Argentina has something with literature that every so often, much more often than one would like to believe, a writer comes to move the earth with her books. If it is not a collection of poems, it is a novel, one of those that seeks its own path. Dolores Reyes (Buenos Aires, 1978) is part of that joyful group from the South American country.
It goes beyond erudition and hyperbolic comparisons, since everyone makes their own name. Dolores, from the land and her writing, has made her own. In 2019 he published Earth Eaterhis first novel, under the seal of Secrecy. It is likely that she did not know then what fate had in store for her. Maybe he still doesn’t know it, but he lives it. Four years later, in 2023, Alfaguara published Miseryhis second novel, once a sequel to the previous one.
It is this last book that brings her to Mexico once again, “not so quickly”, to be present at some literary events, have a couple of presentations in Mexico City and give up a space in her agenda to talk about her inexhaustible book
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Dolores, who is also a teacher, is staying in an apartment in an area near the center of the capital, very close to a main avenue. Despite the noise, you can’t hear anything inside. The time and space are perfect for the conversation to take place.
—You were trying not to repeat yourself with Misery and you got it. And yet there are themes that are very present, that could seem essential. Are they topics that you choose or do they choose you?
—They are the themes, in some way, that obsess me -reply-. They keep me awake, but literally, and somehow they get into fiction. It is very difficult for you to move if you are looking at a certain problem. In some way I feel that they slipped into the fiction and the characters.
Then she recreates the image of Cometierra and Miseria, characters from her first and second novels, respectively, how she accompanies them, now from the city (very similar to Mexico City), and “they somehow collide with the walls.” full of portraits, photocopies of missing girls, as happens to all of us, in reality, If we go out for a walk in our countries, there is something there that unites us in a very sad way.”.
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There is something that changed between the writing of this book and its predecessor. In the case of Earth EaterDolores wrote it accompanied by many voices, one of them that of the writer Selva Almada, who was then teaching a novel workshop. With Misery It was all different, because not only was there no support in this way, but the pandemic was also experienced.
“It was all very strange,” recalls the Argentine author. because I was used to working with listening to others, in a workshop, with feedback —Then he tells me that he had already been promoting his first novel for a year, which had to be suspended due to the confinement. And something that happened to me very specific that has to do with the writing of Misery is that after having won the streets, imposed certain issues on the politicians’ agenda, and felt that we had collectively moved forward…
She interrupts herself to talk about the same thing, but with another intensity, from another position. It is something that you feel, that is transmitted. He tells me that, at least in Argentina, femicides, far from decreasing, continued to increase:
“That is why also in Earth Eater there is more diversity, and I feel that in Misery I focused on femicides precisely for that reason: because it was written at a time when all that got worse with the pandemicand that even the support networks between women were broken or suspended due to the same policies that existed during the pandemic,” she reflects.
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There is something particular with what Dolores’ lyrics transmitted and continue to transmit. Beyond the presentations, she has been asked to attend a gross number of schools to talk to teenagers, to reading clubs organized by themselves. That is, it has occupied spaces in which literature does not have this type of approach. Not in those magnitudes. Before I finish the question, she already knows what to answer because she knows where I’m going.
—Something that happened to me, and continues to happen to me very occasionally, are the stories of very young girls who tell me that they hardly knew their mothers, that they lost them when they were very young, that they had practically not spoken to them about their mothers’ lives. their mothers nor shown too many photos because of everything sad. and reading Earth Eater o Misery —she remembers in surprise— they decided to go out and rummage, even for placards, [hasta a] search photos. Even girls told me that they went out to the “Not one less” marches with photos of their mother, with t-shirts of their mother, and they also tried in some way to reconstruct the lives of those mothers who had been violated when they were very young.
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Although she tells it jovially, with an intensity that does not break, what she says weighs. Because it’s hard, because it hurts, because maybe it shouldn’t be a topic of conversation, but it’s urgent. Maybe the course is soon recomposed because hope appears: “that the book, a device of language, serves to set language itself in motion”.
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(There is a kind of pause in the conversation, because it comes up that she attends schools a lot, and she tells me that days after she leaves Mexico she already has some meetings arranged. She remembers, regarding the same thing, how they have sent all kinds of representations of his reading, as if it were a natural consequence of such a shocking reading. Then, inevitably, the issue of revictimization, how the terms have been renamed, perhaps without saying it, either of us, we recognized as a. I have achieved that in most cases, femicides are no longer referred to as crimes of passion.)
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—Your books take place on the margins, they seem to tell us that there everything is more intense and deeper. They wouldn’t happen the same or wouldn’t feel the same if they happened in a hyper-technological city. Was there always the intention to keep it on the margins? -asked-.
“I feel that this is the focus of the violence, that is where the most flesh is made on the girls’ bodies,” Dolores replies earnestly. So, why am I going to narrate it in the Obelisk, put it, in Argentina? If all the focus of the violence is here and they are the ones who put their bodies, the ones who lose their mothers, their sisters, their friends. I am very interested in listening to them.
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Misery That’s it: “the voice of Miseria and Cometierra alternating. They have gone through and continue to go through those experiences,” the author points out. “So, I am very interested in canceling that distance that has always been in literature. Cancel that distance and listen to those who have been silenced as part of that violencestories that were not told, voices that were not heard, that were not attended to,” the activist also finally blurts out.
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—How does literature help us to continue communicating all this that is so serious and that can happen anywhere?
—I think there is something very specific: feminicide is a part, or the final link, of a series of violence that is made invisible and naturalized. And that in those previous steps, or even later, the incredibly violent and derogatory language towards women —Dolores reviews, always with her eyes awake, giving light to everything. You can hear it in that type of journalism that often judges the victims, justifying aberrant crimes on bodies of 16, 17, 15 years old. Even the judicial sentences, totally violent and derogatory. So literature has the opportunity to make this record of voices much more loving, evaluative, to realize what those lives were worth in the face of all those social records that continue to violate women even after they are dead.
The theme of the names within the book, of the characters, is “a way of taking meaning to the extreme and playing with the possibilities of literature”. They mean something outside, that is, in reality, and something inside the book. Both Miseria, Cometierra and even El pendejo – which does not adhere to the pejorative connotation with which we state it here.
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I confess to Dolores that what she portrays seems harsh to me, all that accumulation of violence, and that despite this I find the character of Miseria hopeful, who suddenly illuminates with her pragmatism:
—Was that balance necessary so as not to get so carried away…
—For me yes! —he answers me—. And especially thinking about how Cometierra is at the beginning of the novel, it is absolutely necessary! Plus it’s like Misery is herding her all the time, even involuntarily. Misery is absolutely necessary, and it balances and enables the advancement and exit of Cometierra…
—And it is inevitable that he will have to eat dirt again, even if he refuses. Did you think that at some point he would no longer do it?
—I think about her fantasy of saying: “Well, I’m going to be one more, I don’t want to know anything anymore.” Precisely because it is very difficult to take charge of such a gift, so terrible, which in reality is a small gift that, in [el] context, it acquires all this magnitude and everything tremendous that the earth shows it. But well, she ends up going towards the end because she wants a normal life, she wants a common name…
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The power of the language of the margins, says Dolores when I tell her that the music and language discussed in her novel remind me of donkey belly already Helmet —and we remember the unique character that Johan Mijaíl is—:
“The language in what is usually said to be the margins or the periphery is very creative, I feel that there is a creativity and a power there… It is even played and composed from something very playful and very festive, we forget the rule, the RAE, and what do I know, and then other freedoms of the language appear.”
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In the same vein, he confesses that he was not interested in aligning himself with those rules of the language, because there are even in his language “something very subversive and of struggle in that potentiality of language, of creating meaning, of putting the finger on the sore spot”.
—It’s quite a political question, isn’t it? —I question.
—Yes, and we see it a lot lately, with inclusive language, with people who are horrified —he muses—. If inclusive language is accounting for a conflict or precisely the violence that certain bodies have, well, what?why does it have to be beautiful? No, let him make that horror manifest on the tongue.
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Finally, it was essential to ask at what stage is the adaptation to a television series of Earth Eaterin which Yalitza Aparicio plays Mrs. Ana, Lilith Curiel of Cometierra and Juan Daniel García Trevino in an undisclosed role. There were no details to reveal, because Dolores ran the risk of creating a ruckus, but she said she was fascinated by the cast. And he said that he has seen episodes and a series of things that he cannot say anything about. But it gives lights. “I think you will like it a lot”, he concluded.
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2024-10-08 22:14:22