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Ariana Harwicz: racism, pedophilia and motherhood as a wild state

2021-07-31T09:43:22.998Z


The author of the novels Precoz y Matate, amor, who has lived abroad for years and has been the subject of lively controversies from there, will see two of her works adapted for theater and cinema.


Hector Pavon

07/30/2021 15:06

  • Clarín.com

  • Magazine Ñ

  • Literature

Updated 07/30/2021 3:06 PM

Without fear of words, always ready to provoke with her texts that travel from the book to the theatrical setting, here and in Europe, and very soon to the cinema,

Ariana Harwicz

exposes herself flesh and soul in each of her works. He lives in Paris and is passing through Buenos Aires, prior to his participation in the Bogota Book Fair, in August, and the Helsinki Book Fair, Finland, dedicated to Latin America. “It's kind of weird, that's why I said yes. I am going to meet Mexicans, Colombians, Argentines and we are going to talk about literature. I hope it's not too cliché, that they don't wait for me, as has happened to me several times, with the boleadoras, the hype, the dulce de leche, in the sense of the stereotype ”.

He also plans to attend the Guayaquil Book Fair and the Tel Aviv Fair. He also closely follows the theatrical adaptations that, if all goes well, will enable the premiere of

Precoz

in Santos, "in the same theater as Matate, amor", he points out in dialogue with

Ñ

. And he adds: “It has been two years of gestation, that alters all the works. But also

The weak mental

will be released in December

in the Eccentric, the theater that Cristina Banegas leads in Villa Crespo. Ingrid Pelicori, Claudia Cantero and Banegas will participate in this work. Now everything is traversed by this political context and, although obviously I do not say anything new because the political always seeps in, sometimes it turns them into something more interesting and other times, into something less interesting ”.

- What do you mean when you say that politics intersects in the theater?

–The theater is an apology for the body and my novels are physical.

I saw rehearsals in which the actors work with masks on, that they cannot kiss or spit on each other.

So, I am sure that there is something of the virus, of fear, that intercepts, that plays and that is there in the bodies of the actors, something that is imposed in the passage from literature to theater.

–You studied script and in all your works there are permanent intersections between literature, cinema and theater.

Is it something that you have been developing from your first books?

- At this moment, there are projects to adapt the three novels to the cinema.

Perhaps, at first, that was not thought, but now I realize that writing, translating and adapting are part of the same, long road.

Obviously there are works that have never been translated and will not be, as well as some that are not adaptable or that have not been adapted, but even in those cases it is the same path for me.

In fact, I think of the authors like this: August Strinberg, Bergman or Chekhov, for example, I like to approach them in their entirety, in all their multiple possibilities of adaptation and degeneration.

–On the other hand, your novels cross the social and the political, as interpretation.

- I am not at all interested in works that, from the outset, reveal a certain partisan inclination or adherence, whatever party it is, even the one with which I agree a little or have sympathy.

But just as I don't like that a piece has a marked bias, it is true that a piece is always political, today more than ever.

–Why do you think they blocked you on Twitter when you mentioned your novel

Kill you, love

?

–You can no longer, for example, write the phrase

Kill yourself, love

. I don't know if this happens to other writers. And now that I say "writers" I think that is also political because I could say "writers and writers." For this reason, although there was always the awareness of the language and the ways of using that language, now more than ever to say something is to express oneself politically. For one thing, it's good too. But the truth is that not all people know massively those things that cannot be written and it was just the case of my novel

Kill You, Love

.

They accused me of instigating and promoting self-harm and of driving people to suicide.

And that generated a wave of systematic blockades.

So, I no longer write the title of my book on Twitter.

I write down "Matat" or "Amame Amor".

There are always possible games and codes.

Some readers changed that to "Andate a la concha de la lora, amor" and things like that, but not the original title.

–After the recent conflict in the Middle East, you were active in the networks and even did and published interviews in the media on that subject.

That led you to position yourself as an active intellectual with a public intervention.

-Of course and it is the most unfriendly. If an artist is carried away by what is convenient for him, by what his community manager suggests, by what the time dictates, he would accept the "don't go that way" because intervening may lead you to not sell tickets, books ... The Gaza conflict, once again, is historical, systematic and has no solution. A group of intellectuals made up of Eduardo Grüner, Elsa Drucaroff, Alejadro Horowicz, Andrés Neuman and others published a letter against the systematic killing of Palestinians at the hands of Israel. All that letter is debatable in historical and political terms. First, there is no killing and it is not systematic, and then the letter does not explain the anthropological, historical, religious causes. I have lived in Europe for 15 years, I am very interested in the Middle East, I worked for ten years at the Berlin Shoah Memorial,I try to read and talk to historians. That letter was a fallacy, it was demagogic and arose from a left that thinks in terms of good and bad. So we did another one, with Martín Kohan, Claudia Piñeiro, Hinde Pomeraniec, Tamara Tenembaum and others. But it cost us a lot because I started calling many people and I saw that the intelligentsia thinks about this issue in a Judeophobic way. I, who am close to Israel and live Islam in Europe, I tell you that it is different from how it looks here. And that's why we wrote a back letter and published it in DiarioAr. Then a note also came out in Rosario / 12 comparing Palestine with Auschwitz ... In a country where there were two attacks, where all Jewish schools and synagogues have bomb barricades at the door, in a country where there was no justice,That such comparisons are made seems to me of great decadence and criminal thinking. I wanted to discuss that with the intellectuals and they never answered me.

- How is anti-Semitism lived in France?

–There were also attacks, anti-Semitic attacks and almost half of the Jewish population emigrated.

There is a mass exodus to Israel and they are leaving because of anti-Semitic attacks.

In a way, Europe is putting on a new anti-Semitism, which is no longer German anti-Semitism.

It has another face.

It is Islam.

- Can this be discussed in France?

-Do not.

Many of the intellectuals who want to think are threatened with death, they have a 24-hour escort, they have to go out in disguise to the street or go live outside.

In France it is very dangerous to discuss a certain idea of ​​Islamism, to question that women are covered with the burqa, to publicly defend the State of Israel.

There are people who do it but it is very dangerous.

I appreciate that in Argentina it can be said, at least.

There are things I say here that I can't say in France because I'm scared to death.

There is a state of siege there, almost one of ideological terror.

–Going back to your work, what impact did your last book,

Degenerate, have

?

-

Degenerate

was actually going to be called a

Racist

, and the crime he was committing was going to be that of a racist. But I am Argentine, I write from the political matrix of having been educated in Buenos Aires, of having lived here for 30 years, and of having inherited violence, like all of us who were born during the dictatorship. Then, I realized that a racist crime was an item imported from France. Racism is talked about all the time in Europe, but it is not our biggest problem in Argentina. That is why I decided to work on a crime that was in my history, in my training: pedophilia, which is now called pedocriminality. Therefore, he went from

Racist

to

Degenerate

.

And I took that idea, that of the degenerate, something that the ladies yelled at a pedophile in kindergartens, as an element of an obsolete language, to say degenerate is to use a retro word, from the 70s. I wrote that book first. in French because he had thought of it as a bilingual novel.

And although the idea did not convince me and I transferred it all to Spanish, I think it was strange after that experiment.

–Family, motherhood and bonds are axes that run through each of your four books.

Why do those themes always come back?

- The story could be made of how the way of seeing motherhood, fatherhood, children, family was changing.

I posted

kill yourself, love

In 2012, nine years passed in which Europe, Latin America and the world changed. The way of seeing motherhood was transformed in an impressive way and that echoes and hits in literature, hits the work and upsets it. Although when I write I do not take that into account, later I realize that it is present in the reading. What I wanted to portray is motherhood as a wild state, outside of civilization, in a periphery where the characters leave, run away from the laws and make their own. About motherhood, I was interested in locking up a mother and a child in an isolated place, outside the social gaze and its police radar. That's why social workers knock on the door all the time at

Precoz

, and the police chase them, because they are two savages.

Hence the incest scenes, the moments of violence, those of love and perversion, because mother and son, if you leave them alone, they can do anything and that is what I like about filial ties, to think that there is no limits.

–The pandemic involved many changes and the interruption of projects.

How do you live them?

- There was an impoverishment of life, literary trips were cut off and the relationship with Argentina became tortuous.

For me, coming to see the family was a ritual and an absolute necessity and it turned into a struggle.

I understand the apprehension of those who come from abroad, but I also understand those who are outside and find that returning became something much more political.

I always say that I live in France and also in Argentina, but suddenly instead of living 11 thousand kilometers away I feel like I live 300 thousand: geographies change because I can no longer come when I want or how I want, and that made it much more painful the experience of living outside, much more traumatic.

–And towards the future, would you say that you have an optimistic outlook or do you not trust the balance of this entire crisis?

- Each one is faced with the philosophical decision of how he is going to live his life from now on.

Because I do not believe at all that viruses cease to exist and scientists say that viruses are going to metamorphose and there will be new ones, some even resistant.

It looks like a science fiction thesis.

We are no longer facing the same capitalism, nor the same relationship with bodies or the relationship with culture, theater, cinema, concerts, music, sex ... Everything has changed and each one is faced with the decision of how he is going to live what remains to live, with fear, without fear, covering himself, not covering himself, getting vaccinated or without vaccines.

"You are now working on a novel."

-Yes.

It's weird, I always say that I don't make feminist novels and then I work with cases of violence or femicides.

In this case, I specifically focus on three French cases, but it is the same, they could be from here or from Bolivia, it does not matter, femicide is femicide.

I'm going to make a novel about violence in a marriage.

Kill yourself, love

, Ariana Harwicz.

Mardulce, 160 pp.

Degenerate

, Ariana Harwicz.

Mardulce, 128 pp.


Source: clarin

All news articles on 2021-07-31

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