The Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza. Grisel Reyes Pajarito
Cristina Rivera Garza has needed thirty years to gather her courage and rummage through the papers of the murdered sister. Understand then that the one he met is also other people: unexpected, different. Open the boxes and take out the secrets. And to find among the letters sent and to be sent, among those received, the uneasiness of a 20-year-old student harassed by an ex-boyfriend who does not want to let her go, who does not want her to continue her studies, to fly to another country, to fly free. . One morning, his corpse was left under the covers with the purple marks of the predator on his neck. At 56 years old, the Mexican writer has been able to assemble the puzzle of a short life, that of her sister Liliana, through the testimonies of friends and family who shared with her the last days of a free university,long, straight-haired, who was beginning to emerge from the tunnel of the patriarchy.
Liliana's invincible summer
(Random House), which is published in Mexico next week and a month later in Spain, has been the author's most painful book.
It has taken 30 years and many failed attempts to break out of silence.
Cristina Rivera and her sister Liliana.
Question.
How many siblings do you have?
Answer.
Liliana is the only one I have.
It is a question that has been very difficult for me to answer over the years, because it involves going into a very complex story.
It is a question that they ask you very easily, very natural, but in a country, in a world where we have lost so many to violence, it always becomes difficult to solve.
Unleash an entire memory.
Q.
When he had the courage to open those boxes, form and substance began to embrace.
R.
What I had tried before was mainly within the field of fiction, and in recent years I have had my fights with fiction, with its limits.
I knew those boxes with my sister's documents were there, but it was a dangerous area in which I assumed that if I entered I would not be able to leave, that was the great fear of this process.
But when I finally dared to read them and saw their richness, I set about the task of reading and classifying and with the long interviews with his friends I realized that this had to be the structure of the book.
I wanted Liliana's voice to be there and, in addition to the account of the femicide, to be a celebration of her life.
That unparalleled energy from Liliana.
There were many things that I found out that I did not know, when his friends defined it as
cabula
[joker],
ironic, with a lot of sense of humor.
Q.
Even the abortion you went through.
R.
Also.
But I was never interested in creating a stereotype.
She was a young girl investigating the world, like many.
He did not want to bring a saint here, but a young woman of flesh and blood responding to his environment with the tools that the environment gave her.
Unfortunately, those tools in the 1980s did not include preparation for dealing with predators.
She was in charge of creating an archive of herself, I listen lovingly and create a context where her voice is heard.
Q.
How have your parents received this Liliana who draws herself through her letters, her writings on each paper, her poems?
Maybe they didn't really know her either.
R.
It is said, with good reason, that many times the people who are closest to us are the ones we know least, that is known by anyone who has been in therapy. I was very careful in the whole process with my parents, who were reading the manuscript little by little. I assured them that I would not post anything they disagreed with, as I did with friends who have generously contributed. And I have respected it. Fortunately, they never told me not to publish something of what was written. My parents saw several versions and I gave them time to digest the text. There were many things that they did not know and it is part of what makes the book important to us. It allows us to get to know Liliana again and receive her with everything she has been. They are both very committed to the need for justice. We have loved Liliana very much, since always,but this other one that his friends give us and we love life even more, with all its complexity and chiaroscuro.
Ángel González Ramos, the alleged murderer.
P.
Literature is playing an important role in raising awareness about machismo that kills, so that we have the appropriate language that allows us to identify risky situations.
Does this book add to that committed literature?
R.
For many years we have lived under the impression that literature was an autonomous field, as if it had its own ivory tower from which it saw the world and I think that since the end of the 20th century there are increasingly interesting arguments about the end of that autonomy.
I believe that all literature is committed, both that which is interested in confirming how things work and that which contributes to another possible world, another way of living and thinking.
All literature is compromised, both that which is interested in confirming how things work and that which contributes to another possible world
P.
It was difficult for you to write it, to come up with a manuscript with which you felt satisfied.
R.
I have been preparing all these years and all the previous books to finally be able to write this one about my sister's femicide.
All of this that I have thought and written about I think, finally, made this book possible.
Q.
The book is like one of those "Wanted" posters, it even has a photo of the supposed murderer, on the run.
Do you hope it will do that, do you hope to find it?
R.
I would like to. That was very present as I wrote. The alleged murderer, against whom an arrest warrant was issued in 1990, was never captured or went to trial, as is common in these cases. I put that photo because it is the one that appeared in the newspaper then. I believe that no one in this world can escape justice without the support of family, neighbors, no one disappears from this world just like that. My hope is that someone can recognize it. Now that we are more aware than 30 years ago of the mechanisms that predators follow and the pain of femicides, I hope someone is willing to identify an individual who escaped the law. The book is an effort to seek justice.
The alleged murderer, against whom an arrest warrant was issued in 1990, was never captured or underwent a trial
Q. It
has been quite a detective task to rummage through your sister's files and find people who belonged to that world of 30 years ago.
R.
I have worked books in recent years for which the materials of others are essential.
I have followed a similar system regarding my sister's life, I did not want to usurp her voice, when it is also so clear, it is so well articulated and it allows us to enter her world very closely.
Finding those files, having the courage to open them was the fundamental foundation.
Based on their agendas, my partner and I, yes, like a detective work, we set about finding friends.
It is difficult, after 30 years, and we thought that one would lead us to the other, but people also stop seeing each other, especially when there is a femicide like this involved.
They generously agreed to be there with their names.
Q.
This will be the most painful book you have written, how do you write from pain?
A.
I have thought about pain for many years, because it has been part of my personal experience.
Pain is an incentive, we never hurt alone.
I am interested in the relationship between pain and language.
It has been said that pain disarticulates our capacity for language, but it seems to me that it articulates us, makes the enunciation of the conditions of the tragedy possible.
This book has been the possibility of enunciating with others in order, together, to think critically about how it was possible, how it is still possible and what we can do so that justice, as Rosario Castellanos said, comes to our house and sit down.
P.
The book mentions the guilt that family and friends carry after an event like this, why I did not see it, why I was not there, how I did not realize it. Have you conjured that guilt?
R.
Patriarchy and these unequal gender relations that govern our lives have been accomplices of silence.
They have forced us to be silent, they have prevented the creation of a clear and precise language that marks these actions as the crimes that they are.
Before, femicides were crimes of passion, that prevented us from identifying the ultimate sources of this kind of violence, which is patriarchy, radical gender inequality, hate crimes, viciousness.
I am grateful to a very wide range of feminist mobilizations, suffering, activists, who have generated the language that little by little allows us to articulate these stories with their names, as they should be called.
Q.
And have you got rid of the guilt?
A.
It is never lost. It helps that when this is discussed, the victim is not blamed. Because the guilt that the survivors feel is related to the one that society fans: they did not take care of it, they did not pay attention, they were not there. Instead of thinking about why predators exist and how they act. But it is never completely erased. A part of me continues to think: I should have registered that moment, I did not notice this or that, but I also understand that more than personal failures they are language failures, we see what words allow us to see. And we do not see what we cannot identify, that is why it is so important to create a precise, clear and practical language that allows us to look at the past and recognize these behaviors. And also to the present and to prepare the new generations.
Q.
Do you think that today you would have detected what was happening with your sister and your ex-boyfriend?
R.
Socially we are more prepared, but it is not something automatic, there is still a lot of work to do.
Just a couple of years ago, with the MeToo in Mexico, many were surprised by telling stories that at the time they had not identified as rape or harassment.
We have seen how language helps revelation and awareness.
Therefore, taking to the streets and speaking out is important.
P.
Many victims still do not report because they can be ashamed, which comes from social criminalization.
R.
That is why I decided to write this book, among other things, because for me that
performance
[by Chilean women] of
Un violador en tu camino
was fundamental
.
The whiplash I felt when I saw those words, which I have known intellectually for many years, but hearing them in the public square, with that group of young women raising their voices, was a catalyst.
Q.
How do you see the current Mexico in its feminist movements and the government's response?
R.
The very poor answer is not only typical of this Government.
It is a response from the patriarchy established in power, regardless of the political party.
Power, whether it has the body of a woman or a man, is masculine and patriarchal.
It is necessary to continue supporting multiple feminisms.
The future, if it exists, depends on the critical lucidity of these feminisms and the generosity of action;
to put the body in those streets where so many lives are decided.
Power, whether it has the body of a woman or a man, is masculine and patriarchal.
It is necessary to continue supporting multiple feminisms
P.
Mexican feminism has explosions of certain violence that are criticized by the Government.
What do you think?
R.
Mexico has a long history of feminism.
Mexican feminism is not the result of recent years, there have been important magazines that educated us and educated those who came later.
Now we do not see violence, but anger.
Violence is that exercised by the State, those who have control of the Army, of the means to exercise violence.
The feminists' rage is justified by the state of impunity in which not only Mexico finds itself.
Q.
Your sister was educated in freedom.
Isn't it a risk to educate in freedom in a place where it cannot be exercised?
R.
I insist that it is not typical of Mexico. I see news of femicides and free-spirited women silenced in multiple ways. Everywhere. We live and are governed by a globalized patriarchy very much in collusion with economies of extraction that ensure the exploitation of domestic work, make women's work invisible and are part of a broader machine of exploitation. The enemy is not small. But yes, my sister and I were raised in great freedom for the time, and this was a fairly clear conviction on the part of my parents, the only difference between my sister and I was that I never ran into a predator. Their behavior is that of many other women who were also educated in this freedom, whose parents also wanted them to enjoy the rights of citizenship.
There is no direct relationship between the real and writing, because there is always a mediation process in which interpretation and imagination are necessary
Q.
When writing a book about a person who is your sister, part of her life, reality itself, does one realize that life is fiction?
R.
That is extremely interesting, because it calls into question that relationship between fiction and non-fiction. I have many years writing books with documents, with interviews, with trips, with very specific materials, but I work very closely with my imagination, my contact with these materials is not automatic or transparent, it is an interpretation and that, finally, is to work very closely with fiction. There are transitions in this book that I have had to imagine, based on what I was told, but I have had to use fiction to move the plot forward. What this relationship with documents requires of me, what we call reality, to which I have no direct access except through these voices, has to do with obtaining them, honoring them and forging a way that makes it possible for them to give what best of itself.There is no direct relationship between the real and the writing, because there is always a mediation process in which interpretation and imagination are necessary.
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