• Interview.Gina Rippon: "All brains are different, but not because they are male or female"
  • Literature Goodbye Harry Potter: A bookstore withdraws JK Rowling's books for her opinion on transsexuality

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.

/ TUSQUETS

In Argentina the transvestites are organized, how did it happen? We review the history, we study. We quit, because we were afraid, because we were sentenced to death, and we began to wonder why. Why am I being impoverished, why are my friends dying of AIDS at age 24, why is the client wanting me and hitting me. "She wants me and hits me," you say. How is this explained? Is there a fascination with the transvestite? I don't know if I should answer you or a transvestite who has more studies than me. But I dare say that this dazzle comes from mystery. Of bodies treated as paintings, as sculptures, bodies that dress with art, gestures that are learned as dances. Women who dare to live that way with the entire universe against it, that willingness to exist within danger, within threat. Who is not fascinated by someone like that. Then there is the desire for transvestites, which is by no means unhealthy, as Carson McCuller said in The Ballad of Sad Coffee that any human being can be an object of love. What is unhealthy is thinking that you can kill a desire for us, killing us, humiliating us, robbing us, forcing us to prostitute ourselves. That is another song. There comes into play a word that I detest and it is transphobia because I do not think it is a phobia what people feel towards us. It is a pure hatred, learned from the cradle, with a lot of dedication and that could be extended to any human being who shines, who lives, who exists without that Victorian discretion to which cis people have become accustomed to living. perhaps not the best term. In Spain it is no longer used.It is also true that there are many that do not want to be named that way, because they simply do not want to be or because the white and European nomenclatures have decided that there is a whole category that seems to order our bodies according to categories that many of us (and when I say many, I say looooooooooong), we don't even wonder. This has had its shake in politics: right now, a transvestite-trans labor quota law is being discussed in Congress. That is to say, like the homosexuals who appropriated the word puto, marica, maricón, cola, we take that word to name ourselves and discharge the destructive power of their insults to the ground. Perhaps I could say, irresponsibly, that we say transvestite to escape their categories. Sometimes, and paraphrasing Estela Díaz Varín, I say that I am nonsense. And something else: I do not admit that we are named masculine. Transvestites never. I have been in notes in which people commit that aggression and I have withdrawn. It's always THE shemales. And in times of feminism where we have learned that NO is NO, you should respect that we want to be called like that. Your book begins with an old transvestite, very strong in heart and courage, who decides to 'adopt' a child. From Las Malas she knew only the story of La Tía Encarna and El Brillo de los Ojos. That encounter. The park, where all the transvestites are working and she who hears a cry and goes looking for its origin. She finds it and takes it home. He also knew about the mystery of La Difunta Correa's son, a popular Argentine saint who was found dead in the desert, with her son suckling from those already lifeless boobs. For the Deceased, a sanctuary and a legend were set up, but it was never known what happened to her son two centuries ago. It seemed nice to me that this child, who is found two centuries later, was the son of the Difunta Correa, in the hands of another popular saint like La Tía Encarna. How was the writing process for this book? When Juan Forn asked me to Send some of what I had written I had the opportunity to send you a book on transvestite eroticism that I have been ruminating for a few years or this story, which was more novel. I think I made a mistake, which was to send along with that story, some passages of my transformation, a kind of explanation of a mystery, what was happening in my head and in my family (which was the same at the time), regarding that fire that was to feel profoundly different from everyone, without knowing how to name myself. Juan Forn liked that there was this mixture in history, between the absolutely fictional and those passages, if you like, more autobiographical. After its approval, I continued the story without knowing where it would end. He asked for some things, from his curiosity, suppose: what references did he have at that time, if it was Madonna, if he was a film actress ... and I decided to include Cris Miró who was one of the first transvestites in Argentina to have visibility media. That's how it was ... like all writing, let's say I was like a dowser, I went with a stick over the desert and with intuition I discovered where there was water. What was Camila like then? She was in an exultant moment. I had a duet with a guitarist, we sang jazz in a bar in Córdoba, I did theater, I gave acting classes, I had as a lover a carpenter who was a little short but very attractive, she saw me in the mirror and I. liked her, she wanted me very much. The Camila who wrote Las Malas published the year of that writing, a book called The Unhelpful Journey about how I became a writer. The Camila who wrote Las Malas had been psychoanalyzing for two years with the best analyst I could meet. My parents waited for my visits with mountains of food, delicacies and we went to the river every time. I wrote that book in a moment of much reflection and tranquility. People misunderstand Forn's prologue and think that I wrote Las Malas at that time of the novel and think that it is a faithful portrait of my life. And I like to tell them that they are wrong and that they don't understand the texts. This leads them to miss hearing a new voice in literature, with a very different view of the world, due to the desire that transvestites only talk about transvestites. What a wasted opportunity to stay calm.

/ TUSQUETS

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 ».

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Argentina
  • Feminism
  • literature

LiteratureBisexual, censored and fascinating: Violette Leduc, the bastard of French literature

CulturePatti Smith: "Sometimes in my dreams I visit loved ones who have already died ... It is wonderful"

CultureThe abstract vision of cities over cities, by Eduardo Hoffmann

See links of interest

  • Last News
  • English translator
  • TV programming
  • Quixote
  • Work calendar
  • Daily horoscope
  • Santander League Ranking
  • League calendar
  • TV Movies
  • Themes
  • Osasuna - Getafe
  • Brescia - Verona
  • Cagliari - Atalanta
  • Parma - Fiorentina
  • Villarreal - Barcelona