Three years after the success of huaco portraitthe book with which she was a finalist for the Booker Prize International and the PEN América, the Peruvian writer residing in Madrid Gabriela Wiener returns with the novel Atusparia. An initiation story starring a woman who experiences firsthand the political drift of her country from the political side of the left. A position that requires large doses of romanticism and courage, especially if you embrace the most difficult cause of all: that of those who have suffered for centuries without anyone even remembering their names.
Atusparia comes from Pedro Pablo Atusparia, an indigenous leader who led the Huaraz Rebellion in 1885, when peasants took up arms to fight against the reestablishment of the indigenous tax during the postwar crisis in the Pacific. Her spirit is present throughout the story: this is the name of the school where the protagonist studies and it will be her militant name during her political career, cut short by the lawfare of a system that manages to land her in jail. And not just any one, but an open-air prison from which, paradoxically, it seems impossible to escape.
Although he shares many things with his main character – from the powerful black hair to the educational center – on this occasion there is no autobiography in his writing. “As in any fiction, there are things that happened in my life and historical things, of course, things from the present of Peru. But it’s all just fiction. It is a story from the Latin American left, but it could be from the Spanish or European left,” he explains in this interview for elDiario.es that takes place in Barcelona.
Where does it come from Atusparia? What drives you to write it?
On the one hand, about a trip I made to Puno (Peru) as a journalist, in which I went to cover a story of a peasant uprising for a magazine. I think I linked this a little to the memory of my real school, which was called Atusparia. It was something that I had left as a small piece of information snuck into a book, but that I had never developed and that I wanted to write. And then other things appeared, such as, for example, some photographs of abandoned Soviet cities after the fall of the wall that reminded me of the residential complex where I had lived in my adolescence. In addition, it also came to me from a documentary about that prison that was originally on the air. All of this allowed me to tell the sentimental and political education of a woman, of a character.
The novel is divided into the different phases of the protagonist’s life, which are marked by struggles for power or who is right within the left-wing political movement.
Of course, in the book there are the internal struggles of the left, its conflicts, over what the political direction should be or what level of radicalism there is. Between each other trying to measure their ideological purity, their impeccability. They are those big issues that occur within emancipatory movements and that are sometimes their downfall. All this exacerbating contradictions, so typical of Marxism, sometimes ends up being a trap.
But there is also everything that happens outside the movements, beyond the left. How any transformative initiative is pursued. Call it a blockade, call it America’s backyard, call it lawfare or judicialization of politics or harassment of female politicians. Things we have seen here, in Spain, all the time. There are very powerful forces that do not want these movements and these leaders to come to power. Nor, of course, a revolution has a continuity to change structures.
Betrayal is a central theme of Atusparia. Everyone feels it but they also execute it.
I believe in betrayal when it has a good basis, a good foundation. At some moments you can see betrayal or you can see justice, sometimes they can be confused. It is a very literary theme because it concentrates an original pain that is not always understood and that pushes us to action. So that makes the hero or character have several dimensions. That dark side always gives a lot of play for writing and even more so if, as in this case, it is about understanding how our political practice is crossed by the sentimental, the emotional, the loving, the relational, the sexual. That is a topic that obsesses me, but we rarely talk about everything that is behind the great political decisions that make humanity go one way or the other. I say that the book is about political betrayal as a love betrayal and love betrayal as a political betrayal. You no longer know where everything begins and where it ends.
If everything personal is political, everything political is personal, right?
Everything political is passionate.
There is a group that has to fight twice, as a proletarian and, at the same time, as an indigenous person. In the novel there is a quote from Manuel Scorza that is essential to understand the story: “In the Andes there are five seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter and massacre.”
I am the daughter of that left that chose the political path [y no de las armas] and that right now it is a left almost cornered in my country, with no possibility of action. I drank Marxism since I was a child, I saw that working proletariat happen in my childhood. But in the book I talk about José Carlos Mariátegui, who said that this utopia of socialism that was planned to be realized in a territory like Peru or any of Latin America could not be a carbon copy of the Russian Revolution. In such an Andean country, the proletariat were the indigenous people and the peasantry.
I have always felt that it is the group that is most abandoned in political memories, because you can know by name and surname the people who were disappeared in Chile or Argentina, but you don’t know anything about the indigenous revolutions, which have a history going back many years. . I wanted to pay tribute to him because it is a movement that is still active and that I had to see in person, we have all seen it, because they have been the ones who have laid the body since Dina Boluarte co-governs with the police.
Why doesn’t the current situation in Peru occupy more newspaper covers? There are strikes, demonstrations and the president has very low approval ratings. Among other serious problems.
It’s called racism. Laura Richardson, head of the US Southern Command, called us ‘cupboard’. It refers to the Amazon, the forests, the mountains, the water. They know perfectly well that if they have to start a war or a new massacre, there will be no problem. An Indian will never be an obstacle to building another mine.
In Atusparia This structural racism is visible and also the machismo exercised by the militants’ own revolutionary colleagues or by the political system, which only has to use an old video to get rid of a candidate with the possibility of governing.
I remember a documentary they made in Peru about the left, in which there were very few women interviewed. My mother was a union member and had been active with women from many places but they are not in the official story. Right now on the front lines of the fight there are always women, ultimately they are the ones who make the decisions and once again, these things are not counted. That’s why I wanted to make a book where all the protagonists are women and sexual dissidents. But the good and the bad are embodied, they are not victims or villains. They are simply at work in the world, and in many cases, there may be decisions or behaviors of theirs that you find disgusting. It is not a book to celebrate femininity at all, but simply has flesh and blood characters.
What do you think about Spain having to apologize to Latin America for the plundering and crimes it perpetrated during colonization? The topic returned to the news a few days ago the request of the president of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum, but it is recurring.
When I published huaco portrait all the headlines in the interviews they did with me were about that. Now I just want Spain to apologize now so that I don’t have to give a single more headline saying “Spain, ask for forgiveness, for God’s sake.” [ríe]
It is important that these symbolic gestures exist. It’s common sense: when you hurt someone, even if ten, 20 or 500 years have passed, you ask for forgiveness. It’s restorative justice. He hasn’t even canceled you, he hasn’t made you angry, he just told you to apologize. But of course, if you say no, then it’s normal that they won’t invite you to the party.
In the book he says: “At school they taught us that history only proves right the heroic romantics.” Will it end up being like this?
This is a story of the defeated and let’s hope the tables turn. The last time there was truly structural change was with the Russian Revolution. And then he fell into the authoritarian temptation. It is difficult because any initiative that is not that of consumption and ultra-capitalism will always be isolated and will always try to neutralize. Right now the world left is in a defensive moment, in a place of retreat.
The book aims to return to utopias, to fall in love with the revolutionary notions that can get us out of this paralyzing state, although on the other hand so understandable due to the far-right offensive. The debate on how we are going to do it better is open.
That’s why I wanted to write Atuspariabecause I see that there is a terrible blockage in the movements and then there is the impossibility of giving political direction after the outbreaks. Look at what happened in Chile, from the outbreak to the constituent process, something broke. When are we going to dare to be a truly revolutionary left and prevent that vortex of the center from eating you and leaving everything there? There is a desire for the white European left to stop fascism, not only with scarves or symbols but from the institutions when they are in them.
#Gabriela #Wiener #Spain #forgiveness #give #headlines #Spain #forgiveness #Gods #sake
