The literary irruption of Andrea Abreu (Tenerife, 24 years old) is titled Panza de burro (Barrett) and it is a friendship story of two 10-year-old girls during the school holidays of 2005. It is a book about childhood written as if it were a game, without paying attention to the most basic corrections, the spelling. Sort of like Gen Z's Blue Summer .
"They fear that everyone expresses themselves as they want," he says.
"I think I was getting savage formally, little by little. I got rid of complexes and prejudices that I had about my way of speaking. In the periphery there is a double oppression: that of the peninsula over the Canaries and that of the metropolitan area of the Canaries over the towns ”, Abreu says. The writer remembers that she was a wild girl for her companions, because she lived at the top of the mountain, in the neighborhood of Los Piquetes, in Icod de los Vinos, on the slopes of Teide.
As he progressed in writing, he discovered the strong idea of the story: “To bring orality as close to writing as possible. I was faced with the dilemma that the language that I was looking for and spoke in my childhood was not registered. The Academia de la Lengua Canaria collects its own linguistic brand, as a variant of Spanish, but my neighborhood is left out of that dictionary as well. So I started to enter wrong words for all the dictionaries. If I wanted to be honest with reality, I couldn't be guided by the officiality of speech ”, summarizes Abreu. The author clarifies that Panza de burro is not written in Canary, but in the Canary of her town. He calls it "chelism", which is the speech of his grandmother Chela.
"I receive many messages that blame me for this, but I am interested in experimenting and not being afraid of the RAE," adds the writer and journalist, who worked in a clothing store before the publication of Panza de burro. She wrote in the morning. It was like that for half a year. Before, she was a waitress. "I have never had a job with a salary of 1,000 euros."
Life change
Now she has left Madrid, has moved to Tenerife and has just become autonomous. Because until a few months ago his plans were to continue working in the service sector: "But Donkey's belly has changed my life," he says. The fifth edition is underway. She acknowledges the decisive drive of the writer Sabina Urraca, who was first her teacher in a literary workshop and then her editor.
In the book, the Canaries of her town are spoken of: she calls it "chelism"
"People are afraid of anarchy and losing control. They fear that everyone will write as they want ”, says the author of a novel that reads:” Sangüi de jamón y queso ”; "Güeno", for good; "Vulcan" and not volcano; “Fisquito” for a bit ... It is a formula that is born and dies in this book, Abreu points out: “Because I couldn't write a novel like this again”. "I already notice that I write differently," he says.
"They also tell me that I am so young that I have nothing to tell," laments the writer. Underneath all this "chelism" there is a traditional structure, in which the telenovela, the evil eye coexists with Messenger and Pokémon. Costumbrismo Z. Without unexpected twists, without a frenetic plot… “If it were a movie it could even be boring”, Abreu says by phone, pointing to the ways of Lucia Berlin. "But it is a very detailed reality of fundamental matters for a girl, like shitting in a liquorice box." The result is a novel of them, in which they appear as a threat: "The girls are like wild dogs and end up being domesticated."