Margo Rejmer (Warsaw, 40 years outdated) is a author who for years has given voice to dozens of non-public tales that condense the collective expertise of nations underneath communism. Now he turns his gaze to the traumas and oppressions that persist in life in freedom. In his new guide, The weight of the pores and skin (La Caja Books, translation by Agata Orzeszek and Ernesto Rubio), the third translated into Spanish, leaves behind the historic report back to delve extra freely into the human thoughts and discover the injuries of the current: the load of dwelling in a world that forces us to make choices with out providing refuge and that pushes us to silence tales of household trauma and violence.
In the style of the Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich, she spent years accumulating tales of strange lives—poets, academics, peasants, shoemakers, kids and grandchildren of repression—to write down two books with first-hand testimonies of those that survived two of essentially the most closed and brutal communist regimes in Europe: these of Albania and Romania. Born whereas Polish communism was collapsing, its literature has not ceased to dialogue with that previous, and that’s the reason one may assume that what strikes it’s a fascination with historical past and the secrets and techniques of authoritarianism. However, his curiosity will not be a lot in political techniques as in what they do to folks. What challenges her most is her curiosity about freedom. “I am interested in internal freedom,” he explains. “Living under an authoritarian system forces you to ask yourself: Will I be opportunistic? A conformist? A rebel? Can I accept the truth of reality or do I prefer to live in a fantasy that makes me feel safe?”
Rejmer turns writing into a protracted strategy of immersion. He lives within the locations he writes about, learns the language, listens to the historical past of his folks for months and years. She considers herself an inheritor to the varsity of Ryszard Kapuściński, which seeks metaphors and symbols able to representing common elements of human nature. But she doesn’t outline herself as a reporter, however as a author with curiosity about folks: “You listen to the story of an individual and, suddenly, the great History is reflected in it. You begin to find answers about what freedom is and what happiness is.”
He got here to Romania as a result of he wanted to disconnect to write down one other guide that was left unfinished, and he had no problem studying the language. She was fascinated by the “chaotic” structure of Bucharest. There was one thing acquainted about that nation, one thing that linked along with her. “I felt that if architecture was so diverse, people’s lives had to be too. That chaos had to reflect history and individual biographies.” From that instinct was born Bucharest: mud and blood (La Caja Books, 2019), through which he immersed himself at nighttime previous of the Nicolae Ceausescu regime, which ruled the nation from 1965 to 1989. Only after publishing it did he be taught, from his mom, that his grandfather had been born in Romania.
He discovered that very same acquainted silence once more within the tales he heard in Albania. In the capital, Tirana, he encountered extroverted folks, but it surely was tough for him to know learn how to method folks. Everything appeared opaque to him, as if society had developed a system of hidden favors to maneuver in on a regular basis life. In addition to studying the language, he realized that he needed to know the 2 layers of Albanian society: an official one, which capabilities on the floor, and one other that’s just like the mycelium, the construction of mushrooms underneath the bottom, in reference to a community of corruption and arranged crime that, in response to him, circulates within the nation. A legacy, maybe, from the darkish previous of Enver Hoxha, the tyrant who dominated the nation with an iron fist in an remoted regime that lasted from 1944 to 1985. It took Rejmer one other six years to write down Clay sweeter than honey. Voices from communist Albania (La Caja Books, 2020). Its starting —“Once upon a time there was a paradise created in the most socialist country in the world”— sought to painting a rustic that prevented trying within the mirror to acknowledge what it was.
Rejmer says that, after ending this guide, she turned obsessive about trauma: with the way in which it’s inscribed within the physique and transmitted; together with his silent presence in household dramas; with the way it turns into oppression from father to son, from mom to daughter. In The weight of the pores and skina personality who survived the warfare, asks: “Can we bury memories within ourselves, like when we cover a body with earth?” Silence is a component that runs by lives crossed by violence and oppression that filter into essentially the most intimate, household and emotional relationships. It is current within the lady who joins a streaming of self-harm; within the complicity of a group that accepts the bodily assaults of a father in direction of his son; in absent or pissed off motherhood. In all of the tales, the human and the carnal are intertwined with the supernatural and the magical.
The scenes of small on a regular basis horrors happen between Albania, Kosovo and Poland, with a mixture of the actual and the improbable. Rejmer, who amongst up to date Polish writers has solely been surpassed within the variety of publications in Spanish by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, explains that her earlier work additionally impressed these tales. “Fiction gave me tools to explore trauma, to create characters who dissociate, who invent another reality in order to survive.” In these tales, completely different protection mechanisms seem that distort the notion of actuality, one thing that would not be allowed within the report. “In fiction I can start from real events or from people I knew, but diverting the story however I want allows me to extract the essence of the problem,” he says.
The Polish creator has spent years trying to the previous to know the current. It seeks to know why it generally brings silence and different instances nostalgia, even for a previous of oppression. “Each nation is making an effort to understand its identity. We need mirrors, narratives from other countries to see ourselves better. By looking at others we know ourselves.” The previous, usually idealized, coexists with the harshness of the current. “There are people who say: ‘maybe we were not free, but we had doctors, housing, work.’ A collective myth was created, a feeling that there was security.”
The pressure between freedom and safety, Rejmer summarizes, explains lots of the up to date malaises. “We don’t know how to carry the weight of freedom in a system that doesn’t care about making us feel safe. It worries about whether we want to have children, but doesn’t ask at what cost.” In his opinion, it’s ceaselessly repeated that girls now not need to have kids, when in actuality it’s a symptom of fabric and important circumstances. “When I arrive in Spain they always tell me about the housing crisis. In the end, this is the basic need, to have a roof over your head to feel safe and to be able to think about having a child, a family. In Poland we have the same problem.”
Furthermore, in his nation abortion is criminalized, and Rejmer explores this example within the story of a pair who crosses the border with Slovakia to abort a fetus with malformations incompatible with a dignified life. “She carries a son inside her, neither alive nor dead, just like her,” she writes in regards to the protagonist. She says that it was important for her to write down this story as a result of she perceives that Polish girls are extremely educated, enterprising, assume a number of duties and, even so, “they do not have this basic right to decide about their own bodies,” and that, regardless of this, “children are still not born.” Between the couple that crosses the border there’s silence, the load of resentments and unrealized hopes. “I see an increasingly different sensitivity between women and men,” he concludes. “We are moving in opposite directions, with a lot of incomprehension. The weight of the skin Try to put your finger on that wound.”
The creator understands that her nation has at present grow to be a discipline of dispute between two nice narratives: that of the unconventional proper and the liberal one. He is curious about observing how the previous impacts society and, particularly, males. For Rejmer, the rise of the unconventional proper responds to the truth that it provides a transparent story in a context of uncertainty. It appeals to household, marriage and kids as a promise of safety in opposition to the chaos of a gift crossed by the specter of warfare on the border, a pandemic and financial crises. That narrative, he maintains, connects instantly with the sensation of insecurity of many individuals. “Poland is changing, but it also reflects all the trends that are very visible in the United States or even here in Spain,” he concludes.
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