In early September, you published the book, and you've already had several interviews, reports have been written, columns ... To begin with, congratulations! On the other hand, how is occupational integration going?
Thank you! He's being pretty crazy. I didn't think I was going to get that dimension, it's being terrible. I think he is happy. I was nervous. But I'm getting a lot of messages of love, I've been written by quite a few kids with backpacks... So she's being pretty.

I have the feeling that many of you have reminded us of a subject that we have forgotten a little in recent years: prisoners and, in particular, children with backpacks.
So I decided this was the time: I think that when we talk about jail and kids with backpacks, we've started talking suddenly in the past. The dispersion in the Spanish State is over and there seems to be no problem anymore. We are reassuring ourselves in a negative sense. I wanted to put the matter back on the table and remind you that the prisoners who are still in the French state are hundreds of kilometres away and that their children continue to suffer what we have experienced.

In addition, in these times we are building the story from other points of view. I do not separate myself from the first view of men: Look at Azkarate pulled out the testimonial book about exiled children, Lander Garro's Little War, the illustrated album Zenbat lo, the thesis just finished by Olatz Harmful obeitia... I have not thrown into the empty pool; others have also opened the way for me.

What place would you say that children have been given backpacks in the collective narrative of the Basques?
I would say it's been small, built from the eyes of adults, and a little bit of grief, the victim has tied to paper. It's understandable, because children are very vulnerable beings, and when they're in a cruel situation, their hearts shrink. But it's been a very poor place and built by others.

Did you start this work with the intention of answering it?
Yes. I've always had a tendency to write, but I never thought I would end up creating a novel on this topic. But, about to end the dispersion, when all the prisoners in the Spanish State were above Madrid, to “celebrate” it, many media outlets began to interview ex-prisoners; in general, former male prisoners. They asked their father about the bus going to Puerto de Santamaría prison in Cádiz (Andalusia). I thought, “What is this, a joke? On this bus have not been the ex-prisoners, but relatives, friends, couples, mothers... Do you really have to ask the ex-prisoners too?” So, driven by some outrage and a feminist awareness, I started writing a text. He finished having an opinion article published in Naiz and walked a little to say that it is enough to focus the matter only on former convicts. I also wanted to remember that at the time when the slogan of unconditional love was spreading, “our girls are the best, they have come to the port every weekend…”, I wanted to remember that yes, it is worth applause, but they did not do it just for love, which was also a political militancy. And, at the same time, fully conditioned: Who could really decide whether I wanted to go on like this or not? What have we done with those who decided no, as a political movement, how have we dealt with them? The article echoed and many feminist friends in the area thanked me for writing it.

In addition, I participated in the Women and Prison Workshop at the Young Feminists Meeting 2021. One of the conclusions of the workshop was that we needed to focus on other looks, which gave me a push to respond. Go to the edges and, taking into account that there are still more peripheral edges, taking advantage of the opportunity that the experiences gave me, to create something.

Knowing that the work has autobiographical elements, it is easy for readers to pick up in the form of nudes. It is not an easy situation, let alone a work that has given you entrance to the plaza of literature. When
I started writing the book, I wasn't very clear about what I was doing, if it was going to be fiction, novel ... But soon I realized I didn't want to focus on my own experiences. On the one hand, the fact that there are so many boys and girls with backpacks in this town, focusing on the experiences of a single person would cause many gaps in the story. And, on the other hand, because I felt a certain startling fear that I would put myself in the middle like this. So I decided to complete it with the experiences of some friends around me and take advantage of it to do a collective exercise, both in the writing process and in everything from here on.

To do this, I have noticed the recurring events and sensations that children have come out with backpacks when we have come together to do a little therapy or to take boats. I wanted to introduce them either. As I didn't remember many passages of my childhood, I went to ask my mother and friends around me to remember or, if not, to think about it. It's been an exercise of imagination, thinking about how we would act at the age of five when we came to jail without knowing what prison was. It's even because of the behavior of the children around them.

Many of us are familiar with the atmosphere of the novel, even though the reality of children with backpacks is not so close. It is an opportunity to give depth to what has been heard in the third person.
That's what I wanted to look for. I think we have a little mystified the impact of jail, which we minimize. We've been so romantic, we're not really aware of the consequences that prison can have. In the Basque Country, very few studies have been carried out on children with backpacks. One of the conclusions of the End of Degree Work that I did about this is that jail conditions enormously the development of boys and girls in different areas. And since we've gone to blur it in some way, we haven't analyzed the trauma that this can cause to a child who has been in jail in the center throughout his life, or to a child who lived on the street with his father or his mother and who has suddenly been taken away from him by his father, who has been present in detention and directed a gun to him ... The situation can create many more problems than we think, not only to children with backpacks, but to any child whose parents are in prison.

When I read, I've had the feeling that in general we've looked at the quantifiable part of jail, we've repeated the number of kilometers, the hours, the money spent on gasoline -- and we've had to look at the emotional implications behind it.
That has two paths. On the one hand, the degree of rigidity with which we have so far had to look at the situation. If we leave a loophole to emotions, they're most likely to cross. So, you've got to build the shell, or you're going to build it; you're going to hide with the kids' innocence what you're living. As a result of this great shell, we ended up believing, also as a movement, that the day on which the prisoner is released, the suffering ends. I decided that the book wouldn't end there, because it cost me much more for my father's return and the adaptation process than the previous one.

In fact, you learn to live in the situation that you're born in. For me, this was the usual thing, and to support it, we have a built network: physically, to help you make trips, economically, socially, emotionally, if it protects you from a nearby environment... And then he comes out of jail and everything is happiness, according to the story. And it's not true. Because suddenly a father or a mother you barely know comes to your house. In general, very special links have been created between those who have lived at home, with mothers, grandparents ... When you feel something shared, you learn to take special care of yourself. And now you have to learn to live with that new person and, in addition, in some way, it will condition your connection with those other people. We have not yet given the floor to that effect. It's hard for me to bring him to words, because I've been judged for that.

When the dew is a baby, in the attempt to soften the situation, they lie to him in the immediate vicinity of the prison. The widespread habit of lying to children doesn't seem fair, but at the same time, how to make the unjust habitable by itself? In any case, I believe that the tendency we have as a society to infantilize children is obvious.
Yes, and I would say that today there is a change from when we were kids with backpacks. In the case of those around me, at least they don't tell them that my father is working. At a time when so much attention is being paid to emotional development, autonomy, etc., many mothers and grandmothers, who are around me, have decided to be clear with the children. With some limits, of course, because dialogue cannot be as deep or developed as you like.

It seems to me to be a very difficult decision, because the negative connotations that come with the prison make it problematic for the child to be aware of the situation. If it's not helped with other thoughts about jail, we have that malefactor in our head. It's the conflict in the book. “My father is a criminal, he is cruel... but how can it be if he loves me so much and my mother loves him so much?” There's this myth that everyone in jail is bad and deserves to die.

The book takes steps to disassemble a figure that is a great column in the Basque Country: the Basque Gudari. Where does that come from?
From one's own experiences. Since I've seen it in the neighborhood, in the militancy spaces... On the other hand, many children with backpack are contradicted by this vision of parents. When you're young, when you're not aware that there's a system that forces your father to be in jail, it's not easy to be clear that he's not deciding to live like that. I think many of us felt it was a two-sided story: on the one hand, covert work and the emotional support of those who have educated us, generally done by women, mothers and grandmothers; and on the other hand, that other figure that we were constantly honoring, that was not in our homes, and that we have sometimes understood as responsible for our pain. Although not, it can be understood from the point of view of a child.

As in other areas the feminist movement is trying to explain it, in our political movement we lacked recognition for these women. Not to transform these figures into idols, but to rethink what we attribute political recognition, what decisions are the ones we applaud and which are not, and even what we take away from the same nature of decision. In fact, it seems that couples of male prisoners have had to be mothers. And that's why, because they haven't been able to afford to decide themselves, when the outsiders have been girls. And on the contrary, how many women prisoners have we had for years and years without an intimate bis?

After all, I wanted to make it clear what had happened in our homes, who has sustained our lives; those inside, unfortunately, have not been able to do so.

If the couple and parents are in the background, Ihintza also has those left at the top: Guides of the collective Mirentxin, more distant relatives and friends… Fleeing from the
absolute drama I wanted and not imagining a child who has a very difficult life, who lives super sad, in painful conditions... Because I think a lot of us haven't lived that way, it would be a little bit fake. And there have been so many figures who have worked to make all this as stimulating as possible for us, because it seemed essential to me to mention, for example, the Mirentxin guides. For example, my mother doesn't drive, and we've always had the opportunity to go visit her: when my father was in Puerto, on the bus; then with Mirentxin, or with my friends, with the family... It seemed essential to me that these people should be recognised, which has also been a political decision. It's emotional, but it's also political. We have had a tremendous level of organisation to organise all that solidarity in this people.

It is true that the story has a certain simplicity: they are violent and painful situations, and the sensations have presence, but the narration is not chained in them. Have you avoided it voluntarily?
Yes. The voice of the child has given me a good opportunity: to make problems a little simpler through innocence and to create a little more absurd humor. That's what Editor Garazi Arrula helped me in. Then, as the Ihintza grows, it gets deeper into the problems and into the political reflections.

On the other hand, when the book came and I read it remotely, I realized its intensity. It reads quickly, because it has a very light letter and that makes you take you. But when you stop to think about what you've read, emotional intensity, politics ... It's terrible.

As for the structure of the work, we start from the moment when the father leaves jail to go back. Where does that decision come from?
I wanted to break it, as I've already said, with the narrative that pain stops when my father leaves jail. I wanted to demystify that moment, because many boys and girls with backpacks said that the same day we felt pretty drowned, stressed. There was happiness, of course, but the moment itself was a little nasty to many. And it seemed to me that it could be a sign of intentions, of all the emotional vicissitudes that work would bring. Similarly, the moment itself is removed from the focus and the possibility of focusing on the anterior and posterior opens. It's another passage, not a work center.

The work is closed with the cry that prison is exploding. And that is that prison has had a great deal of weight in the history of Euskal Herria over the past decades, but it is not a matter for us alone.
I wanted to end this way, on the one hand, by recalling that today there are 97 children who are educating 62 children without parents. I wanted to make an appeal, because at this time we are putting prison at another political stage, but I believe that there are still many years left before the nightmare is over, and that there are colleagues who are going to be paid, who are going to have to suffer a lot. So he has that fear, the desire not to forget it.

Prison is a barbarity in itself. It's a whole system for destroying people, concrete people. Edge. And I can foresee that in our movement, when we go back home to those we consider "our prisoners," it may happen that they forget about jail. I think it can be a battlefield that we'll forget because it's not going to condition our environment so much.

We have also been able to deal with prison under much better conditions than others. Without neglecting the anguish, but there has been an entire network organizing people to visit, supporting the prisoners financially and emotionally ... There are those who have to face prison in a much more precarious situation, and even more so their children. And in addition, they have to deal with the stigma of jail. Unlike us, at least in some places. This social stigma is lived in their own meats: if parents are in prison for theft or for drug issues, in the eyes of society, in the eyes of their peers, teachers and even their relatives, parents deserve to be in prison. It is not a tool to seek solutions to the problems that can be generated in society, but to perpetuate them and to hide concrete people. It is an effective and brutal tool.