Elizabeth Duval: “Fascists are humans, not monsters. That’s the dangerous thing. It would be more comfortable if they were “

Have you been offered to enter politics? Elizabeth Duval (Alcalá de Henares, 2000) listens to the question. He makes a dramatic pause. “No”. Nor would he accept if they proposed it to him. “There are two things that degenerate the mental faculties: columnism and politics. Because more than reflecting, you have to sentence ”. With a double degree in Philosophy and French Philology from the Sorbonne, what Duval likes the most is being in Paris “quiet” with his partner and their cats, reading and writing. He would like to pursue an academic career in the future.

At 21, the word future seems to have a special meaning for her. In Queen, her autobiographical book, said with irony that in “the future” she would want to be that, constitutional queen of Spain. 2021 has been full of merits to achieve it: it has published a book of poems (Poserotic), an essay (After the trans) and a novel (Madrid will be the grave). In addition, he appeared alongside Josep Pedrerol, Cayetana Guillén Cuervo and Miranda Makaroff in the video of Atheist, by C. Tangana and Nathy Peluso, and spoke with Juan Manuel de Prada in the special Christmas of The weekly country. Pure spirit of consensus.

Duval, however, has his red lines: transphobia and the extreme right. To the first he dedicates some of the sharpest pages of his essay; He gives voice to the second in his novel, which tells the crossed lives of two activists in squatted centers of opposite ideology: a Marxist-Leninist from the Red House of Lavapiés and a neofascist from the Social Home, in the Salamanca district. “I was interested in narratively analyzing ideas that I don’t believe in and assuming an uncomfortable truth: fascists are human too. They are not monsters. And that’s the dangerous thing. It would be more comfortable if they were, ”he explains while handling a breakfast that he barely touches and that he quickly substitutes for a cigarette. He assumes the risk that someone might confuse his voice with that of the character: “I preferred that the rejection of fascism come from within the story rather than from an external moralizing position.”

In his opinion, however, all the militants have something in common: discipline and the “almost religious” feeling of belonging. The difference resides in the “wound” that leads each one to the military: “For some, it is rage; for others, what is role-playing. For Juan Carlos Girauta, flirt. He himself said that that is why he became a Maoist in adolescence ”. Elizabeth Duval was also an adolescent “premilitant”. “When I was 15 years old, I spent seven or eight months in the Red House. What I tell in the book is not a cartoon: the alternative to the traditional political system was yoga on Mondays and Soviet cinema on Sundays; or make a graffiti wrapping that action in a bombastic speech ”.

Duval was caught by the great moment of re-politicization of Spanish youth, 15-M, when he was 10 years old. Born in Alcalá de Henares, she lived in Barajas at the time and until that neighborhood –or until that age– the echoes of Puerta del Sol did not arrive. What did not take long to arrive were the apparitions in The Sixth Night from Pablo Iglesias: “I followed him closely. It was the first time that I had heard a left-wing speech defended on television in a sustained manner. That and my coming out of the closet was what politicized me ”.

What do you think of the tension between class and identity that the left is going through today? “It’s a trap. On the one hand, they want to sell us a discourse against immigration that privileges the cultural axis over the economic one as a leftist. On the other hand, we are told that recognizing social rights for LGTBI people prevents claiming labor rights. As if Unidos Podemos only had Irene Montero in the Government! Yolanda Díaz has made a great defense of the workers. That is why his new project is exciting ”. Not everything is written about the road that leads to Moncloa. Nor to the Zarzuela.

You can follow ICON on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or subscribe here to the Newsletter.