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Leila Sucari: 'It's amazing that we still think that the mind goes one way and the body goes the other'

2023-05-21T10:55:31.183Z

Highlights: The author has just published 'Almost a bitch', about a female character over fifty years old who has a wild rebirth. The nameless female character, the central protagonist of this short novel – stripped in her style, magnetic in her direct form of short sentences – begins with a monologue of urgent words. She seeks to cut off a certain truth that is imposed on her as a mandate, as a duty to be. Is it possible in today's world, dispersed and overstimulated, to find the space of calm and solitude that the character longs for?


The author has just published 'Almost a bitch', about a female character over fifty years old who has a wild rebirth.


Every morning the world is created again. Under the poetic trail of the American Mary Oliver, whose verses – "but little by little / as you left behind their voices / the stars began to burn" – announce the beginning of her new fiction, Almost a bitch, Leila Sucari anchors her female character of more than fifty years in a wild rebirth, as intense as it is painful.

So desperately vital that she moves in a succession of physical sensations, on the verge of animality, and at other times blinds in a magma of raw, sharp thoughts, impossible to pigeonhole.

Almost bitch is read in one go, it feels in the bowels, it is heard like a howl. The nameless female character, the central protagonist of this short novel – stripped in her style, magnetic in her direct form of short sentences – begins with a monologue of urgent words.

"Since the train started, there is a smell that decomposes me. The sugar in polished fruits makes me nauseous. I close my eyes, I suck the tangerine juice. I want to forget about the world, concentrate on citrus. To be all of me an acid silence. But a drop goes to the back of my eye and forces me outside. I don't return the gesture to the woman sitting in front of me. I just want my sky cutout. Let no one talk to me, let no one come to tell me what I have to look at. May they leave me alone and calm with this heaven that is mine."

"Casi perra", by Leila Sucari (Tusquets, $3,500 paper; $2,200 ebook).

Born in 1987, Leila Sucari is a writer, journalist and teacher, with a collected body of work that places her as a representative voice of young Argentine literature. He studied visual arts, journalism and philosophy.

He published the novels Adentro ni hay luz (First Prize of the National Fund for the Arts, 2016) and Fugaz (finalist of the Sara Gallardo National Prize), the poetry collection Baldío, and the book of short stories Te hablaría del viento. Today she coordinates narrative workshops and writes for La Agenda magazine and other media. He spoke with Clarín Cultura.

Is it possible in today's world, dispersed and overstimulated, to find the space of calm and solitude that the character longs for?

We live in a total maelstrom in the big cities and it seems that being alone and quiet is an unrealizable utopia. It is a great challenge, a territory to conquer. One is not born free, but one becomes free: one must invent these spaces of freedom and solitude.

And that is an indispensable job also for writing. There is something of silence that is a temporary and mental space, like a listening that must be found in that maelstrom. I think of Cristina Peri Rossi, who says "my home is writing", and of Marguerite Duras when she talks about the creation of intimate silence in order to write.

-The character of Almost a Bitch says: "Let my head leave me." And he travels by train to a place far from the city, lives in a tent, eats from other people's leftovers. Loose of origin and future, however, it cannot get out of disorientation.

Drifts, paradoxes and contradictions interest me especially, because there I find truths. Everything can be one way and another, and the most intense and beautiful things have that. She seeks to cut off a certain truth that is imposed on her as a mandate, as a duty to be.

And then it is lost, because there is no other way out when looking for the desire for something new, to go towards the unknown and different. From that running away from the frame is that you can look at yourself in a different way. For there to be a transformation before you have to get lost, leave the world and what is expected of you.

In addition, in his monologue the voice of his former partner appears, as a kind of intimate diary. And the urgency of a new language, after the disappearance.

-The whole principle is her talking about him, the duel is elaborated when she stops talking to him and begins to disarm a common language. Because the couple is a kind of language that is invented, with words and codes. She begins to wonder, what language do I speak? Which language is the other? How did we talk together?

He realizes that they were talking to each other, in an irrepressible overflow. So that emptiness that remains is the refoundation of itself, a silence that allows metamorphosis in the abandonment of speech. Something fundamental to listen to oneself and let one appear in another way in the world.

Leila Sucari: "I find it essential to reflect on what a body is."

Precisely, love appears in different ways: as a combustion, as a way to survive. As if from it arises a redefinition of what it means to love.

"Love is a question I don't know how to ask," says Anne Carson. It is something incomprehensible, a force that cannot be held and yet it is an engine and a risk. I was interested in thinking of love as an abyss where one is not saved, quite the opposite of protected and healthy love.

She, in reality, breaks the limits and surrenders to a love that is terrible because it makes her lose her identity. And in turn, the encounter with another implies knowing oneself more deeply and opening oneself to things that were unthinkable. There is the encounter with Diamela, something that was not within the plans, a woman-apparition that destabilizes and puts everything in check.

Game of opposites

In the novel there is a game of opposites: boredom-madness, silence-word, madness-calm. She seems to enter an increasingly wild universe, in the middle she lives a loving encounter with that woman-apparition. An absolute loss of control.

With her I wanted to put in tension the opposites and the assumptions. Where is madness, where is sanity? What is the edge, what is the border? I set out to think about opposites until it detonates everything or dissolves the limit.

I placed in the novel Ovid and The Metamorphoses, something outside this time and space, something that is born as wilder, animal, where duality ceases to exist. And with Diamela, intuition, impulse also breaks in, all that chaos is part of the same thing. She gets lost, but it is not something dramatic but luminous, a possibility to invent a new life.

"Here I can think. And thinking is a relief," says the character in his tent days where he begins to observe life in a different way. It is situated, certainly, as a thinking body.

"It's incredible that we still think that the mind goes one way and the body goes the other. It is not that the brain gives orders to the body but that the body thinks in its entirety, so it is possible that a hand is the one that looks or that the legs think for themselves.

I find it essential to reflect on what a body is, what it can do in a person when it is not limited, when it is explored, when it is surrendered to experience. In my case, I have been doing dance for years and at the same time I was a mother. I began to understand that the body is not an instrument, it is not something merely functional but an organic and complex whole.

-In writing you can see a work of goldsmithing, of subtraction, of an almost microscopic process in each sentence.

It took me five years to write this book, it was the text that took me the longest. I tried to find a style in poetic prose and take out what was left, leave gaps and silences, so that everything was not so explained and closed. I started it from the point of view of the man who had been left in the couple and then I became interested in the one who was leaving, which was her.

In the pandemic I learned to look more closely, to enter the time of plants and get out of the human madness, that need to produce all the time. And I realized that I was inhabiting a new world where I had to break an order, maybe that's why I also painted a lot and I feel that I moved away from writing writing, another paradox.

It was in that boiling that this novel was embodied. When I write, the autobiographical sneaks in, I use everything and reinvent it, I deform it, it's a back and forth between reality and fiction, I can't separate it. In me, life and work feed each other permanently.

You write non-fiction as well as fiction, you teach writing classes. How do you find that desire of the character for an intimate, own space?

"It's chaos because I feel like I do too many things. I write fiction, journalistic notes, I go to readings, I do dances, I have a child, a house to clean. Everything at once is together, it's not that I say "from three to six in the afternoon I write fiction and in the morning I'm with my son".

I am very little bureaucrat of myself, I am disorderly in order. Suddenly I have something to write and I leave the dirty dishes and put on. Then I write down my dreams and they serve as a trigger for things. Writing multiplies the layers of existence, an organic matter where the content or the plot is not so important but the search for the form, to live the experience of language.

PC

See also

"Pre-si-dente!": from Javier Milei fans to one million visitors at the Book Fair

Juan Cruz at the Book Fair: "Argentina is the best written country in the world"

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2023-05-21

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