The Unbound Book Festival is coming up this weekend, and KBIA has been talking to featured writers in a series we're calling "Unbound Conversations." Find the rest of them here.
Steven Leyva is the author of The Opposite of Cruelty, a poetry collection that asks readers to see and remember beauty in a parallel post-pandemic world populated by superheroes and ancient mythological figures.
KBIA's Luka Turanjanin spoke with Leyva about challenging cruelty by recognizing its opposite. Here's an excerpt from their conversation:
Luka Turanjanin: So can you tell me a bit about your book, The Opposite of Cruelty, and what was the process like when you were writing it?
Steven Leyva: My book The Opposite of Cruelty is a collection of poems that tries to answer the question, "What is the opposite of cruelty?" It attempts to do so through poems recognizing that glib or pithy answers like “friendship” or “love” or any kind of one-word abstraction are too shallow to be lived, that we must approach that question in a more nuanced way.
And so, I imagine the poems sort of like little prisms — prisms, like what you pass light through. The prisms of these poems we will fragment into answers and we may be be able to see the whole spectrum of how to answer that question of what is the opposite of cruelty.
Regarding the process of how it was written, it was largely written during the pandemic, when we were in quarantine. In the middle of the book, there’s a poem that anchors it called “Halo,” which is — the poem is a little bit longer, it’s a crown of sonnets. It’s seven sonnets that are linked together. It’s where the question is asked in one of the sonnets — what is the opposite of cruelty — so [that's] where the title comes from.
Turanjanin: What sort of things growing up helped you, or just like in the process of writing, helped you try to find that answer, and what kind of things did you find to be an answer?
Leyva: I thought about experiences from my childhood, experiences from being a father, from raising my children, everyday things like what it was like for my children to go see Into the Spiderverse and see this Afro-Latino Spiderman in Miles Morales, and what that might mean for us. What does it mean to look upon that screen and see someone that looks like us in animation, and how that might affect their way of thinking about the world and thinking about what and how the world should be. It thinks about the relationship I’ve had to teachers, other teachers in my life, and who gets to be honored and who gets to be remembered in particular ways.
And so, there’s a kind of negotiation in the book about thinking about how and when we remember things, and what brings us to those points.
"So what I’m after is a kind of disarmament of language, so that we no longer weaponize it against each other, but we use it to heal and understand."Steven Leyva
There’s lots of different ways that it tries to approach and answer that question, and again it is drawing upon the whole of my life. It’s just drawing on me not compartmentalizing my life into a singular narrative, but thinking about multiplicity — thinking about synthesis.
I would offer for anybody reading the book or thinking about the book that, rather than me describing the answers I think I found, I think it's better if you go and read the book and engage with the poems and see what answers you’re drawn to. And let that experience of the poems, rather than kind of decoding of a kind of a meaning, let the experience of the poems be not unlike — or let them be similar to — what it was like for my children to watch the movies.
Turanjanin: What makes it especially important when you want people reading this to seek out multiple answers and to explore the nuance of the matter through your poems?
Leyva: Because if you arrive at a single answer, it’s easy to be dismissive. It’s easy to say “Well I’ve done it. Yes, I love people,” you know, “Yes, I love,” right? And then your behavior doesn’t change. When the answer is a mile wide in general and inch deep, [and] has no depth, then no change happens. No actual consideration really occurs. What you have then fed someone is a kind of easy answer to a complicated question.
For me that is dangerous, because it is what can breathe a narrative so people can tell themselves that they feel good without actually doing any good, you know? So they continue to be casually cruel to people, right? They continue to not recognize how they are involved in how the world has come to be a certain way. That it didn’t just happen. We decided, we did things, we made choices. We chose.
Some of us chose to mask during the pandemic, and some of us chose not to, right? It didn’t just happen to us, right? A government decided to have an attitude towards vaccines. So all of these things, right, they require us to reengage with the way that language brings us to nuance, and nuance brings us to our humanity. And it's through our humanity that I think we can then do something about cruelty in the world. We can maybe engage with that. We can search for those answers, but it cannot be done if we memeify the answers and expect them to be so compact and so easily absorbed that they would fit on an Instagram post.
Turanjanin: With people reading the book and then coming to understand and have their own takes to finding out the opposite of cruelty, how do you think people finding their own answers would help them to respond to a lot of those problems that exist, to problems in our world today and later in the future?
Leyva: My hope is that reading these poems, engaging with them, slowing down, it will do two things.
One, it may help people to see each other’s humanity more clearly, which I think is often at the root of many intractable problems — is that there has been a degradation in being able to see the humanity in others. Which is not to equivocate. It's not to say that everyone’s positions are the same, or we don’t have moral judgement about things, and that self-awareness — that seeing the humanity in each other. That’s something that poems I think can do, and that I hope that these poems will do, so that it's a way to kind of return us to our humanity.
The other thing is I think every atrocity that has occurred begins in language. It begins in what we call other people, you know? It starts — that dehumanization starts in language, it starts in naming, it starts in the way that we talk about it. And poems by their nature renew language. They renew our relationship to language. And my sort of relentless optimism is that, when people — despite whatever the content of the poem is — if the poem is written well, if it has a kind of verve and vigor in the lines and in the syntax, your relationship to language is then being renewed. And it's from that place of renewal that we can then reengage with how we talk about these problems, how we come to their solutions, and how we sort of come to each other.
It’s really those two things: that we would see each others' humanity more clearly, and that we renew our relationship to language. I gotta leave some of the other things, like laws, to the lawmakers, right? The organizing, and like food assistance to the public administrators, right?
But — I know that this is something that Justice Stevens once said — he said, “The best preparation for law school is to study poems.” And the reason why he said that is because poems make you think about all the different ways language can mean something. All the different meanings, and I think that’s a useful thing in a time when somebody might be telling you this guy is red when you can clearly see he’s blue, right? That you can recognize the use of language and its particular meanings and not be fooled, not be bamboozled, but also not be cruel, right? Not be given in to one’s own self-righteousness and weaponizing language.
So what I’m after is a kind of disarmament of language, so that we no longer weaponize it against each other, but we use it to heal and understand.
