La Jornada: We need a literature made at the trot of the present: Cristina Rivera Garza

“We are in a moment in which it is feasible and commendable that there is a literature that is close to our body, that is aware of our concerns. A literature from urgency, that assumes its own collectivity, its own plurality. A literature, in that sense, very anchored, very sisterly, very much made at the trot of the present,” said the writer Cristina Rivera Garza, during the conversation Geological scriptures.

The writer participated in the closing of the International Book Fair for University Students (Filuni) in the talk called her book published in 2022, accompanied by the poet Sara Uribe. The columnist for this newspaper spoke about the volume that proposes a critical reading of literature based on bodies, territories and memory, as well as the violence that impacts the stories.

She explained that she has been influenced by a phrase from the writer Josefina Ludmer, which highlights the capacity of literature to create the present. “That phrase intrigues me. I imagine that he must have written it like that, in a rush. It must have been very out of place in his text and he surely didn’t even stop to consider: ‘do I say make or do I say make?'”

In front of an audience that was following the conference with silent attention, Rivera Garza said that he likes that phrase because it is intriguing: “What does it mean to be present? Do we ever not make the present? Is that a possibility? Isn’t that something to which we are inevitably obliged, not only as writers, but also as human beings? Do we ever escape from the present? Are we part of eternity?”

For the author of Liliana’s invincible summer, A book that creates the present is one that forces you to think or invites you to debate what is happening at that moment in your daily life. “Not necessarily because it has to be openly militant; there are some who have an underground, fundamental questioning.”

He added that in the dialogue with activist aesthetics and militancy aesthetics, “a book is present, at least for me, when I haven’t finished reading it yet and I’m already writing. When I feel the urge to talk with the book, dialogue, talk, discuss it with others as well.”

The attendees – the majority women – began to gather near the Clementina Díaz y de Ovando room, in the Exhibition and Congress Center of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), five hours before the author’s participation. Thus, when the doors of the venue opened to the public, the capacity of 190 people was filled in a few minutes.

The relationship between Rivera Garza and his readers is intimate. During the dissertation on concepts such as necrowriting, disappropriation, desedimentation, the writer did not stop speaking to the audience: “How are you? You sound so calm. Anyone would think that you are not even UNAM students, God help me!” “You are very young, but there was a time… says Grandma Rivera Garza,” phrases that her audience took to respond with laughter or a soft “uuuuh.”

Rivera Garza left a message to those who attended his conference and like to write: “if someone ever tells you that you are not good for this or that this is not literature, the first questions you should ask yourself are: what class, gender, race is saying this to me? From what body, what position of power, does this person feel entitled to tell me what they are good for or not?”

At the end of the event, which was part of the closing of the Filuni, dozens of people lined up outside the auditorium to sign autographs.

Aída Fabiola Bahena Delgado, from Lomas de Chapultepec, received the number one token for the book signing. He arrived at 10 a.m. to secure his place at the conference. “I love her simplicity, both when writing and in her lectures. I have followed her for a long time, and today I brought her to sign “No one will see me cry.”