Yara Rodrigues Fowler

Image credit: Jade Jackman

Written by Yara Rodrigues Fowler, shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2019, there are more things is a powerful sweeping novel that explores history, revolution, and love. Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, there are more things builds upon Yara’s unique voice that was introduced to readers in her debut, Stubborn Archivist. Written in a fragmentary pastiche prose style, Yara builds her narrative around two women with Brazilian roots, whose worlds collide in London in 2016 ­– as political turmoil unfolds across both Brazil and the UK. Guiding its readers across continents and generations, from the London riots to the darkest years of Brazil's military dictatorship, there are more things offers an exploration of sisterhood, queerness, and revolution, as well as a glimpse into a better way to live.

Could you let us know a little bit about what led you to this point in your writing career, and how did the process of writing there are more things begin?

My first book, Stubborn Archivist ­– a shorter book about three generations of women, starting in Brazil and ending up in London – focuses on characters who are all within the same family. So, for my second book, I was interested in what I could do with a much chunkier narrative, and how I could keep the reader in my novel for a longer amount of time, creating an imaginary world that spanned many more years, spending more time in the 1960s as well as the 2010s.  

I was interested in the political moment we were experiencing in 2016 and 2017. Depending on how you’re counting, it had been almost 20 years since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War; there’d been this centrist kind of consensus around most of the world in the West, but also in Latin America. I'd grown up with that kind of consensus, so I was really interested in all the things that happened that were not meant to happen: the return of fascism, Brexit, the rise of Donald Trump, and even the coalition government in the UK in 2010. I remember, at the time, I was studying government politics at AS level, and we had been told to write for our exams: ‘the first-past-the-post system exists so that we never have a coalition government’. And then we had the election in which a coalition government was formed, and our teacher just said, ‘Oops… the examiner says that it's okay if you don't refer to the election, you can still say what we had in the textbooks…’

I just thought, if all these things are possible, what else can we ask for? And if this kind of neoliberalism didn't work, what will work? So, I became interested in the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and this idea of demanding liberation, instead of demanding just a bit less austerity. I was thinking about how I could use a longer novel to connect these two periods and create this sense of intergenerational time and change.

Yes, your book is one of the first books I've read in a long time that spans a long period of time, although you don't realise it as a reader. Moving through time feels natural and effortless and you really do gather a sense of all the characters and their feelings and emotions, as opposed to some texts in which the historical flashbacks can be a little jarring or you just spend the whole time thinking, ‘who's speaking now and what’s actually going on now?’. It felt like this fluidity had something to do with the form that you write in, and the fact that you don't stick to prose conventions. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how your writing style helped you to cover the breadth of your work?

Yes, I think there are several things going on here. Firstly, I suppose my starting point was that I wanted to include the historical parts that are set during the dictatorships in Brazil - there's one section that’s set in 1969-74, during the most repressive years of the Brazilian dictatorship. I really wanted this narrative to feel quite magical and exciting, and not like, ‘Oh God, I’m being thrust back to the war bit of War and Peace’ – not to compare myself to War and Peace, but you know what I mean. So, I was inspired about books like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin – where there's also a Laura who drives off a bridge – where the power of the book really comes from what happened in the past being so close to the present. Those narratives are so sexy and exciting. Also, the amazing Possession by A.S Byatt, set in 1990, where there are these academics in the present who uncover these saucy love letters of these Victorian poets.

I obviously can't write about 1960s and 1970s Brazil with the same authenticity as I can 2010s London, so what I'm doing is using all these archives to fabricate a narrative, in the vein of Saidiya Hartman. I wanted that part of the text to feel formerly more magical and almost more imaginary, to signal that it's invented, and much more speculative. I also wanted the text throughout to feel like a pastiche of different elements – there are recipes, there are lists, and all kinds of elements - partly to draw attention to the fact that it is a novel that has put been put together by someone, which has multiple connections to the outside world; it's not pretending to be an authoritative, realist text which gives the final word on a topic, like a traditional, conventional novel often does.

Then lastly – and maybe this is what you were actually getting at – I think the way I write, I try to make it as oral as possible, to have a kind of lightness, in a way that I think probably is informed by growing up on MSN messenger – you know, that ‘why would you put a full stop if you can put a line break in?’ mentality. I think that probably does make it a bit easier to get through as a text, and I've been told that it's easier for dyslexic readers as well. So maybe there's something about using the distribution of words and blank space on the page as part of my textual toolkit, rather than just relying on conventional prose.

On that note, I wanted to talk about this pastiche of different elements you mentioned. Some of the elements you incorporate are in Portuguese, and I really enjoyed that, even though I had absolutely no idea what the words meant. Were you ever worried about putting text in your book that so many of your readers wouldn’t understand? What were your thoughts behind that choice?

I think it's very fair to say that most readers won’t understand them - it's a book that’s published in the UK and I don't think I have particularly well penetrated the Brazilian community in London. I suppose there are a few different things going on. Sometimes it's just because that's the right word to use – that was definitely the case more with Stubborn Archivist, where it was the family talking to each other. With there are more things, it started with wanting to disorientate the anglophone reader, enabling them to empathise with the migrant experience in the UK, but it also became a type of pacing device. So, for the anglophone reader, I thought it was quite fun to hold back information and have them think, ‘Oh my God maybe I'm never going to know what that letter said!’.

I was considering that maybe the English readers never get to find out, but my editor said we couldn’t do that, which I think was the right thing to do; you always have to make a choice when you withhold information, as you are also making the text less accessible. And just to say that my editor was very supportive of me making those choices and having big bits of Portuguese included. I also was really reluctant to have a glossary because I think that again gives the illusion of a final word, rather than of meaning that can't quite be grasped, which I think is a bit more reflective of how language works, meaning works. There are some explanations in that note at the back and that was important in order to honour the real things that happened, that had been suppressed or censored.

So, while it’s not an autobiographical book, I assume that it was kind of a mixture between research and your own experiences from the world? How did you navigate those two elements?

I mean, I wouldn't even call it autofiction; all the characters require me to sit down and think, ‘I just haven't had this experience, am I doing it justice and writing it ethically?’. So, the two main characters Caterina and Melissa: I'm white, Melissa is not white, Melissa grew up very working class and I grew up middle class, so there's quite important differences in our experiences, even though the school she went to is a lot like my school was, and the area she lives in is a lot like my area, the landscape is definitely mine, and I lived in East London as well. And I didn’t have Caterina’s experience, as I didn't grow up in Northeast Brazil.

So, I did a lot of interviews with people who grew up with me in South London asking them about sexuality and sex and drugs and race and class. That was really useful as I wanted to include characters from lots of different backgrounds, and to honour the friends I spoke to and their backgrounds, I gave them the chance to name them and give them characteristics. Again, none of them are Melissa, but it helped me build her and make sure I was grounding her and writing her in a way that was realistic and respectful.

And then, I have a friend who lives in Brazil, and I would show her all the sections that were written there, and she would correct me. I also showed my cousin Ermese, who is a man whose been racialised in a similar way to Pedro in San Paolo, and got him to check certain sections. I also paid a PhD student in Rio to look over all the dictatorship bits; I was very conscious that I could be making a mistake.

In terms of my mum’s experience, I did a long interview with my mum about her experience during the dictatorship; she didn’t go on an underground road trip, she didn’t go to Araguaia, but she did have experience of revolutionary movements in San Paulo as a student, and I’ve written in the back of the book the scenes that are taken from that.

Unfortunately, I was writing during Covid, so I couldn’t go to Brazil. There's a Brazilian truth Commission report published in 2014 which lists the crimes of the state during the dictatorship, which is where I got a lot of the information for the dictatorship section about Araguaia which focuses on the young student activists that went to the forest to separate a liberated zone – it’s as if me and you were like, ‘Should we just arm ourselves and do this?’. They were so unprepared, and many of them were killed.

There’s also a diary from one of the commanders in Araguaia, which was seized by the military police and leaked in 2011. I contacted the journalist who leaked it, and it's insane. It told me a lot more about how they interacted with the local people, and the kind of parties they had. That was what I used for the basis of those scenes in that section, so it was so exciting working with that material.

Lastly, in the dictatorship section there's a part where the book talks about the prayer that a local priest does; I found that in the guy’s diary. He talked about an Afro-Brazilian religion – I didn't know that word before I looked it up and suddenly, I found this piece of revolutionary black history and it turns out that the local black priest really supported the gay leaders. So, yeah, it really is a patchwork of all these different bits of archive and fabulation.

Obviously, the book is very literally about politics in many ways, but I also read that you want the book itself to play a more active, inspiring role and maybe inspire a type of revolution, or at least a revolutionary feeling. So, I wanted to ask – although this is probably an impossible question – what does the word revolution mean to you and what do you think is the role of your book and other books? What is their place within it? And how can we use them in an active way? 

A revolution would mean getting rid of capitalism, and putting something else better in place, in my opinion, socialism. That would be a kind of socialism that protected the planet and meant liberation for all people everywhere, all identities and so on… no imperialism, fascism, etc. However, a book does not change our material conditions. I think it was a poet who said originally, ‘books don't change our material conditions but show me a revolutionary movement without poetry’. Lola Olufemi has also written beautifully about this idea in Experiments in Imagining Otherwise.

I think all kind of imaginative activity is a space where we can imagine what we do want, and then we can build longing for it. And the other thing is, by doing this intergenerational work, we can see that people have got really close before, and that we are carrying on the work of our ancestors. So, even if we don’t think it's going to happen in the next three years, that doesn't mean that we can't get it done. It might be cliche to say it, but there were people fighting to end slavery even though it would only be three generations later that it would happen.

I guess that’s why revolution can be thought of as a kind of deep, expansive work of imagining. And I do think novels can do that; I was listening to a podcast about Ursula Le Guin recently, and she said that ‘all organising is science fiction’. It’s simply about the imaginative work of expanding the political horizon, creating desire for something else, a sense of sisterhood across the generations, and the possibility of thinking in long-time and intergenerationally. 

Could you share what you're reading right now or if you've read anything good recently that we could recommend?

I'm moving house so I have no access to my books… but I'm going to read Abolition Revolution by Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean – it just came out with Pluto. They are people I've organised with in the past and are some of the most intelligent organisers and thinkers that I personally know.

And finally, do you judge a book by its cover?

Oh my god, yeah of course, and I also think it's interesting to think about books as material objects because publishers take the art you’ve made and turn it into this commodity, and the cover is the most visible part of that. And we have a few very large companies that own most of the publishing industry and there’s this whole kind of mystique around getting a book deal and being a published author that is so contrary to how all of us should have writing and creativity and art in our lives. So, I do make judgments on covers, but it's not just of the book, it’s of the whole mode of their production.