Rebelliousness, Fantasy, and Healing in “Magical/Realism” https://ift.tt/Xe5AbVw
Searing, deeply affecting, and profoundly moving, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s essay collection, Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders, explores everything from Kurt Cobain, Selena, and Game of Thrones, to video games such as The Witcher, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Villarreal uses fantasy as a cipher through which to make sense of the echoes of colonial violence, border violence, gender and partner violence, and the impacts of remembrance and erasure on personal and familial history. The future-dreaming and re-worlding that Villarreal enacts across her genre-bending chapters, quite frankly, opens new worlds of healing both for herself and for readers.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the essay collection Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders (Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Dutton Books and Penguin Random House, 2024) and the poetry collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017). She is a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and holds a doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she lives with her son and a loyal dog. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid.
I knew from the first chapter that I needed to interview her so I could capture more of her writerly voice. This is how I ended up chatting with Vanessa over Zoom one sunny June afternoon, our respective pets making guest appearances.
If you could meet one person (real or fictional, dead or alive, famous or not), who would that be? Why?
I have two responses. One is Gale of Waterdeep from the video game Baldur’s Gate 3.
I have this essay that I’m about to start pitching around called “The Real Housewives of Faerun.” It’s about how on the cusp of middle age, I just have no interest in dating, and after my divorce, I have no interest in teaching men empathy. I resisted gaming for such a long time because I thought it was just very male-interest-oriented. I was delighted to find that in the Skyrim DLC, you could get married. From then on, I have pretty much limited my gaming experiences to games that have strong narratives and really, really well-written, compelling romances. It’s not even because the games are funniest when they’re, like, really horny; that’s not my draw. My draw is actually moments of helping and connecting. With Gale, for instance, you kind of talk him down from wanting to become a god because he was so hurt and traumatized by Mystra, the goddess of magic.
There’s a deep catharsis in these narratives that I first experienced with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, in its love story, the potential for healing, and curse lifting. I was in desperate grief and agony over how my divorce happened, and through the process of playing that game, I came to a realization that allowed me to go from this state of agony to a state of complete acceptance. The new romances that I’ve experienced through gaming have been so lovely. They present a safe, imaginative place where intimacy can happen, where healing can happen, and where you can navigate a relationship while being mindful of your traumas.
In terms of real living or dead people there are a few. One of them is Octavia Butler. I would love to get a sense of why and how Octavia Butler saw the future that she did and how she conceptualized time. I remember seeing her archives when she was writing Parable of the Sower, how in her journals and notes, she kept writing ‘more Hispanics.’ It shouldn’t have meant so much to see her write that, but it meant so much to me that her idea of a future resistance included ‘more Hispanics.’ To be seen in the future, for her to imagine this future resistance with queer, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous folks was so meaningful. I would just love to talk to her about that.
I ask this question because one of your essays delves into when you met Kit Harington, who played Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. You write about how you connected with Jon Snow’s borderlands mestizo identity in the show, but that meeting Harington in person felt over and underwhelming because the veil of fantasy was disrupted. Can you say more about the clash between reality and irreality when the magical meets realism?
I absolutely love that question. I haven’t known how to really talk about meeting Kit Harrington. It just felt like such an urgent thing to do while I was deep in the midst of writing what would be one the last essays in the book, “The Uses of Fantasy.” I just kept asking myself, why fantasy?What is it about fantasy that feels so critically urgent in this moment? I was so deep in this theoretical headspace that when I got to the event, the capitalism was just so jarring: Do you want a House Targaryen keychain? Do you want to pose with this dragon for $35? While I really enjoyed seeing the original set pieces and costumes, the consumerism immediately took me out of the fantasy because the materials themselves were so cheap and mass-produced. But I was like, I don’t care, I just want to see Kit. And when I saw him, it was just so clear that he was just this working actor, and I had no connection to this person, no matter how much I’d parasocially connected to his portrayal of a character I loved. I wanted to tell him that his portrayal of Jon Snow literally saved my life, but that’s too much to tell a stranger. I realized that Jon Snow was no longer this thing that I had invented or connected to. He was a product, bridled like a show pony in a stable, working the line until everyone with a ticket got a ride. This deeply personal connection became instantly depersonalized, anonymized, and shared with the masses. And sharing this character I loved and felt safe with in person with the masses, I don’t know. I no longer felt connected, safe, or represented.
I guess it’s that uncanny moment of encountering ‘the real.’ Not to get too postmodern, but the simulation, or the fantasy, broke upon meeting Kit, and I found myself kind of stranded in ‘the real’ with a stranger. I embarrassed myself by insisting that the fantasy of Jon Snow translate into a moment of connection with Kit. But that experience was mine, not his. And that is also the failure of capitalist realism — our disconnection from “the real” is very much an intended effect of capitalism, this manufactured disconnection and estrangement from the world and each other that keeps us lonely and longing, forming parasocial relationships. Simulations of love, belonging, justice, intimacy. It’s what keeps us working, buying, consuming, dreaming. Then, when you encounter the real, it’s this really intense cognitive break. Capitalism forces us to invent fantasies of connection and meaning to cope with estrangement. Meeting “Jon,” this stranger I’d made into a source of comfort in my deepest grief, only to encounter Kit the person — I’d brought all this love and appreciation and gratitude that, at the moment, was inappropriate for the context. I think that’s what made me finally realize that the break between the real and the imagined is the sensation of border crossing. There is a different essay I’m working on that argues that the presence of fantasy always implies the presence of a border because whatever is imagined to be on the other side, whatever is idealized, is different than what is here, present, and material. Once you cross over into the fantasy, you always bring the real with you.
The collection tells many careful, complicated love stories — not just of romantic partners, but friends, long-lost soulmates, your father, your grandmother, video game characters, fictional people, musicians, your son, and yourself. Can you tell me more about the role of complicated love in this collection?
This book came from the unholy intersection of divorce, doctoral exams, and the COVID-19 pandemic. I was in a very dark place, living alone in LA, far away from family — deeply broken, broken-hearted, and fighting for my life.
At the time, I remember I was reading about metanarratives — these grand stories that structure our realities, identities, relationships, and futures, like “college, marriage, career-baby-house” — that function like invisible code we all run on, whether we know it or not, and really control our lives and our choices. I just really started to question my grand narratives, stories that I had been trying and failing to live up to without thinking much about them. Where did they lead? I’d done everything right, was a good wife, pulled myself up by my bootstraps, got as far as a PhD, and still became a single mother living below the poverty line. My parents did everything right. So domestic realism narratives felt almost like a personal insult, constant reminders of a life, an income bracket, a marriage, a level of success, that I’d failed to meet. So fantasy became this way to soothe the heartbreak of failure, to imagine another kind of life. I could turn my brain off.
But at the heart of all of it was grief. And the grief wasn’t so much about losing my husband. It was about the pattern of losing, of failure, of the ways in which I’ve chased love throughout my life and lost it and had to imagine another way to survive without it. So your question was very perceptive; only after reading it did I realize, oh wow, every single essay is about chasing, imagining, and losing love. It’s about how love is a mode of memory and imagination. The way love compels us to recover and restore our ancestors’ past and reimagine more possible futures — futures without hunger, violence, or prisons. All of these essays are about how lost love moves us toward the fantasy of possibility. Fantasy is the space where I can experience love because it’s the only place where it’s available anymore. I’m no longer married, but I am Mrs. Gale Dekarios of Waterdeep. I don’t have a relationship with my family in Mexico anymore, but I can sort of theorize a way back to them through Game of Thrones and Jon’s connection to the Wildlings. So you’re right — what links all of these essays is love.
The essays are beautifully diverse: from a comparative analysis between Kurt Cobain and Selena to a poignant critique of popular role-playing games such as The Witcher, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Dragon Age: Inquisition and the hit show Game of Thrones, to a poignant retelling of your father’s musical career, every chapter offers readers something new, while simultaneously echoing the worlds of previous chapters. What are the threads that weave through and around these various chapters?
One of the threads is an attachment to rebellious figures. I’m rebellious to a fault. I tend to really struggle against the status quo. I’ll find something that is unjust and I have to rail against it. I just can’t mind my own business about it. (It’s a shortcoming. Don’t do that.) As a result, I’ve attached myself to moments of rebellion in popular culture or rebellious figures. Whether it’s my dad in the music industry — he and my mom are my first rebels — to Kurt Cobain and Selena, who were rebels in their own disciplines. Jon Snow rebels against both the Night’s Watch and Daenerys, which is to say, Jon Snow rebels against border patrol, borders, and Dany’s violent occupation and conquest. Solas, from Dragon Age: Inquisition, is a rebel, too.
Another thread is fantasy as a modality of healing. I know we’re all sick of trauma narratives, but I hope I present new ways to think about trauma as a collective, shared experience that can move us to imagine something better together and fight for a better world — the fantasy of a world without prisons, borders, homelessness, violence. We rarely think of trauma as a mass-shared thing. Trauma is thought of as an individual condition to be treated individually — but it’s something that is ongoing, generational, global, and structural. Abolitionist thought addresses the structural, generational trauma of incarceration on families, communities, schools, and the environment. Abolition is also seen as a fantasy: How are you going to defund the police or prisons? Fantasy gives us a framework for that and invites the reparative imagination.
And the last thread: time and the temporal entanglement of the past and the future. Having a child is a kind of time travel: it makes you really think about your roots, ancestors, familial history, what you want them to inherit or carry on in memory, and what kind of future you want to give them. Fantasy imagines a kind of past; science fiction imagines a kind of future — both genres are entangled with the present and imagining a better way.
In many ways, your collection bends and warps genres, melding academic scholarship with personal narrative and social/media critique. What inspired you to write in this mode? What does it allow you that other modes of storytelling do not?
We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to cultural criticism. I hope that this book is a kind of tribute or spiritual successor to Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America, or Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. All of these books are doing such urgent, critical, reparative work in how they reframe and recontextualize cultural production as deeply historical, personal, and political projects.
I wrote this while I was in the midst of studying and reading for exams and encountering incredible Black feminist criticism and Indigenous theory. I felt compelled by the kind of world-building and world-making they were doing through theory. Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds absolutely reoriented me in time and space via the cartographies of domination and how racial cartographies differ across Black and Indigenous archives. Monique Allewaert’s Ariel’s Ecology is an incredible plunge into Black ecofeminist critique, pre-colonial science, and understanding the middle passage as a chasm of ontological death. Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, Maria Saldaña-Portillo, Jodi Byrd, and Christina Sharpe were absolutely formative theorists. I could reworld my reality, my life, and my knowledge systems via “the speculative turn,” or critical fabulation, a mode of writing into and against the silences and absences of the archive, which Dixa Ramírez-D’Oleo critiques in This Will Not Be Generative. The speculative is a reparative mode that uses fabulation — feeling, intuition, embodied memory, the specter — as a legitimate and credible form of knowledge production, writing with and against an archive dominated by the records of white enslavers or institutions. So, a project like Zong by M. NourbeSe Philip, is listening for the lost voices of the enslaved between the spaces and syllables of legal court documents. You start to hear these inundated voices of the enslaved in the broken-up vowels — that is the speculative mode. It may not be an archival document or record, but the feeling it evokes, the loss, is an embodied deeper truth.
That was world-shattering information for a girl stranded in time and space, with a memory of Indigenous family but no records, estranged beyond the border. It’s one thing to encounter literary criticism that opens up how you read gender in Virginia Woolf or something, but it’s a whole other thing to encounter theory that reworlds your reality at your most oppressed moment and liberates the way you think about the world, yourself, your body, your relationship to history. And I started connecting the same revolutionary imagination at work in speculative theory to the worldbuilding in fantasy, character creation in RPGs and video games, the critique of Black and Indigenous surrealisms like Get Out and Reservation Dogs, how allegory can clarify history in fantasy, and repair through magical realism.
I guess the overarching genre would be speculative nonfiction, but the scandal is there is no fabulation or magical realism anywhere in the book. I’m telling the truth, but I expect not to be believed, credible, or seen as an authority. So, the book begins with the sentence, “That never happened.” And everything that comes after that sentence is in a footnote. That’s also speculative — telling the truth and still not being credible or believed.
What is next up for you? Do you have any upcoming tours or events you’d like to share with our readership?
I’ll be in Houston reading at Brazos Books on the 23rd of July at 7 p.m. I am trying to put a tour together, so look out for dates. I’ll just be announcing them as they come up.
I just defended my dissertation, so once I do my paperwork, I guess I’ll be a doctor. After that, I do want to continue doing fantasy theory. There’s a lot here that I didn’t get to write that I still want to talk about. I still want to talk about Stuart Hall. I want to talk about Octavia Butler. I want to talk about Jordan Peele’s Nope. So hopefully, there’s space, time, and support for me to do that. Eventually, when I get this poetry manuscript together into something I’m happy with, there will be a second poetry collection coming out.
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