INTERVIEWED BY OWSHNIK GHOSH

Guadalupe Nettel is the author of four inter-nationally award-winning novels: El huésped, The Body Where I Was Born, After the Winter and Still Born; and three collections of short stories. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Granta, the White Review among others. She currently lives in Mexico City, where she’s the director of the magazine Revista de la Uni-versidad de México.

Owshnik Ghosh: When did you start writing?

Guadalupe Nettel: I started writing to take revenge on the bullies in my school. And, yeah, I invented all sorts of horrible scenarios where they have, like, sheep, braids, and accidents, and all kinds of terrible diseases and curses. And yeah, one day my teacher asked me to read what I had written in front of everyone. I had to do that, and to my surprise, the other children loved that story, and even the bullies loved to be in the story, so I became the writer in the classroom. And I could do that, you know. Another very precise moment where I realized that literature was very powerful was when I was eleven. I also write of that in The Body Where I was Born. I was living with my grandmother. I was having lots of struggles with her, and we didn’t have a good relationship at that time. When I read La Increible Historia de la Candida Eréndira by Marquez, I felt this guy from Colombia, who is 70 years old by now, understands me. He knows exactly how I’m feeling. So, he’s describing exactly what I feel. And I’m sure you all have this experience, that at some point when you’re facing a very difficult moment in your life, you’re reading the exact book that you should be reading, because you feel that the book understands you, that the book speaks about what you’re facing, the challenges you’re facing, and it’s like magic, no? It’s a kind of magic!

OG: You often refer to the works of different writers in your novels and stories. Who are the writers from Latin America who have had a deep influence on your writing?

GN: One is Julio Cortázar, but he is not the only one, for sure.  Also, I love the works of the Argentinian poet, Alejandra Pizarnik. There was this other woman, Amparo Dávila, who was Mexican, and she’s from an older generation, and of course, Juan Rulfo was very powerful, reading that guy was amazing. Also, Clarice Lispector, from Brazil. There are many of them. And yes, I like the poetry of Octavio Paz, some of his poems, especially the ones he wrote when he was left-wing and then later on, he tried to correct them, to make them very abstract, but they were infused with a kind of anger, because of the injustice in Mexico.

OG: You have moved across the boundaries of different countries throughout your life. How did that play a role in your formation as a writer?

GN: I think what really was interesting was being in touch with all kinds of different cultures, you know?  For example, you guys here (in US Universities) are very lucky because you can relate to people from different cultures. In Mexico, I was lucky to live in that neighborhood that I was telling you about, with people from different parts of South America. But it’s normally not the case in Mexico. We mostly see Mexicans, like, you know, mestizos one, mestizos Mexicans. We are not very in touch with the indigenous cultures, for instance, and we are lacking in that diversity that we could enjoy. But the fact of moving countries and living in the south of France made me aware of the existence of other cultures, like Vietnamese, for example, because there were many Vietnamese there, and also people from North Africa as well, like Moroccan or Algerians, and Portugal too, like the south of Europe. That also made me read their books, wanting to discover how it was to live in their societies and what were their traditional, their literature. It opened my doors to world literature.

OG: Why did you choose to write your autobiography, The Body Where I Was Born, through your bodily experience?

 GN: Because I was feeling that my body wasn’t right. There was something broken in it, that it was something to be mended, and I wanted to tell that experience. Being in my body wasn’t comfortable at the beginning. I didn’t want to be in that body. But I think later on I found out that many people were having this same experience for different reasons. But I thought it was my problem and just me having that problem. One day I found out, especially when I read that poem, which is in the epigraph of that book, by Allen Ginsberg, that actually we, it’s like, in my case, and his case too, we’ve been trying to get rid of the body.  What we needed was to come back to that body and to own it and to be in it. To be present in it, instead of trying to run away from it. And I started thinking a lot about what it is to be, what it means to have a body. We can experience the world only through our bodies. Because it’s the five senses of our body that make us feel, smell, hear the wind, or the music or the birds and everything else. So, it is the instrument we have to be in this world. So that’s what I, I kind of started, first to accept it, and then to honor and enjoy the body. Also, it’s in our bodies where all our experiences are written. It is all in us, in our wrinkles. They bear witness to our thoughts, feelings, joys and sorrows, and all the scars we have in the body tell stories about who we have been in this life experience. So now I really like the body experience, and I wanted to start from there. To tell the story of this journey beginning from the body and coming back to the body.

OG: From the body, if we move to the mind, we can find that you have often written about psychoanalysis, mental health, and the uncanny. Why do you bring Freudian aspects to your writing frequently?

GN: My father was a psychoanalyst; he introduced me to that way of thinking, and when I was a child, I used to tell him my dreams. The first thing he asked me was what the remainder of the day. You know, the psychoanalyst says that there is always something that remains from the day before, and he taught me to look for that remain. And from that I started analysing the dreams. Also, psychoanalysis is a kind of lens to see reality; it’s a system for deciphering reality, and I was taught by him to do that, so I found it very interesting. Not like it is the only way to apprehend the world, but it’s one interesting way to do it.

OG: Many of your stories, and especially the novel Still Born, speak about motherhood from different angles. Why do you choose this theme frequently?

GN: There was a literary critic in Belgium who told me once that like Kafka has this, you know, his whole work could be seen as a letter to his father, my whole work could be seen as a letter to my mother. That because she has been an interlocutor for sure. Like the person with whom I really talk. Not always in a good way, but she is a central figure in my life. Either because of her absence or because of her harshness- she was very strict at some point, or she was very confronting and also a mother who is the most generous person- she takes care of you as she did for several periods in my life.

OG: Another important aspect of your writing is the bond between human beings and nature. Whether it be plants or animals. I’m not just talking about the book Natural History, which evolves around this particular theme, but in stories from Bezoar and, of course, in Still Born, the metaphor of the pigeon family. Can you elaborate on that?

GN: We tend to forget that we are all animals. So, I really like to remind the readers about what we are and to remind myself too. There have been lots of prejudice and misunderstandings about the animal world for many centuries. They say that we are at the summit of the evolutionary pyramid, but I don’t think we are. It’s just not me thinking, we are definitely not at the summit of it. There is a lot of pride and arrogance that I like to pinpoint in human behavior, like us being the supreme species in this world which is not true. We have a lot of things to learn from animals, and observing them is very moving; we learn a lot from them.

OG: You also talk about free relationships, whether it be between men and women or between the same sex. Is it a reality you grew up in, or is it an author’s aspiration?

GN: I think both are true because I was born in a family who had been through the sexual revolution from the 60s, mostly 70s, that my parents opened their marriage and they were having other partners while they were married, and I saw that in many families in my school- like parents of my schoolmates who lived in threesomes and things like that, in communes, where everyone had the right to go with everyone. So, in a way, I was confronted with that reality when I was a child, and a part of me, as many of the people of my generation said, was very reluctant to do that. Like we were, we felt like guinea pigs growing up in very strange situations. I was a little bit conservative towards that, and then at some point, I decided to be more curious about what it would be like. It’s not that I have been experiencing that, but I’m more open to telling those stories and telling those realities. I don’t know, but sometimes, in the case of Still Born, the two women ended up having a love affair, but a very short one or whatever, we don’t know, because it’s open. But it wasn’t me who chose to do that. I really felt that the whole novel pushed me to that ending because it was the logical thing. Sometimes, especially a novel, it’s like a puzzle, where you have a part of it already built, but there are holes in it, and you have to find a way to close them. It was the novel that wanted to reflect the world, the women’s world, in all its different aspects, so suddenly it was clear to me that it was the only solution, and I wrote that part. It was very strange, because I didn’t know, but I found out something immediately after I had written that part, I opened Twitter, and I saw that it was the day of lesbian love! So yeah, writing has a lot to do with coincidences, and you know what I was saying before: we writers are antennas. We cap things, and we are not even conscious of that.

OG: In this novel, you have a detailed description of medical diagnosis. Have you ever felt that the readers can feel alienated because of this sometimes?

GN: Yeah, definitely. Still Born was written, at least the first part, while I was having a lot of interviews with my friend to whom it is dedicated. When she was telling me her experience about giving birth, of her labor, in the hospital, I was thinking about my own, and twice I had the feeling that I was a kind of prisoner of the medical system. Because once you are in a hospital, you can’t decide anymore. You can’t just let me die. No, it’s impossible. Or I prefer this and that. They never ever ask your opinion. They never explain what’s happening. It’s very strange. I think those things should change. And I was very happy to denunciate, to speak about that and complain about that. Many doctors have read that. It’s strange, but they, liked it, even the doctors who were in charge of Ines (that’s the true name in reality too). They were very interested. And, you know, some of them are conscious of what’s going on. We need to build a much fair, direct and just, not a hierarchical relationship transfer. Also, a relating one. They think we need certainties, and they try to give them to us when they don’t even have them. So, it would be fair if they tell us things like I don’t know, I will try my best, but I can’t tell you if this is the right treatment or not, etc.

OG: What are your thoughts on the representation of women writers in contemporary Mexican literature?

GN: I think that in Latin American literature, women are very present nowadays. There are more women writers than men writers in translated works, and they are traveling and speaking about our continent. Though not more than men, but it’s almost equal.

OG: In your works, we find references to political situations, but you never go in depth into them. Is that the political decision of an author?

GN:  I think that the political context is important for a story. Like in The Body Where I Was Born, it’s very important. The feminist fights during the years when I was writing Still Born were very present, and I wanted to honor them. I tried to give them more space in the story, and I suddenly realized that the story was becoming unbalanced. And even my publisher, who was kind of editing the book, asked me, ‘do you want it to be an essay? Like an essayistic novel.’ I didn’t. So, I had to cut around 30 pages that were related to politics, not because I was afraid of anything, but because I thought it was unbalancing the structure of the novel.

OG: At present, when there is a rapid increase of intolerance and violence of all kinds, in what way do you see literature mending the gaps and healing humankind?

GN: I hope it does. I really hope it does. Well, it has healed me. Literature has accompanied me and has opened a lot of bridges and doors for me to get connected to others, to the other’s experience. So, I am sure that it will be a channel for empathy and compassion for human qualities that we still have. And it will always remain a lifesaver.

OG: Do you think we are losing our sensitivity to read literature day by day?

GN: It is not a matter of sensitivity. I don’t think we are losing sensitivity, but we are definitely losing attention span. And that’s a big problem with social media and all these horrible things. Because we are used to it, it’s like we are scrolling all the time. So, we are not used to being attentive or concentrating on anything anymore. Unless you decide consciously and put all your will into developing it, you are going to lose it more and more. So, that’s the only thing. That’s the biggest danger, I would say. It’s more like a lack of faculties.

Also read, Urban Sprawl by Majeed Amjad, translated from Urdu by Rizwan Akhtar, and published in The Antonym.

Urban Sprawl — Majeed Amjad

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