Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Memory has been a central preocupation for me as a writer-when I had a bike accident and lost my memory for about four or six weeks, what memory means to us took up my mind more than usual. What you try to remember and what you try to forget when you cross a border (on land or otherwise) is central to the immigrant condition. I have spent many years thinking about the function of memory.

How were you thinking of memory when you wrote this novel? Can you speak to the process of transforming memory into fiction? In your author’s note, you talk about how this novel was inspired by personal, real events that transpired when you yourself were a child. Memory seemed to be a central theme of the novel, both the act of remembering and the pain of forgetting. Petrona is inflicted with a terrible amnesia, and, at the end of the novel Chula struggles so profoundly with the fact that her father is not the man she remembered. The entire book is an act of remembrance, as Chula, the narrator, looks back on her childhood. I was so interested in the way that memory functioned in Fruit of the Drunken Tree.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras agreed to speak with MQR over email. The novel that emerges is astonishing – a nuanced embodiment of 80’s and 90’s Colombia, an ode to the author’s own experience, and a careful examination of class, gender, safety, and danger. Through these two voices, a story moves, one of immigration and refugee status, of womanhood and fortune telling, of trauma and how it moves through a body, how it simmers, how it escapes. And there’s Petrona, a teenager who works as a servant for Chula’s family, under pressure to provide even as her younger brother comes dangerously close to joining one of the many warring paramilitary groups. One is Chula, only seven years old, a young girl living in a gated community in Bogotá, Colombia, who experiences the conflict of the Escobar years in sounds and colors, in news broadcasts and snippets of conversations ordinarily reserved for adults. At the center of Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s startling, gorgeous, debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree are two voices.

Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras