Mónica Ojeda, the pop star of literature

At first sight, Mónica Ojeda looks like Lady Gaga. A brunette, Ecuadorian version. In addition to appearance, it has in common that he is also a star, even pop, but from literature. He was born in Guayaquil in 1988, still she is pigeonholed as young, and it is, although it has a lot of life behind it. Young, in his case, applies more to a quality that will last even though he gets older and older. It has to do with a certain intrinsic modernity, which does not expire. With that he reads as a way of writing. Because He is curious about everything.

That is present in his novels, Silva’s disfigurement (2014), By doing wrong (2016) y Jaw (2018); in the poems The stone cycle (2015) e history of milk (2020); in the stories of The flyers (2021) and in his new book, Electric shamans at the sun partywhich came out this year and came to present at the Buenos Aires Book Fair.

For that reason, and also because what he writes It is entertainingis that among other awards and recognitions, she was selected as one of the most relevant literary voices in Latin America by the Hay Festival, Bogotá39 in 2017 and was given the Next Generation Prize from the Prince Claus Fund for her literary career in 2019.

Since 2017 live in Spain. She migrated because she did not feel safe in Guayaquil. “I have never known a city that was so violent, there are many inequalities. She is very cruel and very hard on certain bodies.. “It became difficult for me to cross a street without being nervous,” she says and says that now she has changed her fears for others: she worries about her family, the dear people with whom she is hours away by plane. . Although not geographically, then, she is still in Ecuador. In that way, and also when she writes, with the worlds that she thinks, imagines, she creates.

It is not easy Lady Ojeda. Dig into violence. Among the topics it addresses, as a plot or subplot, it may appear pedophilia, incest, child pornography, abandoned children, the purest evil. His literature is dark, also illuminated, and has an intense and captivating, yet fundamental, way of focusing on Latin American reality, purely fiction. Electric shamans at the sun festivallike almost all of his work, crosses modernity with the ancestral to investigate current fears and morbidities.

history happens on the slopes of an Ecuadorian volcano, where a macro-festival of retrofuturist music takes place that lasts eight days: Solar Noise. Noa and Nicole are going to dance. They also escape the violence of the city. One of her friends also plans to look for her father, whom she has not seen since her childhood and who lives in that area, far from the world.

Ojeda plays, in the first half, with the points of view, the choir of voices and the registration of different oralities. In the second half, he assembles everything with prose loaded with poetry, even with poems, synesthesia, intelligence. It touches the joyful and the terrifying, without pause or rest. Reading could seem like a hallucinatory journey, and it is, but it also advances with a pulse of plot and intrigue.

–What attracts you so much about shamans?

–I am interested in many things about shamans. When the shaman feels the call he enters a kind of crisis, psychological and spiritual, then he symbolically dies and is resurrected. That is present in many religions. Also in the myths of societies that had just entered the agricultural world, where the idea of ​​death and resurrection was linked to harvesting the land to obtain food. There is a mythical world there. In contemporary literature it is the journey that any protagonist character takes. The path of the hero. And as an experience outside of literature, It is the journey we undertake every time we have a psychological crisis, for example, where we question our identity, which is cracking, and we feel like we are dying. Then, if we are able to overcome that pain, we are resurrected.

–Where do you read about these things?

–There are many anthropological texts and works. For example, from Joseph Campbell or Patrick Harpur, but also from another place, Carlos Castaneda and The teachings of don Juan. There are many sources. I’m interested in reading everything, because I think that’s the secret of how to build a story. I am interested in thinking, investigating, experimenting with how we generate the story of painful experiences.. I even think of Raúl Zurita, because in his work there is a lot of death and resurrection, especially when he talks about deserted Chile and wonders where those killed by the dictatorship are. And those dead are resurrected in his poetry.

–What other things interest you, in fiction and narrative?

-I really like reading. Thinking about contemporaries, and now that I am in Argentina, obviously Mariana Enriquez, I am also very interested in Marina Closs, Fernanda Melchor, María Fernanda Ampuero and Federico Falco.

–In the authors you name there is something in common, that they use local myths to investigate terror from the local level. You do it too…

-Yes absolutely. It could be said that I do Andean Gothic. He’s a hacking goth, of course. We take that Anglo-Saxon root, that concept, and we transform it, adding another word, for example Andean. Or suddenly tropical gothic. Or river plate. What’s that? Head explodes. Because in reality It has to do with a hack to the conceptwhich uses elements of the construction of the horror narrative, but narrated from other locations that are not exclusively the north with castles, ghosts and Dracula.

–In your books the theme of volcanoes is always present, but in Electric shamans at the sun festival It is a more prominent geography. What do you find in volcanoes?

–Volcanoes are manifestations of the underground in the skin of the Earth. That reminds me a lot of what writing is. I am also very interested in what the volcano represents.. In the sense that it is destruction and at the same time information of constant life. Because when they activate they kill people, animals, they destroy everything in their path, but after a few years that land becomes fertile soil. And again, it is the same constant movement of death and resurrection of the shamans. That seems spectacular to me and very interesting to think about. The spectacle of existence.

• She was born in Ecuador in 1988. She has a degree in Social Communication, a master’s degree in Literary Creation and in Theory and Criticism of Culture, and she taught at the Catholic University of Santiago de Guayaquil.

• She is the author of the novels Silva disfigurement (Alba Narrative Award, 2014), By denying (2016) y Jaw (2018), from the poetry collections The stone cycle (2015) e history of milk (2020) and the volume of stories The flyers (2020).

• She has been selected as one of the most relevant literary voices in Latin America by the Hay Festival – on the Bogotá39 list of 2017 – and awarded the Next Generation Prize 2019 from the Prince Claus Fund for her literary career.

• In 2021 it was chosen by Grant as one of the twenty-five best narrators in Spanish under thirty-five years old.