Amira de la Rosa, a talented playwright from the early 20th century, forgotten by the literary canon, will somehow be present at the International Book Fair in Bogotá on Saturday night.
Although this woman from Barranquilla died several decades ago, in 1974, she found a way to sneak into FilBo and have a second chance to talk about a taboo subject: the weight that society imposes on women with motherhood.
As far as there is any record of her, her play titled
Los Hijos de
Ella –About a woman condemned by her family for not being able to have a child– has only been presented once before an audience, in 1939 and in Caracas.
Now, 83 years later, the curtain opens again to present her words.
"It's a work that I like because it talks about a very current issue," says Pilar Quintana, a Colombian novelist who is partly responsible for the author's return.
A few months ago, Quintana promoted an initiative with the Ministry of Culture to republish the books of 18 Colombian authors that were never published or that were forgotten by academic curricula and publishers.
Amira de la Rosa was one of them.
"When you read this work, of course, there are things that are from the time," says Quintana.
“But in others you see the same demand that is imposed on women: that if you don't have children at a certain age they ask you 'Is something weird going on with you?'
And it was assumed that the fault of not having children is the woman's, that infertility is a female problem”.
One of Quintana's best-selling and award-winning novels,
La Perra,
from 2017, was precisely about a protagonist who suffered from not having a child and the punishment that society imposed on her for it.
The surprise was that, almost a century before, Amira de la Rosa was already telling the same story in
Her children.
But her work was not, at that time, a publishing success.
“I'm drowning,” shouts Regina, the protagonist of
Los Hijos de Ella
, an elite woman who has been married to Ernesto for eight years and has not been able to have a child with her husband.
And Ernesto, who is unfaithful to her, is a cruel husband.
“Everything bothers me, I've told you a hundred times.
Everything.
I'm sick of your ridiculousness," he yells at her.
The mother-in-law is also far from an ally.
"When the men leave home, the fault is always with the woman, who did not make them pleasant," she says, Doña Luisa.
And if having her family against her is not enough, the women of the town also gossip about her misfortune.
"She is known to be sterile," one speculates.
"What she is is a martyr," another claims.
"I realized that it is a completely feminist play," says actress Natalia Helo, who plays Regina at the reading of the play that will take place at FilBo on Saturday night.
“Although the play was written in the 1930s, it is contemporary.
The play defends what women defend today.”
Regina, a century ago, is suffocated by the same thing as many in the 21st century: being seen as a womb and nothing more.
Being measured or loved only because of their ability or inability to have children.
Rehearsal of the play 'Los Hijos de Ella', directed by actor Mario Duarte (left)Courtesy
The play gets complicated when a motherless baby enters the scene, and whose father is unclear, but whom Regina decides to adopt.
“I cannot allow a child who is not to blame for anything to die for a ridiculous dignity [such as not being the biological mother],” says Regina at one point.
Being a mother, mothering, is much more than giving birth.
And being a father is much more than a title.
Regina knows that Ernesto has always wanted children, she says, but "more because of what people will say than anything else."
Very little was known about Amira de la Rosa, and if her reflections on motherhood were biographical or not, nothing is known.
A stadium in Barranquilla bears her name, although few know what the woman with her name wrote there.
A curious Colombian editor knew about her because the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral had once referred to Amira de la Rosa as "pure loose and clean sincerity."
That gave him a clue.
After searching for it for a while, she found her work, at the beginning of this century, in an old trunk owned by a Barranquilla art restorer.
There it was, hidden,
Los Hijos de Ella
.
Amira de la Rosa is not the only author who is getting a second chance at FilBo.
Among the stands at the fair are also new copies of
Tengo los pies en la cabeza
, the autobiography of Berichá, an indigenous U'wa writer who criticized the missionaries who treated her people like minors.
Or there is the autobiography written by the nun Francisca Josefa de Castillo, in the 18th century, which the editors consider to be "the oldest publication signed by a woman in Colombia."
Or there is
Mi Cristo Negro
by Teresa Martínez de Varela, an Afro-Colombian writer who told the story of the last black leader shot by the state, in 1907, and whose death sentence was motivated by a racist society.
"Some of these women were read in their time, like Soledad Acosta de Samper," says Quintana about the author of
Una Holandesa en América
.
“When she died, there were two days of national mourning and messages came from all over Latin America, and her work was translated.
But then the canon was taking these women out, as if they were second-rate writers.
At FilBo, this year, Amira de la Rosa and others are once again top-notch writers.
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