A girl grows while her imagination expands and pixel by pixel builds new extensions of a life that is yet to be told. This is Aída, she is 12 years old and lives in the south of Tenerife, where he begins to intuit what can be said, what should not be said and what remains silent when he cannot find the words to hold on to. The transition to adolescence is in the move she makes with her mother to the new apartment, also, in the tether her cousin Moco keeps around her, while a new player enters the Pokémon battle and makes her sparkle with joy. like her friend Yaiza. In February 2023, the poet and journalist from Tenerife Aida González Rossiwithout tilde, publishes his first novel, Condensed milkby the publisher Caballo de Troya together with the publisher Sabina Urraca, a story in which the virtual lines of video games intertwine with the vicissitudes of the “real”.
We pass from the poetry of town, ito your first book, how has this process been and what was its origin?
It’s not that different. In the end, writing poetry or narrative are different manifestations of the same universe. I did not try to transform my language, but to transfer it, since I am interested in the poetics of narrative without losing that narrative pulse. In narrative there are more tools to count on that give more respect and, if you understand a bit of poetics like breaking with certain things, you dare to do something different, neither better nor worse, just not being so corseted. I had always wanted to be a storyteller, but I saw it as far away and I didn’t feel capable of tackling something so long that you don’t finish it in two weeks, two months or six months, rather it’s a year and a half process with which to be together and from displace other issues. I arrived at Condensed milk by an impulse to rescue certain things that, although they are not autobiographical, do form part of the fabric of my memory that goes more into detail or texture, where I started talking about abusive symbiotic relationships and ended up putting the narrative voice in the video game universe.
We are facing an essential stage for this girl. How does the rise of video games affect her when she is looking for her identity?
I am interested in the figure of the girl who watches the children play the console, like the little sisters or cousins with older cousins. One of the essential issues of video games is handling it, but I know many people who have grown up watching them as if it were a movie without having a controller, which can pervert the medium. I remember when I took that command I felt super powerful. I cared about that feminist undertone. Also, the video games themselves, especially those of Play 1 and the beginning of Play 2, which are quite rudimentary with a feeling of hooking a thousand times greater, in which it seemed that this world had been generated randomly with its imperfections, machangos with a devilish face where it did not go, for which you had to make a mental effort to enter into standards so far from yours. This can be compared to certain poetic prose that creates a new reality through a language that could be understood as imperfect, but within that organicity it is perfect within those walls. We grew up playing video games, which gave us our first access to narrating and building a story. For example, I didn’t read when I was little, although I did play Play a lot, and that gave me elasticity, like the procession of time in which you move two hours in a space where you would have to spend two minutes. That works because you learn to generate your own routes within the readings.
In that world, Aída finds introspection, like in that first passage in which she knew she was the funny one in the family but no longer, she’s growing, right?
He does not want to grow up and is suffering certain forms of violence and since he cannot decipher it, he resorts to the language at hand, that of video games, which is also what unites him with his cousin, with Moco, who represents his childhood and the childhood that has been handed down to him. goes. She clings to it all the time and seeks to be listened to, she is a sucker, she is trying, but she doesn’t know how to talk about what she has to say. She tries it through the narrative and the video game, and the book itself also tries it by presenting the act of reading and writing it as that same video game. In addition, it is structured like a Pokémon battle and the chapter titles are attacks -an element in parallel to the meta-writing because, in theory, you can make decisions, such as creating routes, despite the fact that all your actions are counted-; What makes reading an experience of its own is imagination and taking you into account as an active subject from perception.
Through Moco, you talk about childhood abuse, a taboo topic that you try to make visible so that adolescents and minors themselves can identify it. What caused you to face this topic?
It was very hard emotionally because it is a complex subject that clicks a lot and the construction of the plot was difficult. I feel that, sometimes, we are used to certain narratives of what abuse and sexual violence are from a certain morbidity, especially what involves such small minors. I had to think about what I knew to arrive at how I wanted to tell it without falling into any kind of romanticization and without it being tear-jerking, while being responsible, truthful and credible. She is a 12-year-old girl who has no idea what is going on, where the things that are said and the things that are not said are important. By being naive you give credibility to what they say more than to what you feel or perceive. Something that is used against people who suffer this type of abuse. I wanted to take this into account with Aída, who is a very candid character and struggles not to lose that candor or suffers to have it. There is a quote from Selva Casal that says “sorry for my sweetness”, which represents her always forgiving him, trying to understand him, a little selfishly not wanting to face that reality, since she fears what it means: losing her childhood and losing her the person he trusted the most.
“The idea of falling was important”
This character is queer In an isolated town, how do you live this reality?
She has to face the change from school to institute, her parents have just divorced and she is going to live with her mother in El Médano in a typical empty foreign apartment. Then, she makes a new group of friends and they get drunk together behind the bushes and she has her friend Yaiza, who she is taken with, and she enters into that process of how to deal with what she is suffering while trying not to replicate it in her relationship with her friends or Yaiza. I tried to approach it from that innocence because she doesn’t have the language yet to talk about it, but she doesn’t doubt it either. That is to say, no character in the book wonders “hey, what’s happening to me” or “hey, this is wrong”, but it happens and is assimilated; That is something I experienced a lot in my adolescence. In the end, we didn’t have certain languages or we had them only through the internet, so they didn’t transcend into “real” life and remained hidden there.
What’s more, we remain in a cast, like the cover of your book, was that the intention?
It has to do with the plot of the book. It was because of the wound of not knowing how to say, that she externalizes and you see yourself violated. The book talks about dirt and the scatological, in the image it has a broken ring because, for me, the idea of falling was important. Suddenly, everything has to do with that cast, what is happening? Can you tell what is happening? Am I going to tell you what really happened to have it?
His style is like that, stark.
There are many parts of the book that are absolute filth, which is fine with me. When we talk about narrators on that border between adolescence and childhood, how can we not talk about corporality, about that eschatology that makes them laugh and is going to be within their conception of the world and of language. Ignoring it creates an unnatural void. Authors like Elisa Victoria insert that eschatological dimension into the narrative that completes the person’s psyche. I like to look for beauty there. Sabina recently posted a post on Instagram about talking outrageously: she associated it with shyness and said that the people to whom this happened learned as children to be entertaining and value outrageous words out of place, like when! you unleash a nonsense and everyone is shocked and laughs! That sensation seems very beautiful to me, like covering a crack, putting what we all think but is not said where it should not be said and, in the end, it is what interests me about writing. If I already do it in poetry, I cannot ignore that here I am developing a 12-year-old narrator.
The editor Sabina Urraca also accompanied Andrea Abreu’s literary debutHow was the process?
I am very happy and Sabina is an incredible editor. She had no idea how to write a novel and felt that it was taking a long time. On the other hand, Sabina was always there to give me good words when she needed it and to point out the things that needed to be polished when she played. When we edited the book in September, we spent about two days at her house from morning to night, which was a lot of fun. Having a person so aware of what you are doing, that she believes so much and is capable of looking for so many internal meanings, asking so many questions, celebrating so many things, is something very good. I wish everyone had a Sabina Urraca as editor in her first novel. If she could have one wish, that would be it.
“We are challenging what we have internalized in the literature”
Connect at various points with other writers Canary Islands current: Andrea Abreu and childhood; Lana Corujo and everyday life; or Meryem El Mehdati and the experience of a town in the south of the island… How would you define this new literary current in the Canary Islands?
I don’t quite know how to define it, but one thing we have in common and that feminism has given us has been to remove the layers of things learned, or mislearned. We are challenging what we have internalized in literature to build something that seems genuine and our own to us. We have that in common: daring to do.
Are you afraid that people will never know how to distinguish between Aida and Aída, with an accent?
[Risas]. From the beginning I said that I would call my character Aida and she has an internal game component that I will not reveal, but I was interested in this idea that, in the end, what separates life from fiction can be a tilde. It is no longer the same name, the same reality or the same story. It may sound like my name, but it’s not, and the distance between Aida and Aida is as great as the distance between Aida and Laura.
She is nervous?
It is a nudity. Yes, I am used to people reading my poems, but this is very different. It is the thing that has cost me the most work in my entire life, more than the race, so, yes, it generates nerves.
What has she discovered about herself?
Many things that obsess me and I didn’t know they did, and a lot of tenderness towards things from my adolescent landscape, like growing up talking on Messenger with people watching anime on the computer or having a safe space with some friends that I had just met but who seemed They were there all their lives. I discovered my ability to work when I had not had the opportunity to verify it in such a long process.
