The Argentine writer, Dolores Reyes, was in Chile presenting “Miseria” (2023, Alfaguara), the sequel to the successful book “Cometierra”. In her novels, the writer addresses gender violence through fantasy.
Broadly speaking, Cometierra, the protagonist, is a girl with mediumistic powers; by eating dirt she can know where the bodies of women victims of femicides are.
“When it comes to writing about social problems that are not yet resolved, that are like a wound so strong and so open, they get into your fiction, which makes you obsessed. And I was interested not only in the issue of political disappearances that unfortunately bring us together throughout Latin America, but also those missing in democracy, the women who are missing every day in all our countries,” she expressed in this interview.
Furthermore, he explained that in the novels one of the premises is that “the earth knows where our bodies are beyond the will of the violent.”
“I feel that writing It is a way to mobilize, to react actively without letting yourself be crushed by sadness, by row, because of the helplessness, because of everything that it generates, well, they continue to kill us and even those who have the obligation to take care of their citizens do not do so,” he added.
Reyes also referred to the massive march that took place in Argentina in defense of public education.
“The best writer or even the best reader, the best critic is not the one who can pay for the degree, but can be any child of a worker from Argentina or from all the countries who wants to come to study at the UBA or the different national universities. What Milei does is defund it, give them a ridiculous budget for the degree of inflation that exists in Argentina and the faculties would have to close in March with this budget,” he said.
Check out the full interview below: