UChicago College Book Club Vol. III – "Don't Come Back"

UChicago College Book Club features published books by College faculty, housed on the College news website. Read along, and submit faculty-written books for consideration.

The next selection is "Don’t Come Back" by Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, assistant professor in the program in creative writing at UChicago.

Published in 2017, Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas’ book is comprised of personal narrative essays and reimagined Colombian myths that tell the story of her upbringing and young life in Bogotá, as well as her early adulthood transition to life in America. 

Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, who has taught at UChicago for four years and immigrated to the U.S. at 17, said that the concept for the book was born out of necessity. When she started writing it, and as she details within the book, too, her visa in America was scheduled to expire 60 days after her graduation from the University of Iowa’s creative writing master’s program. 

She needed to be employed to stay in the country, which meant she needed support from an institution large enough to sponsor her, like a university. She concluded that the best way for her to secure that support, outside of constantly applying for jobs, was by publishing a book, which she first had to write. And, of course, the book had to be strong enough to warrant publication. 

Every day at two in the morning, she would wake up and write, motivated by the fear of being sent back to Colombia and “driven mad with purpose.” 

“I was desperate to write something that might save me, desperate to escape a life of such profound uncertainty, and be for some precious hours something certain, a writer – even if it was a writer of secret pages none but me would ever see,” she said. 

The dire circumstances under which Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas wrote the book add poignant color to her personal narrative, and its contradictory refrain: learning how to reconcile the unstable, yet happy life she left behind in Colombia with the potentially prosperous, yet unpredictable life of an immigrant in the United States. 

Each short chapter tells a different story and begins with a Spanish adage that Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas translates into English beyond the word-for-word translation, representing her sense of a split belonging to two cultures and places (Colombia and the U.S.) and the ever-changing meaning of home. 

These translations serve as the thematic beginnings of each short story. For example, from page 76: 

Echar leña al fuego

or 

To throw firewood to the fire.

or 

Throw firewood [into] the fire.

or

Add fuel to the fire.

or 

“Some must burn so that others may see.”

Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas recalls that her family used to cheaply rent out a private room with a television above a store to watch movies, as “unregulated gangs ran through the night” outside (p. 106). 

Flashing forward to the present day, she narrates the chapter from her sister Paula’s “pristine” living room, illuminated by the “blue light of a DVD menu on loop.” This contrast between how they grew up and Paula's life now in suburban Las Vegas further complicates the sisters’ relationship with their home country and calls into question which of the two countries is truly home. 

“I know that somewhere in a cupboard there is a blue U.S. citizen’s passport with my sister’s name on it… Not the Colombian name …she has shed like a sheath of skin, but a shorter, more efficient name to make sure she’s never separated from her children like our mother was separated from us in U.S. airports and immigration offices because ‘How come you don’t have the same last name as them?’” (p. 107). 

The author’s sense of a split identity is never more clear than when she interacts with her loved ones who still live in Colombia. Readers hear from a beloved aunt who begs her to return to Colombia, while her mother tells her, more frankly, "’There's nothing here for you, Lina. Don't come back.’”

The novel, naturally, features many settings across Colombia and the U.S. Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas excellently describes each location in vivid detail. 

“September is one of the few bearable months in Iowa. February is antibody-white. July is hallucination-red. May is tornado-green. But September is tired of summer and unprepared for winter, and it curls dark yellow like the corners of a page left too close to the fire” (p. 131). 

While that is commonly referred to as “establishing place,” she said she considers it a different skill – knowing what to cut and what to keep, which she believes differentiates good writers from bad ones. 

“In a book about the loss of home and all that it contains, I had to concretely develop the locations more as characters than as places, because the loss of an individual is more closely felt and more easily accessed,” she said.

“The questions of what to include in a scene, how to build a place, what color to choose, or which texture to include can be incredibly daunting. But if you ask yourself concretely, ‘Why does this character exist on the page? Why are they important and to whom?’ It immediately makes things clearer.”

If you read "Don’t Come Back" and want your reflections to be shared in future posts, please send me a note at andybrown@uchicago.edu. The next book in the series is to be determined.