The University of Arizona Press
February 26, 2024
Mananda Chaffa recently interviewed poet Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White, in an article titled, “A Welcome Displacement: Diego Báez On Memory, Language and Belonging,” in the Chicago Review of Books. The interview delves into his poetry’s complex issues of colonialism, language, culture and identity, as well as familial intimacies related to his young daughter.
In the interview, Báez talks about getting comfortable with unfamiliar language:
The speaker of “Yaguareté White” surely knows more Guaraní than most readers (an admittedly low bar to clear). I thought it would be interesting to open with a speaker who seeks to reassure readers, or who positions himself as sympathetic to readerly frustrations with pronunciation and interpretation, only to subvert that originally accommodating tone in later poems, almost to the point of sharpness or hostility. I’m interested in the ways poetic speakers contradict, undermine, or unsettle their own positions. That aspect of the human condition is just so much more relatable to me.
Read the complete interview here.
About the book:
In Diego Báez’s debut collection, Yaguareté White, English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar.
The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Báez grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Báez revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.
