Jaquira Díaz’s debut novel, This Is the Only Kingdom, begins with an epigraph drawn from Aracelis Girmay’s poem “Elegy”: “Listen to me. I am telling you a true thing. This is the only kingdom.” Girmay’s “kingdom” is not the afterlife or some promised utopia but the world as it is—the one we make and unmake together. The line is a plea to recognize the reality in front of us, the life we can touch, shape, and be held accountable for. Díaz makes this idea the moral engine of her novel, portraying characters who, despite living in a world steeped in tragedy, choose to inhabit it with the fullness and attention of those who understand how fragile it is to be alive.

The novel follows Maricarmen and her daughter Nena across decades as they reckon with loss, violence, and the harsh realities of life in a working-class barrio of Puerto Rico. Split into two parts, the first half focuses on Maricarmen and her forbidden love affair with the neighborhood’s Robin Hood-like figure, Rey. When he is killed by the police, Maricarmen is left to raise their daughter Nena alone. The second half, set fifteen years later, finds Maricarmen and Nena reckoning with the fallout of another brutal act of violence. Nena is forced to flee to Miami, where she must grow up fast and come to terms with her queer identity against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic. Despite the weight of her circumstances, Nena begins to carve out a life of her own, finding in Miami’s queer community a model of care and connection that redefines what family means for her. Through all the grief and upheaval, Díaz’s streets and neighborhoods are alive with music, celebration, and the messy, often painful rhythms of life. This Is the Only Kingdom is an audacious debut that weaves intimate stories into the raw histories of homophobia, racism, poverty, and state violence.

I spoke with Díaz via Zoom about truth-telling, colonial legacies, queer family, and more.

ER: Your novel takes its title from a line in a poem by Aracelis Girmay, which serves as the book’s epigraph. What drew you to that line, and how does the idea of the “only kingdom” shape the world and the lives of the characters you inhabit on the page?

JD: I returned to this poem after having read the poetry collection years ago. I came back to it after my mother’s death, which happened as I was writing this book. I was thinking a lot about interconnectedness and what it means to be alive and embodied, to have a physical body that we can touch and feel and embrace. That’s what we’re really grieving when we lose someone. That’s what I was grieving when I lost my mom: that I could not hug her, that I could not talk to her, that I could not be in her presence anymore. Our protagonist, Nena, is grieving someone she loves and is feeling that painful moment of I will never get to touch them again. I will never get to be in their presence again.

But the phrase also takes on other meanings. One has to do with the Catholic Church and how much it uses the word kingdom as a way of controlling people—explicitly telling queer people they’re not going to make it to the kingdom of heaven. The other has to do with colonialism and the U.S. relationship with Puerto Rico, and how the U.S. has become this power that controls Puerto Rico. People talk about Puerto Rico being a territory of the U.S., but this is all a myth. Puerto Rico is controlled by the U.S.

This book isn’t just about this family and these relationships; it’s also about the colonial relationship in which the U.S. controls Puerto Rico and every system within it, including the colonial project of el caserío—the housing projects in Puerto Rico—and how this system of poverty was designed and controlled by the U.S.

ER: In both your memoir and this book, you often return to the question of survival within broken systems and colonial legacies of poverty, family violence, structural violence, and displacement. In many ways, your work refuses the myth of escape from those realities—again, recalling Girmay’s line, “this is the only kingdom.” Instead, your work insists on staying with the truth of lived experience—no matter how difficult—and on finding beauty and meaning within it. What allows you to keep writing toward that truth, even when it’s painful?

JD: Writing has been a way of freeing myself. Rejecting the publishing machine’s ideas of what I should be writing has also been freeing. It’s been a way of knowing myself and navigating the world. Ordinary Girls and This Is the Only Kingdom have forced me to look at myself with curiosity and humility, at how I exist within my own family, within these systems, and in the world. I’ve had to acknowledge the ways I’m complicit in these things: the way I live in the U.S., get to return to Puerto Rico, and spend time with my family who have to live with the real-life consequences of colonialism. I get to return to my home in New York and write about it. I acknowledge all the ways I have more power and more resources than they do. Yes, it’s a privilege. But I also don’t want to be in the U.S. I want to live in Puerto Rico. I want to make a living and raise a family there. Displacement is very real for me. It feels like a kind of exile. Even though I can return, the life I want isn’t the one I have here. I want the life my family has over there and to live fully in my community. And yet I don’t feel like that’s possible. For many of us in the diaspora, there’s always this longing, this nostalgia to go back. I’m always contending with that as I write.

The work itself, particularly This Is the Only Kingdom, which is mostly set in Puerto Rico, feels liberating. It’s a kind of compromise: I can do work that’s meaningful and important to me and write about things that matter to my family and community. It allows me to create something real and honest. For now, while I can’t fully be there, that must suffice. But even when I’m writing about Puerto Rico, a place I love and adore, I’m critical of certain systems. I’m writing about how colorism and racism are very real, even if we’d like to ignore them. I’m critical of the Catholic Church, which occupies so much space in Puerto Rico. There’s a Catholic Church in every town, often at the center of the town, around which everything revolves. I’m being honest about systems of power and the ways they hurt all of us. That’s the lens I try to bring to this work.

ER: Your work analyzes these systems of power across decades. Your novel captures violence, police brutality, poverty, and homophobia from the 1970s to the 1990s with an unflinching gaze. We’re still seeing these systems at work today: from ICE violence and deportations to the ongoing targeting of queer and trans communities. What do you hope readers take away from seeing these realities set in the past? How can that perspective help us recognize or challenge the structures that still harm our communities today?

JD: I think it’s part of my job as an artist to write about this—to create space within a work where a reader might recognize something and think, Oh, wait a minute. I understand something about this that I didn’t see before. Maybe a reader sees themselves in a character or finds themselves rooting for a queer person when they never thought they would. Art has incredible power. Books have so much power. They can change the world, start conversations, and immerse readers in cultures and lives they might never otherwise encounter. I think that’s why books are being banned, why there are efforts to silence writers. They know books are powerful. There’s a reason they don’t want children reading books about queer people, or books by BIPOC people. And when readers come to a book and begin to understand something about the world that they didn’t before, that’s where liberation begins. That moment of understanding—of seeing something the government or the book banners have tried to hide—is the beginning of freedom. That’s why this is my most important job, and I will keep doing it forever. This is my life’s work.

ER: That idea of books as revolutionary feels deeply hopeful to me. And while your novel grapples with trauma and violence, I ultimately found it very hopeful. Was that something you set out to achieve?

JD: In 2019 and 2020, I was living in the UK. Watching the U.S. from abroad was enlightening. Getting out of the U.S. and seeing it from afar was a turning point for me. I could begin to write without feeling like it was a sacrifice, without driving myself into the ground, without taking a toll on my mental health and my body. I could just write and experience joy—the joy of writing and making art. Everything didn’t have to end in disaster. There could be some joy in the end.

Writing changed for me after that—I realized I had things to say. I still wanted to address these systems and talk about homophobia, transphobia, racism, and colorism, but I didn’t want the machine to steal my joy. I wanted to continue to be someone who experiences joy and centers joy in her life. I thought, if that is real for my life, why can’t it be real in the book for these characters? I wanted my characters to strive for something better than what they had before. Even when I was writing about violence, I wanted to show the ways Puerto Ricans celebrate each other and celebrate in community. When we were struggling, because we were poor and over-policed, we still had a party for everything. Parties were never just inside people’s houses. They were always communal. They were outside—block parties, street parties, barbecues—and the whole community participated. I wanted to capture how, even when we are failing, struggling, and being targeted, we still take time to find joy.

ER: For me, Nena embodies the book’s hopefulness. She’s able to find solace and belonging through her chosen family and queer community. Could you talk about what that idea of chosen family means to you in your writing and why you chose for Nena to find this community in Miami?

JD: Community and chosen family are always in my work. As much as I love my family of origin, and as much as we’ve evolved and gotten to a place where we can now love without hurting each other, I don’t know that I would have survived if I hadn’t had my chosen family. That has a lot to do with all the things I was struggling with as a young person—mental illness, addiction, and queerness. I grew up in Miami Beach, in a community that was about 95 percent Latinx, and yet the one thing everyone seemed to have in common was that they were hella homophobic and hella transphobic. Even though Miami Beach itself was a place where queer and trans people came to find community in the middle of the AIDS epidemic, the broader community around them made it clear they didn’t want them there. The homophobia and transphobia were explicit, and I lived that. I felt that.

When I wrote the pharmacy sections of This Is the Only Kingdom, I had to think deeply about that time in my life. Those sections came directly from my own experience. I worked in a pharmacy that primarily served queer and trans people, most of whom were living with HIV. Over two or three years, many of them—if not most—died. I had to live through that as a sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-old and somehow make sense of how it was possible that queer people I saw every day, just trying to live their lives, could be ignored by the government and denied the help they needed.

And yet, within that small community in Miami Beach, there was so much love and connection—so much chosen family. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to write about that experience. I finally felt like myself there. I didn’t have to come out or explain who I was. I didn’t have to say, “Hey, I’m queer, I hope that’s okay.” I was simply seen.

ER: In order for Nena to find her chosen family, she first has to experience abandonment by her mother, Maricarmen. Abandonment recurs throughout the book—Maricarmen is abandoned by her mother, Blanca, and later Nena is abandoned by Maricarmen. What draws you to exploring this pattern across generations?

JD: I struggled with the idea that Nena’s mother could abandon her. Maricarmen loved her so much. I didn’t think it was realistic. I wouldn’t abandon someone I love that much, at least not without saying, “I have to go for a while,” or actually having the conversation. Then I thought, well, that’s exactly why she can’t say it. For Maricarmen, it’s so impossible that she has to leave that she can’t even put it into words. We fail and fail again, and I wanted a character who embodied that.

Nena had a journey like her mother’s when Maricarmen was left behind. Maricarmen’s abandonment taught her how to live in the world, how to be a mother, and how to do all the things her own mother hadn’t done. For Nena, the same was true. She found herself and her strength because her mother wasn’t there. She had to become a different person or maybe grow into the person she was always meant to be. 

ER: Sticking with Nena—she holds many identities. She’s Black, Latina, queer, and comes from a poor background. How did you think about her negotiating all these aspects of herself, especially in contrast to her mother, who is white?

JD: I wanted it to be clear that Nena understands something about the world that her mother doesn’t, even though she’s very young. A lot of mixed kids, a lot of Black children with white mothers, grow up in a very different world and their mothers don’t realize it. I have a Black father and a white mother, and I understand now that there were things my mother could never teach me. I realized as a kid that there were things about the world she had no clue about. I wanted to speak to that experience.

ER: Both Maricarmen and Nena have to deal with so much death and violence. What made it important for you to confront these forms of violence directly in your storytelling, rather than soften or obscure them?

JD: While I was writing, I was looking up how many instances of homophobic or transphobic hate crimes had happened in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico, and the numbers are staggering. It’s shocking to think that this is still happening, and that the people who are supposed to protect us often do not. Queer and trans people today are still feeling the effects of this violence. Even though we like to imagine that things are better than they were in the 1990s they really aren’t. Some people may be more accepting, but for queer and trans people, particularly trans people, things don’t feel safer or easier. I wanted to confront this reality directly. I didn’t want to sanitize it. It was important to have the violence right in our faces and say, this is real. In fact, what happens in the book is not even as violent as what actually happens to queer and trans people in real life. In many cases, reality is far worse. 

 ER: The book feels attuned to questions of what we leave behind, especially through art. What do you hope someone takes away from your work?

JD: I hope readers see that we are real people, neither heroes nor villains, capable of both cruelty and compassion, and shaped by the systems around us—the systems that create poverty, despair, and crime. My work focuses on working-class communities, and I hope it prompts people to think about dismantling these systems, about how poverty is not inevitable, and how people can be given resources to move beyond it. In terms of literature, I hope what endures is a Puerto Rican literature that engages people both emotionally and intellectually, and that readers approach it as literature—not just a book on an airport shelf.