The writer Marta Sanz (Madrid, 1967) will be, on Thursday, October 13, at the opening day of the La Laguna Book Fair. She will hold a meeting in the Plaza de La Concepción, starting at 8:15 p.m., with the first woman named director of the Madrid Book Fair, Eva Orúe. Sanz, who has just launched a collection of poems, is one of the authors with the most personal and professional ties to the Islands.
Come back to Tenerife, you are a regular.
I travel a lot and I don’t say it as a boast, but as one of the necessities of our profession in the current era. That’s why I can’t tell you when exactly was the last time I was on the Island, but I go to the Canary Islands at least once or twice a year. I participate in fairs, festivals, I had the honor of receiving the Tenerife Noir, I have a great link with the Tenerife Women’s Bookstore and with the Fuerteventura Book Fair. I have established links that are literary and that are human and that make me return to the Islands very often.
This year he has published Secret Encyclopedia, where he delves into female characters linked to literature such as Olvido García Valdés or Marguerite Atwood. Is it still more difficult to publish being a woman?
Secret Encyclopedia is a kind of book where I share my way of reading and how that has evolved over time. It is true that in this book the names of women who in the past were systematically silenced because their works were considered minor and who we now have to rescue have a special role. We realize that that sensitivity, that look, those themes and that feminine universe are essential to understand who we men and women are in the present. On the other hand, it is also important to give a voice to women who are writing now and doing so in fearless styles that somehow contravene all conventions because the literary tradition in which we have been raised is obviously governed by a male perspective. There is a need to read these authors with a special interest in their bravery. They are contributing to the literary scene in Spanish the highest doses of stylistic risk
There is also a need for readers to meet these authors. I put you in a compromise. Who would you refer to right now?
There are many authors and on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. We must remember that our language is spoken in many parts of the world and books are written in the context of very different and rich cultures. For example, I am absolutely fascinated by a Colombian writer named Vanessa Londoño, an Argentine writer named Marina Closs, I love the Colombian Lorena Salazar and the Ecuadorian Natalia Freire. I’m talking about very young women, who may be 15 or 20 years younger than me. In the case of our country, and specifically of the Islands, we have a name as surprising and stupendous as Andrea Abreu. The wonderful thing about this is that we write the same language but that is not entirely true. I think there is a problem in contemporary literature in which it seems that all languages are the same and that has to do with the fact that styles are unified due to market laws. Not with these authors. They speak from the idiosyncrasy, from that local terrain that is at the same time universal. Look, with the look of a young and feminist woman, they are able to establish a link between all the fragilities.
He will hold a meeting with the first director of the Madrid Book Fair, Eva Ouré. What topics do you plan to address?
It will be a surprise. I imagine that we will talk about topics that are related to Secret Encyclopedia, where everything that can be my vision about literature and tradition that has been changing is also concentrated. I suppose we will also talk about how that theoretical discourse connects with my novels and my writing in general. I hope we will also talk about a book that makes me very happy and proud right now, which is the collection of my complete poems, Corpórea. I really like reading poems.
Is it necessary to change your skin to write poetry?
Narrative requires you to be disciplined, to have a trade. In that sense, poetry is like more rebellious. It doesn’t come because you force it. A poem comes to you, suddenly, because you have seen an image or have had an intuition. Poetry serves me for two things. On the one hand, to denounce things in reality that seem horrible to us because poetry has that capacity for communication that can be performative and politics. But at the same time, poetry helps us to talk about what we don’t know, about what we don’t intuit, about those vague sensations that sometimes don’t allow themselves to be trapped by words and make us play with them.
«There are many people who consider that feminism has already gained ground»
He remembered his link with the Tenerife Noir Festival. The black genre has traditionally been a male domain…
It was an eminently masculine genre and full of testosterone but note that in its origins and its connection with the enigma novel there are names of women that are inexcusable: from Agatha Christie to Vera Caspary. Then, in the black novel with the darkest and most disturbing eye, we have the great Patricia Highsmith, for example. For a very long time there has been a strong tradition of black fiction written by women. Actually my approach to crime novels is very peculiar. I usually say that I write novels and that to write them I use wicker from other genres.
And the goodbye of his character Arturo Zarco is already final?
Zarco, in principle, was going to have a single novel, which was Black, black, black. In it I questioned to what extent reusing the style of a genre does not mean taking away its political punch. I think that the black novel has a very important political and testimonial base. I think that books have to implicate us politically also because of how they are written. Black, black, black was a kind of parodic approach to how black literature had become an extremely commercial literature that did not take any stylistic risks. I wrote the second, A Good Detective Never Gets Married, because my publisher asked me to. It was at that moment that I decided that to be coherent I had to close the cycle with a trilogy and Little Red Women came out, which is the least black and probably the most poetic of the three.
In Little Red Women, historical memory was vindicated. We are currently experiencing things like the victory of the extreme right in Italy. It’s disturbing, isn’t it?
We are living a very worrying moment and it is not gratuitous. It has to do with the economic crisis and the lack of political awareness of generations that have mistrusted traditional politics because of corruption. They look for solutions in some types of anti-system and anti-European policies that what they do is link us with the most reactionary and stale things in our societies. We are at a time when we can take many steps backwards because we are somewhat dominated by hate speech and by a viscerality for which the unconscious, fast, harmful and lying use of social networks also bears some responsibility. Well-used social networks can be a wonderful democratic loudspeaker but they have become a demagogic loudspeaker in favor of hate.
In this worrying context and after having finally managed to place feminism at the center of the debate and today, what are the challenges in this regard?
A very important challenge is that there are many people who consider that feminism has already gained all the ground and has become a dominant discourse against which to rebel. That is false. Relatively recently, a UNESCO report came out where it says that, as we are going, real equality between men and women will not be achieved for another three centuries. However, there are people who consider that the feminist discourse has already gone too far. You only have to look at the numbers of dead women or verify the disadvantages in the workplace, the contempt or the fear of going out at night. I believe that in times of scarcity and precariousness, women’s rights always remain in the background.