He didn't convert, it didn't come to him suddenly.
Gabriela Wiener was born a politician.
It is. There are things that have always been there although they are not perceived until the day when one wonders where what is comes from.
To her, from the Lima of 1975 where she was born, from marches with a red flag in her hand through that Peruvian city when she was not even 10 years old, from Marxism as a background murmur at home.
From Raúl Wiener, militant father of the Peruvian revolutionary left;
from Elsi Bravo, her mother, a social worker.
Of her very black hair and her brown skin and her indigenous face.
In 2003 she, already 28, had her new migrant status.
Of her identity and her constant search for it.
And that is also
Huaco portrait
, the book that she published in 2021 and that now, after being translated into English and French, is a candidate for the International Booker Prize.
The ladder that Wiener has climbed has been high.
As long as she traces the past that she does in
Huaco
to understand how she and the world got to where she is today.
The death of his father, the anxiety in his
three-partner
(he was part of a relationship with two other people), strung in the genealogy through his great-great-grandfather Charles Wiener, a Jewish-Austrian explorer, becomes an analysis from the first page critical and retrospective of the look, the material and human – and emotional and sexual – plundering of the West on what it calls “the south.”
On that first page Wiener is in Paris, at the Musée du Quai Branly, where part of what his great-great-grandfather took—
stole
—from Peru to take to Europe is on display: 4,000 pre-Columbian pieces.
Huacos portraits, indigenous faces in pre-Hispanic ceramics, passport photos of America from 14, 17, 19 centuries ago.
“They are beautiful museums built on ugly things.
As if someone believed that by painting the ceilings with Australian aboriginal designs and with palm trees in the hallways we would feel at home and forget that everything here should be thousands of kilometers away.
Including me".
It doesn't just include herself.
The “south” of which he speaks is Latin America and is at the same time something else, someone else, “those who have suffered the most, the vulnerable, those destined to be forgotten, to be abandoned by the State, to those who step into wars,” he lists on the phone. .
Wiener, her writing, are focus, collectivity and interconnection through concrete stories.
He does it under his method: grab that world and gut it without gloves.
An evisceration with blood that he splashes and stains, due to the sobriety with which he exposes it.
“It is reflective in the literary depth of her work, poetic,” says Jaime Rodríguez, her partner.
He has known her and “discovered” her for 26 years, observing how she has changed and added, intensified and intersected lines of fire to his life and her texts: journalism, literature, theater or poetry, feminism, decolonialism or anticapitalism.
“There is no difference between Gabriela and her writing.
"It's just one hurricane," says Claudia Apablaza, Chilean writer, coordinator of the publishing house Los Libros de la Mujer Rota, where Wiener is the author of her collection of poems
A Little Party Called Eternity
(in Spain, in La Bella Varsovia), a friend and one of the women with whom he shares Sudakasa.
“What did Gabi do when she started making money” with
Huaco
is the rhetorical question of the writer Cristina Fallarás.
“Building a house in the countryside and putting it at the service of the common, that is Sudakasa.”
A creative residence-school promoted by several Latin American authors in Guadalajara, a piece of land that belongs to them within the territory to which they emigrated.
“Gold returned in the diaspora,” says the website.
“A feeling of community, of self-defense, of migrant protection, is one of the most powerful things that has happened to me and to many colleagues,” says Wiener.
“The house is that attempt to find a refuge where there is speech, letters, story, but where there is basically a house.”
“I am excited to live with a plow in one hand and a torch in the other,” she writes about herself.
Recognizing himself in the territory that his native colonized is what has marked Wiener the most for some time.
“The anti-capitalist commitment against the idea of property and colonization, its construction, also the literary one,” and Fallarás insists, “in everything.”
The anti-capitalist idea, of destruction of individualism, of self as a way of going through life populates his bibliography.
In
Sexographies
(Melusina), sexual chronicles (not just about sex) from 2008 and republished in 2022 with some added texts that unleash and uncover what is often hidden around bodies, polyamory, egg donation or bisexuality and how that conditions the bonds and ways of understanding sex.
He is in
Nine Moons
(Mondadori, 2009), where she unzipped the lying romanticization of pregnancy.
It's in his poetry.
“If you want to find my current
vibes
, my collection of poems
A Little Party Called Eternity
is the best to understand it,” she sends via WhatsApp after hanging up the phone.
The prose for an emetic revolutionary moment
begins like this: “We arrived from Lima to an apartment with twelve people / and a single bathroom in Pla de Palacio.
/ We progress.
/ We were able to sublet to a German / a 20 square meter apartment in Sagrada Familia.”
They are verses from the beginning of a
social ascent
that Wiener reviews, revises, takes up, readjusts, leaving testimony of who he was and why he wanted that world that not only does he not want but despises as unequal, as unjust, in a critique from the inside out. .
On the right and extreme right, “obviously”, against “the simplism” of sexist, transphobic and racist messages.
On the left: “All those people who are well placed within progressive policies, when we knock on their door, we are bastards.
The white left of this country is the only visible left, the only one that has been, is and will be in power for now.
Or not?
So, yeah, of course we got pissed.”
To feminism, to the ideological, philosophical, institutional and hegemonic "that fights for quotas of power" detached from the vanguard of thought and tied "to its catacombs."
Jaime Rodríguez summarizes that “Gabriela lives in constant conflict with the world, with ideas.”
Each one has served to advance the next, building a branched, assembled theoretical corpus that ranges from love to colonialism, race, poverty, class, the liminality of migration, desire, what the body is and why. who.
Her friends talk about strength, fury, overflow, rage, dancing, cooking, laughter, hugs.
And the above underlies a constant analysis of the social structure that does not allow assumption or submission.
He talks about the crumbs left by “the favored sectors.”
The rest of humanity?
Birds fighting “for that misery of freedom, of abundance, of social well-being.”
Wiener studied Literature at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, and did a master's degree in Historical Culture and Communications at the University of Barcelona.
He managed to combine five collaborations in the media, moving on the border between literature and journalism to make ends meet, squeezing “without his own room” from the bathroom, a flight or frying chicken with a baby in his arms, one of his two “children”. ”.
One night he ended up on the floor, crying or laughing, singing for Sandinista Nicaragua or reciting César Vallejo.
In one of her poems it is read “go on, no more;
resolve, consider your crisis, add it, continue, cut it, lower it, let it go.”
It fits Wiener in that something of not letting oneself be invaded by the helplessness that he talks about when he talks about how society has become a “scrolling finger
”
and skipping what it doesn't want to look at because they feel that the remedy is not achievable. .
“It's hard to keep up with Gabi,” says Jaime Rodríguez.
“I am excited to live with a plow in one hand and a torch in the other,” she writes in
Huaco
.
Sign up here
for the weekly Ideas newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_