Feminicides are narrated from pain and resistance
says Dahlia de la Cerda
In the lives of many artists there is a difficult experience that marks their creative process. In my case, a femicide occurred in my family. The day they murdered my cousin, they also murdered eight more women. In six of the femicides, the crime was committed by close people, family members or their boyfriends.
shared the writer Dahlia de la Cerda (Aguascalientes, 1985) during the videoconference Write from the edges, carried out by the Economic Culture Fund (FCE) and the National College of Technical Professional Education (Conalep).
During the presentation, the Mexican activist also recounted the path she had to take to become a writer, specified the place from which she writes and delved into her creative process, which is completely far from the romantic conventions from which it is often conceived. the act of writing.
When I was a teenager, I was into the goth subculture. Because of your age, you want to fit in, and Gothic is very linked to art, so I wanted to be an artist. My family did not agree, because they said that art did not stop.
Still, she chose that path, and although she had an interest in painting or cinema, Dahlia chose writing, because the only thing she had money for was to buy a notebook and pen.
“In the lives of many artists there is a difficult experience that marks your creative process. In my case it was the femicide of my cousin, which made me realize the seriousness of the phenomenon in Mexico. While researching I realized that the victims are always blamed. They say that this doesn’t happen to women who don’t leave their homes. There is a terrible revictimization.
As a reader, I was shocked that there were no cultural products that addressed this phenomenon with a more contemporary and critical perspective that denounced what was happening. That’s why I decided to write about the subject, without thinking that this would lead me to create literature from the edges.
In 2012, his first grant application was denied, since they only accepted projects that addressed classic authors, literature
with capital letters. At that time, the author was working in a call center and sold cosmetic products in a flea market.
The criticism she received from the institutions that grant support, according to the founder and member of the Morras Help Morras collective, is that she was not writing literature, because His themes were very close to reality and you had to let your imagination fly.
. This happened until 2015, the year in which she finally got a scholarship from the then National Fund for Culture and the Arts.
When you have everything against you, you think that you will only have one chance in life. With my scholarship I bought books by Latin American authors who also wrote from the edges and I wrote 10 stories, but I only liked five, because I wanted to talk about femicides, honoring the lives of women, redefining the stigma of the neighborhood and the contexts of precariousness. I wanted to show that femicides can not only be narrated from pain, but from resistance.
Regarding the psychological footprint that results from addressing this problem, De la Cerda recognized that writing about femicides breaks you. Without the support of a specialist, it ends up breaking you because of the hatred of women’s bodies, the degrading injuries and, above all, impunity: 90 percent of cases go unpunished.
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Another challenge she faced once she achieved greater job stability was overcoming a creative block, because she wanted to continue addressing women’s issues from the edges, but encompassing stereotypes that broke the role of what is traditionally conceived as feminine.
“I wanted to confront readers with moral dilemmas, with the stereotype that we are always good, incapable of picking up a weapon, for example. I intended to humanize people who do harm and are in conflict with the law, which was a challenge.
“We can see it with the prisons of the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, and the comments about prisoners who go to prisons to die. Yes, many are criminals and committed very serious crimes, but how can those of us who say we are ‘good’ celebrate that another human being is going to be starved to death, degraded? “Is that the world we want to build? A world that seeks to achieve justice through the degradation of another?”
On social networks, the author has faced multiple unjustified criticisms. Specifically, regarding her work, the fiercest comments come from fellow writers who question her narrative style for, supposedly, being very far from being true literature
although the essayist also assures that these opinions, not arguments, are crossed by racism and classism.
Behind my style there is a political stance
noted the author of reserve bitches (Sixth Floor, 2022) and From the dugouts (Sixth Floor, 2023). “I wanted to use a narrator who would write how people in Mexico speak, use neighborhood slang and regionalisms from the north and south, rescuing the linguistic richness that exists in those contexts, mainly because I did not want to write about the neighborhood and that the neighborhood did not I could read my texts.
I wanted to write for all people, even for someone who had never approached the world of reading. I wanted the people who read my stories to empathize with our experiences and, especially men, to understand that it is a shame to be a woman.
he said.
Cultural criticism
To the question of The Conference Regarding the recent controversy raised on social networks about her position on war bullfights, which has generated threats, the writer assured that all the hate she receives has to do with enmities with colleagues, bots and transgender feminists, in addition to an elementary misunderstanding of its main argument: The living conditions of young people in the country must be changed so that, in any case, such corridos do not exist.
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Dahlia de la Cerda studied a degree in philosophy. She has won various literary competitions, such as the Comala 2019 National Young Story Prize. She has participated in anthologies Mexican thirteen contemporary narratives (White Background, 2021), The bodies we inhabit (AN-ALFA-BETA, 2021), Tsunami 2 (Sixth Floor, 2020) and Ecstasy (Astra Magazine, 2022). He also makes two podcasts: Write how he dies y Morras vs. fundamentalisms.