“The sun is not interested in our pain, the mundane is inherent to the human condition,” he says. Marina Quispe, “Mari”, granddaughter of a Peruvian migrant who survives in the center of the Capital City of a country that is moving towards destruction with her partner Pascale, from a Lafkenche family. (“seafarers” in Mapuzungun). The tearing of migrations, the voracious appetite of limitless extractivism, the stained languages, the housing crisis and the uprising of a movement that is beginning to destroy the departments vibrate in the amplified echo of a beautiful novel with an oceanic cadence titled Chilco (Seix Barral), from the Chilean writer and philosophy professor Daniela Catrileo, member of the Mapuche Rangiñtulewfü collective, who was in Buenos Aires to participate in several talks at the International Book Fair.
Catrileo (Santiago de Chile, 1987) is part of the magazine’s editorial team Yene and has published the books wounded river (2016), flowery war (2018) and the stories of Pinerecognized as the best literary work in the short story category of the Literary Awards granted by the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage of Chile. “In the background, They still see us as a museum piece, as a tourist anecdote or, worse still, as their spiritual salvation,” says Mari in Chilco. “Beyond it being the voice of the character, it is something I reflect on. And not only me, but several people who belong to indigenous peoples. There are different ways of approaching indigenous populations and one of them has to do with a way folklorizedas if we were part of an immovable past and were not part of a living present,” the writer suggests to Page 12.
-Mari does not fit in with the people of Chilque and neither with the people of the capital. Does writing allow you to fit in more or, on the contrary, does writing contribute to not fitting in anywhere?
-It’s nice to see it like this, that is the way we find to assume a certain responsibility with imagination or creation. I occupy a place in the world and that place has to do with the people to which I belong and my way of contributing is through writing. In writing you can expand the sensitive form of knowledge, approach it through language to try to be amazed at the world.
-At one point in the novel there is talk of “tongues stained by other languages.” What is the relationship between Mapuzungun and Spanish?
-In the Mapuche world, those who are Mapuzungun speakers also speak Spanish, a Spanish that is stained with other indigenous languages, with words that disappear deforming colloquially. That is why Mapuzungun is still alive, and that is why the more colloquial ways of speaking in Spanish are also alive. A language is transformed as the territory does something with them. To a large extent, Mapuzungun is also stained with other indigenous languages and that makes it more interesting. As in some dialogues of Chilcothere are Mapuzungun words that come from Quechua, many numbers and the names of some animals. So I think that this exchange basically testifies to us vestiges of encounter. These vestiges have to do with how we lived together previously and how stained languages continue to be part of our daily lives. In Chile there are words that come from Mapuzungun, but suddenly people don’t know it. For example the word pine, which is from my previous book, is a word used in Chile to talk about the dirt that adheres to your body. But many Chileans do not know that it comes from Mapuzungun.
-Why was where the words come from made invisible?
-There are institutional policies that are installed from the Nation State, Chilean and Argentine, through plunderings that are not only territorial, but are cultural. There is no education for memory, not even in education for the rights of indigenous peoples, native peoples who live in the territories that are today these countries. So part of invisibility is not showing that our language is stained because the roots of the territories are indigenous.
-The protagonist is having a revelation regarding the words plunder, colonialism and genocide. Is Mari’s evolution a bit similar to your story or different?
-It is very different; In this novel I wanted to play a lot with fiction, trying to create a protagonist who had a different vision about the possibility of being indigenous. I never had a denial of my identity because my family claims to be indigenous; Obviously not all the spirituality or the language was transferred in the same way as with my father in his community or with my grandfather. During these years of journey as a writer and political actions In the places where I work, many approach me from a position of tenderness to explain to me why they feel this uncertainty, almost like an existential question that haunts them. So when I had to imagine Mari, I thought of her from that place, much more disoriented and lost, but that in some way is strengthened by meeting other characters who are certain of the political place they occupy.
-Did you like that he doubted his identity more?
-Yes, he doubts but deep down he has traces to cling to: having a Quechua grandmother who does not recognize that she is Quechua. Many young people approach me and say: “My grandmother is Aymara, but my mother does not recognize herself as Aymara.” In front of those existential questions of identity I think it is interesting to think of Mari as someone more common in our society than those people who can claim our roots because we are certain of the place they occupy.
-A character in the novel warns that resisting and fighting is tiring. Why isn’t this tiredness talked about?
-People need a heroic story to stay in the fight; There are sad passions of bodies that look tired. To ignite collective strength you also need a story. Sometimes to mobilize bodies requires courage, energy, and accumulated fury. But it is also true that in hegemonic stories many times the small stories, everything that remains against the grain, is not always part of a memory that is exalted. I would like to think about what the fatigue of the anticolonial resistance was like in these territories and how They resisted despite everything. I think it is much more common to see ourselves tired, but that is not talked about because it stains heroism.
