The writing of Gabriela Wiener (Lima, 1975), journalistic in its freest and most literary sense, and more gonzo, remains in a balance between the tendency to propaganda (to argue passionately in favor of an idea that could change the rigid structures of a “normality” that no longer allows us to live) and autobiographical vulnerability (that this idea runs through the narrator’s life). Therefore, in books like Sex graphics or in the curious theater piece How crazy to fall in love with you Dedicated to breaking down sexual and affective conventions, Wiener’s first obligation is the transforming contradiction: to force ourselves to think on our own, from complexity.
Huaco portrait it is a book sustained by a process of decolonization, both personal and historical. In the last third of the 19th century, a “discreet German teacher turned Indiana Jones overnight” came very close to being the discoverer of Machu Picchu. “Although we already know what it is like to discover America and things that have always been there,” writes the author with her usual sarcasm. He is Charles Wiener, a young French nationalized Austrian Jew, historian and also a looter of cultural property, “huaquero” (“huaco” in Quechua means “temple”), whose collection of more than 4,000 stolen pieces is currently exhibited in an ethnographic museum of Paris.
Charles left something in Peru. “The European left a Peruvian child who in turn had 10 children, one of whom was my grandfather, who in turn had my father, who had me, who am the most Indian of the Wieners,” writes the author. And the central thread of Huaco portrait it could be this fear of the fallacy implicit in a surname, the analysis of the “original abandonment” that founds a lineage, but also the dismantling of a perspective “whitened” for centuries. “We all have a white father. I mean, God is white. Or so we have been led to believe. The settler is white. The story is white and masculine ”. The author continues: “My brown, chola and sudaca identity tries to hide the Wiener that I carry inside.” That is why he practices his portrait as a “huaco”. “A huaco can be any piece of pre-Hispanic pottery made by hand, of diverse shapes and styles, delicately painted,” writes Wiener, and “a portrait huaco is the pre-Hispanic passport photo. The image of an indigenous face so realistic that looking at it is for many like looking at ourselves in the broken mirror of the centuries ”.
With humor and lucidity, Wiener (Gabriela) dismantles (decolonizes) these own origins that, I repeat, are also universal: the roots of our rational thought inscribed in a racist scientism. Thus the author can relate, with undoubted success, the “human zoos” of the first universal exhibitions (those “Disney of colonialism”) with the encapsulated existence of a Latin American migrant in Spain, or rather in “Panchilandia” (“I live in Spain for eighteen years, / but actually / I live in Panchilandia […] in the playgrounds I am the babysitter for my son / or any of their children, their mothers, their fathers ”).
Two subplots strain the writing of Huaco portrait: the death of the narrator’s father and a crisis in his polyamorous relationship with Jaime and Roci. For years, the father, a journalist and leftist activist, led a double life: when he lived with his secret “second family” he wore an eye patch that allowed him to fake medical treatments, in which he returned to the old home. On the other hand, after having dedicated books and articles to the defense of honesty in romantic relationships, the narrator-author-Wiener finds herself hiding a new relationship in her polyamorous “tripartite”: “Again I discover how they hook me on love their recognizable, toxic forms, ”he writes.
Both subplots are obvious strategies to avoid the essayistic tone, little traps of the literary narrator, but the crossover also works as an intelligent game of resonances. A liar complex underlies the three plots, a will to unmask: not only the lies we tell others, but those that constitute us.
But there is in the background a greater and deeper unity that keeps so many elements magnetized that in Huaco portrait they want to be dispersed: the will to embody thought. The pending debt of a modernity that has been wanted abstract, stark, white, western and masculine. Because dismantling history, and again we can substitute the verb for “decolonize”, supposes rethinking the domestication of our bodies. And the workshop that the narrator attends during her sentimental crisis is called, precisely, “Decolonizing my desire”: “I was so pretty without knowing it but they made me ugly,” she writes. Sex is experienced as an ambiguous liberation: at one time the narrator decided “that sex would be my resistance, my power, my only thing, which would replace my own love or that of others”. Again, Wiener extracts the paradoxes from each forceful statement: thinking from bodies is also contributing to their logocentric reduction.
Huaco portrait It is not only one of Wiener’s best books (agile and voluntarily contradictory, allergic to didacticism and infantilization), but a rare example of how a literature can continue to be political from complexity, leaving that niche in which it is written to convince to those previously convinced.
Author: Gabriela Wiener.
Editorial: Random House Literature, 2021.
Format: soft cover (176 pages, 17.90 euros) and e-book (7.59 euros).
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