Bibiana Collado Cabrera is a torrent when she speaks of literature, poetry, love, of “the need to break with the stereotypes of the world around us that has stylized and romanticized love as sacrifice and painful surrender.” Her impetus and enthusiasm are printed in the verses of her latest book of poems, Meat chips (La Bella Varsovia), which will be released next week. “I wanted to create a poetic, artistic imagery of good love. I had in mind Gloria Fuertes saying that ‘I’m eroticized by good people’, good people. We are going to show how works can be made that respond to that vital attitude,” explains the writer from Castellón (Burriana, 38 years old), about her fifth collection of poems.
Collado Cabrera was a poet before she was a narrator. But the success of her first foray into the novel, Exhausted mares (Pepitas de Calabaza), an incisive look at classism, sexist violence, the lives of parents exhausted from working so that their children can study or cultural snobbery, which is already in its fifth edition, has projected her name beyond poetry, a genre in which she is consolidated and which has provided her with several awards (Arcipreste de Hita for As if never before or Complutense of Literature by Certainty of collapse). “All my poetry books are connected. They are different ways of entering the poetic universe with the concerns I have at each moment, Yes Violence, The previous collection of poems was about darkness, harm, the pain of love, the journey to hell, the new book is about light, good love, especially in the first part,” explains the Literature teacher at a high school in Valencia.
A claim that is reflected in Meat chips in the verses “I was taught that love was a fierce dawn” either “A dark hurricane that destroys to be eternal” from the poem Daringwhich continues: “And They didn’t tell me about the light/ that sneaks into the houses very early/ to pour peace on your face/”. “I think we see love in a different way now. And it’s not just a matter of my generation. There is a different worldview in which sex is very important, very carnal. I am very interested in talking about this good love. When we started to appropriate it, it seemed that good love was de-eroticized, that the passion of the flesh, of the body, of enthusiasm were linked to dark, destructive loves. We are going to bring the passion of the flesh back to good love, we are going to bring light back to the realm of sex, of seduction, which is also in love. We want a good love in which there is also fucking,” she says, while laughing.
The stage of making fun of romantic couples, of the corny, has already passed, he says. “We are producing texts about that imaginary,” he says, without stopping smiling. In this sense, he cites works such as the essay Superemotional. A defense of love, by Juanpe Sanchez Lopez, or Living Stars. Anthology of cheesy poetry, compiled by the author himself and Berta García Faet. It is about writing something positive, linked to a healthy relationship, not about turning ourselves into beings of light”, adds the writer and collaborator of EL PAÍS, daughter of Andalusian immigrants settled in Burriana, from whom she learned the couplets, the tonalities and the proverbs very early on, a musicality that also permeates her texts. In the second part of Meat chips, To give voice to man, the poet resorts to references such as Miguel Hernández, Jorge Manrique or San Juan de la Cruz.
Collado has now started a new narrative work, of which she prefers not to give details, while she continues to go to bookstores and reading clubs, requested by Exhausted mares a year and a half after it came out. What is the reason for this good reception? “It is a word-of-mouth phenomenon. The publisher is wonderful, but independent and cannot do a lot of promotion. I have a great love for booksellers, for the way they have treated and continue to treat the book. And I have also done street work, from town to town.” And she adds: “In addition, I think there is a certain hunger for stories that show tired bodies, real work, the consequences of a brutally elitist system, at least in the cultural and humanistic sense that we continue to suffer; stories that talk about the working class because most people belong to it, whatever is said.”
In her conception of literature she feels very close to authors such as Alana S. Portero, Violeta Gil, Ana Pacheco or her editor Elena Medel. She abhors the term autofiction and prefers, if anything, the term “self-essay”. She rejects defeatism in general, and in particular, the nonsense that people no longer read as they used to or that they read very little because of screens. “Behind many defeatist speeches there is a wonderful past, in which people had to read a lot, but the reality is that we have a past in which very few people read and very few people studied and access to books was just right. My two grandmothers were illiterate. Who are we talking about then? Glorifying the past means giving a very biased and elitist view of Spanish reality. Of course, people now read much more than my mother and my grandmothers did. And the grandmothers of most people. I am interested in breaking with that biased image.”
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