Automatically translated from Basque, translation may contain errors. More information here. Elhuyarren itzultzaile automatikoaren logoa

"We have to write about what binds us: there lies absolute honesty."

  • Thanks to the novel Huaco portrait I meet chronicler and writer Gabriela Wiener, but she has a long career in journalism and literature. Her text has told me that she wanted to "build the present" – pulling the words of the writer Cristina Rivera Garza. There is no doubt that it has succeeded: it puts us in front of the mirror to observe the colony we are conducting in Europe and to analyse the fissures of our progressive affective relations.
Argazkia: Ibai Arrieta
Argazkia: Ibai Arrieta
Zarata mediatikoz beteriko garai nahasiotan, merkatu logiketatik urrun eta irakurleengandik gertu dagoen kazetaritza beharrezkoa dela uste baduzu, ARGIA bultzatzera animatu nahi zaitugu. Geroz eta gehiago gara, jarrai dezagun txikitik eragiten.

Huaco portrait receives a strong welcome. That you have it.
It's magical that something like this happens when you've been tired of precariousness and pushing. I see this as part of historical reparation, as part of the return of gold, as the Ayllu group says, which works artistic research and anti-colonal political action. It is not just my cry, but the collective cry, the cry for rights and the best lives. With this book, at least, we have to get enough money to knock down Columbus's statue in Madrid.

The novel combines three strands: The research on the ancestor Charles Wiener, the double life of the protagonist's father and the polymerality relationship of the protagonist himself. I have recovered three book
projects here. I didn't have the resources to do a big research on the ancestor -- I didn't want to pay tribute, I wanted to fight with him -- or to look for lost family matriarchs, so I put that project aside. On the other hand, my father died and encouraged me to talk about his life: I had two families who had never had contact with each other. I first talked to my mother and my relatives, of course, they didn't like it very much, but I thought I had the right to talk about it and I wanted to go outside. Finally, I had a novelistic intention about polimicity, I have recycled it and it has become the center of the protagonist's present. I have always had the need to act from the body and from my own experience, although in this case I use autofition. And with these pieces, I created the patchwork.

Let's talk about Charles Wiener. This man almost reached Machu Picchu, among others, and stole four thousand Huacos, ceramic pieces that reflect the faces of the indigenous before the colonization era. He included a mention in his book under the heading: "The artificial nonsense of the body was related, in the case of the Peruvians, to the factual stupidity of the soul."
When I started reading Wiener's book and found that racist language, I couldn't follow: he insulted me and offended me. As I talked about my culture, my city, its people… But in the context of the Huaco portrait project, I got back into the action and ideas of the Madrid anti-racist movement, I wrote about it Eldiario.es in the middle, the Black Lives Matter movement was about to change many things and there were also new stories of resistance that rebuilt history: So it was clear that he would not judge man from the watchtower of his time.

Since today.
I would judge your supposed heroin from the point of view of chol and anger, with my eyes and the rage of my time. There's one thing to say about Wiener: unlike others of his time, he didn't want to eliminate the low races. Among other things because he was part of them: he was an Austrian Jew, excluded, who took French nationality and became a Catholic to flee harassment. However, he claimed the project of European white civilization with paternalism, as any politician of the PP today. Moreover, he bought an indigenous child and took him to Europe to show that he could educate him.

This speech was well known to me, because they talk about mestizaje in Spain in the same way. Spain is told that it came to a field of cannibalistic barbarians and gave them everything: language, religion, culture, art. Spanish deputies say that the best thing that a South American woman can do is to marry a Spaniard. At this point, I related the past to the present. And I started writing this book, telling you how coloniality is going through to this day.

Photo: Arrieta River
"I would judge your so-called Herenyl Charles Wiener from the point of view of chol and anger, with my eyes and anger."

I think it is relevant how you explain the story of your father’s two families. It demonstrates the complexity of the situation without judging anyone. In the
book there is no lameness or victimization, but it was based on the experience of feeling pain in the body, which generates empathy and a certain understanding towards the people of all sides: presumed victims and presumed victims, who are not victims or victimizers in absolute terms, always have more aspects. And I think that, in the end, the figure of the mother materializes that raw humanity that bursts in the face and surprises us in all its truth. You realize that that woman has chosen her destiny; you realize that actually that man is not an evil man, but that he does not know how to love, that they taught him to abuse, that he had never learned to honor. You, on the contrary, are the result of the crossing of these two rivers, unfortunately or fortunately, and you try to do things right and sometimes fail. It is time to embrace contradictions, leaving aside fashions, morals, truth and lies.

All this with a lot of humor.
I follow the literary rule of working with grievous and dramatic things from the perspective of comical pathology. Another rule: writing about what I'm ashamed of is also ridiculous. We have to write about what binds us, which is where absolute honesty resides, and that is what makes texts live.

I'd also like to ask you about the book Nine Moons: It's a trial testimony about your pregnancy, first published in 2009, and you've now published the corrected version.
I felt a lot of things very far from the book and cleaned them up, for example, I'll take away a lot of thicknesses: I found it unbearable to read them, especially because I'm thick. I couldn't change the pantry on the child's gender and sex, now I wouldn't speak it at all, but at the time it was.

It shows the view of the migrant.
Yes, a Peruvian gives birth in Barcelona. It's a clear migratory body: I was writing from the experience of being out. I also directly criticized the medicalization of the maternal experience, pregnancy and childbirth from the point of view of a sweatshirt. How they treat us in institutions, in hospitals, how they see us as children…

It's a book about pregnancy, but it talks, among other things, about abortion.
It looks like a book for pregnant women wouldn't talk about that, right? The book has that dark side. It opposes stereotypes: the pregnant woman is not an angel of the house, a fragile person to whom you have to give up the seat on the metro. Beware! Give the seat to a terrorist, a car system bomb! I think pregnant women are not at all unprotected. They are hormone-explosive, counterintuitive and capable of anything. And I didn't talk about media -- yes, holocaust for everyone else.

How?I worked a little bit on the theme in the play How crazy to fall in love with you, although it was not my semirene, but my girlfriend's: she became obsessed with another typa and left home, with
the
baby, to sing with the other. I didn't have that much effect, but I suffered from my girlfriend's.

Photo: Arrieta River

“I went from being the editor-in-chief of a favorite porn magazine to being the editor-in-chief of the women’s magazine ‘fashion’”

In this work he talks about his relationship with Jaime Rodríguez Z. and Rocío Lanchares Bardají: two children grow together, Coco and Amaru. The starting point of
the work is the crisis we suffered in 2016. When Amaru was very small, we were willing to live the dream of the family of polymerality, with the arrival of desmesio, we built the house, we brought a gigantic bed, and we changed Coco’s life – we presented a woman saying that we were in love with her and that she would come to live with us. We made a big bet, in essence, in which Rocío suddenly burned the first cigarette after pregnancy, drank a glass of wine, and decided that she wanted to stop being a cow right away, she was given back the desire to touch her skin, but in the corner she wanted to do with a stranger, which caused the explosion of our dream. I had been doing proselytizing with the polymerality t-shirt, and there I realized that I couldn't bear the situation, that I wanted to build the nest, grow the polymerality baby. But Rocío wanted to live her moment. And a terrible wave started, with huge clashes. That's what the play tells you.

Basically, I explained how we started from that crisis and how we tried to rebuild things. It's a reflection about this kind of relationship: what mistakes and what holes they have. After all, although we want to want to do it differently, we sometimes go down, because our theories cannot be put into practice and become mere discourse.

He has done a long journalistic career. He left Peru in the early 2000s, why did he decide to migrate and what has been his trajectory in Spain?
In my country, I had a little visibility as a journalist. In the newspaper they congratulated me on my work, but they didn't hire me. The usual thing: my friend's men were hired to do the same thing I did, and I was like fake autonomous. I got tired and went to Barcelona. Of course, he was the oldest scholar in the world, he was almost thirty years old and had to start from scratch. I earned very little as a journalist, combined it with anything else, my husband was dedicated to serving paellas and so we alternated to be able to return to journalism, which was our field. As I had already worked on the magazine Etiquette Negra, a quite emblematic journal of narrative journalism in Latin America, I had the opportunity to tap some doors. Then I started working on anything related to journalism.

For example?
I made the sex horoscope of Frontline Magazine, a porn magazine that in the 2000s still gave DVDs. There were lots of money. I was paid EUR 400 or 600 in exchange for an article on the hottest beaches in Spain – although I have never been on such a beach. I became the editor-in-chief of the magazine and then I was called by the Marie-Claire magazine. Yes: from editor-in-chief of a favorite porno magazine to editor-in-chief of a fashion women magazine.

Did you want to fly inside?
It was an infiltrate, of course. It was a fun time, it didn't last long. One curious thing was that in women's magazines she didn't realize there was a huge crisis. I was welcomed in 2011 and the director thought it was Anna Wintour: I was coming to look in a guided mercedes while journalism was undoing in our environment. He didn't realize they were in Spain from the 15M movement. I too am sorry. I refused to work because I fell in love with an anti-system busy woman whispering to my ears that the work had to be destroyed, and I wanted to be a writer and not that other thing. So I missed the chance to buy a floor, or what I deserved as a sweatshirt that I had eaten for years. And I went back to precariousness. Eat the cabbage soup from the garden of Perales and count the pennies after the festivities of the Vaciador. It was the best time of my life.

And now?
One day I realized the news shift: you had to collaborate with digital media and they paid very little. Gradually I made the way as author and signature, getting some fixed collaborations. But this is very unstable, because a year ago I lost two columns of the coup. If I hadn't published this book, and I wasn't asked for other sessions, workshops or conferences, I don't know what I would have done. I mean, I have more and more livelihoods than I have out of my books, if not, if I had to be a journalist...

 

Gabriela Wiener. Lima (Peru), 1975

Kronikak, saiakerak, poema-liburuak eta eleberri bat argitaratu ditu. Hainbat hizkuntzara itzuli dira bere testuak, hala nola ingelesera, portugesera, polonierara, alemanera, frantsesera eta italierara. Iritzi-zutabeak argitaratu izan ditu Eldiario.es eta El País komunikabideetan, besteak beste. Horrez gainera, bideo-zutabe bat egiten du lamula.pe webgunean. Bere herrialdeko Kazetaritza Sari Nazionala eskuratu zuen, genero-indarkeriazko kasu baten harira egindako ikerketa-erreportajeari esker. Gaur egun Madrilen bizi da.


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