In the following Q&A, Graybeal-Gowen Prize runner up Desiree Santana discusses her poem “The Starving Time.” Informed by her growing up in several Virginia regions, her work combines the historical and the present through haunting imagery. We explore dominant versus marginalized archival narratives as well as the intersections of personal and historical significance.
How does your Virginia background influence your poetic voice or purpose?
I was born in southwest Virginia and raised in the tidewater region. I’m now attending school in Charlottesville and so these various landscapes have a profound impact on my poetics. The ecology of the mountains, the wetlands, the foothills are all present throughout.
What other historical or contemporary events do you explore in your work or hope to explore in future works?
The histories of Central Appalachia are present in much of my past work, as well as the effects of the opioid epidemic. I am a product of both. In the future, I want to write even more about the coastal area of Virginia/North Carolina, which have their own distinct history with scarification and are very much haunted by the colonial era. Growing up, I felt very attuned to the fact that anywhere I walked was potentially a gravesite, that there was grief in the earth.
Did writing “The Starving Time” require significant research, or were these historical anecdotes ones you remembered from childhood?
Most of it initially came from field trips I took as a child to the Yorktown Battlefields, Colonial Williamsburg, and Jamestown. The line “I cut my teeth on the new world” is wholly literal in the fact that I came to consciousness in those kinds of spaces. These areas are sort of a “historical theme park” in a way that is both disturbing and fascinating. When I was growing up, however, the archaeological discovery of cannibalism present at Jamestown hadn’t been made. I didn’t have cable for a long time and so watched a lot of PBS. One day there was a documentary following the discovery that always stayed with me. That knowledge is now superimposed on those childhood trips.Some of the facts in the poem, such as the palisade walls being whittled down and what was found in the trash pits, comes directly from Jamestown, The Buried Truth by William Kelso. The work of Helen C. Rountree is also influential, as she is one of the few historians that really seemed to be pushing back on the whitewashing of tidewater in her books.
What significance does Jamestown hold for you personally, and how does that significance align with or contradict the dominant narratives surrounding the town?
In the narrative of the starving time at Jamestown I was able to explore my own history with food insecurity, as is briefly touched on in the poem. I spent some time in foster care and came out of it extremely malnourished and with a complicated relationship to food. And, as I touched on before, the historic triangle of Virginia is often treated as a historic theme park, and with that comes the erasure of some truly horrific stories. Growing up, we were told again and again that we were visiting these places where “America started.” This was treated as a positive thing. By highlighting the colonists’ cannibalism, it’s an effort in reversing some of those positive narratives that were/are present.
Is there anything else you would like people to know, about you or your work or anything?
There’s a difference between Jamestown Settlement and Historic Jamestown. As a kid, we always went to the settlement because that’s where they have the re-enactors and replicas of native and colonial houses and the ships. Historic Jamestown is the actual archaeological site of Jamestown, which I hadn’t visited until after writing this poem. I went on Black Friday with my sister. While we were there, we walked around some red-brick ruins and a deer was grazing. In all of these places, deer are always present. They’re all over the battlefields. I took this picture on that day.