“I wish I didn’t have topics to write horror about”

Sometimes chance has beautiful coincidences, as happens with two books that are published, almost at the same timeby the Ecuadorian writer María Fernanda Ampuero. While she talks, you don’t notice that she had a turbulent flight, nor that he has just arrived in Buenos Aires for a marathon of talks and presentations. She speaks calmly and passionately about Dancethe anthology which brings together classic and contemporary horror stories written by the women she most admires; and also about the most intimate Viscerala series of personal texts that go from essay to memoir, and together form a kind of furious autobiography.

Actually, one book becomes the flip side of the othersince in the anthology of stories the Reading ampuero, with a journey of creepy stories that make up the invisible life, which in multiple ways feed his own writing; Meanwhile in Visceral you can read those brands of experience social, family, as a migrant and woman who reveal a view of the world.

Overall, the sensation when reading them is to discover the core that beats behind their fictions gathered in Cockfight y Human sacrifices: fierce, stark and meaningful writing.

–Could it be said that Dance y Visceral make up the two sides of the kitchen of your writing?

–I hadn’t thought about it because they are very different, they come from different embryos, but it’s very nice how you put it because it is true that women who dedicate themselves to this hybrid genre, which can be police or horror, have to create our own genealogy. There is a tendency to think that horror is a genre that was masterfully developed by men. Since it came out Cockfight in 2018 The recurring question was why so many women now write horror. And well, it seemed a little strange to me because I knew other previous authors, Mary Shelley herself wrote one of the mythical horror characters, among the mummies, the vampires and the lagoon monster is Frankenstein and a lady wrote it. So, it was important for me to build a classic and contemporary genealogy. Sometimes, there is a lot of selfishness in saying that I was trained by the classics, and it is not true. In different regions, especially in Latin America, the voice of fury is appearing in writings that talk about everything that has happened to women in the region.

-What extent Visceral show your real world terrors?

–I am particularly interested as a reader in zeitgeist, the spirits of the times. The frivolity of some times, the supposed peace of other times. For some years there has been an irreversible dangerous spirit, that of the terror of losing the land, what we have, that is, losing the resources, the air, the water. If we really started talking about ecology, I think we wouldn’t stop shouting.

–In fact, in “Terror” you mention three central arguments, among them water pollution.

–Imagine that you are in the place that seems purest in the world and it starts to rain and the water is not pure, or that girls are being born with micro plastics in their bodies. Those kinds of things that scientists say fill me with darkness. They are like the great Apocalypse on a small scale. I’m not talking about my darkness, I’m talking about what’s inside all the people who govern us. and makes the decisions and that allows massive exploitation of the land, monocultures, glyphosate to continue. Not making a political decision about it, that’s the dark part, not me.

–It is a particularly critical time.

–I would like not to have topics to write about horror, but it is enough to look lightly at a newspaper at a news item about what is happening in Gaza that makes me especially sick because to think that a people that lived through the most macabre darkness in history is capable of doing to another town to live that darkness, you know? It makes me lose faith in compassion and empathy and in the ability we have to not be selfish. So mine is a writing from rage.

–And how do you work on your experiences so that they can embody a fury that screams us?

–Everything is so incredibly interconnected, the intersection between powers and ways of violating a woman. Now that we are talking to smart people, asking the right questions, and making the right connections; I realize that Visceral It’s a book about what they did to me, which in parallel, at this moment they are beginning to do it to girls and adolescents. All the time, that girl I was is being violated, it has to be stopped somehow. Everything they did had nothing to do with me, my health, or my abilities. It has to do with the mandate of the good woman, how an immigrant should be, how a teenager should be. And that has brought me here to an adulthood in which I would like to go back in time and tell the girl and the teenager that I was that all that is not important, even if everyone told her that it was, that she should not give so much value to that a fat woman is worth less than a woman who is at her ideal weight, and that everything that happens or doesn’t happen to her is her fault. Imagine carrying the idea that you have the solution in your hands. The machine is so perfect that it is already beginning to self-sabotage,

–Many of the texts talk about the distortion of image and identity.

–All women on the planet experience a certain aesthetic aggression, whether on television, in magazines, through the mouths of our grandmothers, mothers. Aesthetic aggression is everywhere. In Spain, for example, which is not a particularly vain society, let’s say in quotes, measuring tapes are already beginning to be seen in all pharmacy windows.

–And to what extent do many of these impositions come from the discourse of love, of family?

–It’s like pyramid scams, one woman grabs others and when you realize, well, you’ve scammed half the population. I have only spoken with my mother because she is the direct protagonist of many corporal, chemical and aesthetic violence against my body when she does not belong to her, nor did she ever belong to her. Men will have their moves, but I have spoken with hundreds of women throughout my life, even women who it would be impossible for them to have insecurity because they are at the ideal mega weight and look like top models, but they start telling you things like look at my jaw is very masculine. They are talking like ventriloquist dolls about their mothers and their mothers are talking to dolls about their mothers. We would have to see the primal evil where she came from. Machismo is very intersectional, but there is also something in hair, in certain body types, that at least in Ecuador, have to do with racism.

–Your previous books are horror fictions. What explains your turn in writing towards the autobiographical?

–Many people have told me that they had imagined that they were going to face a more essayistic book about the genre, and of course, then they found what I am, what I write. This is grabbing Cockfight, Human sacrifices and put a two point and take out Visceral. Simply what I have done is remove all the artifice or the construction of characters to talk about those same terrors.

–In fact, in the story “Biography” there is the same interpellation that appears in some of the texts in this book.

–It was necessary that there be something from the general to the particular so that it does not remain something simply of a woman who makes a parade of monsters or a freak show of what has happened to her. He didn’t want to go for personal gloating. I wrote it because I feel so angry that I wasn’t allowed to be the woman I could have been.. None of us are born with the idea that I am less because I am black, I am less because I am indigenous, I am less because I am fat. No being perceives itself as less. They take away our superpowers with mirrors, of course, because that girl who entered the dressing room or who looked in the mirror at home when she turned around gave the mirror a lot of things that she was going to need along the way in life. she.

–In some way there is also something vampy about older men who seduce girls, as happens in “Centro” and also in the story by Emília Pardo Bazán that you chose for Dance?

-I love it. There you see the obsessions, those things of the older man who wants to be seen with the little girl who looks at him with fascination. He feels superior because he is with a woman 20 years his junior and he has managed to corrupt her a little or wants to corrupt her. And he is a vampire, I love that you read it like that because that is how terror works: you turn up the volume on certain behaviors and turn them into a thing, no longer metaphorical, let’s say, but directly the man feeds on youth. Everything is interconnected.

–The issue that girls do not feel confident about their bodies makes them vulnerable to violence because they believe that what is done to them is deserved, they believe that if they had tried a little harder, if they had dieted more, If they had had prettier skin or whatever. Conditioned by insecurities, I forgive the world for this man doing this to me because I don’t deserve anything else.. Of course, look how well thought out it is to make women afraid of a scale, for example afraid of a mirror, I mean, it would be interesting to make a kind of horror story like Beauty and the Beast, but instead of the little cup and the I don’t know what the scale and the mirror. Or that the food speaks to you, I know you want this, but no, you have to punish yourself. You always have to ask for something you don’t like because you can’t enjoy it.

–And what do you think this imposition is due to?

–Deep down, they are terrified of a woman who enjoys herself. In the 8M marches, for example, we came out furious, and rightly so. We talk about femicides and we talk about disappearances and we talk about rapes, but when you leave nourished by all that energy you come out joyful. Yes, it is very paradoxical. We have converted that energy, we have channeled it into a brotherhood. And how can they not be terrified of that, of course.

–In contrast, the possibility of hope to build a different bond between a man and a woman appears in “Neblina.”

–Well, yes, but look what had to happen, me being the only woman on the planet possible for this person and him being the only being on the planet for me. It was like being on a desert island. I like that you see it as hopeful because it was a kind of salvation for each other, two human beings who save each other instead of destroying each other.

• He was born in Guayaquil (Ecuador) in 1976 and lives between Spain, Ecuador and Mexico.

• In 2016 she received the Cosecha Eñe award for the story Nam, which talks about first sexual experiences and lesbian love.

• Among his publications are What I learned at the hairdresser, Residence permit and the acclaimed collection of stories Cockfighta book recommended as one of the best of the year by The New York Times in Spanish.

Dantescas: Tales of women who descended into hell (FERA) and Visceral (Foam Pages), by María Fernanda Ampuero.