2023-12-16 23:21:34
In 1983, Teresa Meana and a few friends – three gays, one straight and two lesbians, for more detail – opened a bar in Oviedo that would be the home of anyone who wanted to enter. It was the first location gay friendly or ‘ambient’, as they said at that time, which was also a very important cultural dynamizer in Asturias. Sometimes it seems not, but interesting things also happen outside of Madrid or Barcelona and legendary groups from ‘la movida’ such as Alaska and Los Pegamoides or Paralisis Permanente, the band of Eduardo Benavente and Ana Curra, passed through that Asturian venue. Although the gang of entrepreneurs only managed the pub for a couple of years, they revolutionized the Oviedo nightlife when the dictatorship was still too close a memory. That is one of the anecdotes from the life of a woman who led Elisa Coll to write her autofiction book We came laterecently published by Amor de Madre publishing house with a prologue by Alana Portero.
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Coll came into contact with the philologist and feminist activist Teresa Meana at a family gathering in Valencia. She was known to her aunt Marga and her girlfriend – whom they introduced as a ‘friend’ for a long time until the writer put the two pieces of that puzzle together – and they had seen each other when she was still a little girl. . He had not crossed her again and that day he met a talkative, friendly woman of about 70 years old, with a life history that was not very entertaining, who had even been a friend of Amelia Valcárcel but no longer. “I don’t even want to see her in painting, because she has become transphobic and has completely lost her way,” says her character in the book. At that same meeting, the writer commented that she was planning a trip to the north with a friend and the woman insisted that they go visit her in Oviedo. She would leave her house to them and she would go to her friend’s house during her stay.
At first, the guest did not understand very well why the host had to leave her own apartment to accommodate them until she arrived in Oviedo and got the big surprise: Meana and her friends had bought the fourth floor of a building to be neighbors. Each one with its own apartment but in community. A reality that inspired the master’s final project that was the seed of this autofiction book. “Finding myself in front of a group of women who have lived together for so long and who are 70 years old, moved me a lot on a personal level,” explains Elisa Coll to elDiario.es. “I decided that my work would revolve around everyday resistance and the different forms of coexistence that people can imagine and carry out.” queer”, he claims.
Of course, the case of those women who decide to share their lives when they reach adulthood is not unique, but it does have a characteristic that is not so common: it is a decision “planned and lived from joy,” explains Coll. This is not a group of people who, due to precariousness, can only choose to share living space even if it is not what they really want. In a system designed to live as a couple or with offspring when the time comes, the writer saw in Teresa Meana’s reality a possibility of a dissident but happy future. “The fact that it was a decision made from that positive emotion is what for me encapsulates the resilience and hope of this story. The feeling that we can live in different futures, diverted with joy and not as a consolation prize,” she declares.
The protagonist of the autofiction part is going through a difficult time in life. She has just left Madrid to settle in Barcelona, the city where her ex-girlfriend lives, with whom she maintains a dependency relationship from which she cannot get out. Plus, she still doesn’t have any friends in her new place of residence and she has to force herself to socialize, so she starts joining the bisexual activism group in her neighborhood. The narrator’s current and past circumstances allow Coll to address complicated topics such as intragender violence, a problem that is talked about very little or not enough. For this reason, in addition to its quality, it books like The House of Dreams by Carmen María Machado cause a notable impact when they reach the general public. “We are afraid to talk about violence in relationships queer because we feel that we are betraying feminisms. We feel that pointing out the violence that occurs in our own spaces implies blurring sexist violence. And it is not like that,” the writer develops. “I think there is a silence about this type of violence that makes it very difficult to detect it,” she says.
The need for a support network is emerging as one of the main themes of We came late as it progresses. Both for the experiences that Teresa relates and for those of the narrator, which are not exactly Coll’s but do have to do with her own experiences. Friends as a point of support in good times and bad, as members of the chosen family, are fundamental in their universes. “The network of friends is essential to imagine futures that are apart from what we have been told our lives should be,” says the author. “Many times, we do not give friendships the importance that we give to our partners or we do not imagine that we can plan a future or imagine a future with them. And I think that’s a key thing,” she says.
Finding myself in front of a group of women who have lived together for so long and who are 70 years old, moved me a lot on a personal level.
Elisa Coll — Writer
For her, meeting Teresa has been a milestone that possibly would have been even more decisive if she had come into her life earlier. “I don’t know what would have happened, but I know that at least she would have had the opportunity for other things to happen. The fact of not having had stories like his has denied me the possibility of imagining or inhabiting a certain life,” says Coll. Developing the genre of autofiction has allowed him, precisely, to let himself be carried away by the freedom of figuration that is not available in non-fiction. “It was quite cathartic to write things that were happening to another person and have that reflect my reality. And I find the door that opens a text very powerful that is not about whether it is true or not but about whether it moves you,” she says.
She already had previous experience of the trial. Two years ago she published Bisexual resistance. Maps for a livable dissidence (Melusina publishing house), a treatise on bisexuality and biphobia in the first person. At that time the concept of biphobia was even unknown to many people, but since then it has become visible thanks to works like yours. Even so, she perceives that she still has a way to go. “I think that in the spaces queer In general, there is more awareness or, at least, more talk about the topic. I feel that this is raising blisters and at the same time it is healing wounds that have been open for a long time,” explains Coll. “People have mobilized both from activism and from cultural production and from a lot of spaces. I feel that at least there is now a listening and a look willing to see. That is key,” he says.
Many times, we do not give friendships the importance that we give to a couple or we do not imagine that we can plan a future or imagine a future with them. And I think that’s something key.
Elisa Coll — Writer
While he conveyed a specific message in the essay, his new book is open to the personal interpretation of whoever reads it. Everyone will take it as a guide, as a story, as an anecdote or as whatever they consider, but Coll points out a paragraph written towards the end in which he explains that Teresa’s words “can be invented, distorted reflections of memories that they carry.” to ravines of nothing, who knows, who cares. There is only one thing they will never be. They will never be a lie.” For the writer, these phrases summarize the spirit of this work: “They say that we need imagination and fantasy to be able to walk towards futures in which they told us we had no place.”
#future #grow #friends #living