María José Ferrada: "Chile is not falling down a ravine, but a lot is at stake"

Portrait of the writer María José Ferrada, in Berlin, Germany, where she temporarily resides. Rodrigo Marín

She is a countercultural writer.

Cataloged as "one of the most intriguing and interesting imaginations of Chilean literature", as her compatriot Rafael Gumucio recently defined it, María José Ferrada (Temuco, 45 years old) is not part of any wave or litter.

Author of thirty books for children and young people that go around the world, she has the sensitivity of those who write for boys and girls who, as Ferrada herself says, do not care about the signature of the writings, but their content. : "They relate to the book as if it were a friend, a toy, something in between," reflects the Chilean in a virtual conversation that finds her in Berlin, Germany, where since March she has been holding Spanish workshops in schools, a space that he is interested in and where he operates in Chile.

While,

Under the wing of a library that houses the largest collection of children's literature in the world, he will investigate the oral tradition stories of Latin America and, specifically, will focus on animal characters.

“When we don't want to say something, we say it through the animals,” says the author of the novel

, one of the latest gems in Chilean literature, where she tackles harassment and violence in the name of peace.

It is the second that she publishes after the success of

, already translated into Italian, Portuguese, Danish and German.

Ask.

You are a solitary writer, a rare thing in this age of great clans.

Why?

Response.

I'm scared of herds.

Indeed, they have a positive thing.

I think of my family, my friends, the micro groups that interest me.

But when the group gets bigger – I see it, for example, in schools – sometimes, losing our identity, we do things that we wouldn't do alone.

By dissolving, we take liberties that can end up harming others.

And that brings me to a topic that interests me a lot: violence in the name of good causes.

“But it was a joke”, is often said.

Well, no.

You are making another child or an adult suffer.

Q.

What memories do you have of your own school stage?

A.

I didn't have an experience of

, but I do remember picking on someone who wouldn't have picked on if we hadn't all been doing it.

Then coming home and saying, “Why did I do that?

Should not".

And curiously, it is something that happens a lot to us adults.

Adult

catches my attention .

P.

It is a violent time, in Chile and the world...

R.

Not only in Chile, of course.

We are in a moment of great intolerance, where we want to impose our speech, but we are not willing to listen to the speech of others.

We are only willing to listen to him to the extent that this speech affirms what I think.

It is complicated, because it begins to leave us static.

Disqualify and put labels, which makes us ourselves have to adapt to certain labels.

P.

How do you take this reflection to Chile, which is experiencing a time of profound change, with a constituent assembly in progress?

R.

I think that Chile is going through a particularly delicate moment so as not to listen to itself.

We are finally starting to move something that was making us live badly, such as the Constitution that we still have and that with great pain we managed to install that we needed to change.

Chile is going through a time when it is especially important to see the debate as something desirable.

And it's not just about the constituents, but about the chorus that has formed around them, about accusations and, finally, not letting these people work because of the constant judgment.

Chile is going through a moment in which it is especially important to see the debate as something desirable

Maria Jose Ferrada

P.

There is uncertainty about how the process will end in September, when the text is plebiscite...

R.

But it seems that we were all already anticipating saying that it is going to fail, in this anxiety to have an opinion.

Perhaps it has to do with not getting lost in this sea that is society.

Appear.

But you have to have a brake: I am not important, but what these people, the constituents, are doing.

In a world where people communicate in circles that reaffirm their own opinion, the convention brought together worlds that came from different parts to be heard and dialogue.

Q.

How would you describe your country?

R.

I am not so critical.

I do not believe that Chile is in the worst of all worlds or in the worst of scenarios.

Chile has advanced.

Two years ago, in 2020, we commemorated the hundred years of the Compulsory Primary Instruction Law.

At that time, the problem was that the children had neither shoes nor clothes to go.

They used logs to sit on.

In other words, I believe that we have made progress and that today Chile is not falling off a cliff, but it is a moment where a lot is at stake and that requires everyone's care and responsibility.

Q.

And the children?

A.

There are 16% of children who live in poverty.

I think, therefore, that it would be desirable that both the conventional ones and those who have spent the last few months rejecting or approving out loud the text before it exists – I am referring to private individuals, the media, opinion groups – would remember not to it is not about them but about everyone, but above all about that 16% of children who live in poverty.

P.

What do you think of the Government of Gabriel Boric?

He has been pushed, perhaps in a shock with reality, to take steps that were not on his agenda.

R.

This government is punished a lot because it said it would not do things that it is doing today.

I see it as something positive to be able to make changes according to needs, which are dynamic.

Chile of yesterday is not the same as the Chile of three years ago.

It's not even the same as last year's Chile.

So the judgments I made may no longer apply.

You may even contradict me.

And I don't see a problem with that.

I see it as something positive to be able to make changes according to needs, which are dynamic

Maria Jose Ferrada

Q.

In both your first novel and your last,

, the narrator is a child.

Why does this perspective interest you?

R.

The child narrator does not have as many possibilities to embellish his speech.

The child is concrete, he has little language in his search for meaning.

And that little language moves me a lot.

It leaves it closer to reality than adults can get, that sometimes we get caught up in our own discourse.

Q.

Do you get a lot of inspiration from your conversations with children?

R.

I owe them a lot, because they are very poetic.

When they can't find a word, they make it up.

That freedom with which we face the world, language, in the first years of life, determines our adult freedom.

P.

In your work you speak a lot about freedom.

Is it what installs her in a solitary place and far from, for example, the feminist wave of Chilean writers?

R.

At least as I understand my job, I need distance.

It may be that it has to do with my character, more than with the work.

I would never like to say how a writer should behave.

That

so heavy short-circuits me.

It is impossible for me not to be a feminist, it is fair, but I separate my work from that.

Q.

Is it something that worries you?

R.

It is something that I ask myself a lot, because I move in the field of school.

But I would like that in my literature children do not find rules of how they should behave, but a space to think, exercise their freedom and reach their own conclusion, according to their history.

And that is desirable, in my opinion, also in literature for adults.

Who am I to advise people and form behaviors?

P.

You have been a victim of prejudice.

A group of feminist writers used a phrase, "I don't write children's stories because I'm a woman," which bothered you...

R.

It is that that phrase contains a very big contradiction.

Feminism is respect for women and human beings.

But I can't build that discourse of respect by laughing at what another woman does, putting what another woman does in the second category.

This is not the time to think only about the needs of writers or any other group.

Something much bigger is going on.

Something that we hope will involve us all.

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