Gabriela Cabezón Cámara: "We'd better start thinking about what unites us despite our differences."

If the awards are any guide, 2024 could be described as the year of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s literary consecration: for her most recent novel , Las niñas del naranjel (2023), she won the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award , the Platinum Konex , the Ciutat de Barcelona Prize for Literature in Spanish, and the Medifé Filba Foundation Award . “It was a great joy. The recognition from peers, from people I admire and respect as much as the members of the jury for that award, was an enormous joy,” the writer tells Clarín about her colleagues who chose her as the winner: María Sonia Cristoff, Juan Mattio, and María Moreno.

The truth is that since the appearance of La Virgen Cabeza (2009), the writer surprised with her own style that did not remain satisfied with what was achieved but continued to delve deeper in novels such as Las Aventuras de la China Iron (2017), where she investigates characters from traditional Argentine literature, such as Martín Fierro, giving voice to invisible characters and, above all, narrating in a particular and eco-affective way the relationship between human beings and nature, something that interests the writer greatly: for some time now, in addition to writing, she has dedicated herself to socio-environmentalism.

Through popularity, hard-earned prestige, and the sheer weight of her prose, she has won fans who will, without a doubt, be seeking out her titles at this latest edition of the Buenos Aires Book Fair. In the midst of an upcoming trip and in the midst of writing new material whose form she's not entirely sure will take ("You see how it is: until it's quite advanced, you don't really know what it is"), she makes time to chat with Clarín about her present and future.

–Your latest novel, The Orange Grove Girls, further explored the aesthetic and narrative exploration you'd already been developing in The Adventures of China Iron. I'm thinking about revisiting historical figures (some from literature) and a poetic perspective on nature, geography, and indigenous peoples. Do you see a continuity?

–In the issues you point out, without a doubt. In the work on the musicality of prose, the blending of languages ​​and registers without hierarchies, in the attempt to conceive of other possible worlds. I was very interested in tenderness as a factor of transformation. Love and compassion as points of convergence and refoundation. The ways of life of other cultures, like the Amerindians, who don't take life on Earth—which includes us completely—to the abyss.

–Do you feel that your literature gives voice to certain voices that perhaps haven't occupied a central place in most of your short stories and novels?

–I don't think I give voice to anything: everything has a voice. But of course, centuries of work have privileged a few voices over the myriad existing voices. An operation that seeks to pass off as universal what is the perspective, desire, and interests of small groups. What happens to me is that, sometimes, I allow myself to be permeated by voices that are not so often heard, represented, or frequented. They are the ones that challenge me the most. I would like to be able to hear and understand, for example, the voices of trees or animals or rivers.

–In an article, critic, researcher, and professor Alejandra Laera argues that your novel, through its unique narrative imagination, its socio-environmentalist perspective, and its evident challenge to the unequal relationship between cultures (Spanish and Indigenous), intervenes in the cultural battles of the present. How do you see this?

–I think Ale Laera is right: socio-environmentalism is, I believe, the most urgent form of activism. We need water—vast regions of the Earth are being desertified, cities like Barcelona and Monterrey are on water rationing—clean air—8.1 million people died from air pollution in 2021—arable land, forests, and healthy seas. We need them to live, as simple as that. And we have governments that deny climate change—or don't deny it but also don't do anything to mitigate it—and hand us over like flies to the voracity of a very few large corporations. And of course, the oppression that some cultures suffer at the hands of others is completely related to the above. Amerindian cultures, for example, are constantly violated in their most basic rights when anything that can be extracted is found in their territories: oil, lithium, rare earths, whatever.

–In a recent interview, you mentioned that you found it “very difficult to do anything in Argentina today” and that the LGBTQ+ community, women, and the most vulnerable sectors of society are “under siege from the far right.” How does this affect you? What are your thoughts on it?

–There are many powerful people working to channel the reasonable resentment and anger of a large part of the population—whose needs and desires were prevented from being met by poor public and private policies—toward social groups that have nothing to do with the causes of these injustices. And who also suffer from them. It's a classic procedure. There's a book by Eva Illouz, The Emotional Life of Populism , that explains it very well. I recommend it.

–You also pointed out that “political correctness is all very well, but if it doesn't include the idea of ​​class, it's useless.” Could you expand on this idea a little more?

–It seems to me like a somewhat outdated debate. We'd better start thinking about what unites us despite all our differences. And fight for dignified, joyful lives, with the freedom to imagine what those lives would be like and to live them.

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's books can be found at the Penguin Random House stand (Stand: 1017, green pavilion).