The writing of Fernanda Trías (Montevideo, 46 years old) moves with the rhythm of the hoe and the rake. The words are arranged like grass on the surface, but she removes them, digs into the earth until she finds the root. “Taking care of words consists in knowing everything that a word brings with it,” says the protagonist of her latest novel, the mountain of furies (Random House), and resonates in the Uruguayan voice. Reflecting on language “fascinates” and “obsess” him: it has become an important part of his life, he acknowledges, especially now that he has just finished a book of essays on his own writing. “Beyond the story that is told, there must be an aesthetic experience, and that experience starts from language,” defends the author, who recently landed in Bogotá, where she has lived for 10 years, after six weeks of creative residency in Italy. Her movement marked her as much as her writing.
Trías has just won, for the second time, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz award, an award that praises literature in Spanish written by women and which has only had one other double winner in its ranks, the Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza, with whom she feels “very proud to share statistics”. He won it with the book he wrote immediately after the first one that earned him this recognition, pink earth (Random House), five years ago. Theirs is a path paved with rewards. Among the things the jury highlighted was “the rhythm of the poetic language” of his novel, a recognition he particularly likes because it involved “very, very intense” work.
The writer fights with words as does her latest protagonist, a woman who takes care of the mountains and writes her thoughts in a notebook, which often clash with a language that seems insufficient to grasp the nuances of reality and a nature that escapes her. “In relation to other living beings we lack many words, there is a void in human language that does not allow us to write that connection, and for me the novel is this,” says Trías. The poetic images that the woman projects onto paper, almost involuntarily, are those that manage, with difficulty, to capture the idea. “My constant struggle is to try to be even more precise, because it is in that precision that we really get to the core, the center of things”, reflects the author, who believes it is essential to “return poetry to narration”. “Lyricism lies in precision,” he sums up.
The defense of prose poetry is more than an aesthetic decision, it is his way of rebelling against what he calls the “Netflixization” of literature: a request that forces books to behave as if they were series or films, to move fast and adapt to the codes of an always hasty market. “Neoliberalism does not support something that is not useful. What is poetry for?” launches the rhetoric. However, poetry teaches her how to write, how to encrypt meanings, what the sound of words is and where the rhythm is hidden. “It also sharpens my gaze,” he adds.
It is not the only theme against which his literature rebels, on which “he has hung”, like an underground root, “the word strength”. “For me, writing has always been writing against: at the beginning against family and the environment. When I started publishing, in 2001, no one cared what a woman wrote, no one,” she recalls. Now she continues to write against a “male establishment that still resists” as the women write. “They give it another name, they call it political correctness or fashionable topics, but what we do is write about the issues that challenge us and find a poetics in them,” says Trías, who sees in the controversy generated by the Economic Fund for Culture – which included only 7 authors in a collection of 27 titles – another example of how that establishment “continues to push from the side it has always pushed”.
Silence extends like a root parallel to that of strength and together they anchor Uruguayan literature to the earth. “I really like working with what is not said. That silence is loaded with other meanings that it brings with it,” he explains. That’s why his novels tend to be short. “Because there are many things that must remain encrypted and that I am not interested in explaining or elaborating. I work by compacting many meanings within those silences”, she finally states after having pondered, wrapped in her own silence, a response.
Strengthened by all this, Fernanda Trías explores with her books the emotions that pass through her and challenge her: first fear, then anger. “If we start digging, we discover that almost all our decisions are based on a reaction to fear”, suggests the writer, who sees in this “conservative” emotion a possible inclination to want to maintain status quo. Anger, on the other hand, “can be a constructive emotion, because from it we can destroy something that isn’t working and build another one”, he appreciates.
It is to that emotion that her latest book is anchored: an anger that is sometimes impossible to give a name to, which at first turns against the protagonist herself but which little by little finds its outlet. “Everything that cannot be named in some way cannot exist, which is why the struggle for words in today’s society is so important. It is not a simple meaningless linguistic struggle. It is a struggle to be able to exist in different ways”, frames Trías and provides an example: “Feminism has made anger its own, an emotion historically frowned upon by women and yet it is so human.”
Human fury mixes with the hostility of a landscape which, where the Uruguayan lives, “is particularly exuberant and particularly violent”, a source of inspiration for a novel that is not set anywhere but which evokes the Andean mountains. “He is so exuberant that he is very aggressive towards humans and quickly puts you in your place,” he acknowledges. Like her, her literature moved and ascended from the Río de la Plata to the Colombian mountain range.
In this exploration of the territory as a further character there is a tendency that above all arouses the interest of the writers, but also the attention of the juries. In its two previous editions, the Sor Juana prize recognized texts that gave a privileged place to nature and its beings: The orange girlsby the Argentine Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, e Just a little hereof the Colombian María Ospina. “What characterizes a part of Latin American literature that interests me most is this reclamation of territory and what we do with the mix that we are,” says Trías, who once again rebels against “a form of intellectuality” that emulates the European canon, considered “higher and more cultured,” and which separates itself from the body and the earth.
In your work both are present and converge in one question: “What is the relationship between the violence of nature, the violence of the landscape and human violence, and how can they interact?” His protagonist also reflects on this and says to herself: “I want to believe that bodies appear without other words looming over them.” But bodies, like words, always carry with them a load, a story. The woman in her novel takes care of those that sprout, like mushrooms, in her garden, and “in that care of what is no longer alive there is a care of memory that is symbolically there,” says Fernanda Trías, who always returns to that idea and is already mulling over the next story. “I still don’t know what that stuff is hanging on,” he admits, “but I’ll find out.”
