Explore Erika Rummel: Award-Winning Author, Global Storyteller, and Master of Historical Fiction

I don’t know how many of you have seen the movie American Fiction --- it won an Oscar last year for best screenplay. It’s about a Black novelist, and there is a scene between the novelist and his agent. 

The agent says to him: Look, I can’t sell this literary stuff. Why don’t you write instead about Black lives, about the violence in Black ghettos, gangs, drug wars? And the author says: But I don’t know anything about Black ghettos. I have a degree from Harvard. I teach literature. 

Well, the agent says, but literature doesn’t sell. So the author goes away, very angry, and dashes off a satire about gangs and violence in a Black ghetto. He immediately finds a publisher for that manuscript, gets a huge advance, and his book becomes a bestseller, except that no one including the publisher recognizes it as a satire.

That film was a cultural touchstone for me.  It raises a number of questions: Should authors write only about their own experiences? 

Should they please themselves and write about what interests them, or should they cater to literary trends and aim to please the reader?  

Well, luckily in the case of my last novel – What they said about Luisa --my interest happened to coincide with contemporary interest in Black lives. I came across the story of Luisa de Abrego – a freed slave accused of bigamy in 1567 -- got hooked on the story, and decided to make her the subject of a novel.  

Clearly, I am not drawing on my own experience here. I am not a “brown” woman, as Luisa called herself in court when she stood before a tribunal of the Mexican Inquisition. 

Obviously, I haven’t experienced life in the 16th century, but I am a professional historian and familiar with the social and cultural norms of that age. I read the trial records, in which Luisa tells the judge about her life. We learn that she is a freedwoman from Seville in Spain, that she married a white man and emigrated with him to Zacatecas, a mining town in Mexico. In court, she successfully defends herself, and is acquitted – and after that she disappears from the historical record. So -- 

I made up the rest of her life, the stormy crossing from Europe to Mexico, the Wild West story of trekking inland and being attacked by marauders, the silver rush in Zacatecas and the shady figures benefiting from it.

I want to emphasize, however, that my novel is not written in the first person. I do not presume to speak in Luisa’s voice, a black woman’s voice, other than in the trial scene, where I quote her own words. For the rest, her adventures are described in my book by “witnesses” to her life, who follow the social conventions and express the beliefs and prejudices of their time. In the 16th century black people were considered an inferior species, Christians were intolerant of any other beliefs, and the colonizers felt entitled to occupy the land their troops had conquered from the indigenous population.

My novel, then, is a patchwork of the opinions of 16th century white Europeans, who offer widely diverging views of Luisa – some describe her as mysterious and saintly, others as a vamp luring men, others again as a upright and courageous woman and a loving wife and mother. Luisa herself says very little. In other words, I leave it up to you, the reader, to decide who among these witnesses got it right and to answer the question: Who was Luisa Abrego?

But to get back to the movie American Fiction and the questions it raises -- I do believe that an author should write about what she knows and I do want to please my readers. But I also want them to understand that this is not a history textbook. It’s a historical novel. 

There is a big difference. Writing a history book is an intellectual exercise, the reconstruction of a distant era based on hard evidence, on documents. Of course documents give us only limited information and leave us with many unanswered questions. Writing historical fiction, by contrast, is an exercise in imagination, and imagination has no limits.  

You could say that historical documents are just teasers: they give you a few dates, facts, figures. In the case of Luisa they can tell us about the proceedings of the Inquisition and the power of the church in the 16th century, or about the conditions on board of a ship or in a wagon train. 

As a historian I can also tell you how a silver mine worked or how raw ore was processed in a smelter. As a novelist I fill in the remaining gaps and add the third dimension, the human dimension, bringing Luisa alive.

You can certainly read the novel to learn about life in the 16th century, or you can read it at the level of an adventure story, go along for the ride, and find out what happened to Luisa in the end – not the real Luisa of course, because we don’t know where she ended up, but the Luisa of my invention.

©Erika Rummel

About Erika Rummel

Award winning author, Erika Rummel is the author of more than a dozen non-fiction books and ten novels. Her tenth novel, ‘’What They Said About Luisa’  was published on June 18, 2024..

She won the Random House Creative Writing Award (2011) for a chapter from ‘The Effects of Isolation on the Brain’ and The Colorado Independent Publishers’ Association’ Award for Best Historical Novel, in 2018. She is the recipient of a Getty Fellowship and the Killam Award.

Erika grew up in Vienna, emigrated to Canada and obtained a PhD from the University of Toronto. She taught at Wilfrid Laurier and U of Toronto. 

She divides her time between Toronto and Los Angeles and has lived in Argentina, Romania, and Bulgaria. To Learn more about Erika and her books, please visit her website at http://www.erikarummel.com/