What has led you to write abroad?

Exile has been created through the fusion of chance and many conditionings. The political situation has been one of those constraints. Suddenly I felt possessed by a retrospective look. As soon as the struggle for the liberation of our people began, I began to look at how my commitment had been carried out, what it was or what I wanted to be. At that time, I also resumed my relationship with Eneko Olasagasti on the occasion of the Windows project to look inside. I started to look at the past and, wow!, I got a whirlwind. I was also curious to devote myself to undermining my task. Literature of evasion, in this case not out of reality, but to immerse oneself in society. With the need to offer something beautiful from this sterile and oppressive environment.

What has been the drafting process for Exteriors?

It's been a delicious process. It's a book that almost occurred to me by itself. The story, the structure, the writing, has been for me a beautiful adventure, also for those who have surrounded me. There is still a source of pleasure every time I receive news from readers. I wrote without difficulty, having set the milestones of what I wanted to tell, I gave myself absolute freedom. Every time I started suffering in writing, I knew I was wrong and I was abandoning it. I don't mean I didn't suck ink until the book gave birth.

How important was the Iban Zaldua quote when the book was launched?

This quote is at the origin of the Accidents section. And within this book, the Accident is of great importance, as it is the main thread of the story. This quote leads me to look back. We feed our present with the past. I wanted to be a writer in adolescence, I was a writer in youth, and then I stopped writing. In this book, I wanted to check how this happened. To review, analyze and offer my trajectory to this collective effort in the struggle for the liberation of Euskal Herria. Until the time I got back. Some splashes have wet the pages. And finally, a kind of answer to the question of that quote, we cannot know what the Basque literature would have been if Mikel Antza had not disappeared in shape, life is in the present, looking to the future, passing past time, passing past time, another question is Exterior, without forgetting anything: Can I be that writer I still wanted to be? Do I have anything to offer to the Basque literature? Are efforts worth it?

In the presentation, you said that the novel is elliptical, because it seemed to you that there are things that cannot be told.

It's an elliptical novel because, since I became involved in the struggle, others have surpassed the strictly personal and have other links and consequences. There is a previous reflection about the individual and the group when preparing the book. In a way, only the “Paths of the Goose” appear, and in the passages ambited in the underground I have been very careful not to denounce anything that should be kept secret when it exceeds that limit. I do not know if it can be measured in figures, what counts or what deserves to be counted. Above all, what to tell, that's what I think. What are the pains and reasons we want to express, for what purpose? The passages of Sasi I have expressly placed them abroad, far from what we could call the first line. I do not think we can get closer. Much less on the path of fiction. What has happened in the time that spans Exteriors is a matter of great importance and influence in the history of Euskal Herria, in the life of each of us. I do not believe that we should approach it in the way of literature, but face to face, without costumes, honestly.

The fact that the writer is again a writer is one of the great yardsticks of the novel, if not the biggest one. Have you ever felt like a writer?

With the opinions I have received from the readers I felt like a writer, yes. I have the biggest cushion in the knowledge of Euskera. As I wrote, I realized that, despite all my freedom, I had a limit, that I was not able to express everything I wanted. I realize that I have gaps in syntax and vocabulary. Although I have tried to live in the most Euskaldun environment possible, abroad and in prison it is really difficult. If you don't use the language, you atrophy. On visits or at home I only have the opportunity to speak in Basque with my colleagues. At the Maison d’Arrête in France we spent at least three or four hours outside the prison, the rest of the time we spent only in silence. The drops of water from this erdaldun are Berria and at the Basque Country Irratia. When we were held alone for two and a half years without any other Basque prisoner, I decided to speak in Basque with officials, police and judges, not only to ask for us to meet with other colleagues, but also to listen to Basque. In October of this year, I will be nine years old under these conditions. So, I'm constantly working on maintaining the tool that I write with.

In addition to the main protagonist, the story features other characters who live in the brush. Are your alterations too?

They have some of me, of course, but they're not my alter ego. Not even the main protagonist is exactly my alter ego. I've also taken advantage of the book to pay some bills with the young man I went. To hit him on the chin.

For some who have read the book, it's a kind of memory book. For others, the storybook. The book tells the reader that what is at hand is a novel. Was he sure he was writing a novel from the very beginning?

I don't know any way to write a novel. Well, every time I've started writing a novel, I've left it unfinished. I have later taken advantage of the raw materials of one or the other of those abandoned buildings, and they have naturally found their place, such as the Goldorak section abroad, as part of an innate novel. There are no strict rules for writing a novel. Also with hospitals, but especially with Exteriors, that genre that is called a novel, has given me total freedom. What's more, I have enough limitations in the day-to-day prison. I've found a land where I could breathe with total freedom. Therefore, I did not write the novel, but write, and the written accounts found their place within a structure. When I got to the finish line, I was told it was a foreign novel, and I was very happy with what I had written in the early readers.

Don't you risk exhibitionism, somehow, putting yourself as the protagonist of the novel? Has it caused you any kind of discomfort?

Yes, you run the risk of exhibitionism, to the extent that I mean myself. In the third person, I also had the option of disguising the character, I haven't, because I think what I meant needed the honesty of the first person. As the story progresses, I have turned to the second and third person, to somehow reflect my distancing from him. The prisoner is torn away from his intimacy in prison: to copy and read letters, to return from sight and to undress them after the cell scans; as far as I am concerned, to the extent that they have classified me as Détenu Particulièrement Signalé (DPS), the guards write in a cashier all about me, how I got up, how I got back, who he has come back with. I don't get used to it, it causes me discomfort and anger, it's humiliation every time. It is not the same to undress on a nudist beach as to undress with separate and threatened clothes. I believe that there is no greater antidote than nudity in the face of the farfaction and disguise of today’s society, in which words lose their transparency. Everyone has to speak for themselves, they have to tell their truth, honestly, without expecting others to do the same, without giving us time to value and denounce the cunning and cunning things we think we see in others.

Isn't the meta-literature already quite exhausting?

Metaphysics were indispensable to the extent that they refer to a writer or writer. There are nominal and hidden references in the book, but I do not think they are essential to understand the book, they are as ornaments or as winemakers, to set and account for the relation of the protagonist with the literature. If you like, you can also consider as a ridiculous attempt to show the credentials of a long-time unemployed at the door in the world of writers the mentions of the writers appearing in Outdoors.

Céline is often listed. Can you say that a trip abroad is until the end of your night?

No. It must be a totally detached person. This is not my case. I have very clear commitments and the limits imposed on me by those commitments are also very clear to me. To do what Céline did, it takes a great distance and social audacity. And being a great writer, mastering language. In a society as small as ours, I don't know if there will be an opportunity and a need for something like this. We are not alone so terribly alone, enraged and hated to that point with everyone. In addition, within the Basque Country, one should walk in comfort, without losing sight of the closeness with the reader, using different registers of society. As far as the Basque Country is concerned, take into account the indecent and digestible use of the three languages of the Basque Country, showing and breaking borders. I do not know if you would be interested in it or what the function of such a work would be.

It concerns the alien and the pre-prison era. In the previous books (Hospital, Chronicles of Bakarmoru...), on the other hand, you talked about prison, what is the next issue you are going to use? Are you going to continue with other issues related to your biography?

Also abroad, I have been imprisoned! And although I was trying to flee, I was ultimately surprised as in the dreams of prisoners. I don't know what the subject of the next book will be. When he mixed abroad, I had other projects in my workshop. I don't know what opportunity I'll have to keep writing, to make known my experiences, my limits, my ability to look deeper into the past of Euskal Herria, even if I like it.

Abroad you mention Salgari and you the importance that this writer had to awaken love for literature. Salgari is an old story for you (I remember his small return in a long time Susa) and the pirate Pellot you mentioned later. Do you intend to rewrite this?

He was writing a novel about the pirate Pellot when we were taken to Mont-Blanc Palacera. It was quite advanced and my intention was to give the pirates of San Sebastian, participating in their approach, because I envision the photos in the newspapers. Once my nephew asked me for a pirate story and started to give me the length of a novel, characters, knot... I also want to address that project, but to do so, the pirates should kidnap me and lock me in the basement of the boat until the novel I’m the Pellot ends!

It can be said that all the books you have published in recent years are somehow very linked to your personal experiences. Those of youth, on the contrary, were rather mere artifacts, and more fantastic. Do you see any change between the fictional ability of then and now?

Many reports of youth were also closely related to personal experiences, although then, due to embarrassment or sadness, they were more hidden in the story. For example, in all the stories of the first collection there is a direct connection with personal experiences. The smell of the blood also exists. The fact that I've been invented a story, today, is less appealing to me. I put aside the ideas that come to my mind without fully developing them. I wonder what literature is? The evasion of reality, the reflection of reality, the disguised reality? Ultimately, behind the invention, as in dreams, there are always experiences. The writer disguises himself behind the imagination to say what he does not dare to say. Because it's also true that the person who is constantly talking about himself, that person who is a writer in himself, can be unbearable.

Do you see this book in another language? Do you intend to speak in Spanish?

As I wrote, I gave myself perfect freedom. I wrote free of the ties between the herd and other cultures. As I have spent many years abroad, looking back, I realized that many of the issues that appear in it would be difficult to understand outside our Basque community, which would require explanations of the keys we handle. When I write, I've also played with word games and writing forms. I cannot imagine how that can be done in Spanish. I do not want to speak in Spanish, but to the extent that I do not write it expressly for the Basque reader, but for the lover of literature, it would be a nice experience that of translation.

In literature, do you consider it important to break the limits of the language, to give a language beyond?

Yes. As he wrote, he had before him what Koldo Izagirre had said in an interview. Among other things, he said: “More than those thousands of stories, a story in a thousand ways. That's literature. The other is the probability calculation.” This extreme attitude of Izagirre paid attention to what the story asked, helped me to escape from a classical novel and to be free when it comes to narrating my interior. And along that road, I've stumbled upon my borders and I've been at a border crossing.

How do you see Basque literature today? What's missing, what's left?

In the state I find myself in, I have a rather narrow perspective. I follow the most important circumstances. I would like to read more of what I read and that is already something. This means that nowadays the amateur literature can survive with the literature published in Euskera, the quantity and quality they publish give to live autonomously in Spanish. The problem is that they don't have their own circuit, we're colonized. In this way it is very difficult to create a sound literary system.

Lately there is a tendency to compare with envy what bertsolaris have achieved, but bertsolaris do not have competences in their own field, they are rare. The Basque writer must compete with everyone and, moreover, in a market dominated by two of the world’s major languages. Until a special and very important effort is made to promote the Basque literature, either its own or the translated one, many good books will go unnoticed again and the advances of our literature will be cowardly. We have to develop concrete planning and our own space. Of course, going to neighborhood literatures is sometimes good. In order for Basque literature to develop, it is necessary to translate the current percentages, to be anxious about the production of writers. The proliferation of groups of readers is a good sign, but we will have to find a way to multiply that effort.

How do you see yourself in the Basque literature? What about your generation, the platoon?

On the one hand, like a new one. On the other hand, like a tanned rookie. Unfortunately, the evolution of the generation in which I started writing has only been indirect. I have occasionally read works by some writers, but not enough to have a full view. I cannot therefore generalise.

What do you read lately?

My reading is conditioned by the circumstances. I haven't met one of my great desires for a long time to get into a bookstore and choose books. I read books that my friends bring me or send me. Those received by the members. Every now and then I ask for a book that interests me, but not as much as I would like. There are many I would like to read, but I am not in my hands. However, I'm always reading two or three books. I read everything, especially novels, in Basque and French. Now, for example, I read the three quarters of the moon of Les Survivants and Ernesto Prat. I am also studying the second birth of the unified Basque Country of Amuriza and studying the history of Spain from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Some people think that romanticism is excessive, especially when women appear (from the Polish student, from the beach).

You surprise me. I didn't know that those passages were romantic. And let alone be too romantic. Why does love appear? More than romanticism, in these two passages the main theme is that of choice precisely, to live without putting a brake on feelings or to let the opportunity pass through commitment to someone or something. The Polish student leaves Paris to give literature to his protagonist in the solitude of the French capital. The story would have been totally different if there had been some step in their relationship. But Marc, already in the arms of literature, resigns to the call of the beach mermaid, reaches a kind of full happiness, where love and literature merge.

The treatment of women has not been enjoyed by some women. What do you say about this?

I feel a little bit alien to this kind of allusion. I had to say that some men didn't like men's treatment either. To respond sensibly, I should know what exactly they did not like. I don't know. I come to the conclusion that someone has considered the women in the book and made the judgment accordingly. Do I leave women in a bad position? Among the views I have received, I have not reached any. I don't write thinking about women or men. For me, in the world, in society, there are people. And there's everything among people. In addition, if I've made an effort, it's been to break the topics that we have about gender. I've tried to show naked, for better and for worse, that human reality that people keep under the gender mask.

According to Zaldua, the tendency towards the ellipsis of the book goes against the development of novelty. Do you agree?

Although I do not have access to the external virtual world here, I know that Zaldua has made some criticism of the book, as he was in Fresnes when they read a point of his criticism on the Txalaparta radio. The book has no tendency to ellipsis. The book leaves out of the story everything that has to do with the struggle for the liberation of Euskal Herria. I think it would be wrong to start telling through the literature what Exterior leaves out of the story, at least today when there is so much resistance to wounds in the blood and to take steps to resolve the conflict. Before we get to the literary world, we all have to do other stops. There has been a great deal of pain, a great deal of suffering and it is still suffering. At least I don't see myself in the jail cell doing literature on the events of the embankment. On the contrary, literature can play a role by saying, “Watch! Here we have a fat account that we have to solve, that we must not forget, that among all we have to solve, as soon as possible.” But it is a very delicate task, both for the direct protagonists of the confrontation and for those who have looked forward. The challenge we face is to make the art that is related to conflict, be it cinema, literature, etc., from a perspective of overcoming conflict and healing wounds. We have to learn how to make art that doesn't fuel confrontation.