Women's word. Of women. The central weekend of the Segovia Hay Festival started yesterday with female prominence. Three young writers narrating their principles and motivations, a veteran narrator describing her career and her life conclusions: girls, it's your time, Elia Barceló came to say. In both events, a scandalous majority of female audiences. Was there football? At the time of both acts, not yet.
Moderated by the editor Carme Riera, the authors Violeta Gil, Aida González Rossi and Margaryta Yakovenko appeared in the imposing public library of Segovia to reflect on “literature that makes people uncomfortable.” Their literatures “go beyond the self,” as Riera stated, and are based, respectively, on family inquiry, sexual violence, and the migratory experience. All three have published on Caballo de Troya, a Penguin Random House imprint that releases new authors. “Clearly we live in a racist country and in a country in which what is not talked about does not exist, in which talking too much generates a lot of pain. But with silence we never go anywhere else,” said Gil, author of I Came with Three Wounds, in which the personal (the daughter-father relationship) is framed in the general context of the country, she described.
In Condensed Milk, the Canarian Aida González Rossi tells the story of a 12-year-old girl who receives violence from someone her own age, and how she bursts into adulthood, without transition. “What terrified me was that it wouldn't bother anyone, being swallowed up by the morbidity of a story of violence against women by an abuser who is also a child. But the violence has bothered her less than she thought and another virtue has appeared, which is narrating from the periphery, with a language from the periphery. And that is another way to break silences.”
Yakovenko, for his part, has emerged in recent times as a voice of migration. In his case, from Ukraine. “We come from the family, from the clan, and I forbade my mother from reading the book, because she is the person I admire the most but she is the one I constantly try to differentiate myself from. Those of us who have emigrated from other countries often reduce our environment to parents, that is all our support.”
Elia Barceló has signed more than thirty books (the last of them is Amores que matan, in Roca Editorial) and was awarded the national prize for children's and youth literature in 2020. Yesterday she cried out against men, or in other words, in favor of women. In a very militant talk in front of Marisol Teso, she began by looking at the feet of her audience, almost all of whom were female.
“Twenty years ago you would all have come with heels because it is raining, but I see that you are all wearing comfortable shoes, and I celebrate that. Not men, they have sold us that they are handsome in any way, but we are winning many battles. Although then you see the 15-year-old girls and you see that there is a lot of work to do…” she added. Regarding his literature, he remarked that in crime novels “they kill beautiful and young girls, but in mine I kill men. “They have earned it.”
"But be careful... - he warned - I don't encourage anyone to kill in everyday life, eh?"
If the Hay Festival has something, it is a common thread in combativity. Close to that of the narrators was that of David Lindo and Valerie Trouet, who, summoned to reflect on “Through the eyes of nature”, dressed in the Barceló spirit to claim that, in the climate fight, the time has come to move from study and debate to more determined action. All.
