Margarita García Robayo: “Inequality is the issue that obsesses me”

At the start of The outside (Anagrama) writes Margarita García Robayo (Colombia, 44 years old) that she found in her notes the notes on which she put together this essay “like a tick between the hairs of an animal.” It may seem strange that a text about the time in which his two children were born has something to do with the parasite, but the simile connects well with the story it intends to tell and that feeling of discomfort that it describes directly and accurately, — “Almost six years of staring at something that I didn’t understand what it was and now it was as obvious to me as an elephant in my living room.” Also from fiction in his new story Happinessillustrated by Powerpaola and published this spring by Páginas de Espuma, García Robayo connects with an atmosphere of barely hidden dangers, not as foreign as it might seem to the one described in his essay. The threat of outer space is felt from another perspective.

That outside What is included in the title is what she tried to avoid as a mother, and it works as the thread with which she linked together scattered materials about affluent motherhood in Buenos Aires, her childhood in Cartagena de Indias, and her years as a young adult without family obligations. “The same things were there, the same thing happened, but before I became a mother it didn’t bother me,” she explained at the end of May in Madrid. García Robayo then spoke of going through violent spaces with children, of the “structural evil in Latin American cities,” which she had observed and somehow ignored, but that as she was a mother, it became the only thing she perceived. Protective nest syndrome as a refuge that isolates and cauterizes. “The crystallization of all that came with the pandemic,” he concluded.

If in The outside the writer used the first person confessional (“I used my personal experience to prove an argument”), in Joy She used an omniscient narrator and described a youthful getaway of two friends to the farm of one of them in Colombia. In the story, a local legend speaks of a murderous ghost that confuses drivers; three young people from the town end up helping the friends and the gap between them becomes abysmal. “Inequality is the theme that runs through all my books, the discomfort of inhabiting a deeply unjust space, and having grown up in those places. It is not without conflict to see from where you stand to analyze the problem,” said the author, who has lived in Argentina for more than a decade. “I visit Colombia at least once a year, but after so many years they tell me that I speak another language. Cartagena continues to be the place that makes me the angriest in the world, I suppose that is what matters most to me. Proximity distorts and, since I left there, I can speak with more definition and distance.”

The “civilized and well-thinking” world of which he felt part “stumbled” when faced with all the contradictions that were taking shape when his children were born, as he relates in The outside. With Happiness He wanted to avoid the “soap opera stereotype with rich girl and poor girl who in the end turn out to be sisters or almost.” And from that framework of “inequality of the Colombian Caribbean”, which marks life according to the social place in which one is born, unless someone hits the board, García Robayo writes stories that escape cliché with courage and intelligence.

Magical realism as a symptom

Magical realism, which in some way the author of novels such as Entrustment either Worse thingsis in some way an involuntary heir, she is interested in it as a symptom of the society in which she grew up. “I grew up irradiated by terrifying news in my childhood and that fanciful and sugary narrative allowed me not to call things as they were.” were. It is synonymous with denial, a national vice. The question of what to do with what happens to us is still there. “He explained, without denying his admiration on a literary and aesthetic level for that current. “One Hundred Years of Solitude “It is the story of the devastation caused by the banana plantations.” Terror today is “another way of trying to narrate those horrible things to which we cannot put a name. we invented little storys, magical or dirty realism, but with horror it is not necessary.” He mentioned Mariana Enriquez and how she describes the environment of Argentina through gender. García Robayo ended up talking about the savage violence against women: “It is so exacerbated that if it is explicit you couldn’t even read it.”

A former guerrilla fighter that she saw by chance on television is the almost invisible thread that unites her two new books. “She is the inspiration for Happiness, someone so intelligent and articulate, who made me wonder about the place in which you put the reintegrated ones,” he explained. “There really are places where a person’s potential is never realized. A poor person has it more difficult in that social framework in which it seems that the only option for women is to end up as a domestic worker. Yoli’s character rebels, but it seems that she could not escape her fate, however, the protagonist also falls into dissatisfaction, although she is flatter.

In the contrast between these two young women, tensions in female relationships emerge, for which García Robayo has a keen ear. “The subject makes me uncomfortable and ambivalent. I love mothers and friends, they fascinate me and I want to kill them. There are all these narrative layers. Maybe Caribbean women are my specialty,” she reflected ironically. “It is a super-macho society, but the last word is up to the woman. She constructs the family narrative. Sometimes she uses subterfuge to get what she wants, and this manipulation is something uncomfortable to name, perhaps a form of resignation due to the lack of power outside. The true patriarchy may be the abandonment of parents, something not often observed.”

Direct and accurate, before saying goodbye, García Robayo once again underlines another uncomfortable area: the environment of mothers that she discovered with motherhood and that made her face her prejudices: “One disdains practical knowledge from a supposed intellectual superiority.” But one day you realize that your life depends on “knowing where they sell the best thermometers that don’t break and, there, irony is no longer useful.”

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