Literature on fire: “I lost my innocence when I began to distrust my peers”

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Childhood is a territory from which one never completely leaves.

A fertile field that is filled with colors and shapes.

Colors and shapes that acquire different nuances with the passage of time, which sometimes we remember vividly and other times we cloud as we battle on new terrain.

It is dizzying that the years go by and that, suddenly, one day we ask ourselves in front of an audience why we had childhoods so different from the rest of those around us or at what moment we lost our innocence.

Doing it accompanied by knowing glances, I suppose, is the biodramina, the medicine.

Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe) and Gloria Susana Esquivel (Colombia) shared a table at the Hay Festival in the Colombian city of Cartagena last month to talk about the transversal impact of issues of race, gender and class on their personal and literary trajectories.

Both authors agree that growing up educated in fear and violence is a problem, a social trauma, they say, to which we barely know how to put words.

“I grew up hearing stories that warned that people around me were going to die or that I was going to die myself.

They instilled in me the fear of being an independent woman.

Only if I fulfilled the 'good woman' narrative, then nothing bad would happen to me.

And that is a very, very violent speech.”

Gloria Susana Esquivel grew up in a Colombia devastated by drug trafficking and war.

She remembers how normalized crime was and how propaganda speeches pitted neighbors against each other.

Stories soak us and condition us, they make us victims of what is still far away from us.

She is clear: “I lost my innocence when I started thinking like that.

When I started to distrust my peers.

When I started to reproduce the idea that we should fear each other.”

Now, in her novels, there are echoes of what that girl with brown hair and a passion for pencil assumed involuntarily and without escape.

The chronicles of fear, abuse, weapons and diasporas haunt the adult Esquivel who becomes entangled with them and transforms them into volumes of vulnerability and resistance.

Clarice Lispector already said it: “Whoever writes is a being in a state of flame.”

For Tsitsi Dangarembga, the loss of innocence came in the 60s with the civil war forced by colonialism that marked his country and his childhood.

She spent part of her childhood in the United Kingdom, where he assures that he grew up with a feeling of not belonging that is unfavorable for any creature who experiences life.

“I remember adults behaving strangely and not knowing why;

and realizing, later, that it had to do with my melanin.

I remember being treated differently than my brother;

and then understand that she was due to being a girl.

I remember going to my classmates' houses and seeing more toys than I had ever seen before;

and assimilate, later, that I belonged to another group that did not have as much.”

The memories that instruct us are so natural and raw.

Dangarembga speaks about them firmly, almost squeezing them by her neck, inviting them to stay the night, because they are hers and she is her memories.

In the midst of this symbiotic relationship, so condemned at times for one of the parties, we talk about losing innocence like a ditch separating the road.

Like a mutation of human purpose, of

telos

.

We appeal to this well-worn purity, intrinsic and abundant goodness that children, children of light, possess, while we divert the focus from the structural evils, which are those that dig deep.

It seems like a game of gods: giving the child complete freedom along with the desire to be older, and the adult the constant insecurity seasoned with the impossible desire to return to childhood.

In between, philosophers and thinkers debate, the original contact with life dissipates.

We lose our innocence, we tell ourselves in a simplifying and somewhat assumed tone that seems to have broken us all at some point in history.

Childhood, like everything, is approached from various corners.

To find the center of the labyrinth, all these questions that Dangarembga and Esquivel speak about in their own voices and in those of so many others must be considered.

Understanding the interconnections of various forms of oppression, such as those related to race, gender or class, is essential to unpack the identities that shape us and our way of being in the world.

In the words of bell hooks, intersectionality is key to true liberation.

The liberation to write and rewrite ourselves.

Maybe, little by little, we are being able to talk about it, to find the words, to get it out of ourselves and, therefore, to begin to heal.

Recovering some remnant of that innocence, as a reconquest of what was once so much ours, may be the next goal.

These are our recommended articles of the week:

Thank you very much for joining us and see you next Monday!

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Cristina Segovia Barberán

is an educator and linguist.

She was coordinator of an NGO in Ghana.

She worked at Aulas de Enlace.

She currently serves as academic director at a school in Colombia.

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