The date with Margaret Atwood ended up being a Valentine's Day dinner at a restaurant in a fine Toronto hotel near her home.
With a mischievous thread of voice that was barely distinguishable among so many celebrations of love at the neighboring tables, the prolific Canadian writer did not come to speak as the author of twenty mostly prophetic novels, such as The Handmaid's Tale
.
(1985), a feminist dystopia that made her world famous.
Nor as a poet, children's author or storyteller, a genre to which she is about to return almost a decade later with her next book in English.
In reality, Atwood, 83, had come into the interview as the insightful, funny and compelling essayist that she also is.
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The Maid and her forced “lover”
In Spanish, on March 16, he publishes his third collection of nonfiction texts,
Cuestiones candentes
(Salamandra; translation by David Paradela López).
Written between 2004 and 2021, in them he talks about feminism, climate change, fantastic literature or the future.
During the conversation, to which she arrived alone, hidden under a wide-brimmed black felt hat, she recalled her habit of celebrating February 14 with her longtime partner, the writer Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019. And she showed the curiosity that He demonstrates in his essays, as well as that inclination that his two million followers on Twitter know well not to keep their informed opinions, not always comfortable.
In the "burning issues" that focused the interview, she also exhibited a certain ability to avoid thorny issues by pulling irony.
Ask.
What worries you?
Given his talent for anticipating the future in his books, it is in his readers' interest to know what they will have to worry about 10 years from now.
Answer.
The problem is that I don't worry too much about the future anymore.
I leave that to the young.
When you're 20 you think you won't live to be 30 and then suddenly you see yourself in this restaurant at 83. At this age worries have an expiration date.
It is not in the hands of my generation to change things.
Q.
Is your generation responsible for the mess we are in?
A.
That account should be passed on to the
baby boomers
.
We were pretty frugal.
We do not use plastic, nor so many cars.
We grew up during World War II.
We know about rationing.
Q.
As someone who lived through the first one from beginning to end…, would you say that we are living through a second Cold War?
A.
Of course.
What differs from the previous one is that not everyone wants to realize it.
Another difference is that with the USSR everything was quite clear.
Now no one really knows what China's extraterritorial ambitions are.
Q.
In the book you say that part of the problem is that after the fall of the Berlin Wall the world went shopping.
R.
They said that the end of the story had come, but the story does not end.
You can finish a part, but not all.
It reminds me of that game where you throw a bunch of sticks on a table and the challenge is to catch one without displacing the others.
When you move a stick, another stick always ends up moving.
If you displace one as big [as the Soviet Union], expecting nothing to happen is very naive.
Now we see the geopolitical consequences of that.
Q.
Is the West doing the right thing by sending weapons to Ukraine
sine die
?
R.
To prevent Ukraine from returning to the Soviet bloc, and that this bloc is at our doorstep, Kiev must be armed.
The only way to make Ukraine free is to send tanks and missiles.
Q.
Perhaps the adjective most applied to your work is “prophetic”.
Do you feel the pressure of the prophet?
A.
I am not a prophetic writer.
I am an interpreter of history.
Memory was not invented to remember what happened to us, but to anticipate what is to come.
Writer Margaret Atwood poses reading a book in a photograph taken in the 1970s.Ron Bull (Toronto Star / Getty Images)
Q.
In the book you write: “The future is no longer a walk in the park.
It looks more like a mud splash."
R.
I also say that talking about the future is always talking about the present.
And to paraphrase [storyteller] Raymond Carver: what are we talking about when we talk about the past?
Also of the present.
Q.
When the US Supreme Court struck down the federal right to abortion last year, hundreds of people flocked to its headquarters to shout their anger.
In a corner there was a silent woman.
She was dressed as one of the characters from
The Handmaid's Tale
.
She was holding a sign that read: "This is not fiction."
R.
That woman knew that the first measure of a totalitarian regime is to go against women's rights.
Q.
Do you see or have you seen traces of totalitarianism in the United States?
A.
One of the signs is when the executive and judicial powers merge.
When those who create the laws, enforce them and interpret them are the same.
Thus, no one holds the tyrant accountable.
Now we know: Donald Trump was trying to do that with the Department of Justice.
Q.
Do you buy the speech that the neighboring country could be facing a civil war?
R.
Not at the moment, but I am not ruling it out: they have done it before.
It will not be as clearly a separate conflict as the first.
It will not be South against North.
American democracy is in danger.
P.
It is curious that when he talks about politics he does it by default from the American one…
R.
Canadians are like that.
We look through that one-way mirror that separates us.
We can see them, but they can't see us.
I often wonder: they are the first power in the world, they have power and influence, they are very rich, how can it be that they are falling apart?
Q.
What is answered?
A.
One of the problems is its two-party system.
The speech is very bitter.
We have six games.
Things are less intense and poisonous.
Q.
You wrote
The Handmaid's Tale
in the Reagan era.
Did the Supreme Court decision begin to take shape then?
R.
In the eighties the use of religion as a political weapon became widespread.
Republicans realized that they could rally people around a polarizing issue.
The novel only tells what would happen if these people had power.
The only thing I did was invent the costumes [laughs].
They are very old ideas.
Q.
And do they have a future?
A reading of demographic trends indicates that the United States is slowly ceasing to be a white, Christian nation.
A.
They will take different forms.
These people are obsessed with forcing people to have children.
Q.
A central theme of the book is climate change...
R.
That obsession goes back a long time, from my father, he was a biologist.
Q.
Seven decades later, have you given in to what is called "eco-pessimism" by some of those who have just launched these concerns?
R.
We are in time to save the planet.
The problem is that people don't react until they see how the flood washes away their house.
Human beings are very short-term thinkers.
That has been until now one of the secrets of our survival.
Q.
In one of the essays, you remember the internal struggles of the second wave of feminism.
R.
Within feminism there are always fights.
Because they are human beings.
They are not all the same.
We have different opinions.
We can agree on some things, but not necessarily on all.
Q.
The rights of trans people is one of those issues…
A.
People should be more sensitive, but they are not.
All biology is like a Gaussian bell [draws the shape of a gentle hill with his finger].
There is a small section of people at each end.
And in the center is the average.
But you can't rule out what happens at the extremes because that's where evolution typically occurs.
The idea that everything happens in two watertight compartments is biologically wrong, as well as false.
Q.
What is your position in that debate?
A.
Trans people are human beings.
They should enjoy the same human rights as everyone else.
Q.
Tell me about the format of the open letter as a way to give an opinion...
R.
What open letter do you want us to talk about?
This part of the talk could be titled
How to Get in Trouble in One Easy Step
.
Abortion rights activists demonstrate as characters from 'The Handmaid's Tale', on May 14, 2022, in Los Angeles (United States).Araya Doheny (FilmMagic)
Atwood is a veteran of stepping in puddles by mail.
In 2020, she signed a famous missive on cancel culture published by
Harper's
magazine that denounced the "bigotry" of progressive activism in the American public debate.
Three months later, she joined another in support of non-binary and trans people, written in response to an article by JK Rowling in which the author of the Harry Potter saga positioned herself in the debate on gender identity, a taking sides that has earned him angry criticism ever since for his "transphobia".
Atwood's involvement in both letters landed her in the headlines, the same place she ended up tweeting an article titled Why Can't We
Use the Word Woman Anymore?
, which apparently contradicted the above.
One of the most interesting essays in
Burning Issues
is titled 'Am I a bad feminist?'.
It arises from criticism received for supporting another open letter in which a group of writers criticized a Canadian university that terminated in 2016 a professor accused of "sexual misconduct" and who a judge later acquitted after the accusations.
“The #MeToo movement is a symptom of the failings of the legal system,” Atwood wrote two years later.
“Too often, institutions do not treat women and people in general who report sexual abuse fairly, which is why they have ended up turning to a new tool: the internet.
(...) If the legal system is ignored because it is considered ineffective, what will take its place?
Bad Feminists like me, certainly not.
We are not acceptable to either the right or the left.
In times of extremes, the extremists win.”
Atwood always makes it clear that he is not a purist in his ideology and that, more than parties, he is interested in truth and justice.
In the interview he will say that he does not believe that "what they call the left" exists.
"There are many lefts: the new utopians, the old Stalinists, the progressives... Progressive is a word I don't like."
Q.
Why?
A.
Many of the things that have been done in the name of progressivism were pretty terrible.
Like eugenics, the sterilization of women against their own will.
I don't believe in inevitable progress.
Not everything has a beginning and an end.
Nor is there an insurmountable future.
It's simply not true.
Q.
Why do some progressive aspirations seem so easy to ridicule to their critics?
A.
Because they are contradicting their own historical narratives.
It is the left that fought for freedom of expression…, they seem to have forgotten.
If you can't debate something... Canceling discussions about what you don't like is typical of dictators...
Q.
Is that what the left does?
A.
Some on the left.
Also some on the right.
In the Harper's
letter
we only asked for the possibility of a reasonable debate.
Many were shocked.
They are the same ones who are now demanding it before the ban on books.
I trust that they prefer the debate to the total censorship.
Q.
The Handmaid's Tale
continues to be one of the most banned titles in certain parts of the United States.
You even ordered a fireproof version…
A.
We did it for charity.
It wasn't easy: it's easy to make a book that doesn't burn, not so much one that can withstand a flamethrower attack [Laughs].
I'd like to point out that the real ban on a book comes when you can't get a copy anyway.
These prohibitions have to do with what students can read in class, with what they can take out of the libraries.
They usually don't work.
If you want a teenager to read a book, there is no way to forbid it, especially if you tell her that it is because she has a lot of sex.
There really isn't much sex in
The Handmaid's Tale
.
I think they forbid it rather because they consider it anti-Christian.
I don't think it is, but I don't share your interpretation of Christianity either.
The writer Margaret Atwood in her studio in Toronto (Canada), on November 14, 2022. LUIS MORA (New York Times / ContactoPhoto)
Q.
You have always said that Genesis inspired you to write it.
A.
There is a lot of violence and sex in the Bible, which is probably why it is still such an interesting book.
Returning to Christianity: for me it is only Christian if those who profess it place love of neighbor at the center.
Q.
How do you relate the censorship of books to the culture of cancellation?
A.
If you invent a weapon, sooner or later they will use it against you.
With cancel culture, the left is getting a taste of its own medicine.
They saw well the cancellation, the ban, the
deplatformization
when it only came out of them.
Now that others are doing it too by banning books, they don't like it as much.
Q.
In the lexicon of the culture war, everything has suddenly become bidirectional.
Woke
abandoned its original meaning, which was to define those
awakened
in denouncing injustice, to become the fashionable conservative insult.
R.
It is a weapon that is used in the daily struggle between right and left.
It is used too much for too many things: as a communist, a Christian, or even a feminist.
The people who use it as an insult would want to cancel anything that implies an advance in terms of equality, approximately 80 years ago.
I don't think it will work for them.
It happened with the term fascist.
People dedicated themselves to throwing it without rhyme or reason.
Q.
Is higher education in North America eaten away by political correctness?
R.
I think the real crisis is that too much money is given to its managers and too little to teachers.
These managers are only interested in ensuring that the image of the universities is not damaged, and they are always afraid of that.
Universities weren't used to being scared cats.
What's the point of continuing to finance them if they don't do justice to what George Orwell said?
He said: "If freedom means anything, it's the right to tell people what they don't want to hear."
Q.
It is not a maxim that seems to guide the public debate lately.
In his Christopher Hitchens Award acceptance speech, he said the two would agree on at least one thing: feelings are irrelevant as arguments...
R.
I think it all has to do with fear.
I am autonomous.
I don't work for anyone.
If you are employed by a university, a bank, a newspaper or a government, you run the risk of being fired.
You are in a vulnerable situation.
You expose yourself to attacks that can have real consequences: losing your job.
Q.
Do social networks exacerbate that?
A.
Without a doubt.
Every time a new form of communication has entered the scene, it has been tremendously destabilizing.
Gutenberg's printing press allowed cheap copies of texts to circulate, including the Bible: that gave rise to Lutheranism, Calvinism, Baptists, Anabaptists, Presbyterians... What would have become of Hitler without the radio?
With the Internet we all fell fascinated with the possibilities of it.
Now it's social media.
Q.
As one of the most famous users of Twitter, what do you think of its new owner, Elon Musk?
R.
We have all stood near the door.
Waiting to see what happens.
I have tried others, but I think that to keep up with the news it is still the best platform.
Once the interview was over, the writer hid under her hat again and walked home.
“I walk everywhere,” she said, as the hotel bellhop asked her in a whisper, “Is that the famous Margaret Atwood?”
Days later, she agreed to complete the talk by answering two more questions by email.
The first was intended for one of the great storytellers of our time.
Do you think that the artificial intelligence of ChatGPT will make the work of the writer or, for that matter, the journalist redundant?
“This has been a subject of science fiction ever since [Karel Čapek's play]
RUR
(robots can be human) and
Metropolis
.
Not to mention [2001's computer
: A Space Odyssey]
HAL (artificial intelligence gone rogue), or
1984 's
, in which garbage novels are manufactured for the masses.
Of course, certain types of art can be artificially produced and certain types of 'journalism' can be cut, pasted and amalgamated.
But can artificial intelligence do frontline reporting and interviews?
It is very unlikely.
They can be falsified, like everything human, but not originate.
Artificial Intelligence is proving, yes, an inexhaustible source for human journalists”.
The second question sought a reaction to the debate on the advanced age of the American political class and the proposal of the Republican candidate for the White House Nikki Haley (51 years old) to examine the abilities of candidates older than 75 (that is, of Trump and Joe Biden).
Atwood responded with more irony and even an emoticon.
Oh Nikki Haley!
What a great way to lose Republican voters over the age of 75!
And who will perform these tests?
Will it be Haley?
Will they ask you to draw a clock [simple test to diagnose dementia].
In that case, why not apply it to all politicians?
And all the voters?
I'll be interested in hearing the full plan, plus an update on scams that involve declaring the elderly incompetent as a way to grab a lifetime's savings.
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