Diamela Eltit is experiencing an explosion of recognition that feels good at the age of 73: the Chilean writer won the Guadalajara FIL award in 2021 and now sees
The Fourth World
(Peripheral), a novel written in the eighties, in the midst of the dictatorship, published in Spain
of Pinochet, which already anticipated the mobility of identities that is experienced today with the trans movement and the pressing debate on motherhood.
From that to Boric's Chile there is a world, but she is the same.
Ask.
You speak of the sudaca stigma.
What is it to be sudaca?
Response.
The Latin American world still lacks its rightful place in the world and I wanted to play with that name.
Latin America still lacks sufficient support to maintain an important valid word.
Q.
Write about a family and its conflicts.
R.
The family nucleus is fundamental, conflictive, and I chose a family and its crisis.
I took the names of women from a book by Caro Baroja about witches burned in the Inquisition.
The twin brother in my novel is a trans figure and, although I didn't have a precise name for it at the time, I was thinking about fluctuating, mobile identities.
Q.
You paint a motherhood as something that can annul a mother, devour her.
Have we evolved?
A.
If we think in intensive terms, the mother has died.
Just as we can say "God is dead" we can think that the mother as we knew her has died.
Due to reproductive technology, women's cycles are being broken, now you can have children at 60, there are girls with two fathers, children with two mothers, there is a declassification of the mother as we knew her.
The poor women use their uterus as a micro-enterprise and rent it out so that other women can inoculate their matter there and they can have a child.
It is a more fluctuating time and, however, the cultural relationship between women and motherhood has not changed.
Whether or not she has children, the woman is assigned the care.
The great task is to de-maternize the cultural apparatus, because women's maternity goes beyond the biological, it is in the social apparatus.
P.
It says that the mother has died.
Is that good or bad?
R.
I don't know, because it is technological, but the social apparatus inscribes women as maternal and displaces motherhood to a service, a social servitude.
Q.
Are we still in a heteropatriarchal society?
A.
Women are still oppressed by the system.
Q.
You also paint masculinity as something possessive.
Haven't we evolved there either?
R.
Societies are changing, but that change is always asymmetric.
Of course we have benefits that we did not have, but there is still an asymmetry of attributes, powers and conditions with respect to men.
The crimes are against women.
Women have not lost their character as objects, there is exploitation, we earn less than men for equal work.
P.
What happened to the constitutional referendum in Chile, which aroused so much enthusiasm and failed?
R.
It was very, very painful, very dramatic.
Not only because it was lost, but because of the very high figure with which it was lost.
It is not yet known what to do with these figures, not even the right one, because not everything corresponds to it.
It is a time to think: What do people want?
why did you vote or did you not vote?
There is an uncertain zone where the votes are anti that could have occurred in another context as well.
Q.
Anti what?
R.
Anti-system, anti-structure.
We had been coming out of a social outbreak of great proportions, the largest since 1973, and which was only stopped by the pandemic.
Chile is one of the most unequal countries in the world, where both the subject and the object count.
The people want and the market is considered the sign of democracy, but they do not access it.
The great task is to reduce inequality.
Q.
Do you believe in the Boric revolution?
R.
The Government is very besieged, it does not have majorities in Congress.
There is a lot of uncertainty, it will be very difficult.
Q.
And where did the energies of those young people who were manifesting go?
R.
They have not disappeared, but there is an evident separation between parties and citizens.
The parties do not represent their constituents.
There was not enough dialogue for a Constitution that was very poetic, very liberating.
But we must continue to maintain a perhaps longer horizon, surely I am not going to see it, but we must live with the horizon.
Q.
Is the
boom
in women's literature coming?
R.
It is interesting that a massive reading of women who write is incorporated.
But being a woman or a man is a biographical fact, not a literary one.
The ideal would be to reach “literatures”, rather than grouping women together and reproducing the binary.
They say “women's literature” and they don't say “men's literature”, but when they say “literature” they leave women out.
The ghetto is enlarged.
I've never been to a men's literature conference (laughs).
Q.
And does it bother you?
R.
There is an inflection of subordination.
That difference has to be diluted because it is a biographical fact, but not a literary peculiarity.
P.
And do you believe in other labels such as feminist or political literature?
A.
All literature can be political because of its discourse.
The literary discourse is not innocent, there are many paths and they all carry a policy.
P.
How has Chile changed from your novel to today?
R.
The most important thing is the end of the violation of human rights, of the dead.
But the slowness of the process has been overwhelming and for this reason the revolt, the outburst, said: it's not 30 pesos (the subway was going up), it's 30 years.
Q.
The transition is not over?
R.
It will end when the Pinochet Constitution disappears.
And Pinochet will disappear when his Constitution disappears.
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