Alejandro Puyana’s “Making Salsa” appears in the Autumn 2024 issue of The Southern Review. Here Puyana talks about bringing the historic Zaire 74 music festival to life by developing celebrity characters, imagining alternate realities, and listening to lots and lots of music.
Halley McArn, Editorial Assistant: It seems like everyone uses Florentino’s trumpet except for him. Why did you choose to write about a musician who listens more than he plays?
Alejandro Puyana: I wanted the trumpet to have an otherworldly quality to it. For it to be sacred in a way. Florentino plays it at the beginning of the story, but then the trumpet kind of has a life of its own and becomes part of the history of the Zaire 74 music festival more than Florentino does. I wanted to respect the history of the event by keeping my fictional character in the margins of it, but with the trumpet I found opportunities to put it in the hands of some amazing people, like James Brown and Hugh Masekela. This trumpet also plays a central role in another story of mine that takes place years in the future, when Florentino’s grandson becomes a trumpet player for The Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, and in a way this piece is the backstory of how this trumpet became an almost magical object, infused with the energy of this time and these musicians.
HM: You end this story on a photograph of the musicians together after their performance. Were there real photographs, documents, or histories that informed your writing of the story?
AP: Yes! The Zaire 74 music festival was a huge historic event, tied to Muhammad Ali’s fight against George Foreman billed as “The Rumble in the Jungle.” It marked the first time many Black superstar artists made their way to Africa to play music, so it meant a lot to a lot of people, and was tied up with the Black liberation movement, civil rights battles, and blockbuster entertainment. To say there was a lot at stake for this event to be successful is an understatement. There have been movies, documentaries and books written about these days, a lot of them focused on the fight and the athletes. I leaned the most on the documentary Fania All-Stars: Live from Africa, that focused on the salsa super group’s experience. Also, the music album of the same name. But I also took liberties. I couldn’t find photographs of all the musicians together for example, but it seems plausible, actually probable, that they would have taken one, so I made it up.
HM: This piece is laced with near misses; in a world alternate to the story, construction materials fall, planes nearly crash, and stray bullets fly. Why do the central characters of this story never learn about or face these catastrophes themselves?
AP: First of all because it was all true! The event could have been a catastrophe many times over, but miraculously avoided it. Can you imagine the level of loss our culture would have suffered if a plane carrying Bill Withers, James Brown, B.B. King, Celia Cruz and many others had crashed? (Rumor has it the flight was overweight and had issues taking off from New York because James Brown overloaded it with tour equipment). Same with the venue in Kinshasa, the Stade du 20 Mai. By most accounts it was a deathtrap, not really equipped to handle a concert of that magnitude: stages were hastily and haphazardly constructed, the electrical equipment wasn’t designed to be compatible with the outlets, etc. All of this was kept from the musicians. But I made a pretty early decision to have an omniscient narrator that could go in and out of people’s heads, knowing everything. This allowed me the great fun of capturing the history and complexities of the event without being tied to Florentino’s experience.
HM: James Brown, Bill Withers, B.B. King, Celia Cruz, Hugh Masekela, and Former President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Mobutu all make appearances in this story. What was it like to depict characters whose celebrity precedes them?
AP: So much fun! It’s all just short moments, glimpses at their physicality, or the sound of their voice, or how they affect the people around them. It was great to have them at my disposal—to put them into a room and to see what would happen. I especially enjoyed whenever Héctor Lavoe made an appearance, he has always been my favorite salsa crooner.
HM: I love the way this story roots Latin music in African sounds. Which traditions most inspire you as you write about music?
AP: The music first and foremost. I grew up on “salsa brava,” like we call it, and some of these musicians like Hector Lavoe, Johnny Pacheco and Celia Cruz are mythical. And Latin American music, especially the one created in New York from the ’60s to the ’80s was a literal hodgepodge. Jazz, of course, was a huge influence. But the backbone of salsa music is African percussion, no doubt about that. One short story I read for the first time while I was working on this piece was James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” which depicts playing music so beautifully. I’m sure it influenced the way that I wrote music playing scenes here. How could it not?
HM: This story deals with themes of identity and exile; many of the Latino band members have never flown over the Atlantic; a Jewish band member says, “we’re not welcome nowhere.” How did you approach writing about so many different communities, often with competing circumstances, privileges, and cultural memories, in such a short space?
AP: Diaspora! Outsiderness! They are great unifiers. I’m not a musician, but from my many friends that are, I’ve always found them to be eclectic, diverse, open-minded, and kind of outcasts. And there’s also something about playing music together that, in my mind, has to bring people together. So, I leaned on what all these characters had in common, and then it was easy to tap into their differences.
HM: One of the joys of reading this story for me was getting the chance to imagine Black liberation in a multinational context. How do you understand the significance of the music festival in Kinshasa, Zaire in 1974 to Black liberation on the world stage?
AP: This question is a bit above my paygrade, but the way I see it Zaire 74 felt like a celebration of Black excellence regardless of where it came from: the US, Latin America or the African continent. It was a coming together. And for many of these artists, it was the first opportunity they had to connect to their African roots and to step in the continent of their ancestry. From documentation, I know this time meant a lot to these Black and Brown artists, and it moved them to be more active in their own communities.
HM: Do you listen to music while you write?
AP: I will sometimes listen to classical music or very minimal electronic music, anything with lyrics is too distracting. I do love to listen to music in between writing sessions, especially if there is music that is related to what I’m writing about. For this piece, I devoured all of my favorite salseros, as well as dove deep into African musicians that I didn’t know that well, like Miriam Makeba and Zaïko Langa Langa. I’m still messing around with the follow-up to this story that follows a child in the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, so I’ve been listening to a lot of their recordings as I revise it.
HM: Florentino assures his bandleader Johnny before his performance, “their feet, their calves, their hips, they’re gonna remember us.” What do you hope readers remember most from this story?
AP: Overall, I just want people to have fun with it. My stories are usually dark and heavy, and I love that this story is not that. It’s about a Venezuelan immigrant having a magical, once-in-a-lifetime experience. We all have moments when we feel we are a part of something special, even if just at the margins of it. Maybe this story can serve as a reminder that we should grab on to those moments when we can and really experience them at our fullest. Also, if a reader has never listened to Fania All-Stars, how great would it be for them to discover their music through this story? That would be very cool.
HM: Tell us about your new book, Freedom is a Feast, out now from Little, Brown.
AP: Oh man, it took me ten years to write and I’m so proud of it! It follows a Venezuelan family through fifty years of complicated Venezuelan history. Two revolutionaries falling in love in the jungle in the ’60s. Prison escapes. Chances at redemption. Coup d’etats and kidnappings. People trying their best to come together through mistakes and failings. All in the midst of a country that is both beautiful and chaotic. Marlon James called it “fearlessly ambitious, dizzyingly complex, gorgeously written, and chock full of magic.” Junot Díaz said, “Epic doesn’t begin to describe this extraordinary novel.” Kali Fajardo-Anstine called it “explosive,” and Amy Hempel said it was “vivid and arresting.” If you like multigenerational stories, if you like discovering other cultures and places, if you like propulsive books where there’s always something at stake, I think you will like Freedom Is a Feast.
Alejandro Puyana is a Venezuelan writer living in Austin, Texas. His work has been selected for the Best American Short Stories and has appeared in American Short Fiction, Tin House, and swamp pink. A 2023 graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, his debut novel is Freedom Is a Feast.
Halley McArn is the editorial assistant of The Southern Review and an MFA candidate at Louisiana State University with a focus on prose writing. She’s served as the Poetry and Nonfiction Editor for the New Delta Review and as an editorial assistant at Speculative Nonfiction. You can find her work in Bright Wall/Dark Room.