Ana Tijoux, Chilean singer, during an interview for the launch of her book in a theater in Santiago, Chile. Sofia Yanjari
On May 9th, Ana Tijoux surprised the 12,000 spectators who attended the Alicia Keys concert at the Movistar Arena in Santiago de Chile. Almost at the end of the show, the Franco-Chilean rapper took the stage to interpret an excerpt of the 1977 song that made her world famous, right in the middle of the American singer’s song Girl on fire. The two artists sang and joked to the applause of the audience.
A week and a half later, Tijoux was back on stage. This time it was a more intimate date: the publication of his first book, Get Out the Voice (Penguin Random House, 2023), which he has been writing for the past two years.
It’s after 3.30pm and Anamaría Tijoux Merino (Lille, France, 45 years old) walks in a hurry to the Teatro Oriente in the municipality of Providencia, east of Santiago. Say hello and go to the dressing rooms. Outside, her fans of different ages are already eagerly awaiting her, posted on the steps of the theater. The artist who has cast a spell on Thom Yorke, David Byrne and Iggy Pop – the latter named her one of the best rap singers in the world and included her on his show in Chile in 2016 – settles comfortably on the dressing table, the the actor and director owned Chilean Theater, Tomás Vidiella, a room with walls painted dark red, beveled mirrors with gilded frames and old photographs that transport you to another time. He wears a denim jacket and pants, and an orange wool hat to match his sneakers. Very rapper. She’ll later take the stage in a sleek white two-piece suit and fuchsia sneakers, a renewed look with messy short hair that she already shared some hints about with Alicia Keys.
He speaks quickly like in his songs, with that unmistakable voice, between soft and whispering. And he talks about his book, about the drawers he opens on each of its pages, and how different it was to write with ease, without worrying about whether the words sound right or wrong, like he does does when he composes the lyrics of his songs. “That was without an audience, without rehearsals, without instruments, without applause, without lights, without nights, without changing dates. It was cool [chilenismo de ‘muy bueno’] being alone with the computer I loved the place where you could go in and dig and dig,” he says.
Ana tells without shame and conventions parts of her childhood, her youth, her encounter with music, with sexuality, her experience with motherhood. Talk about heartbreak, revitalize conversations and let go of your fears, worries and anxieties. “While I was making a record, I felt scared several times. An inexplicable panic. Like a gentleman, he settles badly on the sofa. He lights his cigarette without haste. He sharpens his brain by spotlighting apparent darkness and keeps smoking. I’m sweating cold,” he writes about his creative process.
The book was also an opportunity to travel inwards, to meet his “halftones”, he tells EL PAÍS. The last few years have not been easy for Ana Tijoux. One of Latin America’s most influential rappers has suffered the deaths of two of her half-siblings: Tania in 2019 from cancer and Patricio in 2021 from Covid-19. Removing the voice, he says, was also a therapeutic exercise in giving yourself permission to cry: “Removing it on the outside, understanding death and, above all, absence. And look back, how were my relationships both as a couple and with my parents, with myself, with how I see myself, with how I feel.”
At 45, he admits he feels the fragility of life. “You get old. Gradually, our friends get sick, family members leave. Life slips through your fingers. “When you’re 20, you feel invincible,” he laments. And then he laughs: “It sounds clichéd, I meet a Ricardo Arjona with all his letters, but these are necessary exercises in life.” Then you return to your personal childhood with the elderly, the parents and the childhood of the children . “Everything revels in the same wave,” he says while gazing at a fixed point in space that evokes these memories.
She also explores her relationship with Chile, a country she only met at the age of six, in the early 1980s, traveling alone from France to meet her relatives, and with whom she has a complex relationship who is marked by their parents’ exile in the dictatorship. “Chile is this strange place where I harbor strangeness that is as lonely as it is abusive, where I feel out of place,” he writes in the opening pages of his book.
Ana no longer lives in Chile. He traveled to France just before the 2019 social outbreak in Chile to take care of his sister, was separated from his partner, returned to the South American country because of the pandemic, where he was imprisoned for five months before fleeing again, this time to Barcelona, a city to which she was invited by a friend and which fascinated her. There, he says, he enjoys talking to Salvador, his 60-year-old bookseller friend, and interacting with people of other ages and professions. “Here (in Chile) everything is very segmented: rapper with rapper, academic with academic. And further sub-segmented by age.” Still, he says he misses his people and will likely live in South America again.
“Chile is an earthquake-stricken, schizophrenic, bipolar country, between depressed and euphoric. It’s like their geography, their tectonic plates are like their personalities,” he tells this newspaper, theorizing on the events of recent years. “When I see this Chile after the May 7 election and this political crisis, I say to my friends, ‘There is a global political crisis.’ What happens is that Chile only looks at Chile.” Beyond the international context, however, Tijoux says: “Chile always hurts, that is its mercy and its misfortune.”
Rebellious, anti-system, left-wing, Tijoux writes in his book about October 18, 2019, when he released “Cacerolazo”, the song that eventually became a kind of anthem for social protests. And he also writes about September 4, 2022, the day of the referendum in which the rejection of the new constitutional text won, a failure for the left. “I feel like a girl again, I feel like a foreigner again. The constitutional convention was lost. Not only was a vote lost, once again the turmoil of impunity and oblivion won,” he notes.
Sitting in the red dressing room with her legs crossed and her arms crossed, she thinks for a few seconds and confesses, “I’m going to say something terrible: I figured this shit would end.” [el desastre]“. It refers to what happened in Chile after the social outbreak. “There were indications that something was about to happen: the high Chilean oligarchy would never allow the pockets of those running this country to be touched. It’s like there’s always been a reversal in Chile.” He speaks of the victory of the far-right Republican Party in the last election on May 7, in which the Conservatives got 35.5% of the vote and won 23 of the 51 city councillors, who will draft the new constitutional proposal. And he says, “There’s no need to be afraid, now more than ever you have to fight without breaking down.” They’re thinking people, they’re brilliant enemies, and that makes them extremely dangerous. You have to be smarter than them, I see it as a political chessboard,” he affirmed.
In any case, the counterbalance for Tijoux does not lie in the current government. The artist met President Gabriel Boric and some of the current ministers at the time she wanted to play at the University of Chile and they were student leaders but she says they are not friends. The author of the feminist single Antipatriarch criticizes the current government: “They rule with fear and I think a lot of people feel that. Here the corporations dominate, here the oligarchy rules.” attracted.” The interview time has expired. Ana stops, says goodbye, says she doesn’t want any photos and that it’s time to get ready. The show must begin.