From tonight I will change my life by Paula Jiménez Spain (1969) published in January of this year by the Madeselva publishing house, counts in the first person What was Lesbianism to live in the ’80s and’ 90s, until today. The author manages to capture, through her own history, a collective memory recording the silencing that we had to endure lesbians in past times.
The title refers to the subject Fiesta of Rafaella Carrà, Pop music icon, precursor of feminism and defender of the LGBT community since the 1970s. It is a book loaded with music, as we advance the pages, the author remembers the songs of the Widows and Daughters of Rock and Rollthe day he heard for the first time English chocolate And when he went to sing to Marilina Ross. Paula Jiménez places us fully in the Buenos Aires of the nineties, a decade that enabled the entry of new themes into everyday conversations.
In those years it was when Celeste Carballo and Sandra Mihanovich took out the album Woman against a woman (1990). The city was wallpaper with posters with the cover of the album, in which the two were posing without clothes and embraced. At that time, people did not have in mind the representation that two women could be lesbians. That image caused the existence of a sexual relationship between two women to be made visible.
Days after the disc exit, Juan Alberto Badia invites Celeste Carballo To your television program Radio image. In that interview she says that the album title alludes to the love relationship between two women and that many meet so as not to show themselves. In that same conversation, having thirty -three years, he said that in his adolescence he suffered a lot hiding. It was the first that was named as a lesbian in the air in a television program. And he warned: there are many like me, we are many more than two.
Recall that a decade before it was Sandra Mihanovich who first recorded the subject Puerto Pollensa (lesbian anthem, if there is) Marilina Ross who composed it during his political exile, between 1976 and 1983.
The poet and narrator Paula Jiménez speaks in this book about the concealment that we had to pass in the family and social. In those years we could not walk down the street and said, as a screen, that who was by our side was a friend or a cousin. The author tells in the first pages that her aunt had a friend whom no one recognized in the family as her girlfriend.
It happened that being invisible lesbians, it was difficult to realize and recognize what happened to us in our childhood and adolescence. There were no public places where homosexuality were discussed. There was also no internet, nor the media discussed the issue. It was difficult to have access to that world, to know what happened to other women, what to do with what we felt. Paula Jiménez gets through her poetic writing to take us to those years in which it was difficult to speak and show lesbian. He managed to weave a book of historical and transgenerational recognition.
Following that silencingthe author tells us some situations where she was still not entirely aware that women liked. One day being at the secondary school, her friend chose to sit next to a partner. At that time that situation was so unbearable that that morning I shouted ‘lesbian’ in the hall of the second floor of the school. Paula Jiménez reflects on the book on that situation and says that her voice stated aloud what she was afraid to tell her. “The word that threatened to leave me outside the only life I knew. That grievance pronounced against the person I wanted most, could also have been the key to my own release.”
Then they followed the Faculty years. He attended psychology at the headquarters of Hipólito Yrigoyen and in Independence. I was used to the bars in the area, where he got together to take coffee with his companions. In those bars tables between intimate talks and study, the author tells that she appeared what it was not: heterosexual was passed with little experience.
In that look back we recognize rookies and somewhat lost with what we felt. Sometimes even with nimic issues, as the author says, in her efforts to achieve a beautiful letter to seduce her colleague, to which she had never been able to be completely frank with her feelings, although she spent writing to her letters.
Some years passed so that with their first girlfriend they watched films in VHs lying on a mattress on the floor, on the twenty -inch television screen that bought in the preserve with her first waitress salary.
Paula Jiménez was a girl who managed to listen to phrases from the occasional relative of the style: “Look daughter, nobody pays your happiness, so live your life and don’t give a ball to anyone, you understand me? and that helped her face what she felt until today.
That amordaza silencing, but From tonight I will change my life It is a testimony of how in the course of the years we are placing attitudes that we had, situations that we hid and others that we shut up. And above all he realizes that the personal is historical and the historical, political. A necessary book at this time when conquered rights are in danger, minorities are being beaten with speeches that denigrate those who run from the heteronormative and the violence to which we are exposed to be endorsed from the power itself. We managed to make social and emotional history, the closet should never come back.
Paula Jiménez Spain presents From tonight my life will change On Wednesday 30 at 19, at stand 229. Blue Pavilion.
