The lives of sisters Consuelo and Graciela intertwine and unravel, both with each other and separately, and then crisscross the globe in The Volcano Daughters, the debut novel by Gina María Balibrera.

Much of what happens to the sisters is not their choice. They suffer great losses of their mother and loved ones, abuse at the hands of the General in El Salvador, and repeated setbacks in their efforts to regain a home, sustenance, and love.

These two daughters of mother Socorrito begin their lives on a volcano where the women harvest coffee for el patrón of la finca (the boss of the estate). When their lives converge with the rising dictator, who despite despising their Indigenous roots also finds them attractive, the girls find themselves in significant danger, which they only fully comprehend looking back:

Years later, after everything, Graciela would curse herself for not leaving that afternoon, before meeting the General, before falling under his power. Why hadn’t she, in the minutes before Ninfa called their names to hurry up and get dressed and ready, before the General arrived in his car, before her work at the palace began the following day, grabbed her sister’s hand and run? Despite the inevitable protests from her silly sister—that she wasn’t going anywhere without first saying goodbye to Luis, without first gathering her velvet pouches full of dried rose petals and stolen cigarettes, her tarot cards, her púchica spider necklace—they would have run.

As time goes on, premonitions in which “something that hadn’t yet happened haunted her” and threats finally lead to a life-changing event for the sisters—and life-ending event for their friends in the village on the volcano, which reflects a fictional account of the historical La Matanza murders in 1932.

The narrators of The Volcano Daughters are called las fantasmas and they watch over these sisters. Through first-person omniscient narration, these ghosts—women from the volcano who lost their lives that day—divulge the sisters’ story and bring an understanding of what has happened in the past and even how the future will unfold. Las fantasmas save the daughters more than once during their sometimes seemingly improbable journeys by sending help in unexpected forms, like a white dog that appears in the moment of need, guides them where to go, and then disappears. These spirits also regularly foreshadow events and embody physical forms, allowing them to affect outcomes. Early in the novel, las fantasmas share:

What happened next had long been ordained in our ancient stories: a ferocious battle for order and stability took place, one dependent on magic. And the magic here took many shapes: words made law, the voices of the dead channeled through a young girl, a painting that charted the destiny of skin, a railroad that traversed nations along an old royal road, an ocean of ancient tears, and fertile, verdant land fed by igneous rock. Our lives destroyed, our bones the harvest of a fragile ego. Our souls wrapped around these threads.

Las fantasmas, their voices and presence, sustain the memories and the lives of the daughters who survive.

Balibrera earned an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She will speak on a panel discussing the humanities, fiction writing, and other topics on Monday, April 9, from 5:30 pm to 7 pm in the Osterman Room at the U-M Institute for the Humanities.

Balibrera and I talked about her journey of writing The Volcano Daughters, the narrators’ point of view, the limits of the term magical realism, research for her book, the role of libraries in the characters’ lives, and what she is reading now.   

Q: You studied at the University of Michigan and live in Ann Arbor. What makes Ann Arbor a good place to write?
A: Ann Arbor is an incredible place to be a writer. It’s got beautiful libraries, of course, and a really robust literary scene, which is bolstered by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, the university at large, and also the creative spirit of the residents and community spaces like Literati Bookstore and 826michigan. Ann Arbor feels like an enchanted village sometimes—ordinary geniuses all around you, and the fact that its downtown and central campus areas are so walkable really makes living here pleasant. It’s welcoming and unostentatious, and I’m fortunate to have a writing group full of superstars. We meet in our pajamas after our kids are in bed and sit at my kitchen table lit with candles and hash it all out.

Q: The Volcano Daughters is your first novel, and it was published last year. Writing a novel is a long process, of course. What reflections on writing a book do you have now that you are on the other side of it?
A: Yes, I started the novel as a story during the summer of 2011. I wrote the novel through grad school, and then a million jobs—teaching, nannying, retail, freelance writing, online editing—the birth of my kid, illness, pandemic. You know, all the regular life stuff. Life is always there, and it feeds the writing, of course, but certain conditions do exhaust our bodies and minds and leave little room for the writing to go. And those slowdowns and pauses are OK! It got worlds easier to fit writing in, and to live in general, when I landed a 9 to 5 desk job with benefits, and then when my kid started school a couple of years after that, the daily math of living became more manageable. Having a supportive partner, a solid writing community, and a great agent and editor, really kept me going and reminded me that the fictional world I was sneaking off to was real and worth creating. As a working parent, being accepted to a few funded writing residencies was a book-saver. My sense is that novels simply take a lot of time and a lot of work, humility, a beginner’s mind, constant reading, and a consistent practice of showing up to the desk. I think that’s how we get to the last page.

Q: Las fantasmas, the narrators of The Volcano Daughters, include Lourdes, María, Cora, and Lucía. At times, these four souls talk amongst themselves about Consuelo, Graciela, and events. How does having a group of omniscient narrators change how you tell the story? How did you decide when to switch from the third-person narration to conversations between the spirits?
A: The collective and individual voices of the chorus were the core of the story to me—their voices are what came to me first when I began writing the book in 2011. Their specific, expansive—and historically erased—perspective was vital. The dead are my narrators because the story belongs to them. I was dissatisfied with the flatness of a monolithic god voice, and I found that I needed to honor these four characters with distinct voices, and for the first-person plural to be a little strange and uneven, to telescope into omniscience, to leave space inside the chorus for disagreement, soliloquy, laughter, interruption, and gossip. These ghosts are the experts. They are fact-checking each other, haunting the library, scrutinizing what is written about their lives. They own this story. And through them, mythical characters like Siguanaba and Blood Woman, and poets and artists like Prudencia Ayala and Liliana Serpas, emerge. These dead are also the mothers, las comadres, who rebuild the world and ensure its survival. And I wanted the voice to feel for the reader like listening in on an intimate conversation between sisters and friends—that’s how it sounded to me.

Q: Las fantasmas not only narrate the story but also sometimes influence events, such as taking on a bodily form and giving money and an address to one of the daughters, Consuelo. Some might refer to this as magical realism, but the plot and characters are more nuanced than simply experiencing extraordinary events. The narrators bring benevolence, anger, and justice in the lives of Consuelo and Graciela. In what ways does your book diverge or converge with the genre of magical realism?
A: For me, this strangeness is part of a perception of a world that includes the possibility of the dead being very present with the living and that venerates story, myth, and history. It’s the dinner table with my relatives telling and retelling stories, it’s dreams that contain messages. It’s a luxury of fiction, omniscience, and a ghostly chorus narration.

I desire new forms, narrative shapes that push new boundaries and excite me.

I have often resisted labels like “magical realism” as applied to writers of Latin American descent writing about Latin America, and it’s not the heterogenous canon bearing that label, the works themselves that I object to, but what I perceive as the shorthand, the derivative elements, the marketing tropes, really. Sometimes the category seems contrived to appeal to readers with appetites for the comforting exotic. Which is very far away from what I want to write, and from the responsibility I felt to tell stories ethically and artfully. So many writers described as belonging to the “magical realism” canon diverge from the genre. Take Borges or Juan Rulfo–their mystery, poetry, playfulness, and subtleties. And there’s so much brilliant fiction that works beyond straight realism by Latine writers now: Marytza K. Rubio’s Maria, Maria, Carribean Fragoza’s Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, Ruben Reyes Jr.’s There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, work from Latin American writers like Valeria Luiselli’s Story of My Teeth or Brenda Lozano’s Witches. There’s variety, innovation, and formal experimentation in all of these writers that makes the label feel pretty undescriptive and flimsy.

Ideally, all writers are given the space to write beyond these labels, towards the future, even if what we write about may situate itself in the past.

Q: Your novel situates itself in the past. The daughters, Consuelo and Graciela, survive a massacre, which is based on the 1932 La Matanza in El Salvador, and they go on to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and France. Why did you set your book during the time period of 1914 to 1942?
A: My father’s family came to San Francisco from San Salvador in the 1940s, and I was curious about the place and time that they had left. La Matanza itself was this violent culmination of authoritarianism, mestizaje, colonialism, land grabs, and spiritual grift—and its reverberations are still felt today. This was also an era that saw a global rise in fascism and authoritarianism, and the artistic modes of Dadaism, Spiritualism, and Surrealism were in some ways responses to fascistic violence. And we see resistance to the replications of patriarchal violence that cropped up in these artistic movements through subversive, often female, communities of solidarity and art-making.

Q: Your acknowledgments mention research trips to El Salvador, France, and Columbia Library. What information did you glean from your travels? How did your investigation inform the plot of The Volcano Daughters?
A: In the early 2000s I visited San Salvador’s Museum of the Word and Image, and I saw the country’s first visual exhibit of La Matanza: photographs, testimony from living survivors, a record that didn’t fully illuminate all that I didn’t know, but that showed me a sketch of what had been so vigorously erased. Researching early Surrealist female artists and their fascination with the occult, like Hilma af Klint’s theosophical color theories and Leonora Carrington’s tarot and her life-sustaining friendship with Remedios Varo in Mexico City, really moved me and helped me settle my own writing into exploring that power of artistic camaraderie, and the political implications of comadres.

There were unexpected gifts too that came out of research travel—tactile details that I couldn’t find in libraries or on JSTOR that shifted so much in my telling. In 2012, I received a research grant and traveled to the South of France, where I found this stone face carved into the ruins of the artist colony that inspired the artist colony in the book. This surreal face opened up a little window in my research brain for me to crawl through, into my own realm of invention. There were so many pieces of information, images from my travels and research that only filtered through my mind and locked into place, plot-wise, or character-wise, with patience and time.

Q: Graciela and Lourdes have interests in libraries and archives. What do libraries do to sustain these characters?
A: Libraries sustain the world! Materially and spiritually. In a practical sense for Graciela, the library is a refuge, safety, and access to learning—in the library of her childhood, as well as in the various libraries that she enters as an adult. And for Lourdes, the library is a space for righting the world. What happens when our archives burn? Lourdes is there to haunt these spaces like a literary Siguanaba and to edit and amend what has been written and to fill in the voids with her stories.

Q: Consuelo and Graciela survive abuse, evade prosecution, walk the path of a starving artist, encounter hard luck with love, and endure tragedy. Do you think they find peace in the end?
A: I hope so. In my imaginings they do.

Q: What is on your stack to read?
A: I love this question, Martha. As Lourdes says in the novel, “Books are made of other books.” Right now I’m working on new material and really enjoying and learning from my current reading stack. One of my favorite new novels is by the brilliant Fernando A. Flores: Brother Brontë. It’s gorgeously bizarre and propulsive—post-punk, post-apocalyptic, comadre-powered. I’m almost done, and it just gets better with each page. Another great wonder is Lydi Conklin, whose debut novel Songs of No Provenance is out this year, and it’s amazing. Their musician protagonist is lost in a tangle of toxic threads related to art-making, fame, mentorship, appropriation, and performance. It’s also kinda filthy, in a very fun way. I’m re-reading Michael Ondaatje’s brilliant Divisadero right now. And I just started Tsunami, which is an anthology of nonfiction and poetry by contemporary female writers from Mexico. Oh, and I can’t wait to read Ruben Reyes Jr.’s Archive of Unknown Universes.

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian. 

Gina María Balibrera will speak on a panel discussing the humanities, fiction writing, and other topics on Monday, April 9, from 5:30 pm to 7 pm in the Osterman Room at the U-M Institute for the Humanities. You can find more information and register for the discussion here.