The writer enters the stage and the murmur that reigns in the Juan Rulfo Auditorium falls silent. He has very black hair, short, straight, close to the head, parted in the middle. An earring in each ear: two long, narrow, golden sticks that beat rhythmically on the neck as you walk. A purple shirt with glitter lines glowing in the white light of the aseptic room. There is applause and a shy gesture. María Ospina sits and looks to the side, as if she doesn’t want to meet the dozens of pairs of eyes that follow her movements. When they introduce her, she smiles uncomfortably. She folds her hands, nods her head, loses her sight at an indeterminate point: it almost seems as if she is praying, a gesture that occurs at the presentation of a prize named after a 17th-century poet and nun is not entirely contradictory.
On his birthday, Ospina received another congratulatory call. A voice on the other end of the phone announced that she had just won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz prize as the Colombian writer walked down “an old street in the center of Madrid.” “A district that still preserves buildings from that strange, eventful, fascinating and very baroque end of the 17th century, which was precisely the period in which Sor Juana lived,” said the author this Wednesday at the International Book Fair (FIL ). Guadalajara, at the awards ceremony.
At 47, Ospina is the second Colombian woman – the first was Laura Restrepo in 1997 – to receive the prize, one of the most important literary recognitions for authors in Spanish-speaking countries, thanks to her first novel “Only a little bit” here (Random House, 2023) . The book, starring two dogs, a scarlet tanager, a beetle and a coroner, “is an attempt to think away from a tradition that insists on the superiority of human order and its rationality, even though humans are precisely a network of inter-species interdependencies “In his speech he said: “Challenge the anthropocentric fantasy that other living beings are irrelevant or inferior.”
On the day of the announcement, Ospina recalled, he was very close to the Royal Palace of Madrid, “which was built with the plunder of America and where the conquest is still shamelessly praised and its violence silenced.” It stands five minutes away a statue in honor of Sor Juana: “It is perhaps the only monument that exists in her honor in Spain.” It moves me that he is there, with pen and paper in his hand, with a stern look at the horizon, in the middle so many statues of empire-building patriarchs, so many women reduced to allegories or mythological figures, so many men on horseback eager to command and occupy.”
María Ospina at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, this Tuesday.Roberto Antillón
“Not knowing what to do with the joy of the news, I walked a few blocks to the statue to thank him, as if I were in desperate need of a ritual and a body.” Because of the altitude, he could did not climb the podium, but his ten-year-old son “climbed it with enthusiasm.” He left some flowers in Sor Juana’s hands. “An Irish couple looked at us perplexed, I heard them wondering about the statue and since I find it difficult to give up my teaching job, I intervened in their conversation without being asked and told them about it,” the author added.
“A celebrated literary voice”
The award ceremony went without surprises. Marisol Schulz, the director of the FIL, acted as master of ceremonies at a long table also attended by the rector of the Claustro de Sor Juana University, Carmen López Portillo, and three members of the jury: the president of the committee, Sara Poot-Herrera, Diana Sofia Sanchez and Daniel Centeno Maldonado. Schulz welcomed Ospina to the literary Olympus to which she belongs since this Wednesday: that of a tradition of high-profile writers such as Elena Garro, Cristina Rivera Garza, Margo Glantz, Gioconda Belli, Almudena Grandes, Camila Sosa Villadas or Daniela Tarazona, the previous winner.
Sticking to a protocol script, with Ospina’s book in hand, Schulz highlighted “this wonderful novel” as “a literary voice celebrated in much of Latin America for its narrative proposal in which it opens a channel to language and the animal gaze “. a poetic and critical form.” Perhaps to tone down the solemnity a little, he added: “I must say that the edition is also beautiful.” And back to academicism: “In this book, María Ospina offers the reader a new perspective on the World that lies beneath other species that we don’t understand as well as we think, other species that are not human, or that we simply choose to ignore. So migratory birds and dogs not only live with humans on the planet, they also suffer a common fate, victims of their own condition that prevents them from hating us.”
Ospina took the microphone to deliver an intense, poetic and passionate speech. The initial shyness has given way to a firm, confident tone, probably the professional deformation of a teacher at Wesleyan University (USA). Although the emotions sometimes made his voice tremble. He remembered his origins, the forests and mountains in which he grew up, the “years of hiking on rural paths and the shortcuts of many of these mountains.” It was an affirmation of nature, the foliage, the rain, the wind, the smells, the sounds, the movements of “a world inhabited by many spices” and the women who explore it. “This book is an attempt, although I know it is limited, imperfect, and full of paradoxes, to lower the volume of human voices so that others can sound.”
“I would like to begin by celebrating the 31st anniversary of this award, supporting women who write and the desire to recognize the duty, the urgency, to tell, to investigate, to philosophize, that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz embodied several centuries ago and which continues to exist today it is urgent to defend it. An award that for three decades has defended literature as the place where the most complex questions arise and those who are convinced of the simplicity and obviousness of the world are challenged,” he said. And a long round of applause ended the speech for her.
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