Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

Read Christopher Perez’s Poems from “The Story of the Pocho” in our March issue, then read about why he empties drunk sound into a family of languages beverage to console the useless patrons of earth and Pepsi Cola.

1. What do you hear when you hear Spanish and English spoken together?

I hear aggressiveness among the languages, heterogeneity not only spurted from the voice but constructed as a self. Code-switching offers possibilities for thinking twice as fast or twice as slow or at least for presenting two selves, one doubled over the other. In my hometown and its surrounding area, which is the Rio Grande Valley, I hear both languages interchangeably and for me this develops my sense of placefulness even if ultimately I feel errant and more natural without everything heavy that pretends to house itself in the heart. I think Spanish is the most beautiful of the imposed languages and then English second. In Ramallah a Chilean-Palestinian friend and I code-switch between these languages and we are like secrets when walking down busy streets though we both ask ourselves why we can’t speak Arabic. People often think I’m Arab here because of the way I look. When I’m at a checkpoint and a soldier asks, I respond in English knowing I’m entering an international world that all but allows for errantry. How nice it would be to interject in Spanish and become amorphous and opaque or to even one day speak Arabic and fully assume the typified Other in this context. Continue reading →