“Nothing more degrading than someone who looks at your skin and decides that you are not human.”

The poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, wife of Salman Rushdie, signs her debut novel in ‘Promise’ (Random House), a story about racism in United States society from the position of an African-American family. In that sense, Griffiths has expressed that there is “nothing more degrading” than a person who, upon looking at another person’s skin or body, decides that “they are not human.”

“I have had to deal with so many things in my life related to racism, from mild to very serious, and with many degrees in between. But there is nothing as degrading as someone who looks at you, who looks at your skin, your body, and decides that You are not human. Or that you treat your mother or your father like a slave, like an animal that does not deserve dignity. It seems absolutely intolerable to me,” the writer stated in a meeting with the media this Tuesday.

Thus, she has assured that racism has “very negative” effects on the identities of those who suffer it because they internalize it, something that she is in the process of “letting go.” Furthermore, he has reiterated that in the United States there continues to be a lot of discrimination based on race, as in “practically any continent.”

“It (racism) can have really very negative effects on your psyche, on your identity, on your work as a writer, as a person, if you internalize these elements. I am still in the process of letting go, very painful moments in my life. in which race is what someone can use against me to oppress me. And I find it disgusting, disgusting. And at the same time, the United States is not at all isolated from racism. There is a lot, a lot of racism on practically any continent you look at. But I think which is a central and fundamental question to the human experience right now. Why do we have to continue doing this? Why and how do we connect this with capitalism, with fascism, with oppression, with violence? to have power and to have resources,” he explained.

In that sense, and alluding to the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States, the writer has shown her surprise and sadness at the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ because it implies “control of women’s bodies.” “referring to a few years of “alleged greatness.”

“I find it somewhat sad that there are so many elements, so many aspects of that time (1950) that are so urgent and immediate. Like now, that America Great Again is a return to Jim Crow, to that control of women’s bodies by art of men. This alleged greatness of the United States, what does it mean to go back to 1950? At that time the word gay or homosexual could not even be mentioned, it was impossible. Marriage between different races was illegal. And there are so many things that are happening. now what do they do an echo of that supposedly great time. When people came in boats, slavery, when we had to drink from different fountains, or we couldn’t go to the same school, is that in the Great America that we talk about now? , he questioned.

NOVEL DEBUT

Griffiths comes to the novel after exploring fields such as poetry, photography or visual art and it was the death of his mother, in 2014, that made him write a book with the word ‘promise’. Thus, he explained that it took him a while to reach this genre because it took him time to “listen” to his own voice.

“I have always written prose, actually, since I was a child. I probably wrote prose before writing poetry, although I have been handling different genres at the same time. What happens with prose, and with the fact of being a novelist, is that it took me more time listening to my own voice, identifying with my style, so I had to be patient when it came to developing my own inner ecosystem when it came to writing prose, but I have always written,” he said.

Precisely, the maternal figure – he dedicates the book to his father and mother – has been the one who has had the greatest impact on him when developing his career, and in that sense he has thanked her for his “generosity and discipline.”

“Something that has left me has been a certain generosity towards others and towards myself. And then, discipline. My mother was much shorter than me but she was a fierce woman, she had almost a fire in her, a personality very marked. I am a very calm woman, very restrained, although as I get older, I feel more fire within me, but I think that the discipline of her work marked me a lot. She was a survivor and part of the strength that I had. I have it in me, I learned it by observing its strength”, remembered.