By Mariana González-Márquez |
Guadalajara (Mexico) (EFE).- Women have been the marginalized within the marginality represented by writing and the literary world throughout history, although their voices are increasingly stronger and valued, the writer told EFE Colombian Pilar Quintana.
In an interview during her participation in the program of activities of Guadalajara as World Book Capital, the writer assured that for centuries women have written about the human condition and the female world, but always from the marginal and the little value towards their job.
“We (always) talked about these issues, writing is a marginal profession for men and women, but women’s writing has been marginal within that margin in which literature occurs and, many times, there was a rather misogynistic attitude towards it. their work, what they did did not have the same flight or the literary height of men”, he expressed.
An awakening for women
Quintana, born in Cali in 1972, is a writer whose narrative dialogues about what the female sector was forbidden to talk about for a long time: desire and sexuality, the dark side of motherhood, the violence that can be experienced at home and outside her.
The author of “La perra” (2017) and “Los abismos”, winner of the 2021 Alfaguara Novel Award, confesses that on many occasions she was afraid that her writing and stories would be valued for being a woman and, therefore, being the subject of contempt with which they see what is created by the female sector.
To the feminist movement and the emergence of #MeToo, which exposed the sexual and systematized violence to which women have been subjected in all areas through social networks, she owes not only a self-criticism for the machismo that she herself reproduced, but also allowed her to come to terms with her own idea of feminism and being a woman, she said.
“It was a great awakening that made me reflect on behaviors that seemed normalized to us, on violence that was perpetrated on women and that we believed ourselves deserving of them. These movements made me realize that I was a feminist and always had been,” she noted.
The author was the editor of the Biblioteca de Escritoras Colombianas, a project financed by the Ministry of Culture of her country in which she rescued books by 18 Colombian writers whose books did not circulate in bookstores.
The experience led her to understand more about the literary women of that South American country who, like those of other countries, wrote against everything.
desire and writing
Instinctive desire, the one that runs from one’s own body, desires in life, family to children, are the central theme of her work, recognized with various awards and which led her to be chosen in 2007 as one of the 39 most outstanding writers under 39 years of age in Latin America by the Hay Festival.
“I keep talking about the desire of women, what happens is that one was sexual desire and from ‘La perra’, it was the desire to be a mother, but I keep talking about instinctive desire, our most animal desires that connect us more with our own animality”, he commented.
For Quintana, literature is the territory of freedom and the space to say those issues and behaviors that society censors and points out.
“It’s the territory where I can do literally anything, a writer can have his character wake up monstrous after a restless sleep, you can do that or talk about the things you were told weren’t appropriate for a young lady to say, to talk about the nature of his feminine sexuality. My way of processing the world is through letters,” she stated.
The narrator considered that Latin American literature made by women is at a good moment with the publication of authors such as the Mexican Brenda Navarro, author of “Casas Vacías” and Fernanda Melchor, author of “Hurricane Season” or the Argentine Mariana Enríquez author of “Our part of the night” and Samanta Schweblin, with “The birds in the mouth and other stories.”
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