A few blocks north of the book fair, in a small house with a small patio, a group of Latin American poets sit together to share enchiladas and chat. They talk about literature, their travels – past and future – they remember old drunken nights – they speculate about the ones to come – and they share experiences about the ghosts they live with. That of Cristina Rivera Garza (Tamaulipas, 59 years old) is neither scary nor annoying. He is even loving. The last person to feel it was her father when he visited her at her home in Berlin, where she is enjoying a creative fellowship: “He stroked her hair and her back, but very calmly, without scaring her.” Built in October He walked down the aisle for his sister Liliana, who was murdered by her partner in the 1990s, in the hope that he would also feel invited to the party. “He’s been very quiet since then,” he says with the same calmness as his new roommate. She doesn’t really believe in ghosts, although she claims to live with one.
Supporters of Cristina River Garza line up to sign her new book. Roberto Antillon
Rivera Garza has arrived at the house and is walking through the streets of a residential neighborhood away from the hustle and bustle of the literary district. EL PAÍS accompanies you in this walk and in the rest of the activities of a day in which there are not enough hours for a marathon program. For her, walking, even when talking about her work, means switching off, even if it is a verb that she has difficulty putting into practice. “This morning I woke up thinking about the longest project I have, which is a novel that I call speculative non-fiction,” he tells the journalist a few hours earlier as they eat breakfast. She came down in a hurry because she was reviewing the first few chapters and she’s excited. “Sometimes I see it and say, ayyy, but today I saw it and thought: Ah yes, it has something.” If he wasn’t at FIL, he probably wouldn’t have sat down to read it until the afternoon. “I like to get up immediately and write without brushing my teeth or combing my hair before I go out into the world. If you can do it from bed, even better; I drink green tea and write for three or four hours at a time, sometimes longer,” he says. Then life allows it, and he only takes care of “urgent things” when he eats, because what can’t be postponed can always wait a little longer.
The novel she is working on and which she is so excited to read this Saturday is set in a not-too-distant future from which a small community looks at today’s world. “Usually I would invoke the past and bring it up, and I think now I’m doing the opposite,” he explains. The author flees the dystopias that dominate the creative landscape and rejects the idea that the future and the apocalypse are the same: “Our idea of the future has been co-opted. It is necessary to decolonize it.” But his story flees also before “round utopias”. Where she really feels at home is in the conflicts, the questions that arise in the face of a reality as contradictory and challenging as her literature.
Cristina Rivera takes photos with her readers in the hallways of Fil. Roberto Antillon
This narrative, which has gradually been stuck in his head for years, exists parallel to the numerous successes and journeys that he continues to reap and undertake. Liliana’s Invincible Summer (Random House, 2021), perhaps the book that has given him the most The affection of his readers is undoubtedly the one that arrives this afternoon with the majority of followers standing in line to get his autograph. The story of her sister’s femicide gave new impetus to the political discussion about sexist violence in Mexico, and is now gradually taking place in the United States and on the European continent. She has won several awards in France and is a finalist for the National Book Award in the North American country, which she is particularly pleased about. The highlight for them, however, would be the introduction of the term femicider into everyday English language, which lacks a specific word for this phenomenon: “It has been a small activism of mine.” Fate wanted this to happen Day with an intensive agenda coinciding with the International Day against Gender-Based Violence.
After lunch with her poet friends, with whom she is already planning trips to Switzerland, Finland and Estonia next February, Cristina Rivera Garza barely has time to shower and go back to the ring. A press conference, the presentation of his latest book – a compilation of his poetic work My name is a body that is not there (Lumen, 2023) – and the book signing are still waiting for him. “Do you remember I told you that I was calm?” she says rhetorically to the journalist in the elevator of her hotel, before getting to the first activity: “Well, I’m getting nervous.” Every audience is for her new and even though it’s been 24 years since she first joined the FIL, she still thinks it’s huge and unfathomable. The stomach reacts with a slight but persistent tingling sensation.
Cristina Rivera Garza on the way to the fair. Roberto Antillon
She likes the energy that the fair exudes and the opportunity to meet friends and writers she loves or admires, a devotion that she herself inspires as she walks through the venue, where various readers would like to take a photo with her want to make her approach her. or share an experience. They are the same ones who can put up the full poster before their presentation. The audience welcomes her as an accomplice and laughs with her at her interventions. “Wow, that’s a gigantic question,” the author will say several times to her interlocutors, the writers Jorge Esquinca and Isabel Zapata. However, later he will untie the knot that seemed impossible at the beginning, and he will do it as he always does: with a clear, clear and close voice that creates the illusion that it is easy to get to the bottom of things to go.
In any case, she likes to confuse herself, to penetrate to the center of reality and make it her own, rather than trying to erroneously overturn a context that determines everything. “That of a writer who is one by divine inspiration does not exist. He tells us about middle class and big city men. If that were the case, a career like mine would be inexplicable. Writing is a job and it is a job done collaboratively. “Anyone can become a writer,” he encourages potential kamikazes who want to take on this task. If she hadn’t done it herself, she would have liked to devote herself to upholstering furniture. “I love the idea of restoring objects, the idea of bringing something back to life that may have been thrown away or that seems to have already fulfilled its function. You change your clothes and make it part of a house.” Neither the upholsterer nor the writer can avoid the struggle against forgetting the past. “It’s very monotonous,” he admits humorously.
In his work he tries not to repeat himself. Rivera Garza dreams both awake and asleep – “great film productions sometimes have sequels” – and her creativity conquers spaces in her dream and work life. The last territory successfully conquered is theater, the only genre that has not yet been explored. Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz has composed her latest ballet Revolución Diamantina (Glitter Revolution in English version), directed by Venezuelan Gustado Dudamel in Los Angeles, from a text she wrote, which includes six acts and various scenarios related to the feminist struggle. The author’s voice becomes childish and smiling as she exclaims, “She calls me a playwright!”, alluding to one of the positive literary reviews the work has received. “They’ve never called me that before,” he enthuses.
Security guards talk to Cristina Rivera in the exhibition halls. Roberto Antillon
Today this word, or rather its sensation – enthusiasm – creeps in at different times of the day and drives him forward. The author loses neither strength nor vitality. And thank God, dinner is still waiting for him, and the next day he starts again, this time not at the publishing house, but at the National College, where he has been a member since the summer. On the horizon, he has to spend the next month at his parents’ house in Toluca and then return to Berlin to finish his fellowship before returning to Houston, where he lives. Actually, she would like to return home, but that word becomes diffuse when the roots reach on both sides of the border and even across the ocean. “I wanted Liliana to go to a lot of places,” she said occasionally throughout the day. At the moment she seems ready to accompany them.
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