We have the pleasure of speaking with Mónica Ojeda, one of the most relevant literary voices in Latin America. Her work addresses topics such as pedophilia, double standards, incest, child pornography, and the deep web.
This is an excerpt from a conversation on the podcast Hablemos, escritoras, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.
Adriana Pacheco: You’re Ecuadorian, but tell us a little more about your origins. Where do you live and what do you study?
Mónica Ojeda: Well, I’m from Guayaquil, a city on the coast of Ecuador. I came to study here in Spain in 2011. I spent three years studying here, between Barcelona and Madrid, and then I returned to Ecuador to work for another three years, and finally I’ve come here to live and have been living in Madrid for two years, not as a student, but living for real, working and doing what adults do. I publish with a press here in Spain, with Candaya, which was basically the sentimental connection that I developed with Spain.
A.P.: And suddenly you realize that you want to write a novel with all your critical reflection and with all your studies, and you publish your first novel in 2014, titled La desfiguración Silva, which won the 2014 Alba Narrative Prize. Tell us about this book. How is it that you come into yourself as a writer, as a novelist, as a fiction writer, and this novel comes out?
M.O.: Well, I started writing at a very young age, and I knew very early on that I wanted to be a writer. So, I went to university in Guayaquil and majored in literature. I got a scholarship and went to study in Barcelona, for a master’s degree in creative writing. I didn’t feel I needed to do a master’s in creative writing to write a novel because I think you can do that without getting a master’s, but for me it was an opportunity to escape, that is, to leave Ecuador. That was when I was 23 years old, and that’s where I completed by master’s. It was a master’s that was made to give you as much time as possible to write and, since I won the scholarship, I had no problems either, I didn’t have to worry about working. That was when I started to write this first novel. I submitted the novel as my master’s thesis. And then I sent it to the ALBA Narrative contest—which I thought I wasn’t going to win, I even forgot I had sent it—and then a journalist friend of mine found out before me, because the email where they told me I had won had gone to spam. I hadn’t even heard about it until a journalist friend found out and told me and I was very surprised and super happy, obviously. And that’s how it all started.
A.P.: That’s great, congratulations. What a great way to find out you have won an important award. Double the surprise, how wonderful. So you mark your territory in 2016 with Nefando and you leave us dumbstruck, with a book filled with strangeness, fear, existential emptiness, disconnections between generations, peripheral sexualities, the abject and, obviously, we hear echoes of Osvaldo Lamborghini and references to George Bataille, of course, with this mystical question, union and drive and the question of sex and death. How did you conceive Nefando?
M.O.: Well, because of a personal situation, actually. I began to write, to need to write Nefando, because of a personal matter: a friend of mine confessed to me—when I was a child—that she was being abused by a member of her family, but when I was a child I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand what she meant. There was a moment when I was 24 or 25 years old, I had a kind of recollection. I had completely forgotten about this situation because, like I said, when my friend confessed it to me, I didn’t understand anything she was saying. Suddenly, I remembered that conversation very clearly and, of course, at 25, I suddenly wondered what my friend was saying to me, so I called her again. She was a friend with whom I didn’t have regular contact, she had been a childhood friend. I told her, “I remembered this conversation with you and right now it sounds like you were trying to tell me this and I want to know if you were trying to tell me this.”
And she said, “Well, look, don’t feel guilty because you shouldn’t have understood, because we were kids, but I was in my own way trying to tell you about this.” And then, of course, for me it was a very hard blow because obviously my friend didn’t want me to feel guilty and, obviously, I know logically that there’s no reason to feel guilty because I was a child and quite ignorant and innocent about these issues. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about the issue of child abuse, everything that surrounds child abuse. I started to do some research that wasn’t for any purpose, it was just because of my obsession with the subject at the time and because of my own sense of guilt. And I got to a very obsessive moment, I went to the deep web, I went onto pedophile forums, forums where there is, of course, no kind of child pornography content, but there is a discourse. So that obsessive, harmful experience I had is the origin of Nefando, because from all these recurring ideas, I started to think about many more things. I was working on a research project on Latin American porno-erotic literature. So I was thinking of these links: desire-evil, desire-harm, desire-violence, desire and death, desire and pain. And the drives that pivot between these concepts. That’s how Nefando came about; I had this need to talk about the damage that comes about because some people are capable of desiring and imposing their desire over other bodies and sometimes destroying those bodies in order to fulfill a desire. It was a bit like that.
A.P.: The subject of writing is at the core of this book. What is writing, how to do it and why, and what is the strength that comes from writing itself. Want to tell us a little bit more about that?
M.O.: I actually think it has to do with the fact that, when we live through extreme experiences, experiences of extreme pain, but also experiences of pleasure, we stay in a liminal zone, an area that borders the silent zone, a place where there are no words, where we are unable to build a kind of narrative about what we have lived through. That is why, in Spanish, there is a gap between vivencias and experiencias. We use experiencias to describe all those experiences to which we have been able to give language, but those experiences that we are unable to narrate remain vivencias and do not become experiences. It was a challenge for me, in this novel, to talk about something that was painful for me and that I know is painful for other people as well, and to know that it’s such a complicated subject, that it’s an open wound for a lot of people. And I knew, when I was going to write about this, I wasn’t going to be able to do it without questioning the writing itself, that is, without questioning the extent to which I am capable of expressing what, a priori, is inexpressible. Or to what extent it is ethical to even try to express what is painful for others.
A.P.: The reference to the game is interesting. Tell us about this video game. What is it about and how are you connecting it to the lives of the characters?
M.O.: Sure. It is the center of the novel’s narrative focus. The game Nefando is a video game that some of the characters in this novel create and build together and upload at some point to the deep web, which is this area of the web where there are no browsers and it’s difficult to move around that space because you can find even illegal things that are not allowed on the normal internet. They post this video game online, design it, develop it, program it, upload it, and for a while it’s on the Internet. And the novel is structured in such a way that we know there’s an investigation behind this video game, a person who is constantly asking these characters who have created it questions about the game.
A.P.: Let’s talk about Mandíbula (2018), translated into English by Sarah Booker as Jawbone. And well, the name already puts us on alert, doesn’t it? Jawbone is a book that makes you catch your breath when you read it. From the beginning, it’s in the voice of one of the main protagonists who is tied up, kidnapped by her teacher. She is the one who has kidnapped her. How did Jawbone come about?
M.O.: Well, it comes out of this interest I had for a whole year in studying fear, but fear as an emotion—primitive, atavistic, even, in the body. Fear in the sense of studying the things that scare us. What does it mean to be afraid on an emotional level? And I specifically wanted to examine fear in passionate relationships between women. Jawbone is a novel in which there are only female characters from beginning to end, and they relate to each other in very intense and generally quite violent ways. There is one specific character named Cara, who is also the teacher who at first kidnaps one of her students. The novel begins with a kidnapping that has the characteristics of a thriller, but is not entirely a thriller. And this teacher suffers from anxiety attacks, and I was having anxiety attacks at the time I was writing Jawbone. So for me it was like a way to delve into a truth by means of fiction, if we say fiction always leads us to the truth of the human condition. You might say I was coming to the truth of my own human condition through an invention.
A.P.: Very, very interesting. Monica, what is your poetics for writing about horror?
M.O.: I think, without a doubt, it’s one of the emotions I explore the most, literarily speaking, and it has to do with the fact that it is precisely a rather complex emotion that has been undervalued in literature. I mean that, until relatively recently, horror or literature that deals with fear was seen as a literary subgenre. I think that’s changing now. To me, literarily… I mean, when I write I’m not very interested in writing horror novels because I don’t write horror, but I do write novels about fear and, therefore, when you read a novel that is about fear, you can also, through a kind of cause and effect, end up feeling fear. But that’s not the main goal of my work. What I am interested in is finding out through writing what happens to us, as human beings, when we are paralyzed by fear or propelled like a rocket by fear. The literary conclusions I sometimes arrive at have to do with the use of violence—not only physical violence, but also psychological and verbal violence.
A.P.: What are you working on now?
M.O.: Well, right now I’m finishing a book of short stories that I’m going to publish this year, and I’m also writing a novel. I still think I have a little more time left to go on the novel, but the story collection will probably be finished in a few months and will definitely come out this year.
A.P.: Excellent, Mónica. Congratulations on your career. Thank you very much for taking part in this project.
M.O.: No, thanks to you.
Translated by Will Howard
You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.
