Visceral it is chewed, it is spit out or, rather, it spits out at you. It’s wild, uncomfortable and magical. Primitive. And all this happens because this book comes from a stark, painful and real place. There is no fiction here, no mirror games, no chameleonic costumes. What there is is a furious exhibition. A “this is me” that raises an accusing finger at those who fueled the anger of María Fernanda Ampuero (Guayaquil, Ecuador, 48 years old) and that of so many women for being that, women, migrants, fat, menopausal, crazy or everything at the same time. time. A literary Dionysian scream.
In the book you move away from horror literature to delve into a sort of autobiographical chronicle. Why?
After cockfighting and Human sacrifices, Many people, especially male journalists, asked me why I wrote horror. As if it were something we little ladies can’t do. By answering this question, I developed a theory: women live in the epicenter of terror. And I’m not even talking about single women who are trying to have free sexuality and find someone. No. My mother also lived in terror, she went on tiptoe so as not to move the air so that my father wouldn’t get a wire crossed. We live immersed in a horror movie and we don’t know it. So, I, at least, tell it. In my case, I am also a foreigner and I am not canonically beautiful. There’s more terror there.
How was the process? Because it’s one thing to be aware of the violence that has been experienced and another to write about it without any literary device.
It hasn’t been liberating even though shared anger is always better. Allows the coven. We cannot do it alone. If I have lived what I tell in my book and I am not a protagonist of a Dickens book, I do not even want to imagine what happens to others: to the orphans, to those who had to become prostitutes, to those who were abused by their father, to those who suffered a mass rape at the age of 14… I do therapy. And I don’t think writing is.
They are the monsters that are murdering us. paraphrasing Caitlin Moran“how to destroy a woman.”
The book brings together all the times that have ruined my self-esteem, my self-confidence, and have made me the person I am. And it is also a war cry. A way of saying, “And I’ve outlived all of you motherfuckers and none of you motherfuckers are being interviewed by The country”.
She repeats that she is not the nice and smiling woman she seems. Does the perfection that is required of us reach that point?
We all have to be that perfect woman, but I also have the stigma of being the perfect fat woman. The fat woman has to be funny. The thin, young and pretty woman can allow herself to be rude. Her beauty makes up for it. I have been taught to be the clown who makes up for the fact that she doesn’t look the way she should with her jokes. Since she lives without limits the gluttony that others would like to have, at least she makes people laugh. Being fat doesn’t mean having bad habits. I have a fantastic diet.
She recounts a tremendous experience: having been fed, as a child, drugs (amphetamines and sleeping pills) to lose weight. Do we live immersed in fatphobia?
Until now, I hadn’t talked about diets, injections and drugs because I thought: “I’m doing all this and I’m still fat. I don’t want them to ask me!” I constantly hear comments about how many calories a cookie has, or “Oh, with this body, I can’t go to the beach”… These are said by thin women in front of me! I remember one time, in a bar, they invited me for a drink and a friend said how was it possible that out of all of us at the table, they invited me. The fat one.
One of the main themes of the book is that, isn’t it? That of the woman’s body being colonized, tortured…
Almost everything I have written has to do with the body horrorMotherhood, menopause, period pains. And all the things that are done to that body under the protection of racism, classism, sexism or colonialism. A kind of revenge against our bodies. Is there a war? Women are raped. Do some women ask for asylum? They are prostituted and their passports are taken away. There is a systemic ferocity against women, whether or not they meet aesthetic criteria. Because if you meet them, you must maintain them.
There are very hard episodes in Visceral. A sexual assault without going any further. Are you afraid of the reactions of your environment?
The only one that worries me is my mother. We have talked and cried about everything in the book, except the rape part. I don’t want her to suffer. My brothers are going to suffer the way men do: by getting angry or wanting to destroy walls. And there will be those who think I’m stupid for putting myself in a situation. There they are. After the rape, and I don’t tell this in the book, when I saw myself naked in front of the mirror with my hair in shit, red from drowning, mascara smeared, lipstick everywhere, I saw myself so monstrous that I said to myself: “Of course, how could this guy not be violent, if I am this freakshow of the mirror?”. I thought that. Of myself!
And after the book?
I will make mistakes again, hate my body, feel like a foreigner. The devil is inside. The book is a process of seeing the violence that has made me a person who, despite everything, is empathetic. There is a path that, at least for me, does not end in desolation.
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