And AltasangreClaudia Amador’s new novel was a soup, it would be a sancocho. “Or a mote of cheese,” corrects the writer, with the grace of the Caribbean as a spearhead. Barranquillera, 27, is also the author of stories and stories published and recognized in a very early trajectory. The last prize of his harvest is the National Narrative Elisa Mújica, granted Altasangreco -edited by Mirabilia Books and Laguna Books, and presented as one of its main novelties at the Bogotá Book Fair of this year.
The novel is the result of the mixture of festive folklore, partying and pagan of the Barranquilla Carnival, with a terrifying plot that includes vampires that suck the blood, rituals and devils, apart from the silent and constant presence of death. But also of debts that the author does not hesitate to recognize: the way Mariana Enriquez tells the ghosts, the care and poetic language of Mónica Ojeda, the management of Samanta Schweblin’s tension. Since adolescence, he says, he has felt inclination for the genre of terror and Gothic aesthetics. You wears a black leather jacket and its neck hangs a chin that carries a metal bat that moves as she speaks.
Apart from being a writer, Amador works at the Bogota bookstore that is named the last name of Virginia Woolf, one of her holy. He is a professional in literary studies, and it was in an exercise in that career, in 2020, when he began cultivating the seed of his novel as a story that sowed the concern to explore that budding universe. Then he joined the ingredients of what soon began to look like a novel. In 2022, he discarded what he had written and started again, now with clearer ideas, until he became the story he sent to Elisa Mújica. The text, however, continued to change in the editing process, after which it became the volume of colorful cover and fuchsia loin that decoupled at the books of the bookstores.
Altasagre It is also, seen in a certain way, the result of a shock, of a tension between the author’s gothic obsessions and the warm and partying environment in which she grew up. “I tried to deny everything that was Caribbean,” says Amador in the lobby of a neighboring hotel to Corferias, the headquarters of the filbo. “In fact, I have a joy division tattoo here,” and shows the internal part of his right arm. “Imagine being Gothic in the Caribbean … it is terrible to use black leather,” he jokes. “That identity problem led me a lot to turn to the mystical, to investigate and read about witches,” he adds. Perhaps without suspecting him, he was already beginning to accumulate raw material for creation.
Later, Amador makes conscious the fact that terror and the Caribbean very often go through the same way. “Since childhood one listens to many horror stories. It is impressive, because, on the one hand, one fears God and the Virgin, or whatever, and on the other they tell one, ‘Be careful with the neighbor, which becomes a witch at night’, and then in chicken. Then in the villages they stoned them and say that they see them fly, and that you have to be careful with mooring,” he says. After having grown up with those fears in a Christian home, Amador feels now that he can talk about those issues that, deep down, are his obsessions. “I really enjoyed the novel, because it is taking everything I have loved and has formed me in these years of reading and putting it in a single space,” he adds.
The writer’s relationship with the Caribbean coast, however, remains in the tension of a love that feeds in the distance. “Barranquilla is an aesthetically beautiful city. The neighborhood in which I live is colonial, very beautiful. At sunset, from the window, the sea is seen. But inside there are some social dynamics that do not change at all, so it is a non-love-hate relationship, but love-lionness.” Since he lives in Bogotá, two years ago, he can better observe that world in which he was previously immersed and that is now atmosphere from his literature. “One ends up writing what he loves when he is far. I love the Caribbean deeply, but I feel that it is better to be a bit far to see it better.”
The novel gives rise to reflections such as the absence of men in families, the obsession with not aging or the power of blood, not only to talk about violence, but of the charges inherited by a whole lineage. All this is framed in a scenario that who knows immediately relates to Barranquilla, but that is an undetermined place of the Caribbean, which can all be and none at the same time, related as they are by the same sea around which they build a particular nation. It is a universe with multiple possibilities that leaves the feeling that new stories can run in it.
The women of terror, and vice versa
The works of writers such as the aforementioned Enriquez, Ojeda or Schweblin, or also that of María Fernanda Ampuero, show a very clear affinity between the literature created by women in Latin America and the genre of terror. Why this correspondence? “There is an affinity of terror with women because we live with great fear,” says Amador. That genre, he explains, becomes a “dream and cathartic” space to deal with issues that are terrible in real life. “Within him there are comments about what it is to be a woman. We see things of the body all the time, as in the movie The substance: The most terrible scene is when the protagonist is in front of the mirror and it is so ugly that one says, ‘Of course, inside his head more terrible things happen than what we are seeing on the screen ”.
They are not the only issues: there are also motherhood, desires repressed by prohibition or fear, kidnappings, femicides. “That affinity is born of the fear we have of existing and the dangers that surround us. Through terror you can make catharsis and extrapolate it to put it in discussion, as a very important issue on the table,” he adds. Then he mentions a story by Mariana Enriquez in which some women who burn themselves to prevent others from burning them. “Of course, it is to take it to the extreme, but the terrible thing is to know that it is not so far from reality,” he says, before concluding: “It is a kind of reaction, to say: ‘Look, I will put it here so that you are scared a little, as I get scared every day too.”
