The language may not reach, but barbarism must continue to be named. Even Adorno acknowledged his mistake. After Auschwitz, poetry could also be written. Because there are excesses of reality that always rumbled, although naming them is a recent conquest: the SAR did not include feminicide to define the macho murder of women until 2018. Although its historical recurrence was such that it gave to be artistic and fictional material : the sacrifice of Iphigenia; the beatings of Dona Elvira and Dona Sol on Mío Cid ; the witch hunt since the fifteenth century; the Desdemona of Shakespeare; Mrs. Mencía and the Calderonian dramas on honor; Crime and punishment ; Jack the Ripper; La intrusa , by Borges; the noir ...
The enumeration is lost in infinity. But the inflection are writers like Dolores Reyes (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1978) and her Cometierra , one of those incessant bookseller recommendations since her appearance here this fall. A third edition shake in Argentina - "here we are in a particular economic situation so that a book sells so much," he says from Buenos Aires. And another way to name .
Because the literary custom has been "gloating in the description of the female body, usually of a beautiful and naked young woman, who has been mutilated, raped and violated." In short, treat it as a narrative pretext, "a pornography of violence ," such as "that literature that has helped perpetuate the impossible dichotomy of a whore or virgin, who has used the woman's body as a space for all kinds of violence and as an excuse. straw ». The answer, although it warns of the generalization, is served by Edurne Portela (Santurce, 1974), author of Ways to be away (2019) and of Better the absence (2017), two novels also breaking.
«The murders have always been narrated from another voice. I wanted to build a story that pointed not to the spectacular crime or aesthetic enjoyment, but to the lack of these girls and the horror that they are accustoming us to live. In the literature there was a certain naturalization of the murders of women. I wanted to work against that, ”explains Dolores Reyes, who prepares his visit to Madrid and Barcelona in February.
The voice she draws is abrupt and resounding, with lacerating phrases, but with space for beauty between restlessness, "without being panfletary, without neglecting the story." It is the voice of a girl of little subsistence, who reveals where the missing and murdered are if she swallows handfuls of the earth they stepped on. And in that gesture, of swallowing mud from sidewalks and shores where violent bodies are discarded, Cometierra rescues them from non-place, from absence, and evidence that we live in societies that are necropolis for women.
«In Latin America they are killed every hour [In Spain, 52 murdered on November 29]. We cannot continue to participate in a poetic that naturalizes that, as if these women did not exist or have a future ». Dolores Reyes vindicates the identity of the expelled, of those lives that do not qualify as lives, which Judith Butler would say. He has been inspired by "the kids of flesh and blood, victims of precariousness, without water, laburo, with absent families." And criminals are not monsters ; they are parents, boyfriends, neighbors ...
That look supports the author from the first page, when referring to Melina Romero and Araceli Ramos, two girls buried in the cemetery of Pablo Podestá, located 200 meters from the school where she works, in one of those neighborhoods eaten away by poverty, which It reaches 54% of young people. They are not the only feminicides that marked this mother of seven children . He keeps track of his scars: «De Melina noticed the flocks that she left school and liked to dance, instead of emphasizing the femicides that violated her, so small, they put her in a bag and threw her into a stream. A group of men who are now free ». Protest against this pedagogy of cruelty, as Rita Segato conceptualized.
The writing of Dolores Reyes is due to reality and historical pain, it does not unfold from a remote observation or avoid vertigo. «I was born in 1978. Until 82 there were 30,000 missing in my country. I grew up hearing about missing people, by the State or by femicide ».
And delving into that rib, a collective trauma is outlined. Because they also did not go from the memory of Selva Almada (Entre Ríos, Argentina, 1973) the crimes unpunished against Andrea Danne, María Luisa Quevedo and Sarita Mundín, to whom she dedicated her Dead Girls (2014). « Yes I must accompany the book more than the others. He is the one who makes me continue to put the body, go to talks ... », clarifies about a current story, where he investigated the murder of three teenagers from the provinces in the 80s and in those violence that hide with the landscape.
The writer recalls the news of the first of those crimes, when she was 13 years old: "It was a revelation that took me years to understand, but that made such a deep impression on me that I never stopped thinking about Andrea and her death." In his nonfiction novel, he synthesized that panic in one sentence: "Inside your house they could kill you . "
Almada knows Cometierra from her embryo in a shared literary workshop. Both narrators manage to rescue the memory of the murdered women from the underground story and the discourse of macho oppression in environments where the authorities are complicit or incapable. «But gender violence is not a class problem. Perhaps in the upper classes it remains more veiled by the prejudice that it is something that only happens to the poor. The subject questions me since I was little. In the neighborhood there were situations of violence as a couple, everyone knew but nobody did anything, it was a matter of that home ».
But it was not, it is a social plot, a bloody collective marrow. Dolores Reyes alludes to her obsession with the characters that do not release loved ones . In fact, he has tattooed on his back Dawn and is already wide-eyed , beginning of El Limonero real , by Juan José Saer, about the duel that turns time into a spiral. «They get stuck looking for what society decides to forget».
Reyes and Almada are a kind of antigons who do not abandon the victims and object to the sexist regime by mapping the map of domination . Both are part of a literary corpus that problematizes the real, in such a cross between the referent and the story that shows how macho violence is a stable language . "Many writers are trying to understand why violence against women and the consequences it has on us and the social fabric in which we operate," explains Edurne Portela.
They are not oasis, but watchtower. Already in the nineteenth century, against impunity of the other sex, Emilia Pardo Bazán raised columns and stories like La Puñalada . She was angry with academics and claimed the term womanicide as opposed to homicide (from Latin -homo and -cida , kill the man). So neither did the generic masculine.
The term femicide erupts in 1976 with the theoretical Diana Russell, but it is the anthropologist Marcela Lagarde who reformulates femicide to femicide to insist on the misogynistic burden. Mexico will be the first country to criminalize it (2012). In Latin America it is part of everyday language, while in Spain there are those who intend to go back to domestic violence. There they also pronounce transcide and transvesticide.
20 years ago, Portela began her academic investigation in the United States about violence against women and the torture of three writers in clandestine detention centers in Argentina. And in his two subsequent novels he unravels the organic violence that suffocates in intimacy and social customs. His eagerness arises from the lack, that of "those great knowledge holes when it comes to motives, exercise and the consequences of violence . " In Spain, it refers to El Balneario , by Carmen Martín Gaite, or La plaza del diamante , by Mercè Rodoreda, as part of a literary tradition about sexist abuse, accounts of a rosary not very well-behaved that, in Latin America, multiply: Dulce Chacón, Diego Zúñiga, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara ...
Is another fiction urgent that does not reinforce a horror speech? In the imaginary, the part of the crimes in 2666 , by Roberto Bolaño, is unavoidable. With forensic neatness and surgical descriptions, the Chilean details until the overflow of feminicides in Santa Teresa, transcript of Ciudad Juárez (Mexico), between 1993 and 1997. Hyperrealism shapes the unspeakable and denounces the political inaction and tacit connivance of authorities. Although the accumulation would spoil the victims in real life, Bolaño singles them out, to reveal how there are men who use the woman's body to reaffirm her power . «What literature does help is to make visible, to name, to denaturalize the state of things. It inevitably comes out in what we write and transforms the literary gaze, ”says Portela.
From his account there is an urge to political responsibility. Is it possible from the literature? In Argentina, the Ni Una menos movement was born in 2015 from a reading marathon. «We have a minimal role in social transformation. I think that in most of Latin America the power of literature is valued more than in Spain, it is not even understood as a vehicle for debate, ”says Portela. And Almada adds enough: «I don't want to read novels on the subject, I don't want a shelf in the bookstores that says: literature on gender violence; I don't want it to be an editorial niche. I want us to talk about the problem and solve it , to stop being part of our culture. That is achieved with education ». Because in the bodies we do not have so much death, said a memorial to Ciudad Juarez.
THE ART OF SAYING ENOUGH
Regina José Galindo is a Guatemalan artist, 'performer' and poet, who has put an image to this report. She has made the 'body art' her field of representation, her loud shout, her visibility and her laboratory of contrary ideas. In 2005 he received the award for the best young artist of the Venice Biennale . Regina José Galindo is from 1974. His work explores that violence beyond all limits that has been primed with women. And not only explore: make visible, denounce, point, challenge. In 2007 he wrote: «Women are murdered daily in the most brutal ways. Generally the bodies of men appear slaughtered, with a coup de grace, stabbed, suffocated, but that of women presents evidence of having been raped and tortured , before being killed. This is represented in the work 'The objective' (2017).
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