Guanabee Interviews Margarita Engle, Newbery Honor-Winning Author Of The Surrender Tree

Margarita Engle is the first ever Latina recipient of the esteemed Newbery Honor. The winning book, The Surrender Tree, tells, in free verse, the story of Rosa, a young wilderness nurse whose story is set against the backdrop of Cuba’s war for independence, and the horrors of slavery and reconcentration camps. 

Margarita was kind enough to talk to us about the book, why poetry is a good hook for young readers and about her very, very unusual hobby: Getting lost in the woods, on purpose.

 GB: We love to hear authors describe their work in their own words. How would you describe a synopsis of The Surrender Tree to our readers?

ME: Basically, I think of The Surrender Tree as a biographical novel in verse about the life of Rosa la Bayamesa, one of many Cuban women who became self-taught wilderness nurses. On another level, it is a universal story of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, forced to make terrifying decisions. Rosa’s decision was truly inspiring. Instead of seeking safety and comfort for herself, she chose to heal the wounds of colonial Spanish soldiers as well as Cuban rebels. Imagine deciding to heal your enemies!  This is the image that I hope readers will remember. Imagine choosing kindness, even when history is cruel.

GB: You note that, save for Silvia and her oxcart driver, your characters are based on real people, including composites of stories from Weyler’s reconcentration camps. How did you go about doing research for this book? Is any portion or character based on stories from your own family’s narrative history?

ME: I was unable to learn much about my great-grandparents’ experience, so I read everything I could find about Rosa la Bayamesa, and about Cuba’s three wars for independence from Spain. In each obscure, antique reference book or diary, I found older, more obscure references listed in the bibliography.

I love the research process. The research can even become a story of its own. For instance, a long time ago I wrote an article about family tree research for Hispanic Magazine. In my article, I confidently stated that as a Cuban-American, I would not be able to gain access to records from archives in Cuba. Well, someone in Miami picked up that magazine, recognized a photograph of my grandmother, then read my article, and laughed. The magazine was sent to Cuba, where everyone who read it laughed. As it turns out, one of my grandmother’s cousins was Cuba’s most famous historian, Manuel Moreno Fraginals. He had already done the family tree research himself. I ended up receiving the gift of a detailed family history reaching all the way back to the 1600s, with origins in the Canary Islands. In the margins, there are notes about ancestors who were scribes and pirates. 

GB: Why do you suppose this point in Cuba’s history is not relatively well-known or discussed? As a Cuban-American myself, for example, most of the stories I’ve heard seem to be divided, perhaps intuitively, into Pre-Castro and Post-Castro without extending as far back as the point in time described in your book. 

ME: I am amazed that people aren’t more familiar with certain aspects, such as the reconcenration camps. In a sense, I think Cuban-Americans aren’t the only ones stuck with a pre-Castro, post-Castro view. During the 1962 Missile Crisis, people all over the Untied States thought they were going to die. Once the crisis passed, Cuba fell off the average American’s emotional map, and went into orbit somewhere in outer space, unattached to its closest neighbor in any way. I am basically a pacifist, but I think there is a lot to learn from Cuba’s wars for independence. The simultaneous struggles for freedom from slavery, and freedom from colonial Spain point out a basic truth:  true freedom only exists when it is shared by all.

GB: Why poetry? Is there a benefit to telling a story through poetry rather than prose? Any limitations or obstacles you had to work through?

ME: Free verse allows me to distill a complex historical period down to its emotional essence, without getting lost in all the details. If I had written The Surrender Tree in a more traditional nonfiction form, it would have required hundreds of extremely boring pages. I wanted to tell this story to young people, sixth graders and teenagers. I hoped the format would appeal to reluctant readers, young people who might open a novel in free verse, see the uncrowded page, and say, “Oh, this looks easy, I can read this.” Yet the story is not for babies. They can read it, and feel like they are being treated like intelligent adults, capable of making their own decisions about difficult moral questions.

GB:You are a botanist as well as a writer. Does one occupation ever help to serve or compliment the other?

ME: I studied and taught botany and agronomy, so it was a great pleasure for me to write about Rosa’s use of wild medicinal plants. I love nature. I love wilderness. In fact, I have the world’s most unusual hobby. I am a volunteer “victim.” My husband trains wilderness search and rescue dogs, so at least twice a week, I hide in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in wild forests near Yosemite and Sequoia. I pretend I’m lost, so the dogs can practice finding a lost hiker, or a child who has wandered away from a campground. I think those long, quiet hours of solitude helped me imagine Rosa’s isolation.

GB: The Surrender Tree has won many awards for children’s and YA literature, but so many of the images in the book seem very graphic and unsettling. (The act of cutting slaves’ bodies and displaying then in cages on branches, for instance.) Did this book have an intended audience when you set out to write it? Is writing for children or young adults different from writing for an adult audience?

ME: The image of cages came directly from a slavehunter’s diary.  I would not have invented it just to gross young readers out, the way a writer of horror stories might. I know there are images of history’s brutality in The Surrender Tree. Pretending that slavery was not cruel would be dishonest. However, I do feel an obligation to balance history’s harsh reality with acts of kindness and hopeful endings.  My next book is called Tropical Secrets, Holocaust Refugees in Cuba.  It is another young adult novel in verse, this time with completely fictional characters. The historical events are real, and someone might read the subtitle and think, oh, how depressing, but it is actually a triumphant story rather than a bleak one, because it is about safe harbors and the kindness of strangers.

GB: Congratulations on being the first Latina to become a Newbery-recognized author! How did you find out about the honor? Is there a ceremony of some sort?

ME: Thank you!  Last year, on the Sunday night of the American Library Association’s winter conference, I was incredibly shocked when I received a phone call telling me that The Poet Slave of Cuba had won the Pura Belpré Award.  I couldn’t believe it!  So this year, when I received a similar call telling me that The Surrender Tree had won, I was astounded. I kept asking, who is this, which award, really, are you sure? They must have thought I was drunk, because I don’t think I made any sense. I didn’t think it was possible to receive the same honor two years in a row. Then, early the next morning, I received another phone call, this time telling me that The Surrender Tree had won a Newbery Honor. This is an award that I had thought of as out of reach. When I learned that it was the first Hispanic Newbery, I felt humbled, as well as profoundly grateful. Both the Pura Belpré Award, and the Newbery Honor, will be presented at the American Library Association conference in Chicago in July. The Newbery is a marvelous formal banquet, and the Pura Belpré Celebración is open to all, with free admission, wonderful music, and food. Two very different experiences, both filled with joy!

GB: Tangentially related to the above, would you describe yourself as a ”Latina writer?” Does the term mean something to you?

ME: I am a Latina, and Cuban-American, and I am also just an American, just a writer.  My mother is from Cuba, and my father is from Los Angeles.  I was born and raised in Los Angeles, but I became emotionally attached to Cuba during childhood visits to the extended family. I have written stories  with other settings, but I always return to stories that are set on the island.  I think of myself as having inherited a gene for nostalgia, even though I am nostalgic for a place that was never my own home.  Writing is a sort of time travel, back to my ancestors’ homeland.

Make sure to pick up Margarita Engle’s The Surrender Tree - and keep an eye out for Tropical Secrets, Holocaust Refugees in Cuba, which will be available on Amazon March 31st.