In 1863, Chile experienced one of the greatest catastrophes in its history: the fire of the church of La Compañía de Jesúswhich was located in the city of Santiago (nothing could be built again in that place and there are currently gardens). The event caused the death of about two thousand women. Nobody else talked about it. The case did not receive special treatment in the educational system nor were books written evoking it.
Francisca Solar (1983), Chilean novelist, who has been writing about the Victorian era for a long time based in Chile, He found out about this topic when he was researching his book. The Last Days of Clayton & Co, and with the same thirst of a detective, gathered clues and material to write The mailbox of the impurehis fourth historical novel. A recent work that seeks to uncover what happened in that church in the mid-19th century and to make the voices of women who were buried in the chance of misfortune rise from the ashes.
“I felt very ignorant about the history of my own country. I am very critical of how we are taught the history of Chile. There is a lot of information missing. Energies are concentrated on two or three specific events, but things are missing. As an adult, I began to do this research into what things were happening in Chile and I found a lot of very interesting events that were perfect for writing a complete novel.”Solar tells Viva, in reference to this event of which, at first, as soon as he found out, he only knew a tiny part of it.
That 2,000 women died, unfortunately as harsh as it may sound, no one cared.
And he adds: “For me it was a very vague idea: they once told me that a church burned down and that was that. But when I sit down to investigate, I realize that deep down my ignorance was not so individual or unprecedented. I found that the vast majority of Chileans also had no idea about these events. That is, in part, because so little has been written and researched. It is one of the most important human catastrophes in contemporary history and yet in Chile very little importance has been given to it.. It caught my attention that this milestone had been very little addressed from a historiographical point of view and with all the more reason I wanted to investigate it.”
Con The mailbox of the impure, The writer offers a kind of tribute to the two thousand women who lost their lives in that tragedy. and complete a memory exercise for generations to come. And, on the other hand, it puts at the center of the debate the issues that should be considered important for the education of its country.
This omission, according to some of its hypotheses, could be considered due to the “failure of the educational system”, because not only this, but other Chilean historical events have been “overlooked that are simply not part of the school curriculum and are not “It is obligatory to tell the students.”
“Another way of looking at this is that the Company fire, no matter how colossal it was, is an eminently feminine milestone. 95% of the fatalities were women. You have to be very realistic in the figure of women in 1863. That two thousand women died, unfortunately as harsh as it may sound, did not matter to anyone. Doesn’t move the needle. Women only existed in the domestic space. No matter how much they were from large or cultured families, they did not have any type of power or interference in daily life. The day after the tragedy, life continued the same. The only thing that changed brutally was the domestic space. At that time, In Santiago de Chile there were more or less 100 thousand inhabitants. 2% of the population died. What is disrupted is the family dynamic”, he points out.
While the women were burned alive, the Jesuits blocked one of the escape routes in order to save the furniture from the sacristy.
-Any other factor that has determined the silence?
-Yeah. The fire of the Company is a brutal milestone that leaves a specific group of the population in a very bad position: the archbishopric, the clergy. Not only due to the negligence of the Jesuits, which was the congregation that administered the La Compañía de Jesús temple at the time of the fire. This is known from the historical press. The Jesuits, in the middle of the fire, while the women were burned alive, blocked one of the escape routes in order to save the furniture from the sacristy.. It is worthy of fiction, but it is real. It’s all over the press at the time.
From blogs to the industry
Solar’s literary career began when he was a teenager. Compulsive reader, she based herself on blogs, back in the early 2000s.and his first experiments were captured in fan-fiction Twilight of the High Elves (“a kind of sixth volume of the Harry Potter saga, at a time when the saga had not finished being written”). It was a success and its readers began to emerge from different latitudes.
“It went viral at a time when the concept did not exist because there were no social networks. The only way to spread the word at that time was through blogs, forums. Somehow, this takes off a lot. Hundreds of thousands of people begin to read me and this reaches the ears of publishers. That’s when I get the first offers to write my own books,” he says.
From this, in 2006 she was summoned by Penguin Random House, which published her first novel. Today she has published 17 books and her image as a writer is projected internationally.
“I started writing from a very young age. What I wasn’t very clear about was if I was going to be able to dedicate myself professionally to this. That is something very later. I never considered it as a career. I am from the generation that was educated with the idea that you cannot live with art. My dad told me that I was going to study and work“, recalls Solar when taking stock of these almost twenty years that he has been in the professional field of literature.
Solar gives workshops and his commitment is to the propagation of the written word: “I teach everything I know. I reveal every last comma of everything I do. I teach novel structure, making my entire process transparent. “The democratization of access to art is very important to me.” And about his training, he says that his laboratory was the fan-fictiona collaborative writing space.
“There, the one who reads and criticizes is a peer. There is none above the other. I brought that horizontality to professional literature. “My readers are my peers.”