María Gómez, poet: “My Dulcinea is a feminist”

“I want to talk to Dulcinea as a friend,” says María Gómez Lara (Bogotá, 34 years old), a Colombian poet who has lived in Madrid for three years and for nine years has been cooking up a book that rewrites the voices of Dulcinea, Sancho, or the knight errant of La Mancha himself. Retaking them as Bogotá voices, renewing them from the Golden Age, Gómez wanted to give a feminist look to Dulcinea, an altar to Sancho’s friendship, a tribute to the madness of Quixote himself. “It is a tribute to a book that was very important to me,” she says about Miguel de Cervantes’ work. Gómez, winner of the 2015 Loewe Joven Prize for her work, Countertone (Visor), this month has published in Colombia his fifth book, Don Quixote out loud, with the publishing house Pre-Textos —a collection of poems that has also been available in Spain since July.

Ask. Cervantes published this book in 1605. Why return to Don Quixote?

Answer. Don Quixote It is a huge work, it is many books, it is full of stories and people who are poets. For me, it is about the love of books, about what literature can do in our lives. For those of us who really like to live in the world of imagination, it is a refuge. There are people who see windmills, there are others who see giants, a book of parallel views. And it is a book about a way of seeing the world, a perspective: that of lucid madness. Don Quixote is the sanest madman of all, a madman who frees himself from his bonds, a madman who is free through words. To look at it in today’s world, when society determines roles for us, like the one imposed on us women, someone who steps outside that place is the madwoman. I see these madmen as lucidity, as freedom.

P. The book begins with the voice of Don Quixote’s niece, who is afraid of books.God save us from the incurable and contagious disease / being a poet: / an irreversible illness”.

R. It happens like in the original book, in the episode ‘The Scrutiny of the Library’, when the niece is burning the books, and she and others, in reality, are afraid of poetry. They want to burn Don Quixote’s books because, they say, he lost his mind from reading too much. He was a quiet nobleman, there reading his books of chivalry, and suddenly he got fed up, he got tired of the responsibilities of real life, and he said: I want to be a knight-errant and I’m going to go out into the fields to look for some giants to defeat. What I like about this part, which was what I worked on in the poem about the niece, is the great force of poetry that makes someone believe that, by burning it, they prevent someone else from going mad. It’s the other way around: poetry is what keeps us sane. Poetry is what keeps us human.

P. His book, Don Quixote out loud, It really is the voices of many women.

R. It is very important to me to raise the volume of women’s voices, because we have been silenced throughout history in different ways. It is a current concern: in Afghanistan, the sound of women’s voices in public was recently banned. Women’s voices have the right to occupy a space in the world.

P. Were their voices also silenced in Don Quixote?

R. But of course. I chose three women, Marcela, Zoraida and Dulcinea. I try to give them voices, or interiority, that were not in the original text, that they are their own narrator, that they tell their own story. Marcela is a very advanced character for Cervantes’ time. She is a literary shepherdess and they say that she is a beast, a murderer, they insult her terribly. It turns out that she did not reciprocate the love of Giróstomo, another shepherd, and he committed suicide. What really happened is that Marcela decided to be free and she says so, in the original book, free to reciprocate. She is a woman who is the owner of her desire, of her body, of her life. It seems wonderful to me that Cervantes wrote her, that Don Quixote takes her side and says: oh, yes, leave her alone. I took her up again to go further into her subjectivity, to tell that they harass her for her body (her golden curls, her pearl teeth). I wanted to allow her to say that beauty belongs to no one else but herself, and that she could identify herself as Marcela through her own voice. That she could say: I am the owner of my scars, of my wounds.

“I am Marcela because of my voice / and they open the wounds just by wanting to take over this skin that covers me.”

Marcela Desamorada, in ‘Don Quixote aloud’.

P. And who is the opposite of Marcela in the book?

R. Dulcinea. She is apparently the protagonist of Don Quixote, the maiden, the beautiful one, the most excellent lady. But she is hardly there, practically everything is a product of Don Quixote’s imagination. He invents things that have nothing to do with the real character. Don Quixote has not seen Dulcinea. That is why she has no voice, no agency over her story, over the perception that we readers have of her. In the poem I wrote for her I wanted to give her a full voice, to imagine what she would have said. That Dulcinea is free, my Dulcinea is a feminist. My Dulcinea can’t stand Don Quixote any longer because he has no idea who she is. She just wants to be left alone, and if she is going to become disenchanted, she will become disenchanted on her own, she doesn’t need any guy to come and disenchant her.

P. And who is Zoraida? We hardly know anything about her.

R. Zoraida is a character from an aside in the story of El Cautivo. She is a Moorish, Arab woman who falls in love with a Christian captive, chooses him, and tells him: “You, I’m going with you.” She abandons her father and her jewels, abandons her wealth, to go with him. She is free in that sense. But there is a lot of pain after that moment of freedom, because she does not speak Spanish, and the people around her decide what she thinks. She is freed from her context, but then, in a new place, she is locked in a language she does not speak.

P. Zoraida locked in a foreign language like many immigrants in the United States or Spain.

R. Yes, and there is a lot of pain in that confinement. A person who does not speak the language, or who even speaks another variant of the language, is told what to think, what to need, what to want. The “but they, the immigrants, are fine here, they should be grateful that we welcome them.” Language is identity. Zoraida must change her name to Maria to be accepted. Speaking your own language, or the variant of the language, wherever you are, is freedom. That is to say, I do not silence my own voice, because my voice sounds like this, it does not sound any other way.

“I would have to find a voice, I would have to create it out of nothing, a language that is not my mother tongue, not a foreign one, but my own music.”

The Silence of Zoraida, in ‘Don Quixote a voz’.

P. In that sense, was it intimidating to reinterpret the voice of Cervantes’ characters without being able to write like someone from the Golden Age?

R. Yes, I delayed publishing this book out of fear, because who am I to mess with Don Quixote? And since I live in Spain, I was apprehensive about how this text, written by a Colombian, would be received in the land of Don Quixote. But then I thought of it as a tribute. The authors who accompany me in life, like Cervantes, become like my friends, and one does not take friends with such solem
nity, one makes jokes with friends. The characters of Don Quixote are close to me, I want to talk to Dulcinea like a friend and tell her “look, we have to leave this one because he really has no idea who you are.”

P. Speaking of friendship, Sancho was left for the end of the book.

RYes, unlike the women in the original book, Sancho is the friend who has all the voice. Sancho is the one who is transformed into the world of Don Quixote’s imagination, because this is a book that is also about the importance of friendship. We tend to put relationships between couples at the center of life, when friendship can be so central. That is why the poem that closes my book is a very sad one in which Sancho asks Don Quixote not to die.

“But I don’t want islands or governments or servants / I want my friend Don Quixote who understands me.”

Sancho Amigo, in ‘Don Quixote aloud’.

P. Would you call your book a feminist look at Don Quixote?

R. Yes, I think so. I am a feminist, and very proud of it.

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