The Absolute Present: An Interview with Alia Trabucco Zerán
Para leer esta entrevista en español, haz clic aquí.
In this interview I asked Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán about her craft, about violence inherited and inherent in a country and culture, and about translation. Alia spoke about the way a body experiences time and inertia during a pandemic, and the books that have kept her company in quarantine, when the body is held still, inertial, while the mind roams free.
Having always been intrigued by the cordillera that outlines the Chilean border, and the literature that touches and transcends it, I was immediately captured by Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder, while looking for contemporary Chilean literature. When planning for Huellas’ second issue focused around the theme of ‘inertia,’ this book immediately came to mind. Inertia is movement without change, but often when I think about it, I think about the external actions that force change and disrupt inertia. I think about the tipping point between motion and action: the moment where everything balances on a slim edge, then snaps, tumbles, and changes.
The Remainder is a story about three young people. It’s a story of a death, a road trip, trauma that echoes, numbers that tell an uncomfortable truth, and the slim edge between past and present. It’s a story about young Chileans growing up with the burden of a dictatorship they barely remember but which has irrevocably shadowed their lives, their hopes, their loves, and their actions. It’s about those who try to leave their country and their trauma behind, and the way it snaps them back to where they came from. It’s about the liminality of the road, of the borders between countries and between flat land and mountain range. And it is a story told in prose that races across the page: prose that tangles and backtracks, like the hearse the characters are traveling in, like the body they are collecting, like their shared histories.
Alia’s most recent book is Las Homicidas, which is available in Spanish here, and is forthcoming in English from Coffeehouse Press (US) and And Other Stories (UK).
Your debut novel, La resta (The Remainder), deals with the lasting effects of inherited trauma. How do you think the sources of this trauma—inherited from our parents, countries of origin, cultures, genders, and/or sexualities—interact with and inform one another?
Narrating the dictatorship or, in this case, the post-dictatorship, and to give it coherence, shape, a clear and calming sense of order, didn’t seem possible or even desirable because this trauma, like many traumas, does not take just one form, nor can it be contained in a rigid structure. That is why I was interested in the remains, the fragments, the oblique and subtle way in which the violence and history of a country enter and seep into the biographies of several generations. I think that the dictatorship inflicted a very radical violence that not only manifested itself in the bodies of thousands of people, but also in the imaginations of many, including those of us that only lived part of our childhood during this period. That imagination returns in unexpected moments, it overflows and appears. I think, for example, about the forced confinement of these months due to the virus and how for some, that had to hide during the dictatorship, this feeling of an invisible threat can bring up recollections of that trauma. The way in which trauma renews and manifests itself is always unexpected.
Can you speak a little about the construct of the road trip novel—what drew you to it, and why did you think it would work to frame La resta? La resta is set in Chile, and is there something about the unique geography of that country—of the cordillera, in particular—that worked well as a backdrop for your novel?
Every road trip has an origin, but not necessarily a clear destination. I think that format, structured, but open-ended, in other words, flexible, allowed me to move forward with the writing of the novel without knowing what would end up happening with the characters. On top of that, while one of the characters narrates in chronological order, the other one is constantly poking holes in that narrative. Finally, what ends up happening is that during the road trip, they’re not advancing toward, but rather escaping a destination. They don’t arrive. And they also escape from a landscape, a geography that oppresses them. The cordillera plays a predominant role in this sense. It works as a wall, creating the sense of being at the bottom of a pit that is very hard to escape.
I am interested in the time between a book being published in its original language and when it’s translated. With La resta, there was a four or five year gap between its publications in Spanish and in English. How did your relationship to the book change after it was translated by your incredible translator, Sophie Hughes? Is it difficult to allow your debut novel to be “repatriated” into another language?
I think that the time that passed between the Spanish publication and the English translation was very brief. I still felt very close to the novel, so it was not strange to revisit the text. On the other hand, it’s a book that took me several years to write and there are parts that I know by memory, so it was very nice to see the metamorphosis that Sophie Hughes achieved. She not only captured the words, but also a melody and an emotional landscape in a way that still amazes me. On the other hand, the English edition has been very special because it produces other readings and the novel has connected with other traumas, other stories. I remember a reading that I did in London where an English-Argentine woman told me that the novel had allowed her to connect with the generation of her parents, exiled in England. She, who had lost her Spanish, had read the book in English. For that to happen was very unexpected, very beautiful.
I was fascinated to learn that you went to law school to become a human rights lawyer before publishing your first book. In what ways did the language and rhetorical traditions you were taught influence your creative writing?
As much as I fight with the fact that I studied law, the truth is that studying it marked me a lot. Law is the language of power. Each word, each term, the way in which a sentence or argument is written, is crucial and carries in itself a lot of weight. It’s a dry, aesthetically horrifying language and often very formulaic in the continental tradition. Maybe because of my love for language and its beauty, I always felt averse towards that dryness. But there are also notable texts that exist on the border between law and literature, from Kafka to Armando Uribe, or even the great Judith Butler, that have allowed me to revisit that formal background. On the other hand, my second book, Las Homicidas, feeds off this background. I was interested in exploring the power of those gender dynamics in those cases of violence in keeping women in a place of submission and passivity, even when they had committed violent crimes. So law continues to interest me, but from a different perspective.
Your new book, Las Homicidas, is about women who killed, transgressing legal and gender lines with their crimes. We are seeing the transgressive effect of women’s rage across the world right now, leading Black Lives Matter and Un violador en tu camino protests and more. Why do you think that rage has such contemporary power?
Las Homicidas is an exercise that actually explores cases where rage played an important role, but nevertheless, was erased. I’ll give you an example: Maria Teresa Alfaro was a domestic worker who assassinated the children of her employers. Even though she mentions rage during the trial, that element is dismissed in the sentencing. That erasure interested me. Why erase her rage? The philosopher Marilyn Frye explains that rage is a political emotion because it points the finger towards an injustice, whoever is responsible for that injustice, and demands reparations. And it’s dangerous because it defines the political subject. That’s why it is erased. This happens often to us women. They tell us our rage is irrational, it’s a product of insanity, of hysteria, but it is not something exclusive to women. We also see it in protests in Chile and, as a matter of fact, in the protests happening in the United States. There is a lot of accumulated rage pointing the finger at inequality, at injustice, and demanding reparations. The strategy of governments is then to repeat time and time again that there are vandals or “acts of evil,” as Piñera said in Chile and Trump has said in the United States. In this way, they try to erase the political subject and their legitimate demands. What I’m putting forth, which is applicable to women and to protests for other causes, is that it is important to return to this and other feelings and take them seriously. Rage is a fundamental political emotion.
From The Remainder to Las homicidas, you have gone from writing fiction to nonfiction and essays. What is it like to switch between genres? How porous are the borders between genres?
The truth is that the more time goes by, the more I think the divisions of genre are useful for the purpose of analysis, but are foreign to the process of writing itself. It’s certainly very different to write fiction than non-fiction, especially because fiction requires you to get lost in places that are completely unknown (and terrifying!). But the truth is that the care in the writing is the same and, at least for me, both genres demand an aesthetic and intellectual commitment, affective and reflexive. In that sense, it wasn’t a huge shift for me, but emotionally, yes, I think it’s harder and more challenging to write fiction, at least for me. On the other hand, although Las Homicidas is an essay, it also contains fragments of a diary narrated in first person and even a fictional story, so the border is blurred. Each time, I’m more interested in that gray area.
Do you think there is a defining spirit of contemporary Chilean literature? If so, what distinguishes it? Which voices is it lacking?
The truth is I don’t know or maybe I have a hard time seeing it right now. There are exceptional women writers like Lina Meruane, exploring themes like sickness and literature in her work, but even Lina has non-fiction pieces about other topics, like Palestinian identity or maternity. Then there is Nona Fernández who has dedicated herself to working on the issue of memory from different angles. Or Diamela Eltit whose allegorical novels are always powerful and whose writing explores the current injustices in Chile with an impressive lucidity. I would say that there is a lot of diversity, like in all Latin American literary traditions. Time will tell if there is a distinct spirit to this moment.
I always want to know which books writers are reading. How and where do you read? Which books are on your bookshelves, your desk? Whose words have brought you anger, joy, and inspiration during this pandemic?
I’m responding to this interview in London, from the house of an aunt who has welcomed us until the borders reopen. The confinement changed everything since I usually work in libraries and not at home, so I carry books in my backpack, and others I ask to borrow. And well, at this moment, my books, almost all of them, are on a boat going from England to Santiago. That idea makes me a bit nervous—the books in transit so close to the water while I’m not able to travel—so I try not to think too much about that image. I have with me two books by Nathalie Leger that I haven’t read yet. And well, the truth is I got sick with the coronavirus and I ended up reviewing literature about sickness: Thomas Mann, on one hand, and one of my favorites, Max Blecher, who I found thanks to another one of my favorite authors, Herta Müller. And well, above all, the handling of the pandemic by the Chilean government has inspired rage in me. Their ineptitude and arrogance, a combination that is literally fatal.
You are an editor at a small press: Brutas Editoras. Can you speak a little about what it is like to work with other people’s fiction in such an intimate way?
I was editor, along with Lina Meruane and the poet Soledad Marambio, of that small press, which is now on indefinite hiatus. The experience was extremely interesting, entertaining, challenging and defining. I really like reading and editing, and largely with a sense of joy, I tried to make texts that were already very good, even better. Some authors are a bit resistant to critiques, but my experience, especially with women authors, was excellent.
Can you speak about the importance that indie presses play in Latin America and beyond, where they are taking risks and pushing at the borders of the literary canon with their publications? Are there any contemporary presses you would like to recommend?
I think they are crucial precisely because they bet on books that occasionally stray from the canon or more commercial trends. But also because they have rescued forgotten works or works that, because of the tyranny of newer works, have been unfairly forgotten. Among those with this double profile—publishing excellent contemporary books and also rescuing past works in dialogue with the present—I would recommend: Minúscula (Spain), Periférica (Spain), Eterna Cadencia (Argentina), Cuenco de Plata (Argentina), Dum Dum (Bolivia), Banda Propia (Chile), Alquimia (Chile), La Pollera (Chile), Tajamar (Chile). But there are so many more.
Finally, when we think about inertia for this issue of Huellas, we have to think about time, which people have talked about experiencing differently while in quarantine. Can you speak about memory and time, and the way we experience time differently if we are not allowed to move through it?
I got sick with coronavirus, so my quarantine experience has been branded by that moment, where the confinement was secondary to the other confinement, the one of my own body. In that sense, I can only say that an ailing body experiences only one dimension: the absolute present.
Alia Trabucco Zerán (Santiago, 1983) is author of the novel La Resta (Tajamar, 2015), which was awarded Best Literary Work from the National Council of Culture and the Arts (CNCA) and was a finalist for the International Booker prize. In 2019, she published a book of essays, Las Homicidas (Lumen), exploring well-known cases of violent women from a feminist perspective. She was editor of the publisher Brutas Editoras and has contributed stories and essays to various anthologies in Chile and abroad.
Lily Philpott is an event producer and books enthusiast. She is a member of the International Literature Committee at the Brooklyn Book Festival, and a member of the advisory board of UK publisher And Other Stories. Born in Santiago, Chile, she lives and works in New York City.