Healing Consumption Habits & Cultivating Hope with Poet Vianney Harelly
Note: The following Q&A contains excerpts from an interview that has been edited and condensed for length. The original interview was also conducted in Spanglish. While every effort has been made to accurately represent the views and opinions of the interviewee, please note that some responses may have been shortened or paraphrased.
For immigrants and people of color across the United States, resourcefulness is not just a skill, but a lifeline. Using readily available objects, they create art rooted in their heritage, like quilting or rasquachismo. While we value the role of resourcefulness in sustainable living, many of us—especially children of immigrants who grew up fearing spending money or without access to financial literacy—might overcorrect for living in scarcity once we finally have some financial autonomy. In a country that often celebrates excess, it becomes increasingly crucial that we pause and reflect on our relationship to the objects we own. How can we embrace abundance without materialism?? To shed light on this topic, we turn to poet Vianney Harelly, whose poetry not only ignites introspection but also inspires transformative change among an entire generation. Harelly's poetry invites us to reconsider the narratives and reflect on the emotional wounds that drive our behaviors, encouraging us to forge a more sustainable and harmonious relationship with ourselves and the world around us.
Vianney Harelly is a San Diego-based Mexican fronteriza (of the borderland between Mexico and the U.S.) poet. Her third and latest book, Here Are the Tears I, You, We Didn’t Cry, explores themes of generational and personal healing through love letters to her family, her culture, her community, and herself, in the form of poems. In this interview, the poems “Hoarders” and “Madre Tierra” underpin discussions of healing overconsumption habits, American ideas of “scarcity” versus “abundance,” and the liberation of letting go. Both poems inspire us to examine the delicate balance between material possessions and true contentment, which is crucial to our well-being and to developing sustainable habits.
Your poetry often explores themes of healing and letting go. How do you see this concept playing out in your relationship with consumption and overconsumption?
“It’s hard for me to let go of emotions, so it’s hard for me to let go of items that I might not necessarily need. Lack of closure…led me to kind of make up for the apologies I never got, the feelings that I never healed, the tears that I never cried with buying things.
That's why when I was in San Francisco, I was so broke. I used to just spend money to feel better about something that was tangible—not to mention the lack of financial literacy. I'm the first gen immigrant in my Mexican family. I lived in a culture where talking about money and educating ourselves about money is kind of nonexistent.
Now as I heal, facing my emotions, my traumas, and all of those wounds, I'm also trying to be more conscious as to how I compensate. My poem “Hoarders” came to life because I have feelings attached to things. As a poet, I give meaning and feelings and I attach memories to items. So it's hard for me to just let go.”
What do you think of the “scarcity mindset” versus the “abundance mindset”? Do you relate to these terms and how do you define them for yourself?
“A lot of these terms that we hear about, you know, like scarcity, abundance, manifesting, and affirmations, lack nuance because most of the time the people that get the platforms online or are given the opportunity to talk about this, might not understand the cultural aspects involved as well. I never even heard about these terms until I was online, you know? A lot of people back home or in Latin America don't hear about these terms; for them, life is something you just live and get through. A lot of people in my community don't really believe in the power of the mind, they believe in the power of God. For me, I think it's something that I'm working on and it's something that I am also trying to heal in myself, trying to know what those even mean for me. What's hard for me is feeling guilty for having some abundance, thinking, Oh, my parents are struggling with scarcity at the moment.
‘Yo nunca voy a creer que el pobre es pobre porque quiere.’ A privileged person tends to say that poor people are poor because they want to be poor. So that's kind of where my issue is with people who preach about manifesting and having affirmations and like ‘fix your mindset and think differently and you will do differently.’ There's a disconnect there, which is failing to understand that there are factors that might prevent people from having these mindsets.”
How do you think scarcity contributes to overconsumption?
“When we don't acknowledge our trauma and our wounds, there are voids that we don't understand. We don't have a name for them and we don't have the capacity to understand where they come from and the root of them. So we're just trying to fill them up.
I saw there was scarcity in my financial life, my love life, my work life, and my creative life, in all areas of my life, but I had control over the money I was spending. So, I felt like I was helping and healing myself by over-consuming, buying clothes, buying coffee, and just buying. When I was in college, I was telling myself that I deserved to be spending money and I deserved to be in these spaces that were meant for privileged folks who had money. Even if I didn't have it. I was trying to prove something to myself and to others, but in the end, I was just hurting myself because I ended up broke. Fast forward five years, now I have my business and I'm doing well, selling my books and doing workshops, and I don't want to spend any money. I feel like I’m very apprehensive about my money, I feel a lot of fear, and I am just holding on to it because I'm just so scared of going back to that. “
How does our emotional attachment to objects impact our ability to make sustainable choices?
“I've been trying to donate some of my clothes to my friends, my mom's friends, and others who need clothes, but going through that decision process of what to let go and keep is so hard. The emotional attachment to objects created by an unhealed wound prevents us from letting them go. Regardless of if we keep these objects, we keep buying more items and we keep just adding and adding. I see it with some family members and even close people in my life; they keep objects that they give emotional value to, but it’s not enough, the void and wound is still there, so they keep buying and get trapped in this consumption cycle. “
In your mind, what is the relationship between art and community work?
“I feel like a lot of artists in my community, who are at the forefront of movements and who do art from a place of empathy and consciousness, do it for the community. When you create art, there's a community out there who will receive it, who will relate to it, and who will experience comfort because of it. That is how a movement starts. Even though people sometimes don’t want to give credit to art, there are books, there are paintings or films, and there are a lot of things that come from artists that have started movements and helped people.
I think art is just something that will exist forever and that people will need forever if they want to continue navigating this world and creating change. I don't think they can exist without the other, art and community. “
In your community as an artist and as a poet, how have you seen your art shift people's mindsets both in terms of their emotional healing, but also healing their relationship with consumption?
“With my work delving into healing generational trauma and healing relationships - or maybe not healing, but understanding your relationships- with parents or family members, with yourself, or with your inner child, I think people are being kind of forced to face those feelings. From what I've been seeing, my poetry helps people open up that wound and realize, “This is something that I hadn't faced before and this is something that I need to face.” I'm not sure because my readers don't really share this with me, and I'm not sure about their lifestyle or what they consume, or what they buy, I am hoping that once they have a name for their feelings and their wounds and their traumas, they will stop resorting to habits that don't help them and can hurt them as well as hurt the world around us. “
In reference to “Hoarders,” how has your experience with your family's tendencies to hold on to things influenced your relationship with material things?
“The practices that my mom has passed down to me have both positive and negative aspects. I'm trying to heal from the negative practices to break cycles and patterns that do not help me or the people around me. My mom keeps a really long braid from when she was a teen, a braid that her mom just cut out of nowhere, even though my mom really liked her hair. So she has that long trenza on her nightstand. She also keeps my hair and her dog's hair. So it's not like I just see that and say, “I'm going to do that, too,” even though it is so within us to repeat patterns and cycles.
Most of these poems I wrote when I was very sad and frustrated with my feelings and feeling very alone with them. Through my own healing and self-love process I think I'm also trying to find the positives. Finding a second use for things, that's a positive thing. As of right now, I think I'm also trying to find the positive things in the things that my parents passed down to me, especially with that poem.”
What message do you hope readers take away from “Hoarders”?
“For people to take the time to sit with themselves and ask themselves the same questions. If there is an object that they feel that they've given an emotional attachment to or attached a memory to it, to sit with that object and then ask themselves, why does it need to exist in this object? Where does this memory or feeling come from? Are there other ways that they can keep this alive, or if they want to let go of it, to heal it? I would hope that with my poems, not just Hoarders, but with all of my poems, people find themselves exploring those wounds and letting themselves feel those feelings so that they can finally let them go. I do believe that items carry energy and that the things that you keep in your home will affect the environment and affect how you feel. Especially if they have a negative emotion or memory attached to them, I believe that your home will have that energy and it will weigh very heavily on you.”
Can you tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind the poem “Madre Tierra”?
“Once I moved to San Diego and also started exploring the earth, it got me thinking a lot about just discovering this whole new world of nature and being in tune with it. What also inspires my relationship with the Earth is Ana Mendieta. She has a collection called Silhouette Series. It depicts her silhouette in different natural spaces, like in snow, in un campo de flores, on a tree on fire. She lays on it and then she draws her silhouette. With her silueta series, she acknowledges that she is from the Earth and she is one with Earth even if at times she didn’t know where she was from, having moved to the U.S. and feeling like she lacked an identity. That really inspired how I see the Earth and how I see myself on Earth and the role that I need to play within it…I think that's why I wrote “Madre Tierra.”
What do you believe is the connection between personal healing and healing the earth?
“I talk about it in the poem, where I say, “What is the point of healing if we don't have a home to heal in?” The space and environment that we're in affect our journey, our process, and our emotions. The Earth is healing whether people believe it or not. Plants and water, and all the elements of the Earth, could heal you and you could have a relationship with them in which they can help [you] feel things. People sometimes don't give nature the credit and respect that they deserve. I think that we owe it to the future generations. “
What message do you hope readers take away from “Madre Tierra”?
“I would hope that my readers just take the Earth seriously. A lot of my poems are about inner child and family healing, family dynamics, and my culture, but I also want people to think outside of that and know that regardless of our relationship with our family and our inner child or whoever is around us, we are still living on Earth. Just respect, honor, and treat these spaces the way that you would treat your own home, your own house, or the people you love.
I want my audience to think critically about it because sometimes when we are healing ourselves, unfortunately, we might take the individualistic route, which is very American. This country is very much about the individual and your beliefs and the “You got this, you're strong, and you can just go about it yourself” mentality. I think we need to rely on community in our process. That's why my book is called Here The Tears I, You, and We Didn't Cry. I want this to be a collective movement of change and healing. Let’s go back to the root, going back to community, the earth, and indigenous voices. “
Vianney Harelly’s book, Here Are the Tears I, You, We Didn’t Cry, is available in Spanglish and Spanish.