2023-05-17 01:49:16
LETTER FROM SANTIAGO
In the end, the wolf “and ground the flesh, and ground the bones/and squeezed the heart like a cherry”. Scathing, poetic, the conclusion of this version in verse Little Red Riding Hood by Gabriela Mistral, Nobel Prize for Literature, was exhumed by the author and researcher in children’s literature Manuel Peña. “This text was lost, it is a tale brought back to a Latin American context and which ends in a dramatic way, because Gabriela Mistral did not seek to sweeten it for children”, he describes. An iconoclastic vision of the fable, carried by the publishing house Amanuta which published in 2012 a series of tales revisited by the Chilean poet – Snow White, The Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella –, in line with its unique and profound selection work carried out since 2002.
More than 200 books and twenty-one years later, in March it received the prestigious Prize for the best publishing house for children in Latin America, at the Children’s Book Fair in Bologna, Italy. In the low house in Santiago where Amanuta is installed – which also acts as a bookstore for the general public wishing to pass through the door –, shelves filled with colored slices, and boxes of books leaving for foreign countries. “At first, we decided to go into publishing because we couldn’t find the stories we wanted to read to our children”says Ana Maria Pavez, economist and archaeologist by training, co-founder with the child psychiatrist Constanza Recart of Amanuta, which means “with intent” in the Aymara language, one of the indigenous populations of Chile.
The first publication of the publishing house, Kiwala discovers the sea, tells the story of a curious and intrepid lama wishing to escape from his village in order to taste the joys of the ocean. On its way, the animal meets other local species: a puma, a snake, a condor and a whale. “Our children need to know where they come from. History and culture are essential elements in the formation of a society. And even more so today, where everything is so globalized”explained Ana Maria Pavez.
The good share of indigenous populations
“During the dictatorship [1973-1990]there has been censorship of children’s literature”, recounts Manuel Peña, the researcher in children’s literature. Generally stereotyped stories have emerged: princes, princesses, animals in the woods… Narrations rather flat and above all very little Chilean and “Latina”. “Amanuta has paved the way and, in its wake, many independent houses have been born and are doing quality work, with aesthetic books and related to the country’s history, on the duty of memory linked to the dictatorship for example. , watch Manuel Pena. Today, children’s literature is living its best period in Chile. » The number of children’s books published annually has thus doubled between 2015 and 2020, according to data from the Chilean Book Chamber.
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