The Conquest, the jungle and the Guaraní worldview: the new and long-awaited novel by Cabezón Cámara

Cabezón Cámara combines different registers and tempos with picaresque and humor: a lyrical, moral, pious and Western voice that is a first-person letter from Antonio and has nods to masterpieces such as Don Quixote and languages ​​such as Latin; with Guaraní, its language and its legends, which are intertwined with the existential questions and knowledge of those girls and the language that nature speaks. The writer creates an interweaving of voices and mythologies, as well as her way of conceiving life and literature: “Literature is a gigantic fabric that you can organize like a pyramid, what is above, what is below, but you can also think like sailing in an ocean”.

Translated into many languages ​​and a finalist on the short list of the Booker Prize International, Cabezón Cámara is also the author of “Romance de la Negra Rubia” and “Le vis la cara a Dios”, novels with an overwhelming force that talk about complex topics such as marginalization or human trafficking. Her writing is political although unintentionally: it is full of leaks that illuminate issues of gender, environment, worldviews, origins. “Every time I feel less Argentine and more Latin American, we have a very similar historical, cultural and economic matrix,” she positions herself.

Télam: Why do you say it was difficult to write this novel?

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara: What comes easy to me is the first person that flows like a river, then dialogues and third person are much more difficult for me. And this novel has at least three registers of languages, we had to connect them, feel that they will work with each other. It had started out as a very dark novel and I realized that I no longer want to write those things. With “You Saw God’s Face” I already fulfilled the darkness. So I started it 50 times until I found the light in the girls’ characters and then everything began to fall into place.

T: It is a luminous novel despite the cruel story of genocide behind it, perhaps it is luminous because of the jungle it contains.

GCC: Yes, I think so. I am in love with the jungle. I went to Misiones, which is a province that, with its conflicts and limitations, shows that conservationism and production can be done at the same time. I went to the photographer Emilio White and asked him to see what he sees. The first day he took me at five in the morning because the animals come out early and you have to stay very still because if you don’t they will leave. We went to see the yacutinga. The next day it became heavy and he took me to the mud of the Iguazú National Park, which is the bank of a stream and has the peculiarity of being made up of a soil that has sodium, where the mammals go to eat and we wanted to see the tapirs. So, he took me to a little piece of land full of foliage and we were there for five hours… there is no signal, you can’t talk, you can’t make noise. That day I almost committed suicide because I am not mentally ill and besides there are ticks which is a very good sign but they bite.

The next day we returned and something changed, it clicked and I understood, I was at peace. The Paraná, the half transparent fish with little spots, the warm water, the perfumes and the butterflies, the birds, the flowers and the orchids and a plant that comes out of the other, that comes out of the other. It’s fucking paradise. You are alive in life itself and you have to be present.

T: Did you feel like you had to go to the jungle to tell it?

GCC: No, it is not necessary. I was already narrating it without having gone, and my love, Victoria, told me ‘how can you not go, it’s Missions’, it’s not that I had to go to Singapore, it’s something that I can self-finance without any problem. And the truth is that it changed a lot because one thing is to imagine something and make an aesthetic system and another is to give it singularities and make an aesthetic and biological system. Those unique features are from the real jungle, I felt it on my skin, on my body, in my ears, in my eyes.

T: How did you come to the story of Catalina de Erauso, Monja Alférez?

GCC: I met her because in the house of a girlfriend I once had there was a watercolor by Fermín Eguía that represented her and she told me about Monja Alférez, who has an autobiography. It is a very amazing story, a little girl sent with the ferocious cruelty of the nobles of her time at the age of four to live in a convent, where she was lucky because her aunt lived and I suppose she would have had a little less cruel treatment. Because she wants to see the world, at 15 she runs away, she has to dress as a boy because there was no other way back then and she evidently feels very comfortable in that role because she handles it wonderfully and ends up being in the army for six years and no one notices. never realize. I think that maybe at that time the habit makes the monk and if you were a soldier you had to be a man even if you had tits.

He comes to America, works as a shopkeeper, enters a kind of vicious and tanatic circle of playing cards, having someone call him a whore or fat or a cheat, going into a duel, hiding in the church that at that time was like an embassy and Nobody could catch you. Escaping the gallows by a hair, going to another city, the same thing again, playing cards, dueling and so on until he ends up in the imperial army of the Conquest of Araucanía where he shines, which means that he was high killer; and he continues on the same wheel of perdition until at some point, with the rope around his neck, he asks for the bishop to be called and confesses his biological truth: that he was born a woman. The bishop cannot believe her, he sends for a midwife who checks her genitals and finds that she is not only a woman but a virgin. It’s one thing to have murdered a lot of people and another to be so stupid as to have lost her virginity.

Then they send him to a convent for a couple of years, they let him out and he comes out dressed as a soldier, he goes to Spain, he does a bit of media work telling stories at Court, the king ends up giving him the right to wear both his military clothes and his clothes. to collect the pension, which was something very difficult to achieve. He goes to Rome and the Pope gives him the right to use his male name, he returns to America and there he is lost. I start there.

T: Antonio’s voice also brings together the political and aesthetic tone of the Conquest, the Western Catholic tradition, the Golden Age, the grammar of morality, the colonizers and violence. What was that job like?

GCC: America is always told from the European eye and from a very colonized education. And also the others were murdered, massacred…Recovering those stories is being a very hard job that is happening now in the communities but it was not so easy if you did not have access to the people themselves. The gaze of the colonizer constitutes us and we also have the gaze of the colonized. Many of the most important thinkers in Argentina are referring to European thinkers and almost never to a local thinker, much less to someone from the native cultures. If you see the world through the eyes of a European we are always a deformation. We have to be able to think from another side, in a situated way.

T: Is there, then, a search to write from other spaces?

GCC: I am very interested in the different perspectives and thinking that there is not one world but multiple worlds that depend on where you see it as a human being but also on the perceptual apparatus as a species. What I see with my perceptual apparatus, that I cannot hear a certain range of sounds or see a certain range of colors, is different from what happens to a tick that can smell the acid that mammals emit. The world is different for the tick, it is another world, that is, there are millions of worlds coexisting on a certain support. There is no world.

T: And literature, for you, is the possibility of telling those worlds?

GCC: It is the desire to tell those many worlds, the possibility, hopefully.

T: As a reader too?

GCC: Yes, on the move. Since I learned to read, reading is a ship to another planet. And the fact that it was that, curiously, did not prevent it from being the main instrument through which I met the world. It is both things at the same time. But it is also true that one of those worlds was historically narrated from very specific places. The order of the world is being reproduced within the organization of literature, whether by the market, or previously by the Academy, because when a canon was formed, an order of the literary institution was also being reproduced. The canon was made up of the same class of people in terms of gender, social class, which does not mean that they were great writers.

It seems to me that now we are managing to do it a little less, we are making literature, in that sense, look a little like the fabric of life. Literature is a gigantic fabric that you can organize like a pyramid, what is above, what is below, but you can also think of it as this fabric through which it is derived and you end up in places that would never have occurred to you, like sailing. in an ocean And with this we are going to change the world? Probably not but let’s start somewhere. Let’s start at home.