Uruguay Pink dirt (Random House, 2021). Instead of taking the usual rest between book and book, he felt the need to continue writing, as if he had a torrent of words inside that he had to let out. From that inertia he was born THE MOUNT OF THE FURIASthe work that has just been published with the same publisher. If the previous title – which won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award and the American Book Awards Award – presented a dystopian world to the edge of collapse, now offers a history of camouflaged hope.
“I felt that I had not deepened enough in the issue of woman’s relationship with nature,” he explains to Eldiario.es in Barcelona. After a novel in which the stage was a city ravaged by an environmental catastrophe, has placed its new protagonist in a small house in the mountain where she works as a caregiver of an electric fence. The only near neighbor and with whom he has contact is the warden, another employee who lives in a tiny house half a kilometer below. From time to time, he goes down to the people to buy but she does not leave the mountain. He lives accompanied by the thoughts that he reflects in his notebooks and, from time to time, he receives the visit of two Jehovah’s witnesses who try to convince her to know his paradise. But she doesn’t need to look for more because she has already found her own.
According to Trías, so far the narrative about nature has always been in the hands of men. In addition, mountain or jungle environments are linked to the masculine but in reality it is not so or, at least, not quite. “In Latin America there are many women who have to be in contact with a landscape that is really inhospitable, because the wind is brutal and kills you, but when the sun comes out it also kills you,” he develops. “And there are very rude women who are very physically and psychologically resistant to all these conditions. That’s why I wanted to put the protagonist in that place. ”
The mountain is a woman
In fact, that protagonist (has no name) is not the only female character in the novel because the mountain also has its own voice and is a woman. That entity has been there since time immemorial and has seen all the changes produced by humans such as the construction of cities or the extractivism that attacks it directly to it. But he has also witnessed all disasters such as massacres or earthquakes that changed the lives of people who live in conflict with the environment around them: they destroy it to be able to live while they need to take care of it so as not to die. The illogical neoliberalism that governs the functioning of the world and that is evidenced in the book, which has a markedly environmental character.
The author argues that there must be a change in land care but does not know how it could be implemented. “If we want to recover the planet, another paradigm is needed that cannot be the patriarchal and capitalist now, because it is pure destruction,” he defends. “That is why we cannot think of issues such as separate femicides from the destruction of the environment. All the violence exerted on the woman’s body is the same that is exerted on the body of the territory. ” In her novel, the protagonist managed to position himself in the world, to change her paradigm, when isolation of everything in the mountain. He found his utopia, but had to get out of the system.
Trias wrote THE MOUNT OF THE FURIAS Before the arrival of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States and its decoupling of the global climate pact. The perspectives prior to their mandate were not good, but now they are much worse. However, the writer shows unusual optimism these days but does not fall into the naif. “I feel that the end of the American Empire has begun and that we are now seeing the final decline. It is a very dark moment because the light is not seen at the end of the tunnel, but I want to think that something will change because it cannot be sustained more, ”he says. He considers that it is a historical perspective exercise, because every time has had periods of destruction that seemed to have no end and that they finally surpassed. “I think each generation lived a kind of end of the world that did not happen or I want to hold on to that,” he says.
The extension of care
Another important layer of the novel, which is composed of many, is that of motherhood from different perspectives. On the one hand, he treats the maternal-filial conflict, very marked between the protagonist and her parent but also between this and her own mother.
And on the other, it offers the vision of the woman who does not have the possibility of conceiving. “What did mean that? What kind of mockery forced the infertile women to continue bleeding? ”The character wonders at a certain moment. “It seems to me that extremely interesting and necessary things have been written about motherhood, because we must rewrite it. But I feel that not so much about the impossibility of being a mother, with all the conflicts that it entails, ”he clarifies.
The novel also shows that there are other ways of maternario that do not go through conception and childbirth but have to do with care. “One thing proposed by ecofeminism and that seems very interesting is that care is something that should be shed towards everything, including the non -human: towards the environment, towards non -human animals, towards the plant world,” he says. In fact, in the book La Montaña is also a maternal figure: “Nutre, feed all these creatures, who die, are absorbed and refund the cycle itself.”
Writing is an act of transgression
But in addition to outside care, there is also a reference to what could be considered “self -care.” When she was little and lived in the city with her mother, the protagonist worshiped go to school, learn. But at a certain moment, her parent decides that she will not return and her regulated education ends. However, she maintains her love for writing and fills notebooks with the thoughts she traces. It does not have an objective beyond that of the action itself, it does not think about publishing its memories or anything like that. But capturing in paper the things that happen to you is a way of maintaining your mental health in an environment that is sometimes hostile, especially when men make an appearance.
“Historically, for women writing has been an act of transgression, because instead of being writing we should be doing other things,” Trías runs, “and I think that today, somehow it remains so when we say that we say that We are going to write, we are going to publish and we are going to appropriate the literary world without shame. ” The protagonist’s impulse is also transgressive: for her, being considered an ignorant for not having studied more is a injury in her self -esteem and, even so, she decides to take the pencil. At first, it shows great insecurity and even criticizes itself, but then takes a run and appropriates writing as a tool that belongs to it. “I did not want it to be a novel in which only I narrated, but I wanted a woman to be writing actively and empower,” he remarks.
In the final notes of the volume, Trías comments that in the last fragment of page 23 is taken and freely adapted from the Popol Vuhalso known as Sacred Book of the Maya. For the writer, in this document it can be verified that to find a new way of relating to the environment, it is not necessary to imagine futuristic scenarios because you can learn from how the ancestors did. “For them the mission of the human being was to reach the world to take care of it, not to destroy. Be their guardians and make sure things continue to exist so that new generations continue to have them. That’s where hope is born, ”he concludes.
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