For Adriana Pacheco, doctor in Latin American cultures and languages and founder of the podcast Let’s talk writershaving these four authors in front of her, of whom she claims to have read absolutely everything, is a dream come true. Pacheco is the moderator of the central panel on this second day of the New York Book Fair, which brings together four writers born in the 70s: the Argentineans Selva Almada and Dolores Reyes, the Spanish Alana Portero and the Ecuadorian María Fernanda Ampuero. They have been invited to dialogue about violence, a recurring theme in their works, although explored from different angles such as gender, class, power and marginality.
“The paths of violence are learned and many of them are learned at home. One type of violence cannot be ignored from the other. To talk about violence, no distinction should be made between public violence and private violence. You have to open windows, blow up roofs and let the air in,” begins Alana Portero, whose first novel, The bad habit (Seix Barral, 2023) was translated into five languages and positioned her as one of the most refreshing voices of the moment.
That what is public is private and what is private is public was something that the writer María Fernanda Ampuero also defended. He gave as an example the case of Dominique Pelicot, the 71-year-old Frenchman who for a decade drugged his wife (of the same age) and invited more than 90 strangers to rape her while she was unconscious in her own bedroom. . “Gisele Pelicot contracted several sexually transmitted diseases during that period, for which the health team questioned her about whether she had had extramarital relations. No one questioned the husband at any time! And none of the men who raped her dared to denounce that what they were doing was wrong. The journalists, nurses, students, gardeners… involved, raped her as if she were an animal and then continued with their lives, returning to their homes and jobs with total normality,” explained the author of Cockfight with stupefaction. “Furthermore, this did not happen in Mexico or Brazil (you know that Europeans tend to call us savages), but in a very safe town in France (freedom, equality, fraternity), being perpetrated by her own husband.”
Dolores Reyes highlighted the “absolutely political” decision of the victim, Gisele Pelicot, when deciding that the process be made public, to break with that recurring narrative that tries to reduce violence to isolated private events. “Femicide not only happens to a family, it is a social tragedy. Domestic violence is community violence,” continued Selva Almada, recent finalist for the Booker International Prize, who highlighted that the family is a small-scale society, where abuses and violations often begin and serve as a reflection of what is going to happen. occur outside the home.
The four writers grew up at the same time that their countries were going through sociopolitical situations that would go down in history for their impact. They remember those periods, pointing out that it is impossible for their literature not to be influenced by events, for violence not to also remain explicit or between the lines in their stories. Both Dolores Reyes and Selva Almada were born during the Videla dictatorship. “Talking loudly was dangerous. I remember the terrified faces of the adults and the mothers and grandmothers desperately searching for the children and grandchildren who had been stolen from them. “They are images that inhabit me,” confesses Reyes, whose novel Earth Eateraddresses the disappearance of women and girls in a marginal urban environment. “We have grown up among deaths and torture with silencing. Violence is always floating in my stories, it is a constitutive part of my universes,” continues Almada, who in 2014 published “Dead Girls,” a non-fiction work where she made visible three femicides that occurred in Argentina in the 1980s. .
Alana Portero was born in 1978, when democracy began in Spain after the Franco dictatorship, but for her that period became hopeless. “There was talk of the transition in an absolutely propagandistic way, the explosion of freedom promised to everyone never came. It concentrated on the Madrid scene, which was a wonderful cultural madness but which took place in a single stratum. And who dominated my country for 40 years is still present, because fascist violence is still permissible today.” What struck Ampuero about growing up in Ecuador was the brutal disparity between rich and poor and the fact that there was no middle class. “It was normalized for children to live on the streets, when I asked my parents why we didn’t help them, why the world didn’t stop to help them, they told me that they were different from me, that they were indigenous children. “That is the germ of all the violence that I have experienced.”
The talk ends with a reflection on how the sublime can be reached even in the most heartbreaking story and how pain is an inexhaustible source of aesthetic beauty. “Constantly telling the silenced lives from a documentary or flat point of view has something dehumanizing,” Alana Portero points out in conclusion. “People who have suffered violence also have the right to poetry and beauty. “Poetry can reflect horror in a much more precise way than reality.”
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