“What is it to be abnormal?”: Cristina Peri Rossi, love like a drug

Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi. Matias Nieto (Cover/Getty Images)

"What is it to be abnormal?"

When Cristina Peri Rossi (Montevideo, 80 years old) asked her mother this question, she was 13 years old.

She had lived long enough to know that "women were silent not because they had nothing to say, but because of fear" and to intuit that "society did not want me to wear pants, or read some books, or ask myself questions".

She, who already abhorred the deliberate ignorance of adults ("not knowing created anguish and uncertainty"), needed to find the logic as to why Alina, her classmate, had run to look for her that day at recess while she was reading the

de Bécquer, to tell him that the two were "abnormal, homosexual like fagots, but in women."

That girl, who years later got married in a futile effort to stop loving another and ended up committing suicide, also told him in that school playground that she was a sinner.

"We are monsters, that's why they don't want us," she told him.

Peri Rossi, who was then sighing for Elsa, a classmate who gave up living that reciprocated love for what will they say, decided that same night that she would never go to Communion or confess again.

She also warned her mother that this would not be the only time she would demand answers to all the uncomfortable questions that were going through her head: "I am going to be a writer," she predicted, in an episode that she would later recall in

her childhood memories and youth.

Almost seven decades after she was made to feel “abnormal” without being so, the author of rebellion, enjoyment, transgression and the construction of identity will be the sixth woman to win the Cervantes Prize on April 23.

Peri Rossi, the only one to whom the critics opened the doors of that masculinized club that was the Latin American boom of the sixties and seventies, joins that reduced female list that, in this almost fifty editions, has also awarded to María Zambrano (1988), Dulce María Loynaz (1992), Ana María Matute (2010), Elena Poniatowska (2013) and Ida Vitale (2018).

The love experience was her remedy to overcome that idea of ​​uprooting —of appearances, of the chains of femininity and of the very idea of ​​homeland and home— that permeates her work.

Convalescing and "too tired" to give interviews, as reported to this newspaper, Peri Rossi has been recognized for "her commitment to key issues in contemporary conversation such as the condition of women and sexuality."

Reluctant to limit her universe with labels or conventions of any kind, the poet and writer has already pointed out ways by highlighting her mother's last name (Julieta Rossi) in her name, to record the devotion she felt for that cultivated teacher she had " eyes the color of time” and as disdain for an alcoholic and violent father (Ambrosio Peri), a textile worker whom she never wanted to be like —as a child, when they asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always replied “marry my mother ”—.

rabidly modern,

funny and sensual regardless of the time it is read —about the deconstruction of masculinity it had already been warning us for a long time—, Cervantes vindicates a woman who has lived and loved very much.

Something that he anticipated at the age of 22, when he chose the title

for his first collection of short stories, one of his most sought after books.

Since then, Peri Rossi has treated love for what it is, a drug;

she has rebelled against biological gender and has written to put herself in “the place of the losers”: “For the purposes of love, the sex of those who love each other is of no importance.

As they do not have the color of the skin, the age, the social scale or the geography, ”she wrote in

.

The love experience was her remedy to overcome that idea of ​​rootlessness —of appearances, of the chains of femininity and of the very idea of ​​homeland and home— that runs through her work.

The writer Cristina Peri Rossi. FERNANDO VICENTE

As he pointed out in

regarding his early exile by boat from Montevideo to Barcelona: “To split / is always to split in two”.

She left at the age of 31, threatened and persecuted by what would become the Uruguayan military dictatorship.

“What did I know about Barcelona when I got on the

and instead of ending up in Genoa, its destination, I stayed there?

Catalan, the mountain, Tibidabo;

a poet, Salvador Espriu, and some brand new ones read a few months before my departure: Pere Gimferrer, Ana María Moix”, she wrote about that journey.

And although

(Visor, 2003) is usually her reference collection of poems when contextualizing the effects of that exodus, the writer and literary critic Nora Catelli chooses

(1984) to vindicate it.

"Against the wave of neo-sentimentalism in the nineties and the euphoric self-affirmation of the empowerment of women in the 21st century, here she uses the motif of the ship to unite characters who suffer and enjoy, lie and use themselves", she points out about this moral laboratory in the that the Uruguayan deploys all its arsenal.

“Stripped of the demands of normality, since they are in a sailing asylum, they practice pedophilia, gerontophilia, homophilia and impotence”, she recalls about a novel in which “the festive impulse permeates everything”.

“Reading it gave me the power to love and to write”, says the poet Sara Torres, who calls it “brave and ironic”

If in

(2016) Peri Rossi wrote: “Nobody comes out of war / or love / unharmed”, it could be said that practically no one comes out unscathed from the experience of reading it.

It is enough to chat with the generation of authors and editors who have been emotionally and creatively transformed by the impact of their texts.

"Not only has it influenced me in writing, but mainly in life, in the practices of love," explains the poet Sara Torres (Gijón, 31 years old) by email, who, with

(Torremozas, 2014), won the Gloria Fuertes National Poetry Prize.

When the author of

(La Bella Warsaw, 2019) discovered Peri Rossi, she was still in high school.

The Uruguayan not only discovered for the first time a text that collected the bonds of desire between women (“with her poetry I began to imagine women in a different way, to a certain extent independent of the eternal narratives that tell women from the bond heterosexual"), but offered him "a sensual, brave, ironic writing".

“Reading it gave me power.

To love and to write”, says Torres.

Cristina Peri Rossi and Júlio Cortázar, at his house in Paris, in 1973. JULIO CORTÁZAR / PERI ROSSI ARCHIVE

She is also seen as a pioneer by her editor at Visor, Nicole Brezin, responsible for a special edition that went on sale in February that includes

excluded in her earlier collected poetry.

“Peri Rossi is ahead of her time.

The fact that today we can talk about the things we talk about has to do with the fact that she and many others have been able to write about it.

It surprises me that she had not become a symbol of the feminist struggle much earlier.

I suppose that now with the prize that will change”, adventure.

"I don't know Peri Rossi personally, but I feel that I do", adds the editor of Tránsito, Sol Salama, who discovered her at the age of 18 and confirms that, since then, the book she has given the most is her collection of poems

(2004).

"Back then I didn't know many authors who wrote openly from their identity as a lesbian woman and who narrated desire, the body, in such an immodest and immediate way, so subversive," says Salama about a style that "seasoned the catastrophe with the irony fair”.

That closeness, which tears you apart as well as makes you laugh out loud, may have been Peri Rossi's best weapon.

“With her I understood that solemnity is not necessary, not even when dealing with difficult issues.

The sense of humor and tenderness are tools that, used well, can be more effective, ”summarizes her editor at Visor.

Next Friday, a free woman who never wanted to fit in or imitate anyone's canon will receive the highest award in Hispanic literature.

It's taken decades

'Room 424', an unpublished poem by Cristina Peri Rossi

Life is a meaningless story full of fury and noise narrated by an idiot.

(Shakespeare)

Maybe if this had been the only thing

that they would have taught us

From the beginning

and dogmatically

like a religion

there would have been no wars

neither love nor heartbreak

neither eloquence nor violations

no skyscrapers

and we would have already disappeared

Like the extinct dinosaurs.

Not room 424 of course

of the hospital

between pipes, tracks,

the memory of you

and of others

of you of you

and reading the newspaper

that reminds me that life

it's a meaningless story

full of fury and noise

narrated by an idiot.

And the idiot is me.

(Unpublished poem from the book 'Reflejos', by Cristina Peri Rossi, to be published soon).

A state of poetic zeal

Anna Caballe

When the

de Bécquer, with all the deficiencies of that first edition prepared by friends after the writer's death, poetry in the Spanish language began a radical turn, moving away from rhetorical filigree and emphasis to approach the ear of readers and speak to them with his words.

“You are poetry”, wrote Bécquer, convinced that the beauty of women is for him the best inspiration, because it is born from a true desire.

It was a turn that would see notable advances in the future, from Alfonsina Storni to Nicanor Parra.

The Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi is part of this new "conversational" trend inaugurated with Bécquer, which has permeated 20th century poetry and, with the greatest eclecticism, knows how to combine cultural tradition with street talk and a powerful subjectivity. tinged with mild irony.

In the prologue to his

(Lumen, 2005), Peri Rossi acknowledges the debt contracted with the Sevillian poet: he read it at the age of 13 in his native Montevideo, perhaps in the library of his admired uncle Tito, cultured and misogynist at the same time, and that Reading decided her future: she also wanted to be a poet, not so much a writer as a poet, sensing that poetry could be the highest expression of literature. 

His first book of poems was titled

(Girón, 1971) and she wrote it in what she herself defines as a state of poetic zeal.

There is no reason to doubt it, because the book is not only the key to her later poetry due to the consolidation of eroticism and voluptuousness, but also because of the daring, being a woman, to write about her love for women: one of her poems, entitled 'Prayer', it is one of the most audacious texts that could be read at the time.

Finish: “Silence.

/ Pray: she has opened her legs.

/ Everyone on their knees”. 

That book was a public scandal, but it also immediately placed Peri Rossi as a formally and conceptually transgressive poet, since her object of desire had very little tradition (Safo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Renée Vivien and little else).

"I became, without wanting it, the Rimbaud of the city, the same one, by the way, in which the Count of Lautréamont had been born".

In 1971 Peri Rossi was 30 years old, and Evohé would be followed by other collections of poems until she reached

(Lumen, 2004), a fundamental book in his career.

As readers of his work we are always faced with desire.

A desire that, being what it is, at the same time feels liberated from gender issues, and the poet will insist on this aspect over and over again.

In any case, how to approach him with words?

That supposes the constant siege of experience: words chase the plexuses of desire like the hunter the fleeing bison (a metaphor used in General Linguistics).

So Peri Rossi's poetry could be defined as a long process of translation that consists of releasing the semantic potential of the love experience and processing it in an available and mundane language.

The sieges are endless.

Perhaps love is exhausted, but never the need to express its importance in all human life.

And Peri Rossi is her scribe. 

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