There is a whole generation of women who have had to rescue the memory of their ancestors, mothers, grandmothers, scientists, lawyers, artists ... Today Mexico celebrates the Day of the Writers, another event to pave the way for those who will come, so that they do not have to search in old analogies, dive to the hunt for the book that was never reissued or investigate some literary origins that have been lost in the thick silence of patriarchy.
"We have had to be the hinge generation, I hope we are the last to do this, it is a painful but exciting historical moment," summarized the Ecuadorian writer María Fernanda Ampuero in a digital talk shared with the Mexican Carmen Boullosa and the Chilean Alejandra Costamagna.
“This is not a fad.
It is offensive to think that giving a voice to 50% of the population is a fad.
The literary canon has been the true
mansplaining,
”Ampuero said, recalling the famous concept popularized by another writer, Rebeca Solnit, when she put white on black the tiredness of many women taught by men who know less about the matter in question than they do.
“We should appropriate as women the very nature of literature, the art of storytelling and storytelling.
The only thing that literature is doing is what it has always done: responding in a profound way to what happens ”, added Boullosa (author of
The Book of Eva)
.
And what happens these days is that many women and some men are dedicating themselves to giving a voice to those who have been silenced.
Such is the case of the Vindictas collection, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), which has just incorporated two new books:
La ruta de su evasión
, by Yolanda Oreamuno, and
La octava marvel
, by Vlady Kocianchich.
Also,
Vindictas.
Latin American Storytellers
brings together stories by
female
writers from the second half of the 20th century whose names are very unknown to the general public, even to the most honest readers.
It will be in bookstores on November 25, published by UNAM together with the Spanish publishing house Pages de Espuma.
The edition is in charge of Juan Casamayor and Socorro Venegas, who this morning has served as host for the aforementioned colleagues in a virtual meeting for UNAM Books, which can be seen on YouTube.
“It has been a great challenge to weave many views, but whenever we exhume the work of women we are often told that we are covering quotas, is a gender quota being covered with half the planet silenced?
The absence of women [in the literary work] can only be painful.
They continue to need vindication ”, said Venegas.
Alejandra Costamagna, author of
The Touch System
, has abounded in the need to balance both sexes in bookstores: “Only the day we match the field will the effort to vindicate women no longer be necessary;
nor are the Equality Ministries, which now continue to be reparative bodies.
I dream of that day".
The Chilean has defended that there is a new way of looking at the world of literature fostered by feminism, a movement “that has a lot to do with the collective, a great network, ways of thinking about community structures.
It is about writers who continue, who weave from what has been done ”, against that universe of authorship and ownership“ so masculine ”.
The position of women "is located in a different place, and that has to do with how it is placed in front of the literary, not only with what he writes, because I am against literature being biologized."
If any writer must come to literature already blushing, wielding listening against prejudice and freed from daily or family gags, women, moreover, perhaps have to shed a self-censorship of gender impositions, of what is expected of they.
María Fernando Ampuero, for example, has recognized that if her father were still alive, his
Gallos Fight
would not have seen the light.
So far the recognition of her self-censorship when she has been questioned about it in the virtual chat.
Today it was about unearthing the names of women who deserve a place in the public space and who even resignify it with their posthumous presence, and among all the female members, female names have been appearing and their voices sounding through the reading that their colleagues have made current.
Costamagna has mentioned Marta Brunet, who died when she went to Uruguay to deliver her speech for admission to the Academy of Letters and whose cooking recipes extinguished other literary brilliance.
Ampuero has brought up Gilda Holst and her story
Reunion
, where the smell of the female vagina "bothers and disturbs" the men's gathering.
And he has also mentioned the literary eschatology of the also Ecuadorian Ileana Espinel.
The Guatemalan Alaíde Foppa, disappeared, tortured and whose remains did not appear, has been chosen by Carmen Boullosa, from whom she has selected a poem dedicated to her own sex, which reads as follows:
Hidden pulsating rose
in the dark furrow,
well of shuddering joy
that burns in an instant
the murky course of my life,
secret always inviolate,
fertile wound.
"Who are you?"
Who are you, late son?
Of the others it seems to me
that something knew
since the first day
of doubt and hope.
But you, unexpected,
who you are?
I had never thought of you.
How are you going to get there
to this enemy world
if I don't even know you?
Forgive me, son:
it even seemed to me
that there was no place for you.
My heart, you'll see
it's a bloody open grenade.
And I am tired.
Further,
you're going to take me away
that piece of my life
that others have left me:
almost nothing,
but it hurts to let go
Of the last thing I have left
You will have to help me get to know you.
And it must be your life
so vigorous and strong,
to devour mine, happily,
and I far from myself
and distracted,
I hardly regret it.