The writer Pilar Quintana (Cali, 1972) has been linked to Rosa’s life, the protagonist of her new novel, Black Nightalthough the latter inhabits fiction and author in Bogotá. Quintana has given Rosa life in a couple of stories and gave her a secondary role in The dogan editorial success of 2017 that has been translated into more than twenty languages. Rosa is not exactly an alterego of Quintana, although they share a transformative experience: they lived some time alone in the dense jungle of the Colombian Pacific, when their partners, Irish, they left home for a couple of weeks. “Without violence, the jungle can eat you,” says Quintana to explain why Rosa, citadina like her, fears her own strength before the fauna and flora that surrounds her. But, above all, Rosa fears his own mind. “I want to know what maintains us, what is the limit of our sanity,” says Quintana in an interview with El País. Black night, This novel that inhabits fear, comes this week in Spain and is already available in Colombia.
Ask. Like the protagonist of this novel, you lived several years in the Colombian Pacific jungle with a foreigner. Is there autobiography in Black Night?
Answer. No and yes. I lived in the Colombian Pacific with an Irish, like Rosa, and I am Caleña, like her. But the novel passes in 1980 and Rosa was born in 1941. He has been as 31 years old. History is not autobiographical but he did drink from my experience. I wanted to make a novel about an isolated woman, alone, and I for a three -month season I was alone in my house. I suffered a lot because the neighbors thin, the people were not Chevere. But it is fiction. I had an experience and what I do is make things of real life into fiction to conjure them, because I was very impressed.
P. There is also echo to your novel The dogwhere the protagonist, Damaris, lives in the same jungle
R. The dog and Black Night They occur in the same narrative universe. Damaris lived in a foreign house; She was the care of the Reyes family. Rosa goes to that house in Black Nightand there are three Manes In a kiosk preparing a sancocho. Damaris from time to time went to the house of some neighbors to clean his house, and those neighbors were Rosa and Gene (the Irish) when they were old. It is a narrative universe that I have been working since before The dog. I wrote the story ‘La Rumba, Son, Palo bit’, which appeared in the anthology Stab traperaabout the day it dies. I have another story that is called Secret Gardenwhich has not come out in Spanish, but in Mandarin. In China the novels are longer, and when they were going to publish The dog They seemed very corticated, then they published other stories. Secret Garden It is about Rosa the day it dies. All are characters that have lived with me for a long time.
P. How much is the universe of The maelstrom by José Eustasio Rivera, where the characters “were” the jungle “?
R. It is definitely. The dog and Black Night they drink from a long tradition of the jungle Latin American novel where The maelstrom It is one of the peak works, but there is also the work of Horacio Quiroga and even put One hundred years of lonelinesswith these people who go to the jungle (to found Macondo). More recently is William Ospina, for example, with his trilogy about the conquest of the New World. There are also Joseph Conrad, Hemingway or Jack London, writers who left urban centers and went to Alaska, Africa, Cuba, to Congo. It is the literature that moves away from the city and explores the relationship of protagonists with nature. What happens is that this jungle literature had always been very masculine.
P. Black Night It reveals a very detailed knowledge of the plants surrounding Rosa. Did he do a botanical archive work?
R. In the lot where I lived 36,000 square meters, 3.6 hectares, a significant amount of land for two people. In that area people cut the trees and killed all animals, hunted them. I said no, that in my piece I did not, that I was going to protect it, and I began to make an inventory of all the fauna and the flora. I had a blog in which I was classifying everything. I didn’t know that then it was going to serve me so much.
P. It also counts in the book that was based on the work of Colombian journalist and writer Arturo Alape in La Paz, Violence: Exception witnesses
R. That allowed me to create a character from the past of Rosa, Fermín, who comes from the guerrillas of the sixties, but above all it was very useful to show the transfund of violence in Colombia of 1980, when the security statute governed. Colombia lived for 40 or 50 years in the permanent state of siege, because there was war, and when President Julio César) turbay, on top of a security statute. It was a state of siege on the state of siege. Black Night It is a novel about being surrounded: Rosa lives in a world where there is a state of siege, and she is also in a state of site for men and the jungle that surrounds her.
P. The book is read very suspense for the fear and anguish she lives in that context. Would you call the book a Thriller psychological?
R. Yes. Look that several editors from the United States and England read the book and asked me the same, and yes, it can be. I am not able to put tags to what I do, but I do believe that it enrolls in the jungle tradition and the Gothic that we have done here in Colombia, such as the group of Cali or Andrés Caicedo. What happens is that we did not call him like this, but there are stories of a Rumbera Cali that at night becomes dark and birds arrive to get people out of their homes.
P. About fear, one does not know if he believes Rosa about what he is fearing or if he is paranoia
R. Look that she is not the narrator, there is an external narrator because we can’t believe Rosa. In a moment she says that there is a bat behind in the house, it will show it to some Manes And it’s not there. There one wonders: what is happening to this lady? Is there a bat or is it paranoid?
P. In addition, her mother and grandmother had dementia, which generates doubts of whether she is fine
R. Yes, too. But there is also something very hard, and it is that women have often distorted our stories saying that we are crazy. This novel is about Rosa’s fears and, returning to the question of whether it is autobiographical, because Rosa has my fears, and I think they are not just mine. We all have fears and live in a state of permanent alert: when we go down the street, when we take public transport, when we are in the disco. We know there are always aggressors. At parties we ask someone who feels with us because if “this other man comes to harass me.” It is a permanent alert. And Rosa is a lady who stays completely alone with the threats of the jungle, the bats, the spirits of the jungle, but also with the men. They are a common threat among us, because we are attacked in our homes, in the street, in the workplace, on the farm, in the place of recreation. We all live stalking.
P. Of course, but still she doubts her fear, whether she should have it or is being paranoid
R. And that also happens to us, all the time we ask ourselves if it will be true or we are imagining it, if that is happening to us or if it will be our interpretation. In this novel I wonder about the limit of what maintains us.
P. The dog and The abysses They are on motherhood; Here is a question about fatherhood and fear of abandonment of the father
R. Yes, about the responsibility of men with daughters, and the relationship with the men produced by that link. Rosa that relationship breaks and determines her relationship with the other men: who falls in love with, how she falls in love, why she falls in love, what hooks her, what scares her. It is his great wound. Rosa is no longer a girl, she lives another reality, but she returns to examine her trauma.
P. He is already an independent adult but that his partner leaves the trauma detonates the trauma
R. She, Rosa, is a hard. He studied at the university at a time when others married and had babies. He was boss. He came from a popular neighborhood and progressed at work. He left everything to go to the jungle; She is a lady with a machete and machita boot who challenged all the roles assigned to her. She feels strong and is the one who keeps the house. But her husband leaves and it is her worst defeat, realize that she is completely alone and vulnerable.
P. In that solitude she tries to defend against animals with the machete, and begins to be afraid of their own violence, fear of being the same as the men who have hurt her
R. That is the question that is asked: am I just prey? He is wondering the legitimacy of violence. There is one thing that I discovered in the jungle, and if I did not use violence, the jungle ate me. If I was passive, to hug the trees and walk barefoot, in five minutes the jungle ended with me. Rosa is at the point where the wild animal that is in it has to survive to subsist. But that is Rosa’s most terrible fear, which we also have. The other fears, to the jungle, to the spirits, are light. Our deepest fear is what we have in our own madness. She needs to peel the layers of civilization to survive in the jungle, but she is afraid of that: to wield the machete and kill those Hijuepin before they come for her. What does that make it? In a crazy?
P. Rosa is repeated daily that “life is to wash the dishes.” Is that routine in the jungle a hell or paradise that Rosa was looking for?
R. She says that, a “Juduta, every day I have to get up to do this because if the world does not end, if he did not eat the jungle.” And then he says, “but this is being free, right? I don’t have to live in the city, dress in a certain way, act in a certain way.” She wonders what freedom is. A city inhabitant believes that being free is being calm living a simple life in the countryside, but this lady is in the countryside and is anything less free. It is chained to animals, to nature. Are wild animals free? No, every day they have to hunt their food, their life is hunting. The same happens to Rosa: life is going to be subsisting.
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