Interview with Margaret Randall — January 24, 2025
Margaret Randall is a poet, activist, feminist, photographer, oral historian, and professor. In my getting to know more about her work and her life, I said to her, “It seems like you’ve lived ten lives!” From New York’s explosive artistic heydays of the late ’50s, during which she was shoulder to shoulder with luminaries such as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, artist and critic Elain de Kooning, the writer Norman Mailer, and many others, to the tumultuous, artistic wave of Mexico City in the ’60s, Cuba during its revolutionary golden years of the ’70s, and Nicaragua during its volatile rebirth in the early ’80s, Margaret Randall has been a witness to some of the last century’s most profound political events. As a poet of rich intelligence, sensitivity, and awareness, she is among the world’s most honored poets of witness.
Douglas Cole: What was your early reading experience like? What writers and works first hooked you and gave you an interest in language and writing as art and occupation?
Margaret Randall: I had a hard time learning to read. I don’t know if reading wasn’t being taught well where I went to school or what the problem was. The fact was, at the end of first grade everyone in my class but me had learned. My teacher told my parents I needed to make the breakthrough over that summer, or I would be held back. My father, who was infinitely loving and patient, took it upon himself to teach me. I can’t remember the name of the book he used, but I can still see it: a dark red cover with black letters. Slowly, steadily, I learned to read that summer. And I’ve never looked back. As soon as I was able to make that magical leap from not knowing to knowing, I read voraciously. I remember trying books in my parents’ library. Looking back, I realize they had a rather typical library for their class and culture: lots of art books, books about different parts of the world, “Book of the Month Club” titles. A book called Kaput intrigued me because its first chapter described a hideous torture scene. I remember going to that scene, reading a few lines and looking at one terrifying picture, then slamming the book shut only to return to it a few days later. I think I found I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson in my parents’ bookcase. That may have been the first book I read from beginning to end. I was around eight. Martin Johnson was a colonialist adventurer who traveled to Borneo to spend time with the “natives.” His wife, Osa, chronicled their experiences. I began thinking about becoming a writer. I produced handmade copies of a four-page “newspaper” for which I wrote all the articles and distributed it around my childhood neighborhood. A few years later I read Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, and I read it again periodically for many years thereafter. My early reading was adventure, gradually involving better and better politics. I was attracted to history and philosophy. I hated poetry because, again, it was so poorly taught in the schools I attended.
Cole: What, then, have been your poetic influences? Why poetry for you?
Randall: From the moment I heard a poem with which I identified read out loud, I knew my future was in poetry. I was in my early twenties, and the poem was Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” I didn’t stop writing prose, but I felt drawn to poetry in a newly personal way. Before this, I had been taught to memorize Poe and Hawthorne in school, by teachers who had no idea how to relate the poems to their students’ lives. Early U.S. influences were Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. The Beats, Black Mountain and Deep Image poets were important to me after moving to New York at the end of the ’50s. When I went to Latin America and discovered César Vallejo, his work had a profound influence on mine. It still does. Vallejo taught me that poets can literally change the language, make it more relevant to what each generation has to say. When I returned to the U.S. in 1984, I discovered some of the great female poets: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Joy Harjo, Minnie Bruce Pratt and others. They completed the circle of influence because they brought it more in line with who I am.
Cole: What has living outside the United States given you? Political perspective? New ways of seeing you wouldn’t have otherwise?
Randall: As you know from having read my memoir, my parents took us on amazing summer trips from the time I was an adolescent. Those trips, although limited to the sort of liberal travel typical to my parents’ class and culture, opened me to the world. Just seeing other places, seeing and hearing other people, having some contact with other cultures despite the fact that those contacts weren’t much deeper than those enjoyed by your average tourist. I think those early trips erased the fear of the unknown that many people experience and made me feel that I could always pick up and go, and I continued traveling as a young adult. All of which facilitated my living outside the U.S., also at a fairly early age. I was eighteen when my first husband and I went to Spain on a motor scooter, went broke and lived there for a year and a half. I was twenty-five when I took my ten-month-old son and moved to Mexico in 1961. And I just kept going. I lived in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua long enough to become thoroughly involved in what was happening in those countries when I was there. I definitely believe those experiences gave me a different sort of political perspective: broader and deeper. But they also opened me culturally, to how other people live in the world, and why.
Cole: You seem to be a very disciplined writer—to produce the body of work you have! What is your writing routine? Everyday? Certain time of day? A certain spot? Pad and paper first?
Randall: My writing discipline has changed as I’ve aged, but I’ve always been extraordinarily disciplined, something I learned from Milton Resnick, a painter I knew during my years in New York City. I remember him emphasizing the importance of setting aside a certain amount of time each day in which to practice one’s art. When I began to have children and had to work all day to support them and myself, my writing was relegated to late at night and very early in the morning, after all the other chores were taken care of. As my children grew up and went off on their own, I began to be able to prioritize my writing. But I wasn’t able to put it front and center until I finally retired from teaching in 1994. Since then, I have luxuriated in the writing schedule of my choice. And yes, unless I am traveling it is every day. And I travel with a laptop. Weekends are like any other day to me. I am usually up by around 4:00 a.m., when my writing day begins, and I work until around 6:00 or 7:00, when my wife Barbara gets up. We have breakfast together and then I go back to work. I work all day, until mid-afternoon when I am exhausted. Then we hang out, see friends, etc. When I speak about my workday, though, it’s not only writing. I do a lot of reading and research as well. And there are dozens of issues that must be attended to when writing the sorts of books that I write. For example, securing permissions to reproduce the art in my books, working with poets whose work I am translating, copy-editing manuscripts, writing blurbs for other people’s books, writing the occasional prologue or introduction. As to the mechanics of my writing, I have never written by hand. Writing by hand has always been awkward for me, often actually physically painful; I’ve had a tendency to get small benign tumors in my hands, and have several times had to have them surgically removed. Because of this, I bought myself my first typewriter when I was only about nine. I asked my parents to buy it for me, and they told me that if I was able to raise half the money ($75 back then), they would put up the other half. Their other requirement was that I learned to touch-type. This turned out to be very useful. I became a very fast typist early on. I believed I typed almost as fast as I thought! My first computer was a revelation. Now it is like an extension of my body. So, the above describes an ordinary writing day for me, but when I am involved in a big writing project, it is even more intense. I have been known to work practically around the clock when the project demands it. Now that I am old, and prone to the memory lapses typical of my age, I find I also tend to keep longer writing hours. This is because if I interrupt my writing schedule too much, it disturbs my mental flow and I tend to forget more.
Cole: Do you have fallow periods? And what do you do in them if you do?
Randall: Of course, I have had fallow periods. When I was young, they worried me. I wondered if I would be able to write again? But as the years went by, I realized that I would write again, and those fallow periods didn’t worry me as much. Sometimes it’s a matter of changing genres. I will write poetry for a while, then an essay or something else. Recently, for the first time in my life, I found myself writing short stories, completing them one after another until I had a book of twenty-three. I wondered if I would ever write poetry again. I began to feel anxious about that, because I think of myself first and foremost as a poet. Then, as suddenly as they started the stories stopped. Now I am happily back to writing poems.
Cole: How important is it to be creative?
Randall: I think it is not only important but absolutely vital to the human species. I think almost everyone is born with enormous creative potential. Our societies tend to stifle that potential through rote education and placing a social premium on conformity. And through stressing other sorts of “success” (economic, prestige, etc.) Creativity is like breathing for me. I wouldn’t know how to live without it. Or perhaps I should say life wouldn’t mean the same to me if I weren’t involved in creative pursuits and living with someone for whom creativity is also the center of her life. Our respective creative endeavors turn one another on. When I speak about creativity, though, I don’t just mean artistic creativity. There are all sorts of ways of being creative, beginning with knowing how to think for oneself, ask questions, remain curious, seek new ways of being and interacting.
Cole: Do you work on specific things, like prose alternately with poetry, or is it all going on all the time?
Randall: Again, this has varied throughout my life. I used to work on a single book—prose or poetry—and not start another until that one was finished. Today I find myself working on several books at once, in several different genres. Right now, for example, I am juggling nine different books. Some are poetry collections. Others are prose. Some are my translations of poetry written in Spanish. Some are translations by others of my poetry or prose, for which I must work with the translator on getting it right. Some books are technically finished, but I must still revise them or work with the publisher’s copyeditor or style-corrector. Or a publisher has informed me that I need to secure permission to use a quote or reproduce an image. So, to answer your question, I usually have a lot going on at once. Sometimes I forget which book I am doing what for, and momentarily confuse them. That can be embarrassing.
Cole: Besides the formal structures, what is the difference for you between writing prose and poetry?
Randall: Some subject matter seems to demand the poetic form, some prose. Sometimes, when something is very much on my mind, I find myself writing a poem about it and then perhaps an essay or an article. These are different ways of getting the same idea across, different expressive modes to deal with the same issue or situation.
Cole: You have said that questions are more important that answers. Can you say a bit more about why that is? And how does that idea shape the poetry you write?
Randall: Answers come and go. If we prioritize answers our work quickly loses relevance. Questions are forever new. I don’t think all questions have answers. Or rather, they may not have answers today but will in fifty or a hundred years. The questions are always more interesting to me, and I think this conviction shapes not only my writing but everything I do.
Cole: You write of the power of dreams, the presence of ancestors. What spiritual threads sustain your way of thinking about this experience of living?
Randall: Dreams are important to me. And ancestry, in the sense of those who came before. But the minute spirituality becomes codified in some way—into a belief system or formula, a religion—I begin to distrust it. I am content to let magic be magic. If I were to claim a spirituality of any sort it would be the high desert landscape, rock canyons, wide open spaces.
Cole: In your memoir, I Never Left Home, in your poetry, there is almost equal attention to the personal experience, historical events, and sociopolitical forces, and you have said that you see yourself as a poet of witness. Was there a particular experience or moment that set your vision this way? Has it always been a part of your art and consciousness?
Randall: I have called myself a poet of witness because I have had the good fortune to be a witness to great social transformations. I see historical and/or social and political forces and personal experiences as being two sides of the same coin, interrelated ways of experiencing the world. I don’t think this has always been a part of my consciousness or of my art. I think it is something I’ve acquired as I’ve aged. Today I am most interested in the connections between the personal and the public. That is where I make my most exciting discoveries.
Cole: In your poem “Without Warning,” you write about seeing your younger self at a bus stop and “I even considered a shouted question / might bring an answer.” What question would you shout? And what answer give?
Randall: It could be any question, any answer. The whole point of that poem is that it doesn’t matter. It’s more about the kind of understanding we can never have until we are old enough or experienced enough to glimpse it. And even then…
New York Action Writing
Cole: You write that the ’60s and early ’70s were a time when “honesty seemed a positive social quality” and that art and poetry reflected the social and political awareness growing at that time. How do you see that quality carrying forth in the post-modern shift of the ’80s and ’90s? Or do you think it diminished?
Randall: Perhaps what I was saying is that the world seemed more transparent back then. Among the artists and poets with whom I lived at the time, people seemed to live their values. We valued examined lives. There are certainly people today for whom that is true. But economic success and making it at the expense of others often predominates. We have learned more, but the power structure has also learned more about how to coopt us. Post-modernism is tricky, and as a philosophical position often deceptive. In this country, at least, official support for the arts is minimal. I have more than 150 published books and have never earned enough from them to live. It may be my imagination, but in the ’60s and early ’70s more value seemed to be placed on creative endeavors.
Cole: The late ’60s saw several high-profile killings of socially progressive American leaders, and you write that “Government commissions tried to convince us their assassins acted alone, and those who questioned that conclusion were labeled conspiracy theorists.” What do you think of the work of people like Jim Garrison who challenged those conclusions? Have you met people along the way with more specific information that would shed light on any of those killings?
Randall: Yes, I have. I think Jim Garrison’s research was important. I would also mention Daniel Ellsberg and others. I don’t have the answers and can’t say precisely what the real story was in each of those high-profile murders. What I do know is that the powerful rarely tell the truth about such events. I have my suspicions about many of them. One thing that has changed is that in the 1970s Daniel Ellsberg was regarded as a hero for publishing the truth about the U.S. war in Vietnam and the lies successive administrations told us about that war. The Washington Post and New York Times were considered heroic for publishing The Pentagon Papers. Today whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning are seen as criminals. Power has succeeded in changing the consciousness of the U.S. public about such people.
Cole: As a politically aware, historically well-educated person and especially as a poet, what do you make of the “periods of openness and cooperation threatened by extreme nationalism”?
Randall: Periods of openness and cooperation are too often dangerous to the status quo, be it with regard to individuals, institutions, or nations. Extreme nationalism is often the route those in power choose to keep themselves afloat: tragic and dangerous. It was extreme nationalism that produced fascism in Germany, genocide in Cambodia, and state-imposed violence in many countries before and since. We have only to look to our own recent history: George W. Bush responded to September 11th with absurd notions of patriotism, which is another form of nationalism. And that false patriotism continues to impede our ability to think critically, and it punishes those who don’t tow the official line. As a poet, I abhor such so-called solutions and the twisted language that backs them up.
Cole: An interesting idea you write of after being around many creative and intelligent artists is that “process” is as central to the art as meaning. Can you say more about that?
Randall: I think what I have said is that process is as central to art as product. Process is very important to me. The journey as well as the destination. Perhaps it is my reaction to our extremely product-oriented society. Learning about the process of others as well as revealing one’s own process—to oneself and others—can be very exciting.
Cole: “What do I need or want to say?” You asked this question of yourself when you were starting out, and at least for your own art, claim you needed some experience, learning, and even some wisdom because “I didn’t possess the maturity that would allow me to express it with anything approaching originality.” I tend to agree, but I’m wondering what you think about artists like, say, Rimbaud or Plath, Keats, Mary Shelley, Zadie Smith…artists who sort of exploded young and created magnificently original work often before they were twenty-five?
Randall: There are exceptions to every rule. These are the geniuses who, like Mozart, wrote symphonies when they were still children. I was talking about those who aren’t geniuses, like me.
Cole: You say that your encounter with “prehistoric” art (I think you also use the term “pre-discovered”), made your sense of the “arc” of art complete. Can you say more about how you see the “arc” of art?
Randall: I think I said two things about this. First, that discovering ancient art thrilled me because I could begin to see the longer arc of creativity, how profoundly powerful work was made in different parts of the world that had no contact with one another and often at the same historic moment, and, second, that the term “prehistoric” annoys me because I see history as a broad arc from the beginning of the world to now. The term prehistory is usually used to indicate what happened before the development of writing. But I don’t see writing as a dividing line. Movement, images, sound…so many different artistic manifestations preceded writing and yet constituted powerful leaps in human creativity.
Cole: In your learning about writing, you say one of the more important principles was knowing when a poem is done. When is a poem done?
Randall: Sometimes it’s very hard to know. I have written many poems I thought were finished, only to discover much later that they went on too long or, more rarely, needed something else. In other words, when I removed a few lines or even a stanza I realized they were vastly improved. In my own experience this is usually the case: writing too much rather than not enough. On occasion my work tends to become cliched. When I realize that, it might just be a matter of removing a line or two and the whole poem becomes more successful. It may be different for other poets or writers. I would say that a poem is done when it makes its point and not a word more.
Cole: “Writing about what I knew, listening to the sound of my words, and breaking lines to accommodate my breath” were some ideas you learned from William Carlos Williams. Do these principles still apply to your poetics? What would you add?
Randall: Yes, they still apply, but I would add much more. I think we write best when we risk most. Writing about the unspeakable, the secrets, finding a way to say what is most difficult to say, is all important. I have never taken a risk for which I was sorry—in literature or in life. Making connections is also important to me, that the poem make a connection between two ideas or things that aren’t generally thought of in the same breath. Inventing new language. Writing from a new angle.
Cole: It seems like New York was your artistic and social university in many ways. Does the city still have that energy?
Randall: I don’t know. I haven’t lived there for a very long time. I suspect it does in many ways, although personally I find that the high desert of the U.S. American Southwest nurtures my work more powerfully these days. Of course, there are different sorts of energy, and I think one tends to need them at different points in one’s life. Maybe New York is for the young, or for those who live there a lifetime and have become part of the culture of the city. I remember when I lived in New York City as a young woman, I didn’t think a writer could live anywhere else. And then, with just as much certainty, I found one day that I was done. I went to Mexico, and for many years felt the same way about Mexico City. Actually, I think I have felt that way about each of the places with which I’ve become deeply involved. I have a good friend, a poet, who has lived in New York City most of her adult life. Years ago, she was deeply involved in what was going on. Today she seems to be living a rather insular life in the same city. So I think New York probably holds that energy for some and not for others.
Mexico The Tenth Muse
Cole: El Corno Emplumado (The Plumed Horn) was an incredibly popular, internationally acclaimed journal, successful in its reach, placing within its pages work from artists all over the world and creating a kind of community. It included work from Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, Elaine de Kooning, Thomas Merton, Ezra Pound, Marguerite Harris, Julio Cortázar, André Breton, Carol Berge, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Gary Snyder, for example. What do you think made it so loved, revered, and successful, among so many other journals that were being produced at that time?
Randall: I think there were many reasons El Corno was so loved and revered. In the first place, it filled a tremendous cross-cultural need that had recently become evident in many places. Even though we were unable to fulfill our original goal of making the journal completely bilingual, the amount of translating we were able to do was important. We published Allen Ginsberg for the first time in Spanish and Ernesto Cardenal for the first time in English. We dedicated a whole issue to poetry and art from Cuba at a time when nothing being produced on that island was accessible to a U.S. readership. For the first time, at least between the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking worlds, those barriers were broken down. Then, too, El Corno had a rare energy. Sergio and I were young and enormously energetic. We thought we could do the impossible, and so we did. I think that energy was contagious. People were amazed by our venture, and it became iconic in a certain sense. The historic moment probably also had something to do with El Corno’s success: it fulfilled a need. There was also the sense that we created a sort of family. Not just the work, but especially the letter section at the back of each issue focused on the lives of young poets all over the world: what we were doing, how we managed to get by, our ideas, our fears, our communal rage, our projects. Our home became a physical meeting place for writers and artists traveling from south to north, west to east, and vice-versa. And El Corno never represented a particular poetic group or school. We published work from many different tendencies, of many different styles, with different sorts of content. That was important too. Most literary magazines, now as well as then, published the work of a group of friends or colleagues. We never wanted to get boxed in. And we were rigorous in what we accepted. I rejected poems by Norman Mailer because I didn’t think they were good. I never published anyone simply because she or he was famous or a friend. So, we were known for an objectivity that wasn’t usual either.
Cole: You’ve also written that you felt there could have been more representation of work by women in the journal. Which women artists at that time would you now wish had been in the journal?
Randall: It’s hard to say, because I wasn’t aware of them at the time. My feminist consciousness was awakened in 1969, just as the journal ended. But I do know that many great women were writing back then, and if I had been moved to seek them out, it would have made the journal stronger.
Cole: How did your time in Mexico and your relationships with the many poets and artists there affect your writing?
Randall: My years in Mexico, editorship of El Corno, and relationships with so many poets and artists—especially those from Latin America—opened my own writing up, broke it wide open, gave it new directions. Although I wasn’t really aware of it at the time, and have only analyzed this in retrospect, I was of a generation that, while not directly affected by McCarthyism, certainly suffered the residual chill of that blight on American culture. It was understood that one didn’t write “political poems.” Or, if one did, one would be catalogued as didactic, propagandistic, dismissed in terms of publication, grants, prizes, etc. Going to Mexico put me in touch with poets from other countries who suffered no such limitations. They wrote about anything and everything. This alone was very important to my own development as a poet. Then, too, being in touch with so many poets from so many different cultures put me in touch with different traditions, broadened my poetic vision considerably. During the journal’s life we published more than 700 poets and artists from more than thirty countries. So that was an education. Linguistically, it’s now clear to me that contact with poetry in Spanish also broadened my choices, rhythms, journey.
Cole: “Good work,” you write, was the primary aesthetic in choosing pieces for El Corno. Has your perspective on what good work is changed? What now constitutes your criteria for deciding what good work is, particularly in poetry?
Randall: Of course, my perspective on what good work is has changed throughout my life. Sergio and I were in our mid-twenties when we started the magazine. I had just turned thirty when the political repression of 1969 closed it down. As I’ve aged my tastes have changed. I think that’s true for everyone. And even back then I made mistakes. I remember, for example, receiving poetry from Cassius Clay, before taking the name Muhammad Ali. I had no idea who he was. The poems he sent were haikus with an anti-Vietnam war theme. I agreed with their politics, but the poems themselves didn’t move me. I rejected them. A mistake I have since regretted. What I can say, though, is that I was honest about publishing what I believed to be good back then. Then, as well as now, I consider a poem good if it excites me, if it gives me an experience rather than describing it to me.
Cole: How has translating Spanish poetry affected the cadences and rhythms and language choice of writing poetry in English?
Randall: Reading in another language, listening to another language, and especially translating from that other language, inevitably enriches one’s use of all language. Word choices, cadences, rhythms, and more. If I knew more than one other language, I’m sure my writing would be even richer. Different languages make use of different modalities and strategies. Applying those from one language to another, whether consciously or unconsciously, can’t help but make the language one is writing richer, more complex, and interesting.
Cole: You published a substantial number of your first books of poetry while living in Mexico. How was work from that time different from the work you did before or after?
Randall: In New York City, at the end of the ’50s, I produced two small self-published poetry collections. They were really bad. They embarrass me now. But I know they were a part of my journey. In Mexico, I published several more books: two through El Corno, one with New Directions, and several with smaller presses in the U.S. Also, one in India, strangely enough. This work holds up better. I think of my book October as the first that doesn’t now seem derivative to me. I continued writing and publishing through my time in Cuba and Nicaragua and then after my return to the U.S. in 1984. As could be expected, the work in general got stronger. But I don’t feel really good about any of my books until after I stopped teaching in 1994 and could devote myself to writing full time. In my case, at least, having the time, the proverbial “room of my own,” was essential to doing my best work. I feel I am at the peak of my creative power right now.
Cuba Poetry of Witness
Cole: “Poetry and novels play the role many hoped the media would fulfill,” you said of the Cuban writers. What does art offer that journalism cannot? Do you think this is still true?
Randall: In Cuba I was referring to the fact that most of the media was controlled by the government or the Party, whereas work by individual artists and writers was more freely their own expression. And, with some exceptions, the Revolution honored artistic work and published a broad range of it in very large editions that flew off the bookstore shelves. But I do think this is true, in different ways, no matter what the political system is. Journalism is supposed to be “balanced,” “objective,” etc. A writer isn’t bound by that absurd demand. She can pour all her passion into what she produces. This takes different forms in different places and at different historic moments. But I do believe that the real history is often written in literature and art.
Cole: You wrote, “Younger people, who never knew a time before the Revolution, are frustrated with setbacks, unresolved issues, and the slow pace of change.” This seems true not only of Cuba’s youth but the youth of the world who have any sense of the historical currents that brought us to where we are. On the one hand, shouldn’t they be impatient and frustrated? And on the other, does a lack of direct experience of historical events and conditions make newer generations vulnerable to repeating past mistakes?
Randall: Yes, we should all be impatient, and I think most of us are all frustrated. More so every day. We are frustrated by the failure of governments and corporations to be willing to deal with climate change, war, the great human migrations, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and so much more. Women and our male allies are frustrated with the failure of institutions and governments to take sexual abuse seriously. Young people often have the energy to externalize these frustrations. To speak truth to power. Witness Greta Thunberg, Amanda Gorman, and others. I think the young can learn from the old so that each succeeding generation doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. But social change is in the hands of young people now; we older generations have failed to make the necessary changes.
Cole: As much as your time in Mexico brought you into contact with a diverse world of artists and intellectuals, how do you feel your time in Cuba sharpened your political perspective?
Randall: My time in Cuba was a continuation of my time in Mexico in this respect. During my eleven years there, I not only knew Cuban poets, artists, and political leaders but those from many other countries as well. I met many of the thinkers, activists, and artists who came to see the Revolution for themselves. I knew members of many of the guerrilla movements then active on the continent and throughout the world. I met many of the great Latin American poets and writers and visual artists. I was privy to hundreds of discussions about the most vital issues of an era. I also saw a form of socialism closeup, its advantages and problems. At first, I was awed by the Revolution and took its discourse at face value. In time I also learned to question, to think for myself. I continued to value the Revolution—I still do today—but I was less naïve about its frailties and errors. My years in Cuba provided me with the education of a lifetime, not only politically but also culturally.
Cole: How do you feel the poetry you produced during your time in Cuba differs from what you produced before?
Randall: I did write poetry during my years in Cuba but not as much as when I was in Mexico, later in Nicaragua, or after I returned to the U.S. In Cuba, like most others, I worked long days at a job and then participated in all the voluntary work connected to the revolutionary process. I wrote quite a bit of oral history but not as much poetry. Only a few of the poems I wrote during those years continue to interest me. On the other hand, that was true of other overwhelming experiences. For example, my trip to North Vietnam in the fall of 1974 changed my life. But I was ultimately only able to write a couple of poems out of that experience, and I have no idea what happened to them. The experience overwhelmed my ability to transmit it.
Cole: Both Mexico and Cuba more or less forced you out, yet it is apparent you have a deep love of both countries and cultures. Had you been freer to stay, do you think you would still be living in either place?
Randall: Hard to say—although I wouldn’t say I was forced out of either country. I could have remained in Cuba. I eventually received an explanation of why I had lost my job, but I never stopped receiving a salary or being published in Cuban magazines. I left Nicaragua when the Contra war heated up and I suffered a sort of emotional breakdown as a result of the pressures of that situation. Ultimately, I think I stayed in each place just the right amount of time and, for different reasons, left when I needed to move on. But yes, I do retain a deep love for both countries. Two of my daughters live in Mexico, and I visit often. And we have also traveled frequently to Cuba, especially in the years just before the pandemic. Both those countries, and Nicaragua too, gave me a lot. Part of me still resides in each.
Nicaragua Surrendering the I and Embracing the We
Cole: “When they invited me to Nicaragua, the Sandinistas offered me a Nicaraguan passport.” You had a potential job offer in Nicaragua, but it was also enjoying both the success of its revolution and an edgy unrest. Can you say more about your decision to move there at that time?
Randall: I had come to know many of the Sandinista revolutionaries who went to Cuba in the 1970s, some for military training, some to heal from torture or battle wounds, some to hold high-level political discussions on neutral ground. Throughout 1974 I interviewed Doris Maria Tijerino, one of the early female members of the organization, and wrote a book about her. I had known Ernesto Cardenal since my days in Mexico. And so, when the Sandinistas ousted Somoza in July of 1979, I celebrated with them. For various reasons I’ve already mentioned, my time in Cuba had come to an end, and I decided to move on to Nicaragua. I had arrived in Cuba during the second decade of its Revolution. I was interested in experiencing a revolution from its first days. I was invited to do the fieldwork for a book about Nicaraguan women and traveled the country interviewing them. I was interested in other aspects of the Sandinista revolution as well: its Christian influences, the fact that many of its women leaders were feminists, the fact that poetry was so important in the country. My youngest daughter accompanied me, and the next oldest joined us a year later. My experiences in the Nicaragua of those years were as important in my formation as my previous stays in Mexico and Cuba had been.
Cole: In Nicaragua, you taught a course in Oral History (Testimonio), in the former house of Somoza’s mistress, of all places, after it had been requisitioned by the Revolution. An important principle in your teaching that course, you say, was “the ethics of telling another person’s story: Who owned that story? Who should control it and how could the oral historian involve the informant in the process?” This seems to address similar issues of cultural appropriation in art. How does this understanding, this sensitivity and awareness on your part, affect the way you write your poetry?
Randall: Who owns the story is always important, in art and everywhere else. But it’s something we’ve had to learn. Our society teaches us that powerful white men own our stories, our voices, our lives. Our education promotes this idea, our legal system confirms it, and so much of our everyday living reflects it. Women are doubly impacted by this. As a beginning oral historian, in the early 1970s, I told the stories of people I found interesting and underrepresented—such as Latin American women—and, although I thought of myself as sensitive and respectful, the weight of my responsibility didn’t really occur to me at first. But I was part of a movement of people doing oral history, or testimonio as it was called in Latin America at the time, and I naturally became involved in the discussions that emerged: about ownership, ethics, even the technology. Because we were progressive for the most part, we understood that we needed to situate ourselves for our readers (who we were, in terms of class and race, what lenses and prejudices we might be bringing to the work). Gradually these discussions moved us to the realization that the ideal would be for our informants to be able to tell their own stories. And many of us developed ways for that to happen. In my case, whenever possible I gave my interview transcripts to my interviewees so they could weigh in on what would be published. I also shared what small royalties I received with those who told me their stories. Eventually, many of the people (mostly women) whose stories I told developed their own public voices. I continue to believe, however, that my books of oral history were important. They told stories that otherwise would not have been told back then.
Cole: You write of Ernesto Cardenal, minister of culture (and a poet) in Nicaragua when you were there, saying religious fundamentalism “represented an increasing threat to the world.” Indeed, this does seem a prophetic observation. Among other questions of power, has this problem been an important focus in your art and political writing?
Randall: Yes, it has. More and more, as my own understanding of it has deepened, power—who holds it, how it is waged, its uses and abuses—has become central to the way I view the world and, therefore a central focus in my art and writing. That which is called political and that which is considered more intimate or personal, because increasingly that distinction is meaningless to me. Politics, to me, goes beyond narrow party or movement politics. In an important sense, everything is political. I see all relationships, human and otherwise, as political. It was discovering feminism in the late 1960s that taught me about power. And feminism, to me, is not a struggle between men and women but a struggle that belongs to all of us in a patriarchal system to change the power dynamics, make all interactions more egalitarian and just.
Cole: “I’ve been moved by countries with strong indigenous cultures. There is a continuity and artistic richness lacking where native life has been erased.” Do you see this as related to the “arc” of art you mentioned earlier? How so?
Randall: I guess I do. I hadn’t thought of it this way before your question. But, without falling into primitivist concepts of indigenous art, it’s clear to me that indigenous peoples throughout the world have developed cultural practices and products that have an authenticity and beauty—and then are too often appropriated by the dominant culture for its profit. Additionally, in nations where native cultures have been eradicated, the entire country suffers a profound loss.
Cole: What were your feelings when your two daughters joined militia units? Were you afraid for their safety? Were you reticent to support their choices?
Randall: When we lived in Nicaragua, my two youngest daughters joined militia units in order to learn how to help protect the country from imminent attack. It was simply the way we were forced to live. I, too, had rudimentary military training. We all did. Of course, I was afraid for them, for all of us. But I wasn’t reticent to support their choices because it wasn’t really a choice. It was a necessity. When you find yourself in a situation of impending war, the young as well as the old are forced to respond. Looking back, I am horrified by what they and so many others had to endure. At the time it seemed necessary.
Cole: “What needs to change is the left’s insistence on separating the personal from the political,” you write, targeting power in particular where there is outright misogyny and abuses of women. It seems that that problem has continued throughout the end of the 20th and into the first decades of the 21st century. Do you find hope in such movements as #MeToo for sustained, enlightened change in this regard to power?
Randall: I do find hope in movements such as #MeToo. I think the jury’s still out on how sustained the changes will be. Patriarchy is strong and deeply engrained in every society I have known. But all over the world, over the past several years, women have taken the lead in movements for social change. I think it’s been a leap forward that will lead to other leaps forward. And women don’t tend to limit themselves to so-called “women’s issues”; their demands reach much further. It’s astonishing to me how even on the left there are many people who refuse to look at so-called domestic abuse and consider it a crime on the level of other crimes. A current example of this is the Ortega/Murillo dictatorship in Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega raped his stepdaughter, Zoilamerica, for nineteen years, beginning when she was eleven. He compounded the abuse by telling her it was her revolutionary duty to submit to his will. Murillo sided with her husband and abandoned her daughter. Yet the couple are now president and vice-president of Nicaragua, and there are those on the U.S. left who refuse to condemn them for the kidnappings, disappearances, and torture of opponents, for robbing the national coffers and getting rich off the misery of their citizens, and for the sexual abuse and abandonment they can’t even bring themselves to mention, because in their mind it is “a personal matter.” Until we understand that public and so-called private crime is of a piece, I fear we are doomed to condone all the loopholes that make crime so successful.
Cole: “Failure to address the issue of power allowed old values to surface,” you write, addressing not only the imbalance of power in regard to women but many other abuses of power. Have you seen any revolutionary model that adequately addresses the problem of power across all lines?
Randall: Vietnam came closest in my mind. In the early years of the Cuban revolution, the years we lived there (which I have referred to as the Revolution’s glory years), it did seem as if the leadership was intent upon addressing the imbalance of power in regard to women and in many other areas, but the enormous national effort needed to resist ongoing imperialist attacks soon got in the way. And it was also too often used as an excuse. The same was true in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas of the late ’70s and early ’80s seemed determined to create a just society, but, once again, outside pressures required a united citizenry, and the need to come together to resist invasion was both real and a handy excuse to avoid looking at power imbalances. It’s hard to say what the Cubans or the Nicaraguans might have done if their revolutionary processes had been allowed to develop free of outside interference. We’ll never really know. This, to me, is a great tragedy.
Cole: Did your work on Sandino’s Daughters and Sandino’s Daughters Revisited (interviews with prominent women in the Sandinista revolutionary movement) provide you with any significant ideas about how to create truly just governance in regard to the problems of power?
Randall: Yes, especially as regards Sandino’s Daughters Revisited. Because by the time I interviewed the women in that book the Sandinistas were no longer in power, and the women felt they were able to be more open about the ways in which they had been prevented from exercising real power over the preceding years. They credited the movement with awakening them politically. But they also told poignant stories of how, whenever a woman attained a level of real power and tried to institute new ways of doing things, she was replaced by someone loyal to the male power structure. Subsequent Nicaraguan history—in which women’s groups have had an important presence—continues to teach us a great deal.
Returning Home “The present always holds a tremor of the past”
Cole: Why do you think repressive periods repeat themselves throughout history?
Randall: As I’ve said, patriarchy is central to almost every society, and those who reap its benefits aren’t going to relinquish power without a struggle. When women or people of color or any other marginalized group rises up, those in power respond with repression. Sometimes it is clothed in a discourse meant to make it more palatable. Sometimes it is ferocious, murderous. It seems to be the only way patriarchal structures know how to preserve their power. We make progress from time to time. Consider what has happened with the Catholic church, once so all-powerful in terms of protecting its sexual predators. But to date, at least, the powerful have been able to hold on to power, and repression is one of their most effective weapons.
Cole: Your return to the U.S. was also a time of self-reevaluation. You write about a moment someone suggested you come out as a lesbian and how this set you on a path of reevaluating your own sexuality. In the process, did you look at sexuality as a fluid spectrum, wherein the truth of one’s sexual identity may lie somewhere outside the labels, straight, bi, gay?
Randall: As long as I have been conscious of the variations in human (and animal) sexuality, I have understood identity—sexual and otherwise—as a spectrum, with as many “categories” as there are beings. Traditional society finds it convenient to label people male and female, gay or straight. But we know that there are infinite variations, ranging from asexual to non-binary and everything in between. I’d say that I didn’t think much about this until I returned to the U.S. and my own circumstances enabled me to ponder it more deeply. While I lived in Latin America, I was immersed in different social struggles, and, as a consequence, didn’t think that much about my own sexuality or other personal needs. Once I lived in a place where I had the luxury of considering these issues, it was immediately apparent to me that the “differences” were much more varied and complex than was generally acknowledged. Not that I believe this should be a luxury. I feel that identity is at our core, and we need to pay attention.
Cole: You close your memoir: “I am a natural optimist. I believe in a world I will not live to see. And I feel an intimate pride in having given what I could.” What gives you hope?
Randall: What gives me hope today are the youngest among us. Them and the fact that we are rapidly reaching a turning point beyond which life on earth will be impossible if we can’t effect real change. The urgency is already here. I am hopeful that the younger generations will find ways to make changes and demand accountability so that millennia of life and cultures, science and discovery won’t be lost to cosmic dust.
Cole: You have quite a body of work. Are you happy with the legacy of writing you have created so far? When you look at the arc of your own body of work, what do you see? What else do you hope to contribute?
Randall: I am never satisfied. Although I have more than 150 published books and many more published essays, articles, poems, stories, etc., I am aware that I have rarely reached those who are not “in the choir.” I keep hoping to break that barrier, but it doesn’t seem likely at this point in my life. I believe I have been a valuable witness to the history I have lived. I think my writing reflects that. Although I have contributed what I could, it’s never really “enough.” I hope to continue doing what I do for a while yet.