Selva Almada’s work has long confronted us with a reality that perhaps we had not yet seen in such a forceful way, not only with her nonfiction book Chicas muertas, translated by Annie McDermott as Dead Girls, but with her entire oeuvre of fiction, a fiction based on many stories that she, throughout her life, has collected.
This is an excerpt from the conversation with the Argentine author on the podcast Hablemos, escritoras, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.
Adriana Pacheco: Let’s start with a very basic question, how did you start writing, Selva?
Selva Almada: I started writing, I would say, almost by accident. From a very young age I read a lot. I think it was what I liked to do the most, reading. I wrote when I had to write at school and I was good at it and found it came easily to me, but it’s not like I wrote stories or had the desire to be a writer. I hear other colleagues say, “when I was twelve years old, I wanted to write a novel.” But the pull to literary writing came much later for me, at about the age of twenty when I was studying journalism, because yes, I liked journalistic writing. In a workshop that I took in college, where things were a little more relaxed, suddenly I found myself writing story after story, and well, I began to be interested in moving over to the fiction side of writing more so than journalistic writing.
A.P.: Where are you from?
S.A.: I was born and raised in a very small town in the province of Entre Ríos where I lived until I was seventeen years old. It’s a province that is north of Buenos Aires, about four hundred kilometers from the city on the Argentine coast.
A.P.: About the literary scene and what is happening in Buenos Aires, what do you feel has changed from that moment you arrived to the present day?
S.A.: The first big positive change was post-2001 when independent publishers began to appear. It seems to me (at least in Argentina it usually happens to us, perhaps because we are always going from crisis to crisis) that crises also bring out a creative side in us. And, well, that’s kind of what happened with the phenomenon of the independent publishing houses that began to emerge in 2002 and 2003, it was like an effervescence. Within a decade, many publishers began to appear, many of which are now very prestigious and are already much larger in size. I am sure you will know Eterna Cadencia or Entropía. They are publishers that are about fifteen years old, and both emerged in those early years of the first decade of the 2000s. That, for me, contributed a lot to bringing diversity to Argentine literature, because suddenly it was much easier to publish than it was in the nineties, for example.
A.P.: Of course, that’s on point. Hear this out, Selva: in 2022 we were pleased to receive Gabriela Cabezón Cámara here in person, and one day we would love to welcome you to Austin as well. We talked about the Pañuelos Verdes movement with her. How do you see that women writers are currently contributing, and have contributed in the past, to these movements and to the creation of these networks throughout the continent and in general in the Spanish-speaking world?
S.A.: In Argentina, there are two very strong and important moments for feminism, a movement in which we writers are so involved. The first of these is #NiUnaMenos, a movement that was born spontaneously from a call made by women journalists, which writers and other artists also joined. It is a movement that points out the urgency of doing something about femicides, of doing something against gender violence, a movement that takes all that anguish and rage it causes us to the streets. This was in 2015, and a short time later the Pañuelos Verdes came with their campaign for the legalization of abortion. This was a new wave, as there was another campaign that had already been in existence for years. Suddenly the request, the urgency, and the struggle to take to the streets and go to the marches became much more massive. The possibility was raised, a small door was opened to the possibility that it could become a law. It finally happened for us in 2020, the so-called voluntary interruption of pregnancy law. But in those two years before, the law first had a vote in Congress in 2018 that failed. Finally, then, in 2020, it passed, but that first part of the activism of many of my fellow writers was fundamental. Claudia Piñero was one of the visible faces of the movement and many other authors accompanied her. We all accompanied each other in the streets, we accompanied each other in the campaigns, we accompanied each other by disseminating the word, but some of us, like Claudia, went to talk to senators or deputies trying to get the support of the legislators so that this could become law. Later, these two movements had a beautiful, contagious effect on the rest of Latin America, and I hope that more countries can also see voluntary interruption of pregnancy become legal, it is something that is so important in poor countries like ours.
A.P.: Such strength! You have shown us the way and motivated us on a continental level to fight for many of these struggles that are so important, right?
S.A.: The struggle doesn’t end with the law, because the law is still quite new, it’s three years old, and there’s a lot of reluctance on the part of doctors and public hospitals to carry out interventions, so there are often complaints of conscientious objections. Doctors can refuse to perform abortions, so even with the law, the fight unfortunately never ends.
A.P.: That’s true. Well, we’ve been talking about women’s rights. And something that I think is very important about your work, something I find fascinating is that you are also talking about and reflecting on an issue that should concern us all, which is masculinity. Especially with these three books that have been coined a men’s trilogy, El viento que arrasa (The Wind that Lays Waste, tr. Chris Andrews), Ladrilleros (Brickmakers, tr. Annie McDermott), and No es un río (Not a River, tr. Annie McDermott). I highly recommend them. How difficult is it for you, or how easy is it for you, to contribute to this subject, and the themes you explore of men having their own battles and determinisms that they cannot get rid of?
S.A.: Yes, the trilogy was also a bit involuntary or accidental, in the sense that the novels came about, especially the first two, without a trilogy in mind. In fact, I don’t think that at that time I could even find much of a relationship between The Wind that Lays Waste and Brickmakers, for example. But when I started writing the last one, which is Not a River, the communicating vessels between these two novels and this third one that I had started writing just appeared. And I started calling it the men’s trilogy. But, of course, it wasn’t really a plan to write three novels that centered around or focused on the lives of men or a male character. But this appeared a little in the first novel, which is The Wind that Lays Waste, where there are these two fathers who are in charge of their children, for different reasons the mothers are not there. The men are there in the center of the novel, and the way these men relate to each other has repercussions on the lives of others, on the lives of the women, the lives of the mothers, girlfriends, sisters. This type of relationship, alliance and betrayal reappears in Not a River, where there is a much greater presence of women.
A.P.: Selva, your readers will surely not forgive me if I do not move to a book that was also a watershed moment in Argentine literature, Chicas muertas (Dead Girls, tr. Annie McDermott). This book was also published in 2014, and from this point onwards I feel that a wave of writers began to bring up the ever-present issue of femicide. How difficult was it for you to write Dead Girls, where do the stories of these three girls come from? And tell us, how long did it take you to write this book?
S.A.: Actually, the project came from one of the cases in the book. It narrates three cases of femicide that happened in small towns in Argentina in the 1980s. They are not related cases, they do not share murderers and the victims are not related, but they share an era and the fact that the perpetrators have remained unpunished to this day. In other words, we never knew who the killers were. One of these cases, Andrea’s case, happened in a neighboring town when I was thirteen years old. It is a case that shocked the whole area, especially the women who were entering adolescence, because Andrea, who was the victim, was nineteen years old. She was practically my brother’s age, she could have been my older sister, let’s say. She was kind of very close in that sense, not because I knew her, but because it had a very big impact on me. Twenty years later, when I began to research for the book, I remember that I talked to two of my friends from that time to see what they remembered, what memories they had, and they had the same frightening memories as me, of how totally helpless we felt thinking that something like this could also happen to us, to think that we too could be dead, that they could also kill us. The femicide happened in the victim’s own room while she was sleeping.
A.P.: It was a long process. Obviously, you have also been a part of other projects that I find very interesting, very important, and something that caused me a lot of curiosity is this book El mono en el remolino, because Zama is a movie that I have seen, yet I never knew of this connection with the monkey in the whirlpool. Tell us, how did you come to this and what did it mean to you?
S.A.: Zama is one of the most important novels in Argentine literature, the author is Antonio Di Benedetto, an author of iconic novels. I knew that Lucrecia Martel had been planning to adapt the novel to film for many years. In fact, it had started at some point and then for some reason the project hadn’t gone on, but we were all hoping that one day someone would be able to make a film of Zama. I had met Lucrecia a little earlier, because we had been asked to work together on a project, and she was about to start filming Zama. Then at one point she called me and said, look, the producers of the film are planning to do several things around the film and one of those things is to invite an author to the filming so they can write something about it. And she told me, if you’re interested, I’d like it to be you. And I said yes because I was also very curious; I read the book again and thought about what the shoot was going to be like and what Lucrecia’s work was going to be like. She’s a director whom I admire a lot. Then the dilemma was, what book to write? Because there was complete freedom. When I talked to the producers, I said, “What book do you expect from me?” And they told me, “The book you want to write.” The only terms they had were for the book to be about the filming and what emerged from it, it wasn’t to be about the film, but what came out of the film and the process. So the premise at that time was very liberating because I didn’t have to do a certain thing, I could do anything.
A.P.: This is just a banquet, a delicacy for everyone. Thank you very much for everything, Selva.
Translated by Alice Banks
You can hear and read the complete interview on the Hablemos, escritoras website.
