For those not familiar with the publishing industry, things are usually quiet in the summer, especially August. If you email anyone—an editor, agent, publicist, author—you can expect to receive an automated out-of-office response. The launch of John Manuel Arias’s debut novel, Where There Was Fire (Flatiron, 2023), held in Brooklyn at the end of August, was anything but quiet. There was barely any room to bend your elbow or take a sip of a specialty cocktail inspired by this poet and author’s book.
In this lush and striking debut, Teresa Cepeda Valverde and her family’s future is forever changed one night in 1968 when a deadly fire consumes the American Fruit Company’s most lucrative banana plantation. Her husband and daughters’ father, José María, works there, and consequently disappears. Their daughters, Lyra and Carmen, lose their maternal grandmother, Amarga, on the same night—her death is later linked to José María’s subsequent disappearance. This event marks Teresa’s second plantation-related loss, after her father, a corporate lawyer for the company, went missing years before. Distraught by loss and grief, she flees to Washington, D.C., for six years, leaving her daughters in the care of their three godmothers. Twenty-seven years later, Teresa and Lyra still reel from the wounds left by that fateful night. Lyra is raising Carmen’s son, Gabriel, after her sister’s suicide. Angry with her mother for abandoning them when they needed her most, Lyra is determined to unearth the truth about the cover-up that led up to this sequence of events. Teresa, still haunted by her husband’s absence and mother’s ghost, wants nothing more than to be a part of her daughter and grandson’s life. What results is a story of a fractured family trying to reconcile a past steeped in loss, secrets, and sadness—and trying to find forgiveness amidst it all.
Over a series of emails and texts, Arias and I discussed secrets as bonding agents in families, omens and spirits, the deadly impact of imperialism, and more.
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The Rumpus: Every time I see a family tree at the beginning of a novel, I rub the palms of my hands together like I’m about to eat a delicious meal—which is actually how I felt after reading this book. Which character was most fully formed from the beginning?
John Manuel Arias: The first scene that came to me was a woman with a husband yet to come home. Her daughters, in an adjacent room, feel their mother’s warmth in the doorway. Their faces emerged, slowly, from the shadows of the scene, from the shadows of my imagination. The woman took the form of my grandmother. The other characters, [took shape from] the rest of my family. Sometimes when I write, it’s as if I’m watching a movie play out in my head and I’m just describing it. What popped up in that scene was her face, her hair, the way she stood.
Rumpus: Did the rest of the family tree grow from Teresa?
Arias: Because the protagonist took her cue from my grandmother’s life, the family tree sprouted from the same earth as my own family tree. There’s so much family history in the novel.
Rumpus: What was it like balancing all the truth with fiction?
Arias: Fiction allowed me the chance to place my family in a parallel universe. I could add twists and exaggerate; I didn’t have history to tether me, and that allowed me so much freedom to create. What definitely bound me were the consequences: What did the fruit companies do? Why? How did it affect those communities? I had to approach those consequences holistically—how did the effects of pesticides affect men and women, for example.
Rumpus: Were there any gaps in your own family history that you were able to fill through fiction?
Arias: There were definitely instances. I’d write a scene or a chapter and, when talking to someone in my family about it, they’d say it really happened. It’s like I was predicting the past. So, so weird. I was writing down things that happened, not from a place of memory but from a place of imagining and instinct, which is where telling the future comes from.
Rumpus: Your unboxing video on Instagram takes the cake. What has it been like to hand-deliver your book to your grandmother? What was her reaction when you told her your main character was based on her? Does she even know?!
Arias: I haven’t actually told her the protagonist is anything like her! I’m sure she assumes it, but I don’t think I’ve ever said it outright, which is really difficult, right? Basing a character on someone else can bring joy or it can bring harm—I pray for the former, but the protagonist, Teresa, always began from the image of my grandmother.
Hand-delivering the book was incredible. She’s ninety-two years old, so it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I owe so much to her, and every one of my victories is a victory for her. She asks me about publishing all the time, even though she doesn’t completely understand it. I mean hey, I barely understand it!
Rumpus: The relationship between individual and collective histories is reciprocal. Did that help keep you organized when threading multiple timelines?
Arias: When I teach creative writing workshops, I like to have the students watch Powers of Ten. It begins here on Earth and zooms out one meter by increasing powers of ten until we have reached the limit of the universe, then it quickly zooms below our skin, into the cells, particles, subatomic level, etc. This macro versus micro approach to the understanding of reality is a great way to approach fiction—oscillating between the personal and larger systems that influence our personal lives. Zooming out, then in, then out, allows a complete story, piece by piece.
Rumpus: This is a novel about secrets. What did you set out to explore about secrets—how they shape a family—before writing this book? How did those intentions compare to what you learned after you finished?
Arias: Coming from a Catholic, Latin American family, secrets are our bread and butter—well, let’s say blood and body . . . ha! So many families, including my own, hang skeletons in the closet like worn coats. The Cepeda Valverde family is no different. What’s important to know is who is keeping secrets and why. Family members protecting each other, or a company protecting itself—there’s nothing more fascinating than the act of uncovering.
Rumpus: What fascinates you about it?
Arias: It’s like an archaeological dig—it’s dirty, exhausting, and, at times, rewarding. It’s both an act of uncovering and recreation. Because there’s never a perfectly preserved truth—you have to rebuild those pieces, recreate until it most resembles the truth.
Rumpus: The truth is interesting like that: there can be multiple versions of it, depending on whom you ask, or when you ask. Details erode over time, or new ones emerge. When you’re writing toward the truth, how much do you weigh fact against feeling?
Arias: Fact and feeling definitely share the same space on the weighing dish! Fact is interesting because unless it’s documented in some way—photographed, written down, recorded—it’s subject to change because memory changes reality every time we remember something. And then our feelings evolve based on time and perspective. Maybe I’ll say that when they’re fresh, fact and feeling are the closest they can be to the truth, but in the act of remembering and reflection, they’re less objective but so much more human.
Rumpus: This is also a book about international exploitation: how one company’s massive cover-up seals the fate of this family, countless others, and generations to come. Besides the cover-up, what else was important for you to expose and why?
Arias: When I recently went back to Costa Rica, I told everyone about how my novel exposes the use of Nemagon. They would stare back at me and exclaim that I was going to get arrested. Nemagon is an infamous pesticide used by the American banana companies, relatively unknown outside of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. But just because many haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean that it didn’t sterilize 30,000 Costa Ricans. It doesn’t mean that these fruit companies were well aware of its side effects and used it anyway. These corporations have never really paid for their sins. Hopefully this book can get the world to pay attention.
Rumpus: Was this an intention from the start?
Arias: Yes, ever since I learned about the existence of Nemagon, I knew it had to be in the novel, that Nemagon had to flow through it like blood.
Rumpus: What was it like, filtering this through fiction?
Arias: Fiction allowed me to attack it from every angle. From the narrative to the found memos—with some actual quotes!—I could fully demonstrate how Nemagon and agribusiness and American greed put profit over people.
Rumpus: What were some of the things that came up in your research that you didn’t know or surprised you?
Arias: Until I delved in headfirst, I had no idea that Costa Rica was the first “banana republic.” It was the birthplace of the United Fruit Company—unwittingly its birthplace. The government and land gave way and were easily harvested by Minor C. Keith because of his lust for that golden fruit.
Rumpus: You include the people responsible for the cover-up, in a way that doesn’t pull focus from the story. Instead, those characters are given space, through correspondence, in the book. What were the reasons for writing them in this capacity?
Arias: I wanted to give white foreign interests as little narrative attention as possible. I had almost no interest in the way [they] would feel about the horrific actions they committed. But I did know those reactions, their reasoning, were integral to the plot of the novel; the idea of motivation is indispensable, especially in a novel. Characters do stuff, and the reader is always going to ask why, and as a writer I’m just as interested. So I isolated their stories to the very cold pages of internal company memos. And in that isolation, these characters felt that no one would be watching, or reading, so their arrogance came through in a way a narrative couldn’t replicate if not from their mouths. These white people practically brag about sterilizing Costa Ricans. It’s as damning as real documents written by the higher-ups in the real-world United Fruit Company.
Rumpus: There were some twists in this book—phew, baby! Without giving anything away, were there any twists that even you, the writer, didn’t see coming?
Arias: I definitely did not set out to write a scene toward the end of the book, with an American doctor examining a Costa Rican laborer and the former’s insecurity. Toxic masculinity exploded from this man, as it did from many others throughout the book.
The book examines Costa Rican–specific machismo and marianismo—that is, patriarchy and a branch of it in which women are expected to live up to the example of the Virgin Mary: pure, maternal, perfect. It’s a horrible, exalted prison.
Rumpus: There are elements of magic peppered throughout the book, like Carmen’s psychic abilities. I recently talked to Ingrid Rojas Contreras about how the term “magical realism” is, more times than not, misused. Do you agree that magic is realism in many Latin American and Caribbean cultures, including indigenous populations? Was it important for you to show the reader how characters in this book interact with the magic present in their lives?
Arias: I both agree and disagree. Actually, I believe the point is unfinished. I personally see ghosts, so I definitely know very well the porous nature of this world and the next, where magic is bleeding from. However, I think it’s unfair to chalk up magical realism to a simple documenting of culture, which is only part of it! When we’re talking about literature and fiction, magical realism is very much a mode, a tool. Yes, I can see ghosts, but how do I use ghosts in my novel to expose that which the living cannot see? How does Toni Morrison use the ghost of Beloved? How does Gabriel García Márquez use the insomnia plague? From all sides, I feel that magical realism is short-changed and seen as unserious, for whatever reason. There’s so, so much that goes into making it work, just like any other technique or genre.
Rumpus: Besides lifting the veil between our world and the next, what do you think makes it an effective tool in fiction?
Arias: My theory is that magical realism is a type of mythmaking. Magical realists are revealing something that a colonial and patriarchal society has forcibly erased, and in an effort to let that never happen again, they exaggerate it to the point of myth so that that story can never again be forgotten. Magical realism is the savior of memory.
Rumpus: You recently taught a workshop on magical realism through the Shipman Agency. What was the most important thing that you wanted to impart on your students?
Arias: I did my best to impart joy! Magical realism is a joyous genre. Even if it’s hotly debated, when used correctly, it can be the perfect tool.
Rumpus: Speaking of seeing ghosts, you lived in San José, Costa Rica, with your grandmother and four ghosts. Did they inspire anything in the book?
Arias: Of course, they did! They’re actually pretty annoying, to be honest. A lot of the ghosts in the novel are bored—the afterlife seems boring—so why not entertain yourself by fucking with the living? Why not hang around, trying to have conversations or answering interview questions, even if the living haven’t consented to it. Ancestors came to me in dreams and when I was awake, clamoring for a place in this book, and many of them made the cut!
Rumpus: What criteria did they have to meet in order to be included in the book?
Arias: Unfortunately, plot and character development were the great equalizer. There are plenty of satellite and ancillary characters in the novel, but I couldn’t find a way to keep them all without pulling away from the more narrative-focused characters.
Rumpus: How does your background in poetry inform your fiction?
Arias: I love a good sentence! There’s nothing more delicious than the perfect musicality of a line. I want paragraphs tuned like stanzas and words like notes. It makes me pay attention to every sound.
Rumpus: Nothing makes me geek out more than when I meet another writer who writes at a sonic level. There’s rhythm in syllables, sentences are more composed than crafted. R.O. Kwon does this, which is what made me fall in love with her writing. Who are some writers whose writing is music to your ears?
Arias: I love Arundhati Roy! The way she made a colonial language like English work for her. She’s a genius. I also just love poetry: Sally Wen Mao, Ricardo Maldonado, Monica de la Torre, Gabrielle Bates, Diannely Antigua—their books teach me each and every day.
Rumpus: What has writing this book taught you about yourself?
Arias: This novel definitely taught me how to be a writer, whatever that means. It forced me to be better, to mold a sentence into a jewel, to construct the skeleton of a plot, to hit metaphors home and really flesh out characters. It gave me the confidence to write the next [novel] and hopefully many more after!
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Author photograph by Nicholas Nichols
