Juan Gabriel Vásquez: "Literature doesn't change the world, but it does change consciences."

Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez believes that literature is "a kind of rebellion" against the attempts of those in power to impose their narrative on society, and while "it doesn't change the world, it does change consciences."

In an interview in Santo Domingo, where he participated in the first edition of the Sea of ​​Words Festival, Vásquez states that, although literature does not have a direct impact on the world situation , "it does change consciences, it does change the individual" and this, "in its civic role, has an impact on the political life of a country ."

"Political life is always, always an attempt by power, that abstract entity we call power, to impose a narrative on societies , we see this all the time (...) The more authoritarian the tone of political power becomes, the more unscrupulous it is in its attempt to impose its truth," says the author of El ruido de las cosas al caer (2011).

And at this point, literature presents itself as "a kind of rebellion against that position," as "a dissent," as "a way our societies have of raising their hands and telling those in power 'you're lying,' 'you're forgetting this,'" he adds.

For Vásquez, " literature is an apparatus of fictions , which are like defense mechanisms that society has to counteract lies that come from outside."

Like the title of his book, he considers it important to "look back" because, as Carlos Fuentes said, "there is no living future with a dead past" : "Latin American societies constantly need to revisit our past to defend it from biased, mendacious, distorted versions and, in some way, regain control of the narrative of the past for ourselves, the citizens. That is one of the things that literature does."

Asked about the situation in Colombia and the recent attack on presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay, Vásquez is unclear about whether history is repeating itself or "whether it's the same story that continues," since this attack, "deplorable and reprehensible from any point of view," inevitably reminds him of similar actions he grew up around.

These situations are part of " a Colombia we thought we had left behind , and the fact that these crimes are returning is deeply worrying and further evidence of the kind of disintegration of Colombian society we are witnessing," he laments.

In his opinion, " we are living in a certain sense the consequence of never having definitively closed the wounds of previous violence (...) We are witnessing the wasted opportunity of successful peace agreements," those signed in 2016 between the Government and the guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to end half a century of conflict.

But criticism and attacks on these agreements from a segment of the political community "ended up undermining their power, sowing distrust among citizens , and, therefore, we have not been able to fully implement them. This is a missed opportunity for Colombia."

At the Latin American level, Vásquez believes that countries "are going through a difficult time of breaking down dialogue between citizens , of breaking down political conversation" and "new social agreements, new social contracts, are needed. But I don't see much will (...) they are terribly polarized societies that can't find a way to heal wounds," to establish dialogue.

For Vásquez, the novelist and the journalist are "two very different, almost opposite ways of looking at the world" : the columnist writes because "he has brief certainties, because he sees something that he deems necessary to say or that he cannot keep silent about", and the novelist "writes because he does not know, he writes from the feeling of ignorance, that the world is complex, it is much more complex than we thought. It is full of dark places, contradictions, ambiguities. And the novelist writes from those uncertainties, from asking questions".

In his case, as a writer, he tries in his novels to make a kind of repair of the relationship with "the world that surrounds us , with the society in which we live, with the past, which is so important to understand where we are and to know where we are going."

One of his "obsessions" as a novelist is the examination of the past , "of that place where political forces, of history, social forces enter the intimate lives of the characters."

That is what he has always been interested in dealing with in his works, and "those to come will also speak of those places that we call the past, that we call history," concludes the author of Los nombres de Feliza (2025) and La forma de las ruinas (2015).