page-turner. Gentrification is one central conflict. What other literature concerning gentrification would you recommend? A: Halsey Street, by Naima Coster, is the brilliant story of Penelope Grand, a young woman who is forced to return home to Brooklyn to look after her ailing father. A struggling artist who has been unable to find firm ground, Penelope's fraught relationship with her mother mirrors the devastation she must confront in her altered, gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood. There is a blindness, a refusal to confront the truth, that at times seems to shroud the way everyone functions in Coster's fictional world, and it is within that space—where transformation is tied to a need to come to terms with the world and people as they truly are—that readers are granted a path to meditate on our own everyday fictions. Halsey Street is a virtuosic novel everyone should read to better understand themselves. Survival Math, by Mitchell S. Jackson, is a spellbinding, powerful, and complex essay collection...