The first death that Mónica Ojeda (Guayaquil, Ecuador, 35 years old) remembers was a violent death. “I saw a decapitated body,” she says, “it's a hard image, you can't erase it.” She turned it into fiction in one of the stories in
Las Voladoras
(Páginas de foam, 2020). Experiences like this, she says, “come into your writing, because you end up writing about things that hurt, worry or fascinate, it's a mix.” She has now published
Electric Shamans at the Sun Festival
(Random House), a novel in which she reflects on loneliness, belonging, friendship or abysses. It seems like a dystopia starring people who flee the city to dance in nature, in a kind of
rave
in the middle of the collapse of the world, with poets, shamans and diablumas (masked beings from indigenous mythology). Although for Ojeda it is not very unreal: "It can be read from a dystopian tinge, but in Guayaquil there are shootings at all times, in 2023 there were more than 7,000 violent deaths in Ecuador." At 18, her father took her to a shooting range: “They were constantly murdering and raping women and I had to drive to the university alone.” Her 9mm gave him peace of mind; to her, fear.
Will this spiral of violence stop?
I am optimistic about the future, but also realistic, and I don't want to be naive. The examples we have close to us are Colombia and Mexico, with the issue of narco-states. The president of Ecuador follows Bukelean alignments, working with the military in the streets that have already killed innocent people... It is a very complicated situation that I don't see will be resolved soon, but I want to believe that it can be resolved. And that possibility is precisely in thought, in places of social anti-power: community feminist movements or anti-extractivist movements that fight so that nature does not end up plundered.
When did you start writing this novel, what led you to it?
At the end of 2018, I had just arrived in Spain less than a year ago. So Guayaquil was already becoming what is happening now, that the narco gangs have the power of everything, the judicial system, they are involved in politics, in the police... I wanted to write the story of two young friends who are trying to They flee the violence of the city and go to an experimental music festival in the Andes. I didn't know what the meaning of that recurring image was, and when writing I realized that it was talking about how one, in one way or another, seeks in contexts of death to claim life in the way that is within reach.
Like, for example, through dance.
They are going to revive the body in a context where what violence does is cage it, paralyze it. They look for a certain possible future imagination. Imagining is not nonsense, it involves projecting, making a future while you walk. Imagination is political; If you are not able to imagine a future you are dead.
Is that why dystopias and
neo-Gothic triumph today
? Do they help to see escape routes, to survive in a turbulent reality?
Yes, I think that, just like the party, the arts offer that escape route. But it is a kind of paradox, because art gives you that feeling of escape, but then it returns you to the presence of the body with your feet glued to the ground and recasts your gaze, makes you look at reality with other eyes, not alienated. , more sensitive.
It starts by saying that “the ear is the organ of fear.” Why talk about music and enjoyment, but also about dangers?
Because I don't like to work or think about art from an idealized place. Art is a place of enjoyment, but it is also a place where one can delve into very complicated territories. The power wants a living dead body. That your sensitivity is exhausted, tired, precarious and that you do not even have time for leisure, which is important because it allows you to revive the body.
What leads you to use mythology, shamans, the condor?
I come from this mythology, which was always a denied mythology. I was educated with a Western education, I had an education that looked at Europe or the north and denied what was one's own. I come from a problematic mixed race, which tries to look towards whiteness and deny the rest. The Latin American mestizo is a project of whiteness. For me it was a process of adulthood, of reflecting, of saying where my mythology is, the philosophy of this territory, why I have not read feminists from my land, who have to talk about other things that are totally different than feminists from the global north. .
That reflection began when he migrated.
When I was in Ecuador I belonged to a privileged social context because it was middle class and the majority of the population is poor. My mother is a teacher and my father is an engineer. She was vice minister of Education and vice chancellor of a university. Miscegenation is experienced very differently within Latin America than outside. There you are the almost white one. And when you move as a mestizo to another place, you are the non-white, you begin to experience what institutional racism is. Then you look at your territory and say, this same thing worked here too, but I was blinded by the privileged.
Has living in Spain changed your way of writing?
It has changed because I do it from a place of bodily tranquility. Not emotional, because my family is in Ecuador, and also my usual friends. Migrating is exchanging some pains for others. I get up and the first thing I do is write to my family, and until they tell me that they are okay I am not calm.