“The Naranjel Girls” is a long-awaited novel due to the time that has passed since the last novel by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara but also due to the success that preceded it in “The Adventures of China Iron”, which was a finalist for one of the awards. most prestigious international events.
“A book is what you think you wrote, but what others actually read may be something else. It is a surprise and I am waiting for readings to see what others read, as happened with China that generated a lot of things and I still don’t understand it…”, he confides in dialogue with Télam about the release of his novel, after five years.
Télam: In each of your novels there is a search or the construction of a real and magical world at the same time. From the reformulation that you did in China with the nationalist story and the literary tradition of the gaucho, to the one now where you revisit the period of the Conquest but from another place. Are they searches?
GCC: Yes, it must have to do with a quest to understand the world or to find new perspectives to see it. And in recent years I have been reading a lot of Davi Kopenawa, Aílton Krenak, Caístulo. There is enough evidence to not even have to argue that the West’s way of seeing the world has been very genocidal and now it is doing ecocide, with which it is doing biocide, there will be nothing left. In other words, a philosophy that is supposed to be rational and the best in the world, etcetera, etcetera, that did not come to the conclusion that something infinite cannot be done with finite resources and that everything together is the fabric of life of which we are a part: without plankton there is no There is air, without trees, without forests, without air the planet catches fire, floods and for that all species are necessary.
In that sense, Amerindian thought is much more sophisticated and complex than ours. I am interested in how they have managed to resist, how the map of the best preserved forests in the world coincide with the map where they live, how they have managed to resist these 500 years, where genocide has been constant on the native peoples. Spain has a debt with us but the Latin American national states have a debt as large or more because they are supposed to protect all the inhabitants of the Nation. The conquest never ends, the apathy, the mistreatment, the eviction, the razing of the lands. And if they stand up, if they complain a little, they are terrorists. The only good Indian is the one who doesn’t raise his voice.
T: A reality that persists to this day.
GCC: Even so, they have managed to get here, in the most cruel and inhumane conditions. Right now the places they live in are the first line of battle, for example, with lithium in the north of Jujuy, Catamarca. Despite the violence, which seeks to corrupt and divide them, they resist, fight and are threatened by the police. They are only defending the right to live as they have lived for thousands of years, which is a right that we grant to any community, right? Go tell the evangelicals not to live as they want, to the Jews, to the Catholics. And they are defending the right to water, not the electric Mercedes Benz.
T: Although the Conquest is narrated in “The Naranjel Girls” with all the force of the horror, the murder, the unjustified violence, the voices of the girls, the jungle and even the transformation that Antonio, the character who was a former nun, experiences, reveal a certain beauty. Is it possible to illuminate when the real story is so terrible?
GCC: The conquest is one of the most atrocious events in human history. It seems to me in terms of its historical period itself and also in terms of the fact that it never ended and still lasts. But the jungle was there, the people who lived there were there and many were massacred and others were not. And many rose up, fought glorious battles and others were able to live in peace for many centuries and hide and have a culture and the jungle was always with its flowers, its birds, its bugs. In the novel, Antonio, who is a guy who was busy killing and not dying most of his life, stops for the first time to see a flower, a bird, and finds something beautiful in himself.
I mean, the same megagarch of Columbus when he arrives in the Antilles cannot help but have his jaw drop because of the beauty, then the only thing that interests him is gold and 100 years after his arrival there is not a single native settler of those islands left, They are all dead. One hundred years later the American population is reduced to 10% of what it was, it was a massacre. It is assumed that after the conquest there was a small ice age: so much death, less cultivation, less forests, the land cooled, ecocide. It was an unspeakable atrocity but the jungle was and is there and the Guaraníes and the Wichis are still there. It is a feat that they persist in sustaining their culture and persist in sustaining a way of life against hunger and impoverishment because they were people who lived in the economy of abundance.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
