MARGARITA GARCÍA ROBAYO
Born in Cartagena, Colombia, and now living in Buenos Aires, Margarita García Robayo is the author of three novels, a book of autobiographical essays and several collections of short stories, including Worse Things, which won the Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014, one of Latin America’s oldest and most prestigious literary prizes. Her writerly relationship with Charco Press began with the publication of Fish Soup in 2018, and continued with Holiday Heart (2020), both translated by Charlotte Coombe, whose translations retain the visceral nature of Margarita’s original. Her new book, La Encomienda, will be published in Spanish in September 2022, and in English provisionally as The Parcel in 2023, translated by Megan McDowell.
Interview by Nell WhittakerPortrait by Alejandra López
NELL WHITTAKER Where are you right now? What can you see from where you’re sitting
MARGARITA GARCÍA ROBAYO I’m in my kitchen, which is also my dining room, in my house in Buenos Aires. I can see my bamboo plants through the window. Usually I work in my studio, but when I’m alone – an unlikely event – I move my laptop to the kitchen table and eat something while I write. I’m having avocado and palm hearts while answering these questions.
NW You often work with constrained forms, such as novellas and short stories. What does brevity give to your work?
MGR I love forms that imply depth and complexity. My work is not usually born within this form; it requires a lot of condensing and obsessive selection of images and words until they represent the essence of whatever I’m trying to say, or come close to doing so. I guess this is why I don’t use big, intricate plots; my plots tend to convey everyday situations because what matters to me is not the situation but the gaze of the narrator or author trying to shine some light on a particular and unobvious part of the universe. I always think about my books as pieces of something bigger. When I began to write, I wasn’t entirely aware of this. I knew that I wanted to write about something that was bothering me, which turned out to be the social make-up of the environment I grew up in, the Colombian Caribbean coast. I come from an extremely unequal society: we have very few rich people and tons of poor people, and in between there is the narrow strip of the middle class. My novels and my characters are located in that strip. My books are part of that universe, which I’m determined to look at because I believe our literature – by which I mean Latin American literature, not only what comes from Colombia – hasn’t dealt with it as much as other themes such as violence, drug dealing or living under dictatorship. And I firmly believe that this social layer, the middle class, is implicated in the failure of our society to find room for everyone.
NW In your novel Holiday Heart, the relationship between Lucía and her nanny-housekeeper Cindy, who Lucía’s parents insisted she hire, is fraught and often uncomfortable. How do class differences play out differently in Colombia and in the US?
MGR In many Latin American countries, not only Colombia, there are many middle-class people who have easy access to these kinds of services; having a maid or a nanny in Latin America can be extremely affordable. I wasn’t raised in a wealthy family at all and yet we always had a housekeeper. The characters in Holiday Heart represent these kinds of people. They are snobbish and class-conscious, even – or especially – if they don’t belong to the upper-middle class. If you have been to Colombia, Mexico, Chile or Peru, you will know what I’m talking about. When this book was published in Spanish, the characters of the novel were received differently. It was uncomfortable, of course, but there was also a shameful sense of recognition. Somehow, when you point out these flaws that are so familiar, you end up asking yourself: do we actually sound like this, when we say the same things the characters are saying? Yes, we totally do. Latin Americans are used to these people; we know who they are and, sometimes, we are them. We have naturalised their behaviour, and one of the things I wanted to do in this novel was to undermine that naturalisation in a very crude form.
NW The book is, above all, a portrait of a faltering marriage. The switching between each viewpoint allows the reader to appreciate how distant Pablo and Lucía are from one another, but also their closeness, particularly when they describe the same feelings in different words. What were the challenges of depicting this intimate and estranged relationship?
MGR The hardest part may have been trying to describe them with detachment, without blaming anyone for what they have failed to achieve in their marriage and in their lives. It is hard to observe this kind of situation from a distance, which was my narrative intention in the novel, because there’s always a part of you that wants to yell at the characters for being so clumsy and cruel to each other. What I really wanted to describe is how it feels when there’s no one really to blame, because guilt is everywhere: in the place, time and way we were raised; in the system we feed every day with our “dreams” knowing that, like everyone else, we won’t fulfil them. Lucía and Pablo are typical victims of this upbringing.
NW Both parents describe the children as being “part” of Lucía, but she deliberately doesn’t tell them where she’s originally from. How do children become the locus for different conflicts, both interpersonal and geopolitical?
MGR Both of the characters are conflicted about their identity. They express it in different ways, but in the end, both of them have lost their sense of belonging. When people have children, they face down the concept of the future in a very heightened way, and the future demands its origin. When you become a parent, it is understandable that identity becomes an issue. If on top of that you are an immigrant who doesn’t feel part of the place you live in, there’s an even greater emptiness to fill. You can’t use children as an antidote to emptiness; it doesn’t work that way. What usually happens is that parents make an effort, as in the novel, to give their children a new sense of belonging. Neither Lucía nor Pablo has resolved that for themselves, so they give nothing but confusion to their children. I think they both attempt to escape from that responsibility until they can’t escape any more. The last part of this novel shows Lucía driving away with her children to nowhere, and she ends up facing the last possible boundary, the horizon. Elsewhere, there’s Pablo, completely devastated without a job, without his family, fantasising about leaving his home but knowing it’s too late – not to leave everything he has built but to find another place of his own, a place that feels like home. He has lost it. Both of them have.
NW All of your published work in English involves fantasies of escaping: fleeing relationships, families, work and countries. What does escape mean to you?
MGR Escape is a constant search, an endless questioning. What I like the most about being a writer is that it allows me to rewrite the versions of reality conjured from certainty and create realities of my own. Writing is escaping, too. My characters escape not only geographically, but also from the mandates of society – family, friends, community – that make them feel stuck.
NW The book traces the development of racism in Tomás, the couple’s young son: he declares that he doesn’t like Venezuelans, then Russians, then Black people. Towards the end of the book, Pablo thinks to himself: “It’s impossible to construct a strong identity if you’re brown.” How do race and racism play a structuring role in the novel?
MGR Racism, as well as classism, is a very important topic in the novel. I think many of the people we don’t consider to be racist are racist, just as how many men and women who proclaim themselves to be feminist are quite the opposite. This kind of behaviour, especially in stratified societies such as Latin American societies, is so incorporated into the idiosyncrasies of daily life that we, as people who benefit from white privilege, hardly notice its presence until it explodes in our faces. We can naturalise outbursts easily, as we grew up listening to outbursts about social class, race and gender from our relative, and we never consider our family or friends to be horrible people until someone or something – maybe a book, a film, a change of place or perspective – points out that, “Oh my God, we are horrible people.” I don’t really think Lucía and Pablo are worse than any of the middle-class families with which I grew up. They are more bitter and they feel morally superior because they were able to leave their colonial country for a “free” one, but we already know how that went. I’m sure Lucía doesn’t think of herself as a racist – she is a civilised lady with a scholarship to Yale – but she is so distracted and unsatisfied that she overlooks the conduct of her little son. This is a mirror of her own conduct, so that he has to shout in her face in the middle of a crowded beach to get a reaction. I tried to show this seed of racist behaviour: a kid saying the horrible things that his mother doesn’t bother to confront out loud, until it is too late.
NW The novel ends in ambivalence: nothing is conclusive or concluded. What do you think people will think or feel at the close of the book?
MGR Hopeless? I’m joking! I know I didn’t write lovable characters here. This is a bitter novel that refers to the ugly things that are part not only of Latin American identity, but also the whole human condition. I like it when literature confronts people with their own limits. The things that the reader can’t tolerate about “mean” characters says more about them than about the author of the book: you can’t tolerate racist behaviour in a novel, but you can live with it perfectly well in the real world? I don’t want art to lick my wounds; I prefer artistic expressions that punch me in the face to wake me up, to show me something about the world that might not be not good or nice but is certainly honest. When that kind of revelation occurs, I feel comforted. Having said that, I do think that the end of this novel shows us a ray of light. In the final image we can see Lucía finally understanding the futility of keeping things fresh forever, and we can see her developing an ability to free her children from that possessive but clumsy love. She even shows her gratitude towards Cindy; I mean, it’s hard to believe that after we close the book that the couple will be reconciled, but, certainly, they will achieve other forms of self-knowledge. ◉
Margarita García Robayo, Holiday Heart, Charco Press, 2020