Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams.
Speaker: Carmen Rodriguez is an internationally acclaimed Chilean -Canadian author, educator, and journalist. Her new novel Atacama came out in September from Fernwood Publishing.
Speaker: At its heart are the intertwined stories of Manuel Garé, the son of a communist miner, and Lucia Cespedes, the daughter of a fascist army officer. Atacama is set against the backdrop of Chile in the first half of the 20th century and Europe during the Spanish Civil War. It's both a sweeping historical novel and a gripping tale of personal drama.
Speaker: Carmen Rodriguez joins me today to talk about the book. Hello, Carmen. Hello, Jane. Why did you decide to focus on this period in Chilean history? There are a couple of reasons. The ah initial impetus for the novel came from my parents' stories. My father grew up in abject poverty.
Speaker: in the north of Chile, in the Atacama Desert, the oldest of 13 children, only four of whom made it to adult adulthood, and two of whom died in their 30s of tuberculosis and the other one in his 50s. So my father was the only one that made it to be an old man, but he died at 73.
Speaker: At any rate, he was a fantastic storyteller and he would entertain us at the dinner table and at social gatherings with his stories of his childhood, which were always full of adventure and very vivid descriptions of the desert and the coast. It took a long time for me to realize the tragedy behind these stories because they were so entertaining and so full of life.
Speaker: My mother on the other hand did not tell many stories. She loved to recite poetry. But when she was in her deathbed, she told us the one important the story of her life.
Speaker: which I tell in the first few pages of the of the novel at the beginning. So it didn't take long for me to start researching the background to her story, which happened in Tagna, which is now the southernmost city in Peru, where she was born, when Tagna was part of Chile.
Speaker: So my research into those events led me to find out that similar events had happened in the middle of the desert in Chile in a saltpeter mine called La Coruña.
Speaker: So my imagination went wild and I started making the connections between the two events and between my mother's story and my father's stories. So that was one thing that really encouraged me or prompted me to write this book. The other thing was that After the military coup of 1973, of September 11, 1973, in Chile, the mainstream media insisted on on talking about the extra extraordinary nature of this event, that the Chilean armed forces had always been so, quote unquote, professional and neutral, and they had always supported the government of the day.
Speaker: But you know people that have studied the other sides of history knew that this was not true. So it was important also for me to demonstrate that the Chilean armed forces were embedded in fascistic ideologies, that they had sympathies with European fascism and Nazism, that they had a history of massacring people. At the War of the Pacific, which was in the late 19th century, which pitted Chile against Peru and Bolivia, the Chilean armed forces were renowned for their cruelty. And then they continued to massacre
Speaker: chales workers, indigenous peoples, ah you name it. So it was also important for me to research that and to include it in this novel. Why did you decide to include the Spanish Civil War? It was in the process of writing somehow Manuel, Manuel who's one of the protagonists who becomes a ah journalist. I don't know, these characters, Jane, take sometimes a life of their own and they kind of tell you where they want to go. And somehow Manuel wanted to go to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War. And also from an ideological or a political point of view, it made sense
Speaker: to give Atacama the novel and the story in Chile the wider context of what was going on in the world. Because what was going on in Chile was influenced by what was going on in Europe. And as we know, ah it has been said that the the Spanish Civil War was a kind of a dress rehearsal for the World War II.
Speaker: the difference being that in the yeah at the Spanish Civil War, the Nazis and the fascists in Germany and and in Italy gave full support to the Franco forces, to the fascist forces in Spain, including sending their own armies and bomber planes and so on, whereas England, France, and the other European countries did not support the progressive forces, the Republicans, and declared themselves neutral, which was really so not not neutral, but allowing the fascists and the Nazis to participate fully in the Spanish Civil War. So um it was important to show that
Speaker: world context so that the Chilean story could be understood better. The novel switches back and forth between Manuel's voice and Lucia's voice, both in the first person, both sound very authentically themselves. Was that a hard thing to do? Yes.
Speaker: um yeah The challenge was to find their voices, there as you say, their authentic voices. It took ah quite a while.
Speaker: to differentiate because ah you know my own voice as the author wanted to come through. But as I said before, once ah you create these characters, they take a life of their own and they become their own people. So once I was able to to find their stories to to um have a background story in my head and to figure out how they would speak about their stories, then it's it just flowed. But yes, at the beginning, it did take a while to find their their own voices.
Speaker: Now I was reading an interview with you published in Room Magazine in 2015 and you said that you started the novel in Spanish and then switched to English. Why did you do that? I started it in Spanish with Manuel's voice and he sounded too Chilean and at some point I realized nobody else, you know, will be able to understand Manuel if he keeps on talking like this. Because of all the Chilean idiosyncrasies in the language and the expressions and the words being a working class kid, it would have been difficult for people in other Spanish speaking countries to
Speaker: to get the whole ah story from Manuel if he kept talking like that. But I couldn't bring myself to have him speak in a more neutral or more ah universal kind of Spanish. So I got a little frustrated and then I decided, okay, I'll try my hand at having him speak in English. And that worked. That worked.
Speaker: so I kept going in English for quite a while. And usually what happens if is that if I get stuck, then I start, quote unquote, translating what I have written into the other language. And that also opens up new avenues. And that's what happened in this case. Do you write quite differently in each language?
Speaker: um I'm not sure. I don't think so. I don't think so because um what I've done for the last almost 30 years now is that I have been writing bilingually, meaning going back and forth between the two languages. So they're very close together in in my creative mode. And now unless ah sometimes poetry comes out completely in Spanish,
Speaker: first, and then it is a challenge to transpose it into English. But most, when it comes to prose, I think that there isn't very much of a difference. Now, I mentioned that I was reading that interview from Room Magazine. That was 2015, and you were already working on this novel. How long did you work on the book in total? Ten years.
Speaker: whoa Yeah, because it involved tons of research. I did archival research. I went to Chile, I went to Peru, I went to Spain. So every time I did more research, more information or more ideas came to my mind and I had to interweave those into the novel, into the voices of my characters.
Speaker: So it was ah it was a coming and going kind of process between research and the personal stories of Manuel's and Lucia's. So yeah, it took 10 years. Are you saying the acknowledgments that when you took it to your editor, you were like, okay, I'm done.
Speaker: Yep. And what happened? ah Linda Little, who I have a lot to thank for, who's a great editor, she told me, oh, it's a great novel. It's really good, this and that. They need some work, particularly with character development. I said, okay. So I thought, oh, okay. So she'll tell me, okay, go to page so -and -so and, you know, page five, maybe you could do this or page 19.
Speaker: And she said, um what I find most effective is if you just print your novel, put it on the side of your computer, and start with a blank page. Oh, no. And he said, what? Yeah, it may sound like um like you're starting all over again, but you're not. But I was.
Speaker: And mean it took me a few days to... oh you know i i as ah As an author, you have the choice of telling her to go to hell, right? And to say, no, I'm not going to do that. But um she was firm and gently for firm. and um And when she explained it to me, ah ah she made sense.
Speaker: so i I did what she said. I printed the novel. I i followed what I already had done. But then I we had to think about these characters more deeply and um and find those places in which I could show more of who they were as people.
Speaker: And she was right. you know For example, Lucia becomes ah a dancer and a choreographer. And Linda said, but I don't see that when she's growing up. you know If I were Lucia,
Speaker: And I was so enthralled with dancing and choreographing things. I would be thinking about that all the time. I would be choreographing all kinds of things in my head. And she was right. So Lucia started choreographing things in her head as ah as a girl and as a young person. ah Things like that.
Speaker: which gave the characters a lot more depth and um rounded them up a lot more than they were at the beginning.
Speaker: so good Good for you for taking the advice. And good for her for giving it. I want to go back to the the setting of the book during these periods of great struggle in Chile and in Spain. Are there resonances for you with what's happening now in Chile or in the world more broadly? Definitely. Let's say that at the time, you know the first half of the 20th century, the world was living through a type of capitalism that we used to call imperialism. Basically, the powers that be going into countries like Chile and taking over the resources.
Speaker: And that's what was happening with the saltpeter first and then the copper in Chile. And at the same time, worldwide, European countries and the United States were giving up the world and taking whole chunks for their own benefit. So today we don't have a very different situation in general, although Now we call it neoliberalism because there are other factors that also come in, but it's still an extreme kind of capitalism that also involves the privatization of everything. In Chile today, everything is private from health care to education, even the ocean. I forget how many kilometers. I think it's 20 kilometers of the coastline.
Speaker: into the ocean are privatized. The rivers, the water, Chile is the only country in the world where water is privately owned. And the same thing happens everywhere in the world where neoliberalism is practiced. And let's not forget that ah Chile was the first country in the world where the neoliberal policies were applied. The Chicago Boys theories about capitalism were tested in Chile during the dictatorship. The workers were oppressed.
Speaker: Nobody could protest anything. So that's where neoliberalism began. And in 1980, Pinochet and his cohorts entrenched these policies into the Chilean Constitution, a constitution that has ruled the country until now. So what happens in Chile today has a lot to do and is quite similar to what happened 150 years ago. The people have said enough. In 2019, almost exactly two years ago, on October 18th, huge protests throughout the country began. Millions of people poured onto the streets demanding change.
Speaker: and more specifically demanding a new constitution. And the government had no choice but to give in. And the government called the plebiscite in which the people voted yes or no to a new constitution. The yes won by a huge margin. And then there was an election of the Constitutional Assembly members.
Speaker: which again gave 75 % of the vote to those leaning to the left, the independent and the traditional left positions. Furthermore, a Mapuche woman was elected president of the assembly because 17 of the seats were reserved for indigenous peoples and half of the assembly is made up of half and half male and female representatives. So this assembly is right now in the process of writing a new constitution ah for Chile.
Speaker: Thank you so much for talking with me this morning, Carmen. ah I was saying to you before we started recording that I'd read the book in three days. I actually just couldn't put it down. That's good. I'm glad to hear that. It's been great talking with you. Thank you. I've been speaking with Carmen Rodriguez, Chilean -Canadian author, educator, and journalist. Her new novel, Atacama,
Speaker: came out in September from Fernwood Publishing.
Speaker: The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at coopradio dot .org slash redeye.
