By Gustavo Borges |
Mexico City (EFE).- For the Mexican narrator Cristina Rivera Garza, Xavier Villaurrutia Award 2022, the existing impunity in Mexico gives a different dimension to the way of assuming death, a theme present in her prose and poetry.
“Impunity makes asking about death constant. It is not a matter of psychological fixation; it is a social issue. Impunity means that the question about death does not disappear ”, the author assured EFE this Sunday.
Rivera Garza (Matamoros, 1964) published two years ago “The invincible summer of Liliana”, a novel about the femicide that caused the death of her sister, which questioned impunity in Mexico and shook the country’s literary community.
After that work, winner of the Villaurrutia prize for the best book published in Mexico in 2022, and the novel Mazatlán, the narrator has just brought to light “My name is a body that is not there”, an anthology of poems in which she returns to the theme of death.
“We have many traditions of communication with death. Beyond any magical realism or anything metaphorical, it seems to me that there is a concrete material presence of the people and the experiences that have passed through the earth. Perhaps the virtue of books is that, that they help to communicate with the dead, ”he commented.
Rivera Garza, language explorer
When reflecting on the importance of poetry, Cristina Rivera Garza flees from pigeonholing and believes that those who write chronicles and works of fiction should also be concerned about the poetic in their prose.
“I like it, not so much taking care of the language as if it needed our protection, but as a way of exploring it that is also questioning it. Those of us who write fiction and non-fiction are also exploring with language; that would also have to be the concern of those who write narrative”.
This idea is applied by the author in her novels, in which she usually makes her prose poetic. In works like “Nobody will see me cry”, described by Carlos Fuentes as one of the most beautiful and disturbing novels written in Mexico, there are well intertwined narrative threads, but also a concern for language.
“In those works my concern has always been, what am I doing with the language, what does it allow me to do, what questions am I trying to throw at the language. It is our responsibility as writers to be close to our tools, to know them well and all of this has to be conscious, with intention”.
poetic fan
The anthology, edited by Random House, brings together Rivera Garza’s collections of poems up to 2015. Upon entering them, the reader is faced with a range of topics, among which the relationship with the body stands out.
In the collection of poems “La más mía” revolves around the theme of disease, from an aneurysm; in “Death gives me” there is a relationship with the language of the red note and in “The public imagination”, there is a game with the way of expressing yourself from Wikipedia and diseases, based on the author’s experiences.
“I am interested in the complications we get into when we think of writing as the practice of the body and in the relationship of these bodies with others; the unequal relationships, the discussions about which bodies we let enter our fields of visibility. I am interested in how we become a body, how we become genders”.
The book touches on the subject of violence, which in Mexico is part of everyday life, with the indifference of the current government, as it happened with the previous ones.
“Understanding that violence is structural is important. Do not put men against women and women against men, but understand that there is a patriarchal system that creates unequal relationships that generate violence. On the writing side, that would have to be counted ”.