From Me to Us

No more wonder, adolescence has begun. The “I” has torn to pieces: you must learn to recognize yourself in others, in the other. The delusion of harmony is over, and everything becomes small: time, space, people. The stunted leaves of the lemon tree go untended. You haven’t yet discovered the pleasure of silence, despite knowing from isolation. Everything is sad, but you can’t pinpoint why. Here’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz:

. . . And with total tenderness
I lament my plight
though I sense my sadness
its cause escapes my sight

You’re made to conform to the script they’ve written for you. Those same people who, when you were a girl, said you had a great imagination now call your stories lies. The hypocrites have organized the world according to order and law. If you’re going to lie, you must do so within the conventions of your flock. The same words that used to make them smile now provoke nightmares. It’s over, then, the mystery in life. But literature remains.

Mercè Rodoreda found adolescence very boring, and it was then that she began writing: to flee the monotony. You write to escape tedium, from the script they’ve assigned, and to recover that lost “I.” This is how poetry is born, in the same way that women have always made themselves known primarily through diaries, confessionals, and letters. It’s the “I am” and “I exist.” The reclaimed “I,” lost in the “us”—which is, after all, no more than a sum of “I”s—is a revenge against deceit, against law. They’ve dragged you into the age of corruption, and you now need to know: you can no longer daydream, or marvel, or find yourself surprised.

Growing up is a difficult art. You don’t yet have the tools to understand the ambiguity of existence. Through writing—letters, diaries, lyric poetry—the future writer tries to reconstitute a world that appears fragmented. You’re pedantic and rebellious; you bid farewell to childhood with rage. But the novelist hasn’t yet grown up: she lacks distance, cynicism, acceptance of the permanent world of things.

You must say goodbye to Eros. When they make you read books about sex, you try to remember what the world of feelings was like before it was the world of feelings. You’re bark: you let water and sand sift through your fingers, you sink into the mud, you sweat and drink fresh water, your body sinks further. In adolescence everything is rigid: stiff back, crossed legs. You’re taught to sit like a lady. And on your tongue you taste a glimmer of sky. Eros has been caged. There’s a box in your body, and the nuns speak to you angrily of how they can’t be women, and inside that box your purity is kept. Your hands? Your hands keep what’s inside that box from spreading. School and family ensure you forget you have a body, which you made use of without realizing. In adolescence you begin to learn, through those books, that you have a body but shouldn’t make use of it.

There are different rites of passage in a lifetime. You’re born and you die, you’re born and you die. Until you reach forty and have to learn to look because you stop being seen. A good moment for revenge. A good moment to write.

If in adolescence you ask yourself what evil is made of, it’s because the Unnamed has appeared. In my case, a slightly grotesque man. He and men like him have won the war, they told me. He’s a soldier on the ground in Africa, rebellious and resentful, fighting against everything we love. This gives rise to the notion of “us” and “them.” The Whites and the Blacks, the pure and the impure. Everyone lives in accordance with these prohibitions, but some people, your people, a little less so. And the grotesque man looms large with his high squeaky voice and his robot-like arms; he’s the cause of all pain, all chaos and disorder. He made sure you all whispered in secrecy, that you pretended your heart wasn’t frozen over when it was, that you were educated under the strict rules of fear. He made your relationship to your mother tongue, which in time would become the language of literature, into something courageous. He defined us and made it difficult for us to redefine ourselves.

There are those who, encouraged by a mixture of romanticism and cynicism, claim that feeling deprived spurs the creation of literature. “The more you suffer, the more your people suffer, the better you’ll write. Give me a child born from obliteration, from historical annihilation, and I’ll make them a writer.” Tall tales. Slaves sang in low voices and no one called it literature. These disheveled romantics rely on feeling offended and humiliated to write; they forget that writing is a job like any other, and to think otherwise is to denigrate the work. They believe themselves inspired by an abusive divine conscience.

I once argued with a Spanish writer about the topic of human suffering, which is often mistaken for literature. This writer had been imprisoned during Franco’s dictatorship and affirmed that these were the best years of his life. He wasn’t a masochist; it was more that he chose to play dumb. He argued that religious repression contributes to the magic one needs for good storytelling. That mental concentration camps stimulate fantasy. I didn’t agree, but a clever reply hadn’t occurred to me—I never believed in killing the mother in service of a clever reply. The writer ended by claiming that intelligent people save themselves no matter what. And only those who suffer become writers.

I just wasn’t convinced. There’s too much human suffering throughout history to deliberately stoke those flames; too much anguish about life’s great mysteries to tack on smaller doses of individual repression. Without Franco, without the nuns, the writer would still be compelled to write. Every day a child’s death stops you in your tracks. Terror is intrinsic to our lives. Physical fear will block you, or lead you toward the dogmatic, but it won’t stimulate your imagination.

Still, we have to admit there are certain aspects of adolescence that a writer takes with them into adulthood. It’s a learning process: in adolescence you discover the value of confidence, the joy of a singular friendship, the call to solitude, the need to share a secret that matters only to you. Also the pleasure of keeping a secret. In literature, you can finally say what you’d never dare say otherwise. And then you try (unsuccessfully) to impose order on chaos, and then suddenly you’re an adult. You’ve become the architect of your desires and obsessions. As an adult, you oversee your own herd of unbridled black horses. But you know why you want them to roam free.

After adolescence come the young adult years. 1960s: the crest of a generation that dreams of making manifest the world in their heads. But those sun children failed. They didn’t admit that reality, their new reality, was also small, mean, mediocre. Literature helps the victim discover the executioner inside herself. Writers, as opposed to actual executioners, understand this. But that’s another story.

Society doesn’t pay or value writers, which allows them to behave like teenagers. But if they don’t, who will? Society wants its writers separate, strange, a world apart—it wants them solitary and narcissistic, and every once in a while, they say something painful but true. A writer benefits from this languid phase of adolescence, sad like Sor Juana, also ignoring the cause of their sadness. Because the occasional reader wants someone who can reflect back their own sadness, even if they can’t determine its cause.

Your personal revenge is the ability to dedicate yourself to a completely unvalued profession (who’s going to demand your novel in these times!) that guarantees nothing if you aren’t willing or able to rise through the ranks: not economic security, not public appreciation. I now return to my flock. The question of why write always leads to a murky response. I started writing so my dad would pay attention to me; I had to entice him with my horrible first attempts, which I left on the table in his office . . . and which he marked up and gave back. But this attack of narcissism was short-lived because my dad always paid attention; I continued writing because I wanted to make the rest of the world stand at attention as well, and later, because I was driven to impose order on what I couldn’t understand. I failed at this too: the world kept spinning, nonsensical as ever.

In conclusion: maybe you write because you feel like it. Without too much fanfare, you continue demanding that small freedom, misunderstood, solitary, unprofitable. You recover the delight children feel when they put a name to everything as you realize that words have more autonomy than things. You’re still the adolescent who sticks out your tongue when they tell you what you can and can’t say. You say it anyway. You can lie without being punished, without being sent away from the table to the rest of your life. Or maybe you want everyone to love you, and you write because you can’t demand that love face to face. An absurd but acceptable egoism.

Now, as I finish, I realize I’ve been lying. I set out to describe writing as a job like any other, but I failed. I’ve been sublimating it. Why not write? If life continues to confound you, if you feel separate from the world? Writing, then, is a pleasure and a privilege. And, if you want, revenge. Or miracle. What have you. Because there’s always someone out there, just as broken and lost, who will read us and, in doing so, resolve to write something even better, almost perfect and wholly its own. Then the pleasure of reading begins, and our work is done.