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The exile inherited from Ana Negri

2021-12-18T20:05:43.217Z


The author, born in Mexico, daughter of Argentines retaliated by the dictatorship, publishes 'Los eufemismos', a reflection on exile and family burdens


Ana Negri inherited exile from her parents.

The feeling of uprooting and a strange accent, which by dint of growing away from the family land, became a mestizo, stateless, border language.

His parents had to flee Argentina in 1975, persecuted by the military who a year later would impose the dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla.

And she grew up in two worlds, the one at home and the one outside.

In a home in Mexico City that was a stronghold of Buenos Aires.

That sounded like tango and tasted like gnocchi and dulce de leche.

A school attended by other children of exiles.

And the street, the outside world, where she was neither Argentine nor Mexican.

As a child, she tried to ignore the family burden that exile entails, but that element, which forever marked the lives of her parents, ended up also being installed in her DNA. This year, the author has published

Los eufemismos

(Ediciones Antílope, 2021), her first novel, in which she delves into these sensations through the relationship between a mother and a daughter with a story almost identical to that of her own family .

One December afternoon in Mexico City, Negri (38 years old) arrives for the appointment in a bookstore-cafeteria with warm lights, wood and brick walls. She dresses simply, with jeans and a black sweater on which her hair of the same color falls. She often pauses long between questions, as if she is blocked for a moment, but immediately laughs and the words come out again like a torrent. His life is spoken and lived in two latitudes; two accents; two gastronomies; two ways of understanding the world; two countries of origin. In one of them she grew up, calling her parents' exiled companions “uncles”, surrounded by a political family, because the blood family was thousands of kilometers away. The other is a nation that, until she was an adult, she only knew through the stories and scars of her parents.

In the book, —published for the first time with the Chilean publisher Los Libros de la mujer rota

(2020) -, Negri fictionalizes her own reality through the story of Clara, a kind of alter ego of the author, also the daughter of Argentine exiles, who has to go through years of blocked and impossible bureaucratic processes to get the judgment of reparation of his mother, a measure that began to be promoted in the 90s in Argentina to try to compensate the reprisals of the dictatorship.

But Clara's mother begins to develop psychological problems as a result of the years of political persecution - as has also happened to the author's mother for 15 years - an episodic paranoia for which she feels that she is being watched, which at any moment an armed command will appear to stop her.

Through the relationship between the two, Negri illustrates the idea of ​​how, despite not having suffered directly from the dictatorship, nor having ever lived in Argentina, he also carries with him the weight of the exile that his parents dragged in their flight. .

"At the beginning of my life I said 'I have to be Mexican because I live here.'

Somehow I rejected the possibility of linking with Argentina.

It was the story of my parents.

But 30 years later it turns out that I am taking care of my mother, who has not been able to work for 15 years due to a psychological affectation that has to do with her years of the dictatorship.

So it is not the story of my parents, it is also mine, "he explains.

Old diaries

Currently, Negri works in a school, although she also works as a freelance editor - she has edited authors such as Margo Glantz, among others - and writes articles for cultural publications. She graduated from UNAM and has a doctorate in Hispanic Studies from McGill University in Montreal (Canada). The

The origin of the book found him diving into his childhood diaries: “At some point I did a kind of nostalgic reading of my old notebooks. There I began to see that there was a line that was maintained over the years, this whole question around exile, belonging, the homeland. Here [in Mexico] somehow I have always felt a little out of tune. There was not a place that had emotional value. There is a part that I definitely find closer or perhaps directly more familiar with what happens there [Argentina] ”.

When Negri began helping her mother with the legal processes of reparations trials, she began to see and understand Argentina differently. “When reviewing the procedures, I thought that I also have the right to redress. I was also born in a period of dictatorship and grew up in my parents' exile. Somehow they ripped my story from me too ”. The process, he explains, is traumatic, full of bureaucratic bumps, a constant re-victimization that lasts for years, that many people are not able to finish. Her mother and she, in particular, have been involved in procedures for more than 20 years that have not yet been completed.

Until her illness, her mother studied medicine and worked as a therapist.

In Argentina, she lived in hiding, being pregnant with Negri's sister, and left the country when the baby was three months old.

His father is a theater actor, and in the seventies he was active in political groups.

They have returned to visit the country since the dictatorship ended, but they have never wanted to live there again.

Fear and bad memories weigh too much, says the author.

"The dictatorship does not end when the government says, 'Well, we are going back to democracy', much less the violence that took place there, that is perpetuated for generations, and it is not so visible," he says.

Craziness

The book also explores her mother's illness and the caregiver role that Clara's character, the daughter, is forced to assume. The excessive personality of the mother drives him crazy. He often explodes against her, cannot bear her ravings. “My intention was to provoke. Many of the negative comments that I have read about the novel go around, they say that Clara is unbearable and deeply violent with her mother. And I say 'okay, I want to see you there'. The madness of someone drives the whole environment crazy, it is impossible to be cordial and remain sensible ”.

The first time Negri traveled to Argentina he was 11 years old.

She went alone, without her parents, to meet that other part of the family she had never met.

The culture shock was huge.

From understanding a country from the perspective of its parents, to colliding squarely with a completely different and strange reality.

At that moment he terrified her.

Now, more than twenty years later, he hopes to be able to spend a long time there.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-12-18

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