Cristina Rivera Garza (Tamaulipas, 59 years old) has immersed herself in all literary genres and emerged victorious from all of them. He has dabbled in short stories, novels and essays, but few people know that his first foray into poetry was “thousands of years ago” when he won a competition organized by the Mexican magazine Punto de partida. Although it is her lesser-known side, the renowned author has almost 20 years of poetic production behind her, which she now summarizes in the same volume under the title My name is a body that is not there (Random House). “Storytellers need to read poetry continuously. “There is a very important tension for the writing process,” confirms Rivera Garza, who welcomes EL PAÍS in the editorial office.
This compendium of five books is, for the narrator, the “X-ray” of the fiction texts she was publishing at the same time; a kind of side B of the tape. There are certain continuities: bodies that get sick, bodies that disappear in a Mexico that continues to kill its women. However, over the years other aspects of his poetry were altered and he added new elements: verses severed from the body like a limb; Poems that are blog posts, telegrams, tweets; Definitions from Wikipedia and medical diagnoses that take on a lyrical dimension under his tender gaze.
But those poems were also, and she now realizes this, one of her attempts to tell the story of her sister’s femicide, which is expressed in her novel Liliana’s Invincible Summer (Random House, 2021), which won her the Xavier Award . Villaurrutia. Recently elected as a new member of the National College, the woman hasn’t decided what she’ll explore from now on, but her mind is filled with all the girls who, despite everything, managed to survive.
Questions. Before this one he explored many genres. What does poetry offer you that you cannot find in others?
Answer. A lot of what I’ve done over the years has moved between genres and challenged the idea of gender. But the truth is, this book will be on a bookstore shelf that says “poetry.” And when I think about it, one of the definitions I like the most comes from an American author named Lyn Hejinian, who argued that poetry is the language we use to study language. It’s a definition that opens many avenues for me, that makes me think about many things, and that doesn’t reduce them to one or two concrete things, but opens them up to the world.
Q A kind of journey to the origins.
R Definitely an exploration. But let’s assume we do the same thing when we write novels, right? They don’t just tell a story. At least the kind of narrative that interests me is also a process of exploring what language is and how it intervenes in us.
Q In all volumes there are certain recurring themes such as the body, gender, illness or violence. What fascinates you about them?
R You’re obsessed because you can’t see it, aren’t you? You return to things that are outside of your awareness. So it was a bit of a surprise for me to see all these books together. I see there are things I’ve been chasing like a bloodhound. And I think that this question of a body’s habitability was definitely a puzzle powerful enough to keep coming back to in very different ways.
Q The title you have chosen indicates your absence. How do you think and name what is not there?
R I think writing has a lot to do with that distance. It’s a technology that helps us to overcome distance, but to overcome it you have to acknowledge that it exists. Writing presupposes the body, which is not there. But of course these poems are also deeply touched by the so-called drug war and the process by which this country has been transformed into a vast mass grave with a violence that still assaults us today.
Q Is poetry also a political battlefield?
R When we work with language, we work with history, with all the experience that is already there and that builds the language itself. Whether we like it or not, we decide our own struggles and those of others. I like to think of poetry as an open and presently aware field that can be traversed by technologies, energies, concerns and conflicts.
Q Some of his poems in particular are created with a machine that mixes texts from different people. Can technology make poetry?
R Note that I believe writing has always been closely related to technology. A pencil and paper are technology, a specific technology, but it is. More traditional notions of writing portray us a little as if it’s something that happens in the mind and that goes down and reflects on the page, as if there’s no mediation between one thing and another. And I believe that we don’t write with our heads, but with our bodies. I was very interested in what was coming out then, which were language cutting machines that made visible choices that we always make when we write. We always write with others, and sometimes those others are human, sometimes they are the tradition in which we write, and sometimes they are not human, like these machines.
The Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza.Aggi Garduño
Q He defends writing as a collective practice and uses a very interesting term: public imagination. how would i explain it
R The first three books published under the title Los textos del yo are collections of poems which, if read without this discussion, would seem like confessions that represent the truth, the web of the planet, about you. I initially wanted to bring them together under that title, a bit like that ironic wink. What has been a topic there for years, in La imaginación pública, the first poem is a paragraph from an article by the Argentine theorist Josefina Ludmer, which impressed me a lot and in which she mentions this topic. When we write we not only express ourselves, there is a production process that goes beyond that. And when we use this language of the many, we are part of an idea that cannot be individual but plural.
Q In the text he quotes from Josefina Ludmer, he says that he doesn’t care whether his writing is literature or not, whether it’s fiction or not. What is important to you?
R Part of Ludmer’s argument related to what she understands in literary terms as the 20th century: a time when literature liked to think of itself as an autonomous field with its own rules. And he said, well, that’s not true. First of all, reality is not reality, it is also laced with fiction. I was very interested in this idea and it questions how we value the literary. How we can measure this style of writing is its ability to create the present tense.
Q And what does that mean?
R I would say it’s their ability to dialogue, their ability to affect the environment in which they perform.
Q On one occasion she said that all previous books prepared her to write the book about her sister’s femicide. After writing it, is sadness still the driving force behind your writing, or do you feel like you’ve closed a chapter?
R I think the grief doesn’t stop there, especially when it comes to impunity. Impunity keeps a watchful attitude and a very open wound. But what the writing does, I think, or at least what I’m left with from this surprising and tremendous experience, is that grief becomes something social that’s more akin to the activation we’ve been talking about, this ability to produce reality. I hadn’t thought that this book of poetry would be the one that would follow the publication of my sister’s book, but I really enjoyed the jump from one to the other.
Q This compilation covers almost 20 years of writing but ends in 2015. Have you written poetry again since then?
R As I write more and more related books, the urge to call something poetry has weakened. However, a few months ago someone asked me if I could post unpublished poems and I said no. And then I kept that in mind. I went back to my house and started looking on my computer and I found a file of poems. And I thought: Wow, where did that come from?
Q Did you rediscover something in it after forgetting it?
R Discover them like this first, because there are many of them and some of them are also written in English. I didn’t have a clear memory of this process, and many of them correspond to my experience as a migrant in the United States. Something I wrote very little about directly in Spanish.
Q The theme itself challenges you to tell it in one language or another.
R One is a person in one language and another is a person in another, right? And there are things you give yourself permission to do in one language that you don’t give yourself permission to do in another language. I have lived in the United States for many years, but I have not taken it upon myself to publish what I have written in any other language. I’m like a secret bilingual author [ríe].
Q Do you find it more modest to write in a second language or to recount intimate experiences in your mother tongue?
R There’s a Canadian author named Anne Michaels who has a novel called Vanishing Pieces, and there she has a character who grows up speaking German and ends up writing in English. One of the things he says that was very enlightening to me is the great freedom that the second language gave him. The focus was on being able to talk about experiences he had had in another language because the experiences were too close and painful. I had always mistakenly thought that the second language limited me. I said I will never reach the level of proficiency I have in the native language. Then I realized that writing isn’t about mastery, quite the opposite. And with that idea, I started writing a lot more in English.
Q For example, when we open up to a stranger and not a friend.
R It can be accurate. There are things I can’t write in Spanish because they are very difficult. In fact, the process in Liliana’s book was to write it in Spanish and English. The English edition came out in February and I cannot present it as a translation as it is in fact an original version. This other emotional relationship is also resolved aesthetically in a different way.
Q Next month is the induction ceremony at the National College. Do you have the speech yet?
R That’s one of the things that took me the most work, because the speeches are like a genre in themselves. I already have a first draft, so I’m quiet. Juan Villoro will respond to the speech and see what happens.
Q What will he talk about?
R I’ve always said that when you’re invited to these institutions, you’re invited because of your personality, then I’ll deal with the issues that have been on my mind, and now I see things more clearly. And offer that perspective as a way to expand the conversation.
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