María Iglesias (Seville, 49 years old), writer and journalist, loquacious and confident (she says she only seems that way), lives looking at Africa, at the sea, at those who try to reach these shores from another world, which is also this one. He writes about migrations and human rights, choral stories where friendship has great weight. His latest novel, Pure effort (Edhasa), tells the story of two European friends who face from different perspectives the possibility of illegally bringing to Spain a disowned baby, the son of a Moroccan teenager and a Malian man who died in a jump over the Melilla fence. A dilemma.
Ask. Why do you write about migrations?
Answer. It is not premeditated. My first novel, smoke loopsis inspired by my Cantabrian great-grandfather who ended up coming to the south to work as a charcoal burner. But I didn’t realize that I had been a migrant, because the migrant is always the other.
P. Life took him down that path.
R. Yes, it’s not strange either. My parents were anti-Franco militants. He was a labor lawyer and became a candidate for mayor of Seville for the Spanish Labor Party, the PTE. The rallies were full because Lole and Manuel were playing, but then people didn’t vote. I went to a French school and at the school function we used to take out the silver foil guillotine.
P. When did you get involved?
R. The scene still gives me chills: early morning in Mytilene, capital of the island of Lesbos. When I saw the people get off the boat, soaked in the early morning, freezing, with the children, with the grandmother… and me with my notebook and my pen, I felt so ridiculous. How are you going to ask? What you get is to start helping. My family had a relationship with basic Christianity, although I am not a practitioner, so I thought: if there is a Christ, he must be with these people. And that these people were the perfect scapegoat for the extreme right to come in and take away our rights from all of us.
P. Now the Christian thing returns on the conservative side… and for Rosalía!
R. We also have to see where we put the focus. In the Church there are those who play an active role for social justice, such as the Jesuits of the Claver association, the Vedrun nuns who work with migrants who arrive in Ceuta or the work of Cáritas on social exclusion. Let’s not buy the discourse of the extreme right that Catholicism is them, furthermore their message is nothing evangelical, nothing about loving one’s neighbor.
P. His novel asks whether it is legitimate to disobey unjust laws.
R. I wanted to build an environment where it was not easy for me to have an opinion. In the novel there are two positions: one who, seeing that reality is unjust, breaks the law and one who clings to the law in the conviction that a good that breaks the law can generate other evils. Other dilemmas occur to me…
P. Which is it?
R. If Israel allowed us journalists to enter Gaza and a Gazan mother asked us to put her daughter in the trunk to get her out of that hell, what would we do? And if we refused, citing compliance with the laws, would we be doing it just for that or also to not complicate our lives?
P. In his novel, migrants are people. Here we are painted as one-dimensional beings, who only migrate.
R. First: Spain needs a greater presence on the front line of Afro, Latino, Oriental people… There is a homogeneity in visible positions that no longer corresponds to the sociological reality of the country. This makes it easy to fall into stereotypes.
P. And second?
R. That resigning is not in the DNA of human beings. The desire for the future, for progress, that moves migrants is the same that is leading more and more layers of the population in the West to trust in desperada in fascist discourses.
Spain needs a greater presence on the front line of Afro, Latino, Oriental people…
P. Then there is the rich migrant, what we call expat.
R. Some expats They argue that they do provide value, as if other migrants did not provide it. Although this utilitarian vision is terrifying and must be avoided: we must focus on the intrinsic right of the person to migrate, whether African or European.
P. It’s not usual.
R. We have been growing potatoes for 40 years, so we cannot harvest tomatoes. Now we want to have a society that is very attached to democracy, that engages in self-criticism of the institutions or of each person’s favorite party, and so do journalists and the media. We have allowed, out of complacency, a very gradual erosion. Values of individualism and competitiveness have been sown that have nothing to do with the collective and with democracy as a system for managing discrepancy. People say: “Now if Vox comes out, nothing happens.” You don’t get to that overnight.
P. What is migration? A challenge? A problem? A natural phenomenon?
R. It is an inevitable impulse, very connected to hope, as I said before. And hope is inextricable, it is natural, like empathy. There is a human need: if where you are you cannot develop your potential, then you look for a way. Because that is the meaning of life.
Values of individualism and competitiveness have been planted that have nothing to do with the collective.
P. “If you like migrants so much, put them in your house”
R. One of the topics that trigger the greatest messages of sexist hate are those related to migration: it is very common for women who work in this field to be told to “put them in our house” or “to get caught by a herd of Africans.” And it is curious how the system leads us to admire individual heroics: “you fix it,” but denying collective solutions that are the ones that address the underlying injustice.
P. What political approach should be given to migration?
R. That the democratic right and the left have the temptation, for fear of losing votes, to be lax in the defense of human rights or to stigmatize migrants, is to justify the racist discourse of the extreme right. We must do like Zohran Mamdami in New York: deny the major. Migration is not a problem nor is it related to crime. Get out of that framework.
P. Them and us?
R. There is another them and another us: the ambitious extractive elites versus civil society.