The civic-military dictatorships that devastated the Southern Cone of Latin America during the enactment of Operation Condor unleashed a tidal wave that resulted in a marked change to Latin American societies and cultures, to the very notion of nation, of homeland, of borders, and of language. With time gone by, these last few years have seen the emergence of artistic works from the second generation of exiles—that is to say, the children of exiled Argentinians, Uruguayans, and Chileans. Ana Negri (Mexico, 1983) is the daughter of Argentinian parents who secretly fled the country in 1985. A writer, editor, and doctor of Hispanic Studies at McGill University, Montreal, in 2020 she released Los eufemismos, a novel about the pains caused by a ghostly past that refuses to stay dead, and the tension between letting go of that past, while not abandoning it completely in a world, a life, of constant transformation. “Everything falls, mum, everything falls,” says Clara, the protagonist, her words somehow exemplifying the vitality of modern life that Negri captures so relentlessly in this novel. Published by Los libros de la mujer rota in Chile in 2020, by Antílope in Mexico in 2020, and by Firmamento in Spain in 2022, the novel appeared in French translation in 2022 via Editions Globe under the title Ce que tomber veut dire.
Diego Recoba: From the book’s epigraph comes this idea of giving order to disorder. How did you manage that, bearing in mind how biographical the material you were working with was?
Ana Negri: Although it’s at the start of the book, I put the epigraph in towards the end of the writing process. When I started writing, I was almost working as an editor, curating my notebooks and private thoughts but without knowing why I was doing it, or what for. Then I realised it was all a mess, a very singular one—mine. And I realised that to make all of that legible, I had to make sense of some things, make others more plausible, cut out and exaggerate certain events. Fiction, I’d say now, is what brought order.
D.R.: What were the initial questions that made you pull on this thread?
A.N.: The first one was to do with a very personal question relating to my mother’s status. That made me wonder about a lot of things from her life during the dictatorship, and her life afterwards, in exile. It was a really crucial question for me, whether this idea of exile really included me, whether being born in my parents’ exile made me an exile or not. And I understood it’s a really ambiguous place, and as a result quite uncomfortable for everyone because you’re not exiled in the strictest sense of the word, but at the same time you don’t belong in the place you were born. They’re not the same consequences that an exile might face, but they’re consequences all the same, and they’re still directly related to exile. It’s not the same as our parents, who had to start from scratch with regards to money, family, and friends, where there was no common history with the people in that place, where their traditions and words and ways of life were so different to everyone else’s; we’re the children who have to shoulder the destruction of our families post-exile, the trauma that can’t be healed by an order of democratisation.
When I started to understand it all, I decided I wanted to follow those tentacles and see how they spread, and then more aesthetic questions began to crop up: how I was going to give form to it all or from where, what to change, what to keep, what to throw out, how much, how exactly, in what order…
D.R.: Did those tensions also exist in relation to language? How did you go about resolving the issue of the languages that you live in, in your writing?
A.N.: Coming at it from that angle was inevitable because it’s what I work with. Playing out this constant contradiction, this rivalry, this hybridity. I’m not sure exactly how it came up—it was there in my notes before I had even thought about it. And for me it was essential that the protagonist had that linguistic duality, because with it you can show something that doesn’t require explanation, and that defines it in a very precise way. The two Spanish registers that coexist within Clara show what it’s like to live in a language where you have to be constantly alert, where you can never let your guard down. Not just because it involves two types of Spanish (or maybe even more, so you really can’t relax), but because the little details that either allow you to become part of a community or expose you as a stranger are so subtle.
D.R.: There’s a strong focus on connections and the new families that are forming. Like a palimpsest. How did you work with that growth?
A.N.: It’s also related to disorder and the separation that’s still present. When all your connections are broken, damaged, or far away, it’s almost instinctive, I suppose, to look for new people to fill those gaps. It’s a very on-brand thing for exiles, that need to build new connections, and to redefine family with those connections included. Really, I think all exiles and all children of exiles are overflowing with unofficial aunts and uncles and cousins and siblings. It creates a more horizontal family tree, like a mycelial web. I realised I had to explore that as well, the difference in the structure of the supposed “family” unit, because Mexico is a deeply traditional country in that sense. Family is at the heart of everything, held in the highest regard. It might be the only thing that the drug dealers and traffickers respect, or try to. In Mexico, the character of Clara, for example, is really shocking because mother-daughter conflicts are dealt with so differently, and seeing those shouting matches is very unsettling, and it all has to do with that, the difference between the tree and the mycelium.
D.R.: With respect to Los eufemismos, there is a story in the unsaid, the elliptical, but also in the masks and the stagings we adopt so as to connect to one another. Did you run into and have to disassemble your own masks while writing?
A.N.: It happened when I was in the fledgling stages of the novel; I was getting very attached to the main character. And I realised I wanted everyone else to love her too, and in order to do that, I had to make Clara a kind of heroine to her mother. In the first drafts there were hints at the turbulence in that relationship, but they were almost unbelievable because Clara was all love and patience. And I realised not only was the story going to be really boring, but I had no interest in perpetuating this stereotype of the selfless daughter who sacrifices everything for her mother just because she’s her mother. So then I started, quite viciously, to move to the other side, and make this character irritable, intolerant, have her made hopeless by her circumstances. And I really enjoyed putting an end to the idea that those masks of unconditional love and tolerance are real faces.
D.R.: When writing or revisiting the past, what did you resign yourself to? What did you accept was impossible?
A.N.: It’s contradictory. On the one hand, I resigned myself to the idea that there was no way of recounting what had happened as it had happened; and, on the other, that it was impossible for me to claim that people wouldn’t believe this is my story as it happened.
D.R.: Exile, memory, and dictatorship were all words that were present in the day-to-day lives of the children of the exiled, although they never fully understood what they meant. Carrying the weight of others, it says in the book. Did you shed that weight through the writing process?
A.N.: The fact that my first novel is this isn’t random or by chance. I think I needed to write Los eufemismos to be able to write whatever comes next. Now, I think I understand better where I write from and why I do it. Regarding that weight, I don’t know.
D.R.: It’s related to an idea that appears a lot in the book, that even with the passage of time, the effects of such events never really end.
A.N.: I don’t know if they never end, but I do believe the effects of a dictatorship like the one in Argentina at the end of the seventies don’t go away overnight. They’re not erased by a decree or by reparations, they’re long, painful processes. Sometimes the process lasts longer than the life a person has left, sometimes their descendants carry the consequences—different ones, but still stemming from the same source.
D.R.: At times, these books are very intimate, but on occasion they also deal with broader public issues like job insecurity and gentrification. There’s a back-and-forth between the private and the public.
A.N.: Yes, I love that you’ve said it like that because, of course, from the conversation we’ve been having, it would seem that the book is a book all about the dictatorship, but it isn’t at all. Yes, it’s always in the background, but as context, as an antecedent. I think the book can come across as an intimate story, even a simple one, because there’s no proselytising or campaigning; but there’s a mountain of things hidden in language, in gestures, in tiny codes that are established between characters, in the sequences between one passage and the next, in what goes unsaid. And that’s where human rights issues come in, identity issues, the ignorance towards caregiving roles, towards mental health. I was quite pleased because I think I managed to talk about the public and the private in a fluid way and, a lot of the time, without being judgemental. I hate moralising literature.
D.R.: The protagonist is very irritated by her mother’s solemnity. But much of the time, writing about the recent past can lead you into solemnity. Was that a problem you faced?
A.N.: Undoubtedly. In fact, the first artistic works that dealt with the dictatorship that I saw—Garage Olímpico (Marco Bechis, 1999), for example—I found very solemn and confrontational. They were necessary at the start to highlight what had happened and fight against the silence, but I think now you need to do something different with it. A while back I came across Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003), and that’s exactly what it discusses: what we do with all of it now. It was awful, terrible, it changed the history of the nation, our families, it’s true, but we can’t stay still forever. Like Walter Benjamin’s idea of a past that consumes you. So with that in mind, my aim was to make something different. When I was writing, I realised the stories I wanted to incorporate were extremely heavy and I had to leave a lot of things out because the book was becoming a melodrama. I don’t know, my mum, for example, was in hiding for the whole of her first pregnancy, and went into exile with my three-month-old sister in her arms, but that isn’t something that had to be in the book. It wasn’t my intention by then; it was enough just to mention that Clara’s parents had been exiled. What Carri does in Los rubios was interesting to me: what is it? Is it memory? Yes and no. I looked for contrasts, added in some elements of black humour, and some easy-going moments that showed the absurd or funny sides of all of this nonsense, this madness. Because the weight of it can become unbearable, in both life and literature.
