Three powerful works address physical and sexual violence in minors

"I want to kill my father.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
10 November 2022 Thursday 01:49
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Three powerful works address physical and sexual violence in minors

"I want to kill my father. Not metaphorically or in the fiction of a novel where I have killed him every time the narrative opened the slightest possibility of doing so (...) For as long as I can remember, I have fantasized about the ways in which died, in which he put an end to his life. And he did it with rage, with resentment, with restlessness. It has been very difficult for me to love my father, but it has not been easy to hate him either." Miguel Ángel Oeste opens with this stark allegation (Málaga, 1973) his novel I come from that fear (Tusquets), a shocking story that starts from his own experience with his father and with the physical and psychological violence he exerted on the whole family.

A violence that forty years ago, he remembers, was seen as normal, it happened in the homes of other friends, and it stayed behind the doors of the house as the bullying and sexual violence suffered by the writer Alejandro Palomas stayed behind those of the school ( Barcelona, ​​1967) by a priest and his own father and which he now narrates, with a poetic halo but without skipping the descriptions of the rapes, in This is not said (Destiny), a book where he delves into the destructive effects of abuse: "I have understood that there are men and women with childhoods so broken that the measure of happiness to which we aspire is relief."

Both volumes coincide in bookstores with a novel that from fiction but with a view well above reality also portrays bullying and especially the gang rape suffered by an overweight teenager: Look at that girl, by Cristina Araújo (Madrid, 1980 ), Tusquets award and in which the author explains that she investigated La Manada in depth, but also "many memories of victims who recounted their rapes, many non-group, perhaps perpetrated by their best friend in a parking lot". Araújo was especially shocked to discover “the tests that a girl has to undergo after suffering a rape, everything must be immediate, analysis, questions just hours after the trauma, all the medication they have to take, antibiotics, antiretrovirals.” And, of course, the protagonist of it feels the impossibility of not thinking that she has been guilty: “In the statistics books it did not matter if the victim was a girl who went to buy bread dressed as a nun without talking to anyone. Still, she felt guilty.”

It also deals with the gaze and actions of others around him, as Oeste does in his novel, in which the protagonist confronts his memory with that of relatives and acquaintances. The boy Palomas finds salvation in his mother by recounting the abuse he suffers at school and instead finds horror in his father, who instead of helping him will make him a victim again, masturbating in front of him. He also speaks of guilt: “The worst thing about abuse is not the physical abuse, it is the emotional and psychological perversion. It's that 'it's what you make me do' thing, that you don't understand because they don't explain to you what's happening and what you do to get him to do that. At eight years old you don't even know that sexuality exists. You don't know what ejaculating is, I thought he was peeing and it hurt a lot. And I was to blame for that. That remains unexplained and that load of guilt that you are the cause of everything and therefore do not say it and I have the power that if I say it it will be your misfortune, it is terrible. In his case, the result is a mutilation of sexuality: “When he had sex he wasn't there, he controlled everything, thinking to see what he wants, what he expects, where the door is. It was like going to an opposition”. And then there is the fear. “While they are alive, in a percentage you are still in their hands, you always live in fear of them, that they reappear, do or say something. The one who is afraid is the child because you are still an eight-year-old child inside. A ghost that in his case was that of a religious who died three days before Esto no se dice appeared. "You think: it can't be, it's too strong that this has happened," admits Palomas.

And the fear he speaks of is an echo of the one lived by the protagonist of the Western novel: "Fear never left me." He remembers that “fear paralyzes you, it doesn't allow you to be yourself, it brutally erodes you” and that he began the novel in the third person, but it seemed artificial to him. “I wanted to remove the masks and I went to the first person, raw, go to the bone, leave any rhetoric, it is a book in which I distance myself from myself and at the same time dig into the depths of myself. And in that search the first word I wrote was fear, it is the main character of this story, with whom one fights through writing”, acknowledges the author. That he recalls that in his book there is a game between fiction and reality and with "the genres, horror, police, testimonial novel" and that not everything he tells is authentic, but despite the terrible scenes he describes, he points out that "reality is worse than what is counted”.

“I am not an extraordinary person, I know a lot of cases at the time we come from, now it seems intolerable to us as a society but then I saw it as normal. Now more cases come to light but a small part, people continue to put on masks, not everything that happens is counted, there is the shame of what they will say. And he shall honor your father and mother." But, she acknowledges, “when one is a father, his mentality changes: when I had my first daughter I began to harden the text that she wrote more. Maybe what I thought was not so normal”, she says, reflecting that “all my novels talk about pain”. "Memory never coagulates, it always drips," she says. But, he stresses, “with memory and imagination the pain is attenuated and it is not the same, you look for the pieces as lost and you begin to rebuild them to understand and forgive yourself. It is an idea that is in the book and it is hopeful, in fact it is a hard but luminous, open novel, if it were a film I would say that there is a happy end”.