2024-04-13 21:10:19
There is a written universe in which Princess Leia and Obi-Wan Kenobi live with community members who prepare dishes for the deceased, Chupacabras, mangroves and Fanta drinks. It is a place plagued by inequalities and violence, both subtle and explicit, but also by resistance and ties that sustain its inhabitants. Mafe Moscoso is responsible for that world in which the seven stories that make up the book take place. The Saint which has just been published by the Consonni publishing house with a prologue by Mariana Enríquez. A new title to the author’s bibliography, which includes essays such as Biography for the use of birds: childhood, memory and migration (Iaen, Quito, 2013) and the collections of poems Breaking the spell: anti-colonial verses y Red Chronicle (both in La Reci, Chiapas, 2021), all written from a perspective free of ties.
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Moscoso has been away from Ecuador, his native country, for twenty years. Since she packed her suitcase and left there, she has passed through different European cities until settling in Barcelona, where she is a professor and researcher at BAU, University Center for Arts and Design. Before her, she earned a Doctorate in Anthropology from the Freie Universität of Berlin and won the third Marqués de Lozoya National Cultural Research Award, among other achievements. Her resume is much more extensive – she is also a co-mother of the LAAV_(Lab of Experimental Audiovisual Anthropology) in León, for example – but only with these do we already show the traces of her path and also explain her extensive knowledge on topics such as popular culture and traditional Andean that appear in his fiction writings.
The author explains to elDiario.es that these different migrations make her feel, in some way, “a perpetual foreigner of race, gender and class.” The rootlessness she felt when she sat down to write The Saint It became, as the work progressed, “an migratory duel,” he defines. In all the stories someone dies, because she needed to talk about losses as well as investigate her roots. But not to look into the past but to try to find her “place in the world, even if it is invented,” she develops. The book is dedicated to her grandmother Lucinda – “who is a great storyteller,” she emphasizes – since the stories she has told him during her life appeared to her as she developed her stories. “I discovered that her ways of relating to herself and to what surrounds her have the wonderful power of disintegrating, without any pretension, the Western and Westernized notions of what we understand by reality and with it, the presupposition of the existence of a center and its margins, living and dead, body and spirit,” explains Moscoso.
This disintegration to which the author refers is more than present in her writings, where popular and traditional Andean culture converges with Western pop culture with total naturalness. Rock, Chayanne or Hello Kitty appear in stories along with rocks that emerge from the center of the earth, legends of ladies with donkeys, hummingbirds, blessed candles, sleeping pills and chickens that communicate with humans. A tangle of references that is perfectly understandable for anyone who “was born and raised in Abya Yala [nombre acuñado por el pueblo indígena guna para referirse al continente americano antes de la colonización]”, he claims.
“One day you wake up with the equinoxal sun, you drink a papaya smoothie with Quaker oats produced in the company of the richest man in Ecuador – father of the current fascist-aspiring president we have – while listening to Juan Luis Guerra on the radio on the way to market so that one of the ladies from the herb stall can do a cleansing ritual with nettle, drink and tobacco,” he explains. “With ‘the scare’ out of your body, you eat a green banana empanada with a Coca Cola and go to watch football with your family, being aware that your country, which always loses in almost everything, will never reach a final. That day Michael Jackson Quiñonez, born in Guayaquil, scored a goal. You celebrate it by thanking the Virgin.”
One of the ingredients of that crazy salad of allusions is the soap opera Cristalwhich was also very well known in Spain in the 90s of the last century, when those mainly Venezuelan fictions were made with the share television. A couple of years ago, Moscoso wrote for (H) broken love from the Continta Metienes publishing house, a volume in which ten signatures deal with the topic of separations and heartbreak, a text about sentimental education built on the basis of those idylls of the small screen. Of course, the author does not try to romanticize the violence – gender, racist or class – that occurs in these titles, but she is interested in them because “in a migratory context, emotional excess not only has no place in the new sentimental regime like the European one, but, in addition, or rather, precisely because of that, it is an enormous fertile field for the generation of peripheral and dangerous sentimentalities.” “The endless kitsch, the agonizing dramas are practices of resistance because they not only help us refuse the erasure demanded by European sentimentality, but they also leave the modern correction of love and lack of love out of place and uncomfortable,” she adds. .
The social denunciation – of massive touristification, class inequalities, ecological disasters, the attack against the community queer, among other topics – is evident in their stories. In fact, one editorial labeled – “indirectly”, he explains – The Saint as “a political pamphlet.” Moscoso emphasizes that “all writing is political, even when it pretends to be neutral. Furthermore, there is a genocide happening in Gaza right now, no one is neutral and in fact, the world will never be the same after this.” There is no social problem or reportable fact that worries him above another, but he declares: “It literally hurts me, that is, in the body, the suffering of human and non-human lives that sustain the excess of well-being of ours.” ”.
Reductionist Eurocentrism
Reading the prologue by Mariana Enríquez removes the idea that Europe continues to have a very reductionist vision of Latin America, which is seen as a whole without its differences between countries and cultures. For Moscoso, an Ecuadorian on the other side of the pond: “Eurocentrism has not known how to deal with phenomena, including literary ones, that escape its canons and hence the obsession with labels.” His book of poems Red Chronicle It was classified as ‘magical realism’ when, in reality, it includes news published in the newspaper Extra, which is the most read in Ecuador. “In Europe, certain types of writings are approached as magical; it is linked, very possibly, to the same gesture that expels my grandmother’s ontologies into the field of superstitions,” he declares.
On the other hand, it also explains that there are different ways of being a Latin person in Spain. Reality is not the same for an Argentine migrant, who has leading roles and has been considered an object of desire in audiovisual fictions, as for a Peruvian, for example. “We Andeans (Bolivians, Peruvians, Ecuadorians) are treated in a radically different way compared to Chileans, Mexicans or Argentines in the sense that we are seen with contempt,” he says. He remembers that when he arrived in Spain, the only Ecuadorian reference that appeared on television was the waiter in the series Aida which his boss nicknamed Machu Pichu. “In fact, upon arriving, they called me ‘affectionately’ Machu Pichu, which was a very subtle form of racism that I was not entirely aware of.” “Therefore, Latin America cannot be generalized in its different layers, neither there nor here,” he concludes.
The Saint closes with a playlist in which they fit from The shark from Project one to Landscape by Don Medardo and his players. Music is present in all the stories because in all of them a radio is on, as was the case at the writer’s parents’ house, where it was played very early throughout the week, although on the seventh day the soundtrack may have changed. “Many Sundays, instead of the radio, my mother’s Julio Iglesias albums played, which competed for the sound space of the house with my brother Raúl’s heavy metal bands,” she remembers. Moscoso was not aware of the presence of the device in his book until someone told him about it. “I have the feeling that, during the writing process, the songs were not sought by me: they appeared alone, they needed to accompany the characters, be part of the story,” he explains and adds, jokingly, that: “they are all very politically incorrect”: “I am afraid that some fellow feminists are going to withdraw my license.”
#Chayanne #Kitty #ladies #donkeys #hummingbirds #Mafe #Moscoso