Can you talk about women’s writing without going into gender issues?

“To know nothing about the river or fishing, I write a lot about it. I’ve heard it said, haven’t I said it many times too?, that you have to write what you know. However, just as I write to answer a few questions myself I write out of curiosity and precisely because I don’t know”, says the Argentinian author Almada Jungle in the opening text of the recently published anthology woman and writing.

Edited by Gwendolyn Diaz-Ridgeway and co-edited by Claudia Ferradasis a selection of texts by authors from all over the country (winning, recognized, emerging) whose purpose is to present an overview of the “variety and richness” of the work of Argentine writers, with “particular attention to the act of writing itself”, rather than proposing texts alluding to the genre.

Besides Almada’s text, to which the author of brickmakers there not a river Entitled “Fishing and Writing”, the book brings together unpublished writings, others with restricted distribution, complete stories, or fragments of books already published. Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, Mariana Enriquez, Esther Cross, Elsa Osori, Marie-Therese Andruetto, Camera Gabriela Cabezon, Luisa Valenzuela, Ana Maria Shua, Maria Rosa Lojo.

woman and writing, Published by Fundación La Balandra, it is a project born in 2021 on the initiative of the PEN Argentina Center to pay tribute to 100 years of the international organization that brings together poets, essayists and storytellers from all over the world.

“The anthology celebrates the variety and richness of the work of Argentine writers today, with particular attention paid to the act of writing itself,” she explains in an interview with Telam. . Gwendolyn Diaz Ridgeway. What is the writing process? Where do the texts come from? Under what conditions is it written? What inspires writing? What place does writing occupy in the country’s individual and social identity? These are some of the questions that weave this map of voices and registers.

The compilation does not offer thematic texts alluding to genderRather, what these pages leave behind is a conversation with writing, literature, fiction, his, the creative universe. As its editor warns, “it is not a question here of debating whether or not the literature written by women differs from that written by men, but rather to offer a current (although necessarily limited) panorama of the production literature of Argentine writers, with attention to the variety, quality and quantity of the country’s production”.

So write, for example, in a poem Cristina Pina: “Attention and silence/ intimacy/ so that the voice/ dares to come out/ so that it says/ everything that is silent/ what it does not dare/ say,/ does not want.” Ana María Shua wonders in “The Kitchen of Creation” about what she calls the “mystery” of “creation” and he will say: “But if the core of creation is undemonstrable, it belongs to the domain of the unspeakable, on the other hand it is possible to speak of the craft.” AND Luisa Futoranski he confides: “Some door opens a little where the poem is born and once again, for a time, I am safe.

Like any selection, there is a discretion behind. They’re not all here, they could never be. But the anthology attempts to expand voices, representations and geographies. They are all linked to Argentina: those who were born and live here, those who have chosen this country as their homeland or those who have left it but continue to write from a language that dialogues with this tradition. “The variety of work by the authors gathered here underscores the importance of an inclusive voice in the development of the country’s national and social consciousness, as well as in the cultural and scriptural field in particular”, maintains the publisher.

In this direction, woman and writing makes a great contribution with a federal map that crosses Entre Ríos, Chaco, Córdoba, Tierra del Fuego, among other provinces. The anthology even includes bilingual poems by Liliana Ancalaoorigins writer and researcher mapucheand of Claudia Herrera who recovers the language huarp. As Díaz-Ridgeway points out, editing took “into account geographic diversity, ethnic diversity, diversity of literary styles and genres, and diversity of output by including internationally renowned authors alongside emerging authors” .

How to read the rise or visibility of Argentine writers in the world of publishing and their recognition? How does the poetic, literary, essayistic richness that we see at the moment enhance or express the omission that women have suffered in the field of writing or in the canonical system of decades ago?

The publisher acknowledges that the reading on this subject has changed over the years. “Towards the end of the 1980s, it was not common to do a thesis limited to contemporary Argentine writers. when i interviewed Beatrice Guido He asked me if I was sure I would be accepted for a thesis “on women, nothing more”. In 2009, when my book was published woman and power, in Argentine literature, a book on women was no longer surprising. Currently, the work of Argentine and Latin American authors in general enjoys recognition demonstrated by the number of national and international awards they have received.

On the social level, Díaz Ridgeway associates this situation “perhaps” with the fact that “for a little over a decade, and especially since Not one lessthe media paid more attention to the women’s writing. There have always been valuable female writers in Argentina, but they have not always had their place in publishing houses. For example, it is difficult to find a single feminine given name in the Latin American boom which led figures like Vargas Llosa to receive the Nobel Prize. However, there were excellent women writers at that time, such as Sara Gallardo there Elvira Orpheus For example”.

The editor says in the prologue of this volume that there is a complexity in the notion of writing in relation to genre. What difficulties does it entail, then, to associate a text with the genre of the writer? How not to fall in ghettoization? “The discourse on women’s writing has changed dramatically over the past four decades. “In the 80s, there was a debate about the difference between the writing of women and that of men”, she identifies.

“This debate is still raging, but at the same time a new debate has emerged which questions whether there are indeed differences. Gender is no longer seen as a binary opposition. For the new generation of writers, gender identity is not polarized, but it is considered a fluid and changing spectrum, even for the same individual. Obviously, this complicates the notion of writing in relation to gender,” he concludes.

Source: Telam SE

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