October is Latinx Heritage Month in Canada. Reflecting on my Latin American heritage brings both nostalgic joy and a sting of bitterness. 2021 marks a decade since I set foot in Venezuela, a country that shows no progress towards peace or the oil-fueled prosperity that made it so famous in the 20th century. Instead, we have cemented our rank as the country with the 2nd highest refugee population in the world, with about 4 million fleeing a devastating economic and political reality.
Over the past year and a half, I’ve written a novel, short stories and flash fiction, trying to make sense of what has happened there and how a nation poised for progress turned sour in less than a decade. As I do so, I’m conscious that I write from the only voice I can draw on: one that comes from my family, from a house full of ghosts and traditions that seem both distant and intimately close to my heart. To stop writing is to lose the little that I have left of that world that exists only in my memory… the country that is left, I’ve been told, is changed beyond recognition.
This week, as I prepare to attend the BIPOC Writers Connect digital conference for emerging writers, hosted by the Writers Union of Canada, I sit with the first pages of my novel in hand. These are the pages that I’ve rewritten so many times. They hold my hopes and also my fears of whether this work will ever be read by others, whether it will be publishable one day. It holds memories and fantasies, reality and that magical and unexplainable truth that so many Venezuelans swear is true: a child ghost, a santera who can see the future, and cardboard saints that can change the fate of a whole family. As I conjure this magic on the page, I can only do so with the hope that if I mold this into something readable, then maybe, just maybe, the old house in Naguanagua and our family memories will live on. Perhaps, if the story is told just right, we can survive Chavez, Maduro, poverty, hyperinflation, political spats and the thousands of kilometers that divide our family, now that we have had no choice but to leave.
My Writing Story 