It is our pleasure to discuss Peruvian literature today with writer Gabriela Wiener. We’ll talk to her about her work and her career, and speak about her vision on journalism and her other initiatives such as performance and theater.
This is an excerpt from the conversation on the podcast Hablemos, escritoras, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.
Adriana Pacheco: You live in Spain, so how has being able to see your country from the outside changed things? But then also coming back, catching up, seeing everything in your own country firsthand, how does this impact your work?
Gabriela Wiener: It’s always had an impact. From the beginning, my work was conceived as the work of a person already in the diaspora, precisely because the material conditions of my country did not allow me to grow as a writer or even as a journalist. Now, due to the state of the media in my country, it is clearer than ever that my immigration was on an economic, labor level, but in some way it was also on a social level, because it is outside, in this limbo, in this liminal condition in which writing springs up. Writing springs up from a distance, from conflict, from being somewhere or from not being able to be there; it also springs up from not wanting to be there, because queer or racialized people—any vulnerable communities—are still oppressed in my country of origin. Being in Spain also, I encounter similar problems within my own community (not just personal ones), such as everything that migration implies for a person, for a person who creates their own family and also their own cultural or artistic production—in my case literary—in this second country, and everything that that entails, all the walls that you have to smash through, everything that you have to fight.
A.P.: What you’re saying is very true. We begin to adapt, to see and use what we see in our day-to-day life in the diaspora, which we then return to and connect with everything that is happening in our own countries. Something that catches my attention is your great work in magazines and newspapers. What has it been like for you to be in these newspapers, in these magazines? Who are you talking to from these spaces?
G.W.: I’m a literature person, but I come from a family of journalists. My father and his siblings have worked as journalists. My mother, now, for example, does some kind of communication work as well. I come from a family that was made up of people who liked writing and telling stories. The kind of journalism I saw every day in my house was always activist journalism. Now, we talk about feminist journalism, for example, which I have defended several times, or anti-racist journalism. Both are journalisms that do not try to be neutral or vindicate their activities and ethics so much. They are journalisms that involve their tools and their resources and their work in the struggles of the present. These were the kinds of journalisms I saw because my father and mother are political people. At the end of the last century, and more concretely at the beginning of this century, I started in journalism that covered an elitist, a profoundly elitist, reality. Thus, cultural and more supplement-focused journalism allowed me a freedom of expression and a freedom of subject matter. A genre that we began to see a lot of in the first decade of the millennium, a genre that was flourishing on all levels in Latin America with several publications across countries, was chronicle magazines—there was a real boom of these specialized, thematic magazines. At that time, I started writing for the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra, a cult publication. I published my first chronicles with them, written within the Latin American tradition. The autobiographical subject and the fact that I am interested in issues of the body made me make self-references very early on. The good thing is that this was a magazine that allowed me to do so, even if I was often the only female Peruvian journalist being published.
A.P.: You won the Peruvian National Journalism Award with an impressive story. What did it mean to you? What repercussions did this prestigious award have within the world of journalism, both in Peru and internationally?
G.W.: None. It didn’t have any impact. I’m not like an award-winning writer or journalist at all, I mean, if you compare me to other journalists or writers of my generation, this was something quite unusual that happened. In fact, the great investigations that I think I’ve had the opportunity to do, in two or three cases, have been my own initiatives, because I considered them to be issues of activism, of political commitment. In this example, it was a case of gender violence in which Diego and I got involved in a selfless way, proposing the idea to a media outlet, so really, the prize was like we were being paid for the work and that’s it. There was no more to it than that. It was important, yes, to continue making these cases of violence visible, in particular a case of violence that had to do with a person who was a character with a cultural profile and recognition in the world of literature. I think it was also something that came out of the victims or survivors themselves who were looking for someone to tell this story, in addition to having a very large retrospective component, because it had happened when they were children.
A.P.: Thank you very much, Gabriela. Thank you for your courage and for your lucidity and for understanding exactly what is important. So, you started with poetry, with Cosas que deja la gente cuando se va, and then you wrote a narrative book, Sexografías, translated by Lucy Greaves and Jennifer Adcock as Sexographies. Tell us a little bit about these beginnings.
G.W.: Poetry has been with me for a long time. When I was still in college I participated in readings, I wrote some poems, and I also published a small book. It’s a tiny, micro book, but it contains several poems that would eventually come to be part of my only published poetry collection, titled Ejercicios para el endurecimiento del espíritu, published many years later here in Spain with La Bella Varsovia. I then started writing a book like Sexographies, which contained a lot of humor, mishaps, and adventures. It was a book of first-person chronicles, very much in the vein of what was called journalism—but that was a label that was put on the book, a label that I wouldn’t necessarily have put on it myself. Basically, they were stories of immersions in worlds that I was drawn to, but that were foreign to me. I think poetry appears in my writing all the time, and it is doing so more and more. I always consider that I’m a person who has a poetic eye when I write narrative, and that is something that I never lose. Sexographies is a very particular book where there is this nexus of what makes me a writer of personal literature or auto-fiction—or whatever you want to call it—alongside the liking I have always had for poetry.
A.P.: Moving on to Nueve lunas, translated by Jessica Powell as Nine Moons, I came across this interview where you’re talking to your daughter, Coco. They are very different: the Gabriela who wrote the book, in the moment she had the impetus to write this story, and the Gabriela who is now rereading herself to make re-editions and even resume and retrace some steps. What was it like writing a book like that, which was a bit explosive at the time?
G.W.: Nine Moons passed without pain or glory, honestly, because it was left out of the new feminist wave, or it was a little bit early. After Sexographies, within my own oeuvre, the book was quite ignored, or simply put aside as a book for women. It’s a book about pregnancy, it’s not a universal theme. If with Sexographies they could say, “what a perverted girl,” with Nine Moons it was, “I’ll give it to my mom, my cousin, my aunt,” or “I’m not interested in it because I don’t want to have children,” or “I’m not interested in it because I’m a man.”
A.P.: You were a pioneer. The book was published in 2009 and then came this boom of so many other books about motherhoods—I love the plural motherhoods. Then comes Huaco retrato, translated by Julia Sanches as Undiscovered. What an interesting book, how interesting the way in which you work on the figure of the father, the family, identity, inheritance. How difficult was it to write this book?
G.W.: It’s a book that evolved over time and maybe evolved with my own life as well, with knowledge, with my dead and with everything that started to give me more consistency in order to be able to write the book, the reality that I had to write it. It’s a book project about my great-great-grandfather, as my idea was originally called—I can go back to the moment I had that idea, during the time of Sexographies, 2008, 2009 more or less. I already had it in my hands and I knew that I had to write this book about the cross between my own ethnic identity and my European surname, about the shadow of these ancestors whom are celebrated by my family, celebrated as the reference to which we owe ourselves, the shadows we defend, to whom we are permanently endebted. So this book, for me, is a book in the present, in conversations about the present.
A.P.: Tell us about Qué locura me enamorarme de ti and the literary performance you have with 1986 with Jaime Rodríguez.
G.W.: In some way my writing has always been a writing that performs, that is, a writing that puts forth the body and activates things in the world, that really sticks its finger in the wound, or tries to do so. Of course, I’m speaking about performing in the sense of exposing the personal and the vulnerable within us, in a kind of recreation that is evidently filtered by imagination and, in my case, by literature and language, or using other languages. I think it was a very natural thing, alternating writing and publishing books with the production of a stage work; it was something that started off at first shyly and then precariously between Jaime and me. We produced a couple of performances, Dímelo delante de ella and 1986. And Qué locura enamorarme yo de ti also started as a performance. In particular, Qué locura enamorarme yo de ti is a work clearly connected to the things I write—it’s like Undiscovered or Dicen de mí. They have communicating vessels.
A.P.: Wonderful. Well, thank you very much. We are very grateful that you have this impetus, and that you want to continue covering everything, because from all of this experimentation we come out on top, from seeing your work. A thousand thank yous.
G.W.: Thank you very much.
.
Translated by Alice Banks
You can hear and read the complete interview in Spanish on the Hablemos, escritoras website.
