‘Western culture is taking us to the abyss as a human species’

Since 2009, with the publication of The virgin head (Eternal Cadence), Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (San Isidro, 1968) began to make his way in Ibero-American literature. Maybe it was before, with the publication of the story Sister Cleopatrabut, to stop since then, another story would have to be told.

Eight years later came (another) turning point. It was published, in 2017, The Adventures of China Iron (Random House Literature), once a modern representative of gaucho literature that reinterprets the Martin Fierro by José Hernández with China as the protagonist.

Then, six years later, came his “counterconquest”: The Orange Tree Girls (Random House Literature), a historical novel that reviews the life of Catherine of Erauso o to Ensign Nun or Antonio; or, in short, an exercise in memory replacement.

The Argentine writer has granted 24 HOURS an interview a few months after having received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize for The Orange Tree Girls (Random House Literature, 2023) in the latest edition of the Guadalajara International Book Fair. He has returned to Mexico for a few days.

She is sitting on an orange sofa that contrasts with her monochromatic clothing, always opting for black, expressing the same calm of each occasion; although, it’s true: that hairstyle lyncheano It can confuse us momentarily. He holds a coffee in his hands; At times he remembers drinking from it. However, his attention seems to be focused on listening, thinking about what he hears, and perhaps then responding. One can perceive her concerns in the words of the Argentine author.

Contradiction

“I’m not so sure that people are not interested in nature,” the Argentine soon asserts when asked about the real interest that people feel in nature. “It’s not very interesting, but the way life and work are organized takes us away from the possibility of being in nature, doesn’t leave us time, piles us up in gigantic cities.”

“Why the jungle? Because it is a place where it is easier for me to see how life is a fabric. Life is not the life of mine or yours or of the jaguar or the cockroach, it is the life of the earth, and each of us are little forms, like little adventurers of that life that is the life of the planet,” he reflects on the choice to place this story in the jungle, somewhat removed from the gaze. anthropocentric.

Origen

Cabezón Cámara, current finalist for the National Book Award, fondly remembers the Paraná jungle where not only The Orange Tree Girlsbut where it also concludes The Adventures of China Iron.

“I had fallen in love with that place, with my head there. (Then) fires happened that now happen all the time, but they began to happen in a gigantic way: in Australia, in the Amazon, in my country, there were tremendous fires all the time!

“It’s very scary, because they are approved, in general, to do real estate business, to do livestock… And all that death is killing us tooand besides, it is very cruel: it takes away our beauty, it takes away our air, it takes away our water. And the air and water are getting complicated, and we are not going to be able to live without clean water and clean air,” she reflects with dismay.

“I had my head there“, he resumes after his concern. “In that beauty and in this fire, the causes of the fire, which are the same as those that were the causes of the enormous genocide that was the conquest, a genocide so enormous that it had geological traces.

“And what leads us to create a sacrifice zone, to make it in our territories where the lithium is extracted… (because) then to extract the lithium they burst all the water that exists in places where there will be no new (water), they do fracking, they burst the water tables of enormous territories, monoculture, mining in general, oil platforms off shoreIn other words, they are killing everything that is life in general and in the Global South in particular. “I am concerned about that,” he says, on the one hand.

“On the other hand, I really like adventure stories and the life of the nun Alférez is a story with many adventures. And I always wonder, in these scenarios of cruelty, how we do to feel a little joy, how we do with tenderness, and can tenderness transform us? How far can the exercise of tenderness take us?

“And on the other hand, another question I have is: the culture of the West, in which all of us were formed, is taking us to the abyss as a human species, like many other forms of complex life on earth, it is on an abysmal edge… If this continues, if it is not stopped, in a very short time huge parts of humanity will die.. So I had all these questions and it occurred to me that through the life of the nun Alférez I could tell something about this.

“To tell it a lot with beauty, working a lot with the language and having fun. I can’t tell a story, or I haven’t been able until now, to tell a contemporary story of extra-activism, of the genocides and the atrocities that the global north does to us because it gives me so much hate and so much pain that I can’t write it,” he says.

Reflective parenthesis between jungles and concerns

(In the previous answer I forgot one part: when I said that Western culture is leading us to death, it mutilated us, it exiled us from the life of the earth to make us believe that we are something else, so that we have a bad time. Let’s see how we live in this world if someone cuts off the tap of anxiolytics or with all the forms they may have, with all the ways in which we calm down. Because it’s horrible, we need that. On the other hand, I find that in Amerindian cultures there is a way of seeing the world and of living in the world, a philosophy and a vital practice, which allows us to live on the earth without the earth ending, without killing the earth, a non-parasitic way.

And they have sold us in all these centuries that the reason is from the West, from Europe, from the global north, and the truth is that to think that it is reasonable to destroy the life of the earth and with that ours to continue producing nonsense that no one needs, so that ten megamillionaires become more megamillionairesI don’t find it very reasonable. It seems to me that the view of the world and the practice of Amerindian life is more reasonable, more interesting and more beautiful. I also wanted to think about it a little bit, explore it.)

Writing

Perhaps choosing to leave, or not, the overwhelming reality that keeps us attached to these lands, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara builds a lucid imaginary about writing and what emerges from it:

“Look, it seems to me that the most interesting thing about writing… Writing is like something, a collective imagination, like a flying river (…), something that goes through all of us, it is something that we breathe and that we do together.

“What we writers do is make ourselves available for that to pass through us, but what is coming out is collective. While we write, some of it falls a little and things appear that in another state other than that of writing would never have occurred to you, because they are not yours, they are passing through you, they belong to everyone.

“It is the world that is thinking, it is not each one of us, and perhaps, as we are flesh of the flesh of the earth, also, what in that collective imagination is passing through us, They are the voices of animals, of mountains, of rivers, of the earth itself”, he blurts out.

Characters

Without any preamble, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara confesses that writing the characters was a mess that took her time; However, as she herself states, “this book needed that, it needed different music, different voices and the book needed those different music and voices to put together a kind of concert, together, with their counterpoints and differences.”

“It was a great effort to try to feel different music for each voice. It seems to me that writing is music, too, and I like that what I do is like music, a little music that takes you away,” he asserts.

Freedom, another parenthesis

(When you take a character, what that character is, is. For me it is not a question that a character is trans, it seems great to me, everything is fine, as if he is not trans. It seems to me that this is how it should be: why don’t we let people live in peace, what bothers you. There is a place for everyone, there is love for everyone, why you have to hate like that, I can’t understand. There is love for everyone. It’s very strange, I can’t understand it.)