2023-06-02 22:48:43
I found that even though it was elusive and brief, the gender euphoria was there and it blew up all over me. In that room, during that meeting, I wanted to be no other than myself for the first time in my life.
Alana S. Goalkeeper
Lynn Hunt, autora de The invention of rights, one of those essential books that any democrat should read, uses a concept to explain the important role that novels played in the historical moment, at the end of the 18th century, in which the legal foundations were laid for the modern recognition of dignity and human rights. She talks about “imagined empathy” to explain how through reading other worlds we generate the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others, to understand their loneliness and misery, to finally recognize in them the same humanity that we share. Literature, as well as cinema since the last century, has the enormous virtue of building bridges between our own room that we inhabit and those other spaces in which beings live with whom, despite the distances, we share the same fragility. That of nomadic bodies, that of destinations under construction, that of knowing and feeling in need of care.
For me it is precisely that criterion, that is, the ability to awaken in me what Hunt calls imagined empathy, which leads me to distinguish between the novels that stay with me forever and those others that fade like that fleeting smell of earth. wet after a spring rain. Bad habit, by Alana S. Portero, is one of the first, I suppose because thanks to her I have not only been able to feel the broken wings of a fallen angel as my own, but also because I have discovered a lot about myself in her. Of what it means to live in a constant precipice of questions and fears, of solitude and of words that do not serve us. In short, the wounds that come from knowing that you are a nomad but also the always-open trails that autonomy allows us. Our capacity for self-determination.
Thanks to ‘La mal habitura’ by Alana S. Portero, I have not only been able to feel the broken wings of a fallen angel as my own, but also because in it I have discovered a lot about myself
Reading Portero’s first novel has also been an exercise in pacification, in reconciliation with lines that have restored my confidence in everything that adds up, in overcoming that inevitable mud that in these years of anger and fights has ended up splashing us all over the world. all. To all the people who perhaps lack vowels to write who we are. With a prose that is much like a fable, as well as that of a surgeon who leaves open the organs of the social body, Bad habit it situates us inside and outside, in the protagonist who is being (re)made and in those around her who are also part of her itinerary. The context of a certain moment in our country, dotted with pop references and situations that are conveyed to us tenderly but without nostalgia, also allows us to give the story a collective flight. Somehow, Portero manages to fit one more piece into that always incomplete puzzle that is the recent history of a democracy that has had such a hard time, and has a hard time, assuming that difference is the ultimate substratum of equality. The eighties with so many victims, the nineties with so many half-open doors. That Madrid of dysphoric beauty that looks down, twisted and welcoming, where the devil lives in a corner of the Retiro. The author does it with a healthy class perspective, without which it would be impossible to live what she tells us from the bowels of the neighborhood, of the miseries and solidarity that is breathed below and of the beings that show us that equality of opportunities is nothing but a hoax for the benefit of the powerful. A class perspective that is also feminist, that is, emancipatory. The emancipation of everyone, and also that of those who go beyond the narrow limits of the “o” and the “a”, so accustomed to locking the rest of the vowels in the closets. Feminism as a battle against the violence that maintains the hierarchies built around masculinity. The definitive farewell to a world of macho machos educated in virility: to be and to seem (I didn’t want to be like El Cordobés either) To the female exemplar turned into submission. The blessing of a salty and sweet sorority. cascading. Bees in search of multiple nectars that multiply. All women to the rhythm of Rafaella Carrá.
Bad habit, which is one of those books that open small wounds like when you cut the tip of a finger with the edge of a paper, it puts flesh and eyes, belly and chest, to those who from the margins do not stop telling us that it is already well of paradigms made to the measure of those who were always sheltered by the norm. Alana S. Portero’s novel, which I have read as a celebration of euphoria, is, should be, recommended reading for those who make fun of her and many like her when they talk about the difficulties of inhabiting a body. Those who insist on feeding the curse instead of recognizing the gift. Something very easy to understand if we place ourselves in that plane of extreme vulnerability that involves recognizing ourselves as beings always in transit. So in need of an ethical, epistemological and political revolution that finally frees us from a world divided in two. May the guilt of mirrors take away forever and allow us to inhabit the beautiful and diverse imperfection of our living bodies.
#euphoria #Alana #Portero