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Camila kindly declines a zoom video call, preferring the option of a written interview. One more sign of that passion with which those who eventually become writers are sometimes born. Camila writes agile and fast, she says that in her worst time she fed on mate and black bread. Upon receiving her lines, an image appears: Camila Sosa Villada perhaps smoking a cigarette, face to face with her computer, as the Argentines say, as she is. Only Camila inhabits many worlds, mysteries, nights and even sordid homelessness.
She claims to be a transvestite, with all the letters and especially with such a pronoun. Of these, "las travas", he writes in his novel Las Malas (Tusquets editorial), now published in Spain after the maelstrom in Argentina , where it had seven editions in less than a year, last year.
While her novel is translated into different languages, this woman from Cordoba in the other hemisphere tests herself in interviews. "They place a great responsibility on me," he perceives, "that of speaking about people who are like me, about transvestites. I think that I have no right to be wrong, that I must be correct, intelligent, friendly, not angry, lucid and concise in what I say because perhaps there is no other opportunity to denounce that the transvestites are being persecuted, that they are impoverishing and murdering us. , that we have an average life of 35 years in Latin America ».
The place of the book is the Sarmiento Park, in the center of that Córdoba that is being described, in which Tía Encarna, María la Muda and El Brillo de los Ojos, some of their characters, grow, age, practically disintegrate, and in which suddenly the shelter of trees where the transvestites prostitute themselves becomes an idyllic green in which there are athletes and happy families. It could be said corny: the book is stark. But neologism draws it better: it is a dark book . Strongly darkened . Behind the fiction and the story is Camila becoming aware of her body, her body, all of them, the ones they hear from some parents who will end up "in a ditch, with AIDS, with syphilis, with gonorrhea. If you are like that, nobody will love you ». He says it in Las Malas : The body as «a cathedral of nothing».
What was the most complicated of all? The most difficult thing when I studied was poverty. It was the root of all pain. At that time I used to fix myself with black bread and cooked mate and it was fine, because I was young, but as the months passed, or just a year, I felt tiredness, the aging process through pain. Being poor and transvestite, not having access to any opportunity to make that poverty possible to live, aging was rapid. Double or quadruple, everything had that plus, which is what makes transvestites withdraw within themselves.Sosa Villada belongs to "a generation of transvestites" forged "in the most hostile and murderous country." 25 years ago, in Argentina, you could not go to the supermarket without the Police waiting at the door to take you into custody. The acquisition of rights was unthinkable. We were condemned to this illegality. It was illegal to be a transvestite. Today, at least here, we have a law of gender identity, we are visible, those of us who are visible try to tell about the invisible ones, the others like us who could not escape anonymity and misery ».
While in Spain transsexuality is at the center of the feminist debate , Camila does not even value the use of the term. «We did not meet in our homes to say: I am a transsexual because I had a genital reassignment, a vaginoplasty, I am transgender because I put on silicone and you are a transvestite because you want to name yourself that way, with an insult. Here, for the people, shemale was always said (as one of the softest words) to insult us. We were all transvestites. So for a while now, that word encompasses an entire community. Of course, there are people who take more time and say, for example, trans women, trans men, but the truth is that on the street we are transvestites. We demand from our femininity that we are treated as feminine, we don't say transvestites, we say transvestites ».
Having clarified the matter, it is difficult not to ask this author, from whom we will soon be able to read in Spain her first collection of poems - although "corrected, amputated and mutilated" - if she considers that transphobia is increasing. I don't know if it has ever decreased. It seems to me that there are moments that cause it to manifest and others that do not. And it has not decreased, because there were no public policies for it to decrease. And that's the transodium . And it must be said: it is not fear, it is not a phobia that makes them scream and sweat cold. No. It is a deep and devastating hatred that begins by consuming them and then us.
There is no zoom video call, we do not see Camila, but letting go in writing easily gives us one more sample of who she is: «I would like to talk about what I read, the wonderful Sharon Olds, the beloved Lucia Berlin or the most Joyful, it was Lorrie Moore. I would like to talk about the beauty of Anna Magnani, her devastating acting talent. But instead, I am with this responsibility and I feel very stupid, very incapable of representing the transvestites as they ask me when doing interviews for Las Malas. I keep writing, it's not something I choose, I do it whenever I need to, hours with back pain in front of the computer. Also waiting for the end of the confinement to sing again in bars or wait in the dressing rooms to go out to act. Sometimes a very handsome man visits me and stays on weekends and I discover that love has calmed down, that it is a feeling that has a rhythm, that it is possible to do it, as books are made ».
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