They make you want to hug him, comfort him, protect him. The protagonist of “Solito”, the memoir of writer and poet Javier Zamora, is a 9-year-old boy who takes an impossible and terrible journey. A trip no one should take.
At that age, Zamora left his hometown in El Salvador with the aim of arriving in the United States to join his parents, who left before him: his father fleeing the civil war, his mother, a few years later, to find her husband and in search for new opportunities.
His grandfather accompanied him to Guatemala, but Javier, known as “Chepito”, had to continue alone and cross Mexico and the Sonoran Desert, along with other migrants who followed the same route. Many stayed along the way. They were arrested, died or simply disappeared.
The crossing was supposed to take two weeks, but because of a betrayal, it took nine. “Solito” talks about what happened in those 49 days and the relationships that were born in that journey. It is a text in which devastating details intertwine with passages of breathtaking beauty. A book that critics qualified as important, necessary, unforgettable.
Read below the main excerpts from the BBC News Mundo interview with Javier Zamora.
“For the first time I felt alone, lonely, alone, lonely, really lonely”… Let’s start with that phrase that gives the book its title and which reflects a very desolate loneliness. What did you feel when describing that child you were?
I remember when I wrote that sentence, it came out like this the first time, I didn’t make any changes to it. I think it marked a moment and somehow summed up what I felt while working on the book, which is like an acknowledgment of what happened to me, what I suffered, something that took me a long time to accept.
I came to the United States when I was 9 years old and only started writing these memoirs when I was 29. It took me 20 years to dare to remember and leave behind that masculine shield, of a Latino man, so macho that he believes that if you don’t think about something that happened it will simply make it go away.
But happened. And writing freed me, helped heal me. Of course, I didn’t choose the title, and when my agent proposed it to me, I didn’t like it one bit.
Why?
Maybe because I was in the middle of therapy and I wasn’t ready to face that desolation yet, which was very big. In fact, if I think about the title, I don’t think I had one, but three lonelinesses.
The first was growing up without my parents. Without my father, who leaves first when I am 1 year old, and without my mother, who accompanies him when I am about to turn 5 years old.
The second occurs when my grandfather, who accompanied me to Guatemala, returns to El Salvador, and I feel very alone because it is the first time in my life that I don’t have someone close to me.
And the third is when, after surviving with all those migrants —mainly Chino, Patricia, and Carla, who became my family—we arrived in the United States and got separated. They leave and I’m left without them.
By the way, it is very paradoxical that the book ends when you meet your parents, and that an enormous joy is accompanied by a loss that hurts you so much.
Yes. This is probably the loneliness that cost me the most. It’s the one I hid, the one I forgot about for 20 years until I started writing “Solito”. It’s that of having lost those who literally carried me when I couldn’t walk anymore, those who saved my life.
And while there is such desolation, tenderness abounds in the book. Were you aware of this when writing?
Yes, it was something I consciously did. It helped me a lot that, in 2017, two years before I started writing “Solito”, I published my first book in the United States, Unaccompanied (unaccompanied, in free translation), which is a collection of poems.
I was 27 years old, and when I reread it in the middle of the therapy I was doing, I realized how sad all the poems were, which spoke about my father during the civil war in El Salvador, about my life in the United States without documents, and about crossing the border.
And when I recognized the anger and resentment that those verses had for myself, for my parents, for the United States, I understood that I was deceiving myself, that there was much more than that trauma.
So when I made the decision to write my memoirs in prose, I made a point of being more affectionate with myself and with the migrants I traveled with. It is also my way of criticizing what journalists wrote at the time of the border crisis, when they seemed to have discovered that migrant children existed.
Being one of them, what I read hurt me, those reports that reduced us to a statistic or to the profile of someone who suffers, who is a poor person who must be helped.
I knew that wasn’t all, that we didn’t spend 24 hours suffering. There are also tender moments, funny moments, pure joy, eating, for example, tasting the tacos, and many other things that I hope were captured in the book.
In fact, one of the most emotional moments in the book comes when the immigration police stop them and force them to lie on the floor with their extremities outstretched, and you imagine you’re Superman and that you’re flying. It’s a heartbreaking image. Is it real or a literary license?
I’m convinced this happened. I think it’s the technique my brain used to dissociate. I didn’t want to be lying on the ground with soldiers pointing at us. I preferred to fly or play with the lizard that appeared at that moment, which I called Paula. Doing that, transcending the scene, I leave.
And I know what happened, which is true, because even today when I’m in a situation I don’t want to be in, for example, in a conversation I don’t like with my wife, I say “ah, look, look at the bird, look how he flies”. It’s something that never went away, something I learned as a child through trauma, and it stays with me.
I understand that the first scene you wrote is the boat leaving Guatemala to reach Mexico. And that, although it contains the sweetness of how your companions look after you, it describes a brutal situation with details rarely mentioned in the press, which only speaks of shipwrecks or those who manage to cross and are detained or cornered…
I began writing the book as a traditional memoir, as a 29-year-old man, a poet, remembering the worst nine weeks of his life. But even I, as a writer, got bored with what I wrote.
It was on those days that my therapist suggested that I do the exercise of thinking about what would happen if I connected with that child with whom for 20 years I had not wanted to talk or put myself in their shoes.
We are talking about 2019 and in the newspapers there was still very little understanding of what it is to emigrate to the United States. They only talked about the wanderer caravans or the Beast, usually in trucks or freight trains. But that wasn’t my story or my route. And nobody wrote about these boats, which are still in use.
It was something that disgusted me. And when I started to write, this chapter came to me, which I wrote almost compulsively, without stopping.
It was a tough experience, but writing it in the present tense helped me remember many things, like the smell of the sea mixed with gasoline and sweat. Or the dizziness and vomiting of those who went with me and how the wind returned to us what they vomited and we were all soaked. Or even the man who screamed because he was afraid of the sea and he didn’t know how to swim and who scared me very, very much because I didn’t know how to swim either.
Were you afraid of dying or more afraid of not reaching your destination, of not meeting your parents?
I don’t know if at that age I cognitively understood the concept of death, although, like all human beings, I certainly had that intuition. But seeing adults so full of fear caused me great horror, a terror that you don’t forget, that scars you.
It could be said that, parallel to the crossing, the book is like a maiden voyage in which you name many things you learn or happen to you for the first time, from tying your shoelaces to discovering new countries, foods you haven’t tried before, your attracted to Carla…
Yes, beautiful things happened to me on that trip, but looking back I realize that I didn’t have a childhood, that I lost it on the journey. And that’s sad.
There is a particular scene that marks this, which is when I try my first cigarette and the men who accompany me tell me to look for powdered gasoline. As a joke. Because I was naive and didn’t know it didn’t exist.
For them, that smoke was all it took to make this 9-year-old boy feel more of a man or more powerful. Yes it works. But that moment also marks the end of a childhood stage, of what I was and what I would have been if everything that happened after hadn’t happened.
It’s something very complex, because, at the same time, what happened is what shaped me and what made me the person I am. Maybe that’s why, because I feel like I didn’t have a childhood, the best compliment someone can pay me when we meet is to say that I look like a child.
As with any migration story, the coyote is a major character in your book. But you say that to the people of your town he was a familiar figure, like a “good coyote”, which sounds rather counterintuitive.
Yes, this is a point that many people may not understand, but back then, in the 1990s, many of these people, who we called coyotes, thought that they were really helping other people like me or like others who were fleeing a war or post-war, to join their families in the United States.
In people’s minds, those coyotes were doing something good. And even though a lot of what happened to me was the fault of a coyote, I’m of the same opinion. That yes, they were doing something good. It works a bit like an economy. The work was there and someone would have to do that work.
But today the market has become so rich, so good, that it has become a monopoly dominated by cartels, who buy and rent coyotes. There are no coyotes that don’t belong to one. The immigration infrastructure has changed exponentially for the worse. That’s why more and more migrants are dying.
Neither Salvadoran nor American, you prefer to be described as a migrant, right?
Yes, yes, I’ve used that word before and asked you to use it, but now, in many of my talks and interviews, I’m trying to use the term survivor, because I believe the word migrant has been so distorted that, at least in the United States, it became very negative.
Let’s finish talking about love. The relationships that are born on your journey are full of this. After having written so much about pain, don’t you feel like writing about love?
Oh yes, it’s true that maybe my poems don’t have that much love, but I see my prose, this book, as one big love letter to the four of us. The letter I always hope you read, or hear from her and we meet again.
And what I’m writing today, which is like the second part, my life in America, I think it’s going to be even harder to read, but it’s also a love letter, this time to my parents, who had me when I was 18. , and who also suffered a lot.
For them, what happened was very difficult. My dad says he’ll never forget the smell I smelled when we met again. He cried a lot about it. He read the book, but my mother didn’t make it past the first chapter.
And do you know the impact it had on other migrants?
You see, funnily enough, in the three years I’ve been touring with my book of poems, I’ve never spoken to any migrants about my work. But with “Solito” it is different. It’s been wonderful that reading has reached children or that adults have approached me and said, “I was a migrant child too.”
It’s scary that many tell me that they crossed in the same month and year as me, that we were in the Sonoran Desert at the same time. For a long time, I felt that I was alone in that trauma, that I had suffered more than anyone else. And this is very toxic, because you stop caring about who is next to you. But it’s not true. We are not alone. We are many.
Right now, as we speak, there is certainly a child from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua or El Salvador who is crossing over. I hope they also know that they are not alone, that they never were.
This text was originally published here.
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