Argentina Mariasch (Buenos Aires, 52 years old) is the creator of a hybrid universe in which poetry, narrative and essay erase the known limits. His works feed on lived experiences, but the characters that find words to tell them are frankensteins armed with real and imaginary pieces. His latest book published in Spain, Personal effects (Of Conatus), orbits around his mother’s suicide: a rich architect who threw himself into the void after a loving disappointment.
“I was very embarrassed to opt for what I considered a very bourgeois death at that time. Having an entire contemporary generation of his exiles, missing in dictatorship, and she, with a lot of resources by hand, ends up taking his life, ”says Mariasch when he remembers his death during an interview with El País in his floor in Buenos Aires. Outside, beyond the balcony, the trees of the square in front of them stand out. Inside, the prominence is of the books, classified in alphabetical order on low shelves throughout the living room.
Ask. What is the fuel of your writing?
Answer. There is something of the experience that crosses and insists, it is spinning. At some point he asks to be taken to the word as a way of organizing emotions. There is of course the subject that intervenes in the assembly, it is not that those words arise at random or something cathartic.
P. Is there any emotion that is especially fertile?
R. It usually thinks that pain is a good time for writing, but it doesn’t happen to me because when I am very taken by pain I paralyze myself and I get inside.
P. Started with poetry before the narrative, with books like Coming attractions, XXX y Tigre and Leónamong others, but it is still very present in its entire work. What enables poetic language?
R. The language of poetry tends to infinity because there all the possibilities are given. One can combine words that in prose would not because you would be saying an incoherence. At the other extreme are the hypercoded languages of medicine or law.
P. The title, Personal effectsrefer to another of those languages, the police.
R. Yes. I love to rethink those common places of language. The personal effects are the objects of a person, but also the effects they cause.
In the novel, those objects are the jacket and the bag that give the father at the police station. In his home, Mariasch retains with great affection another of his belongings: a wooden accounts necklace that his mother had saved in a drawer. “I had it as always and used it a lot. It was double long as now because when we found it we divided it in half with my sister, ”he recalls while he puts it on. Years later, walking through Berlin, he entered a store with architecture objects in which there were accounts equal to those of the necklace. “Possibly she did it,” he guess.
P. In Personal effects Paralysis after suicide reaches speech. Was the language broken, as the protagonist?
R. Yes, it was like a loss of language. In that sense I had to learn to talk again, understand the world again.
P. Suicide is an almost taboo theme. Was it difficult to address it?
R. A while ago I proposed a column with this issue in an Argentine newspaper and they told me that it was impossible, that this issue could not be played. It gave me anger because what is not spoken is not resolved. For the book it was different. I understand that it is an issue that can be unattractive, but it is like a touchstone to talk about other things: life, love, motherhood, the mother-daughter relationship … In any case, I also thought about it and I told myself ‘I’m going to stay alone, no kid will give me ball’. I found it contradictory that a woman who had some political commitment in the seventies, who was a party, who had a feminist position at least in working, being independent and free, chose to take her life and to do so, thinking about it in a simplifying way, for love.
P. Will the idea of romantic love ever expire?
R. I have some faith in the new generations. In my mother’s generation, separating was no longer a stigma, but it was lived with a lot of pain. In mine it was not so much, we separated to be better, and in that of my children I see that they live love in a lighter and lighter way.
P. He addressed love – and heartbreak – in another of his novels, marriage. Have the roles of a couple that appear so stagnant evolved?
R. We could think that it is a marriage of the fifties, but I wrote that book in 2004, when I was married to another writer and the two were professionals and we had the roles of tasks and care distributed 50% and 50% supposedly. Here the keyword is supposedly, there are many issues that seem skipped but no, we all have a dose of patriarchy in blood, we too.
P. In fact you divorced but bet again on love.
R. Yes, I love marriage and I am married, in fact. They are rituals that support us and order passions. And yes, it is complicated and difficult, but love lives.
P. What is feminism for you?
R. Social justice.
P. Feminism had a huge force in Argentina as of 2015, but now there is a great offensive against literature with attempts to censonce by the government to books by Dolores Reyes, Gabriela Cabezón Camera and Sol Fantin, among other authors. Does it seem casual that those indicated are all women?
R. I think it is no accident and that it is not a distractive agenda, but is part of the political and economic project of the Government of (Javier) Milei. As seen in the federal march of February 1, it is demonstrating that true opposition is feminisms and diversities.