On Literary Lineage, Transformation & Writing in Many Tongues with Poet Amanda Galvan Huynh

Barely South Review: There were so many beautiful themes in your work, but I wanted to start off with language and belonging, especially resonant in your poem “Tongue Untethered.” How does working in multiple languages influence your craft?

Amanda Galvan Huynh: I’ve actually been writing in Vietnamese, Spanish, and English. With my little one, we are learning language right now, and that is making for a wonderful creation of new words. I’ve been interested in multilingual and bilingual forms. I think it jumped off the fact that I write bilingual poems, bringing Spanish into the mix, which depending on who you talk to and their experience with their mother tongue or heritage language, can bring up a lot of emotions. The Spanish I know is really a non-academic Spanish. I’ve always wanted to write a poem titled “They Don’t Teach Grandpa Spanish in My School,” because no matter where I go to learn the proper way to write ‘academic Spanish,’ it’s not going to bring me closer to my familial tongue, which is a specific Spanish spoken in Texas.

“Tongue Untethered” speaks to that because my abuelo makes an appearance in there, in these little bits I’m trying to capture. I think it’s really nice for Spanish speakers, or speakers who speak Spanish and English, to read that form, because even the first row of Spanish that’s included I’m literally building a city and the line that comes after is “until cities overgrow in my mouth,” because I’m naming things that you would find in a town in the city. For those that understand it, it’s an extra layer that’s there and for readers that might not understand Spanish, if they go and learn these words, it’s another layer to discover later on.

The collection felt in many ways like a love letter to your heritage and I wanted to ask about your literary lineage. Who are some of your influences and inspirations?

As I was writing this specific collection, I was very much reading different poets in conversation with different poets. However, moving to Hawai‘i has changed my view on who we’re in conversation with or who our lineage comes from, because when we talk about writing and when we talk about this sense of academic writing, if you will, we often exclude stories handed down from our families. I really tie a lot of my storytelling and narrative arc to family members, because I get these bits and pieces of stories that I then create something from.

I’m still trying to figure out who my lineage is and what that lineage means. I am taking a Spanish literature class right now that’s taught in Spanish, and I’m being introduced to the history and a lineage of Spanish writers whose first language is Spanish and who are writing in Spanish that focuses on our community. For me, it’s undoing of what I thought was my lineage, and so my lineage at the moment is transforming. I thought ‘Oh, I thought I came from this line of writers,’ but really, it extends and also includes these [Spanish] writers. I’m in a moment of discovery. I’m in the moment of figuring out who I am in conversation with because I think it’s a lot bigger than just American writers.

Mothers and mothering is another theme that resonated throughout your collection. How does your mothering influence and impact your art?

It drastically changed, in all the good ways! This book was actually written and accepted before I had my first child, and I love to tell people that this book was edited as a new mother. So I find it fascinating to be writing this book and putting it together as a daughter and granddaughter, but then editing it and reorganizing it, and looking at it differently as a mother. In the very last stages of getting the book together, I had just given birth.

My writing has shifted because this collection [meditates so much] on questions of intergenerational trauma: What is passed down? What are you going to pass forward? What is your responsibility as a parent, and how can these things affect you? The whole first collection is about the realization of knowing where my lineage comes from, and where the behaviors and inheritance comes from, and my writing is now very much focused on: where will it go from here?

When I was growing up, I was told ‘one day you’ll understand when you’re a parent’ and I think it’s not hitting the same way as my mother was hoping because I’m realizing that ‘Yeah, I do understand, but I understand where you could have done better.’ I think that brings a different layer to everything. Motherhood is also making me lean more toward joy. The poems that I’ve been writing lean more toward the joy and wonder, because my child is making me rethink and relearn how to play.

Lynda Barry says something like: “When we are kids, we go out and play, hoping that something will play back with us,” and I think that speaks so much to writing. When we sit down to write, in a sense we’re going to play, hoping that something will play back in that moment. So my writing has really shifted in terms of looking at the joy of things, trying to be more playful. I’ve been diving into more of Ross Gay’s work and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders to really tap into that, because writing about joy and humor is difficult. How do you tap into that and how do you make it interesting and profound for the reader?

In the collection, as the speaker moves from a daughter who did not feel mothered to speaker who is about to be a mother herself, there is a shift. What specific choices did you make to evoke that shift in the speaker?

One specific thing I did was play with titles. You’ll notice there are titles that look very similar to one another. “Who La Llorona Cries For” and “Who La Llorona’s Daughter Cries For,” “Before My Mother Was Born” and “Before I Was Born,” “Notes on Absence.” I’m trying to mirror these poems, give them a sense of recombination. What does it mean whenever we carry a characteristic that our mother or our grandmother passed, or what does it mean when we look like our uncle? I’m playing with that idea. “Before My Mother Was Born,” and “Before I Was Born” is a play on each other, because “Before My Mother Was Born” is a whole history, and that poem has a specific form. I take that history, put it in “Before I Was Born,” overlay things, but also make it a little bit longer because it’s a continuation of a story before it, though the titles are still very similar to each other.

Same thing with “Who La Llorona Cries For” and “Who La Llorona’s Daughter Cries For,” again, looking at the same situation, this time of coming into motherhood, but different reactions to a specific moment.

I loved the repetition in those two poems of the two blue lines and how the speaker’s reaction to those lines changes from the first poem to the second. I loved those echoes, and I wondered if you had particular favorites from your collection.

It’s funny, the favorite poem I love to read is “When My Little Sister Mistakes Selena for Selena Gomez,” and that could just be because it’s a happier poem. The same thing with “Tongue Untethered,” it’s happy and lyrically fun to read. “The Songs of Brujería” too. I always keep coming back to that one as well, because it sets the scene for where we’re at, what we’re doing, and what’s going on, specifically in Texas.

I also really loved the poems where absence was doing so much, like “The Abortion My Mother Told Me Not to Write About” and “Notes on Absence.”

I’m obsessed with absence at the moment in terms of how do we capture it? Does absence take up space, or is absence the lack of something? Is it something or is it not something? That’s the question. And I think with writing about it or around it can be difficult because it’s more of what does absence and the white page and the blank space do? What can it do? How does that silence take up space and how can you use that to move a narrative along? What can we capture in that moment? The whole collection is a result of an absence as well. It’s very much a grieving, and how that breaks down and ripples through generations.

What are you working on next?

I am working on lyric essays in hybrid forms. There are essays in there, but there are also hybrid poems, but those hybrid poems could also be considered lyric essays, depending on how you wanted to view them. It’s very much working in the space in between poems and essays, which can get very confusing. I’m working with Polaroids right now, overlaying them on poems. I’m very much concerned with how can we transform the thing we’ve inherited? How can we transform pain?

I think the lyric essays with hybrid forms are going to look at mothering through that different light of ‘I am a parent now.’ What does that mean? I feel like I was getting there at the end of [Where My Umbilical Is Buried], like, ‘Oh, this is a new start. Where do we go from here?’ It’s exciting.