The gold of Katherine Vaz’s writing lies within her powerful metaphors. Strikingly unusual, her style takes her readers deep into their own imaginations. Though an experience within itself, reading Vaz’s stories draws a magnifying glass to only one pulley within the intricate mechanism of her thinking. To see the big picture, one has to close his eyes and listen.
When Katherine Vaz began reading excerpts from Below the Salt, her raspy voice was quick to convey the solemn tone of the story that was about to unfold. “They ate nothing but the music of birds”, she described the starving Trinidadian prisoners with a pain in her voice. Each word, pause, and breath revealed just how deeply she empathized with the characters that she had given life to. Through meticulously weaving in combinations of figurative language, she built a beautiful relationship between a mother and son who escaped a life of imprisonment and found a new land of erratic possibility and happiness. Though the processes of growing older and immigrating produced inevitable changes within her characters, Vaz was able to keep them grounded. As the family found a haven in New York, traces of their despairing past reemerged when they started to ponder about their future. In a heartwarming moment, the mother said that she would continue to caress her son even in death. Her body would transform into cobwebs after being consumed by spiders, and if her bleeding son walked through them, she would make his pain dissipate. With a moderate pace and a clear effort to enunciate each word of her story, Kathrine Vaz drove bizarre yet beautiful images into the mind of her audience.
In the following Q&A session, Vaz admitted that her talent of building a labyrinth of metaphors is also her biggest weakness. Looking into the distance and evidently thinking back to a prior conversation, she revealed that she must remind herself not to “hang a tassel off every sentence”. Her well-developed tone and self-monitored style is the icing to a cake well layered with research. With a smile on her face, Vaz recounted her time of travel in Illinois, the main setting of her story, and the challenging pursuit of information about John Alves, a soldier from the American Civil War. Even with the necessary information and inspiration, Vaz’s creation of Below the Salt spanned eight years. In a response to an aspiring writer, she said that the biggest challenge of creating a full story is developing a story line, and then asking yourself “how do I make it blossom out?” Even her speech, it seemed, was packed with dazzling images. Some were breathtaking and fantastical, while others were crude and funny. As her hands demonstrated shaking the figure of an upside-down saint, the audience burst with laughter at hearing how the Portuguese chastised their holy-figures for being disobedient.
The air of solemnity turned into one of relaxed conversation as Katherine Vaz explained how her experiences resulted in a varied and surprisingly realistic array of fictional stories.
Image provided by disquietinternational.org
