by Tanushree Baidya
Author Dariel Suarez immigrated to the United States from Cuba as a young teenager. Moved with unearthing the complex layers of a country often mischaracterized and exoticized in American culture, Dariel brings an expansive yet intimate exploration to his second book and debut novel The Playwright’s House. I had the wonderful opportunity of reading an advanced reader copy of the novel, and when I tell Dariel, over a Zoom call, that even though his novel delves deep into the history and socio-political landscape of Cuba in the early aughts under an authoritarian and oppressive regime, his characters could easily face the same plight and consequences in a present-day democracy like India (from whence I emigrated). He acknowledges the sentiment and adds: “Our world often feels much smaller and more connected, but sometimes not for the best reasons.”
Our remarkable conversation follows.
There are so many things to admire in The Playwright’s House. There is a confluence of art, history, architecture, of life in a surveillance state, politics, different faiths, and familial relationships. The storytelling is incredibly strong and often reads like a thriller. What was the inspiration for writing this book and how much of it is rooted in your own personal experience?
Thank you for the wonderful description of the book! The neighborhood where Serguey and Victor—the two protagonists—grew up is based on the place where I lived in Havana until I migrated to the U.S. Some of the details that found their way into the book, whether around setting, class division, or interpersonal conflict, I pulled a bit from my personal family history. But I’d say the bulk of the book, and in particular the sections on art, politics, and religion, were external to me. They required a good amount of research and invention. In terms of inspiration, I wanted to tackle the topic of political prisoners in Cuba, which the government there always tries to suppress. Another thing that doesn’t get talked a lot about in Socialist countries is class. It felt important to shine a light on it. I also wanted to explore the tension between art and the state, something particularly fraught in a communist country. There are many stakes attached to any strong position, which is fuel for fiction. More broadly, I wanted to write a contemporary Cuban novel that broke away from the nostalgia, the Revolution, and a lot of the stereotypes and exoticism associated with the island.
One of the highlights of the book is reading about Havana. The way you describe the architecture, the streets, and the culture and history of people is compelling and specific. What was the research like? Were you concerned about how someone who is familiar with the history of Cuba might perceive the authenticity of this book?
Authenticity in my writing is something I always take seriously. In addition to pulling details from memory, I researched quite a bit, as I noted before—whether by reading books, articles, and interviews, looking up videos and photographs, or speaking to family members who lived in Cuba for much longer than I did. I was also fortunate to visit Havana about five years ago, when the manuscript still hadn’t gotten into the hands of a publisher. I was able to verify things I’d written, get a more recent feel for the city, then go back and make some revisions in some of the descriptions. I’m happy to say that the book, to my mind, largely matched reality. Though I understand there might be Cuban readers who disagree with some of the perspectives and experiences in the novel, I hope they ultimately feel I provided a nuanced take on the country.
The book is written in third-person limited point of view. Can you speak a little about this choice and why Serguey?
First person was tempting, to be honest. I resisted it because I wanted more freedom to step outside of Serguey if needed. Most of the novel is filtered through his sensibility, flaws, and naiveté, which felt important, but I didn’t want to be fully confined. How Serguey experiences his own family history, and the personal hubris and stubbornness that he initially holds on seemed more layered to me in limited third person, since the voices of the other characters aren’t always completely manipulated by his perspective. I also tried putting him in many different places and situations, and had him interacting with a large cast of characters, so that the reader doesn’t always feel fully trapped in his POV. At least that was the attempt.
How long did it take you to write this book?
The general idea and opening pages started about a decade ago. Once I committed to the project later on, it took over three years to complete. I wrote the first draft in about a year, since the primary story was clear in my mind, but then I had to expand the narrative in revision. Slow down at certain points, better connect some of the subplots, get picky with the language. So there was additional writing involved before I shared a draft, got feedback, and revised and edited the entire thing a few times. I did a final round of edits with my then-agent before we went on submission, which took another three months or so.
Your novel deals with living in a surveillance state under an oppressive regime. In so many ways it serves as a cautionary tale. How did it feel working on it, given the pronounced shift towards authoritarianism in America over the last several years?
I finished the bulk of it before Trump got elected. But during the final rounds of revision, I definitely sensed that a lot of what’s in the book—surveillance culture, suppression and manipulation of journalism and journalists, propagandist rhetoric—all of a sudden was more relevant in the U.S. than ever before. There are stark differences between what many people experience in Cuba and what’s happened in America over the last four years, including the governmental and cultural infrastructure, but occasionally the rhetoric and actions coming from Trump felt eerily similar to the Castros’.
This isn’t your first book. I wanted to talk about your debut story collection—A Kind of Solitude, that came out in 2019, and its relation to the novel —how did the two evolve and how do you perceive the two in terms of your body of work?
The collection was done intentionally during my MFA program at Boston University. There’s a lot written about migration and nostalgia around the revolution during the fifties and the sixties. But I was focusing on topics and characters that weren’t always centered in Cuban literature and were a lot more contemporary. With the novel, I wanted to push the boundaries beyond what the collection wrangles with. And even though the characters don’t repeat, the two books do speak to each other as they share the same universe, are around the same timeline, and set in the same city, more or less. It is a time period that really fascinates me. People were waiting for something to fall and change, and it never really happened. So as my first two books, they do work as a piece to show my range, my sensibilities, and my socio-cultural and political interest in fiction.
Though there are numerous writers on the island writing about contemporary Cuba, outside the island, not much has been written in fiction about this time after the Special Period.
You’re also an essayist. In your essay about a childhood memory of building a spaceship with your grandfather in Havana, for The Threepenny Review, you wrote, “But migration isn’t only about escape. It’s also about irreparable loss. I know that who I am today is not just what I’ve become, but what is no longer with me. One learns to cope. The knowledge that something cannot be regained eventually moves past grief and nostalgia into a more indefinable state, a state in which hope begins working its way back…” As an immigrant writer of color myself, this exploration of nostalgia and history of our home country and the way it channels into our art, really resonates. Has this feeling gotten stronger as you continue writing about Cuba? Will you continue writing about Cuba?
Thank you for that! I’m glad it resonated. I have written about Cuba after the novel, including the essay you quoted. And yes, I suspect the island will continue to find its way into my work. I have ideas for more books set there or with central characters who are Cuban. I think there’s a lot left to explore. More selfishly, it allows me to stay connected with that part of myself, a sensibility and experience that’s difficult to replicate in the U.S. It’s very centering, though at times also nostalgic and somewhat tragic, because as I mentioned in the essay, there’s a lot that’s inevitably lost identity-wise, not matter how much one attempts to retain it.
Often there are debates and discussions about what constitutes political and apolitical writing and that all writing (and art) doesn’t necessarily need to be political. What are your thoughts on this? Can any kind of writing be apolitical?
I guess a person can fool themselves into thinking that such a thing exists, meaning apolitical writing. The act of writing something supposedly devoid of politics often stems from a place of privilege, which is in and of itself political. Maybe the issue is that the word is commonly associated in this country to things like government, individual rights, voting, war, and political parties. But culture, class, identity, race, gender, ability, etc., these things inherently have a social connotation, which to me is political. It’s in that tension between external forces—how you’re seen or defined and the subsequent impact—and the individual that so much of life happens. Even at the family level. Someone who’s lived in a bubble and possesses copious amounts of privilege might not feel compelled to stop and consider these forces, how they’ve shaped their characters, how they might be complicit. But great fiction, in my opinion, dares to look with intention at the broader picture, even if filtered very intimately through a singular consciousness and set of experiences. And again, the choice to avoid or reject “political writing” says a lot about the social condition of the writer and/or their characters. For a lot of us in the audience, you’ve ultimately made a political choice regardless.
There was a time you wanted to be a musician. Why did you decide to become a writer? And does music inspire your writing?
I’d say that I still want to be a musician. I play guitar often, write riffs and melodies, and I’m planning on building a home studio in the near future. Music is still a big part of my life. I chose to become a writer in my early twenties simply because I realized I was a little better at it. I enjoyed the level of intellectual immersion and imagination, and I had respect for the art form because I grew up with a father who was a writer. Once I began taking classes and enjoyed them, there was no looking back. However, music has taught me a lot: to be patient, to practice, to not take any shortcuts, to think of art as a craft you must develop. It also taught me to collaborate, to seek a community of like-minded people. If I’m frank, music, and even film, are more emotionally rewarding to me than a good book. But man, when you finally turn that blank page into something which feels real, that is some serious magic.
When I think about your work, writers like Ha Jin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Min Jin Lee, and Arundhati Roy come to mind. They’ve also written complex political (and historical) novels and stories about the toll it takes on ordinary people living under oppressive regimes, surviving war, immigration, and living through racial and religious strife. Who do you read for inspiration?
Some of the names you mentioned, for sure. I was fortunate enough to study with Ha Jin and learned tons from him. Authors such as Aleksandar Hemon, Mariana Enriquez, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Elena Ferrante, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Marlon James, Han Kang, Nathacha Appanah, Valeria Luiselli, Teju Cole, and Alejandro Zambra have all impacted my writing one way or another. I also turn to contemporary poetry for inspiration: Ocean Vuong, Ada Limón, Terrance Hayes, Natalie Diaz, Tyehimba Jess. I find all of these writers to have tremendous substance and power in their work.
What is the one thing (or things) you wish readers would take away from this novel?
I hope they walk away with a more layered view of the country, not just the stuff you see when you visit. I hope they can understand that, like any nation, Cuba is a complex place where not one view or experience is a monolith, but where poverty and political oppression are concrete forces that shouldn’t be ignored.
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Dariel Suarez was born and raised in Havana, Cuba, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1997 at age fourteen. He is the author of the novel The Playwright’s House (Red Hen Press) and the story collection A Kind of Solitude (Willow Springs Books), winner of the 2017 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and the 2019 International Latino Book Award for Best Collection of Short Stories. Dariel is an inaugural City of Boston Artist Fellow and the Education Director at GrubStreet. His prose has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Threepenny Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Caribbean Writer, where his work was awarded the First Lady Cecile de Jongh Literary Prize. Dariel earned his MFA in Fiction at Boston University and currently resides in the Boston area with his wife and daughter. More about him can be found at www.darielsuarez.com.
About the interviewer: Born in India, Tanushree Baidya has been living and writing in Boston since moving there from Bombay in 2011. A graduate of Northeastern University, her work has appeared in WBUR, Kweli, Creative Nonfiction, Pangyrus, GrubWrites, London Journal of Fiction, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and support from the Yale Writer’s Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, Kweli, The Mae fellowship, and [Grubstreet supported] Boston Writers of Color Group. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of essays.
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