Writing Is Like Drowning | An Interview with Mónica Ojeda
Interviews
By María Fernanda Ampuero (Translated by Frances Riddle)
Nefando, in Spanish, is an adjective. It means infamous, abominable, perverse, horrendous, something that can’t be spoken of without repugnance or disgust. All of these words could be used to define what the characters in Nefando—now adults—went through as children. The book tells the story of a group of friends sharing an apartment in Barcelona. Together they create a video game which explicitly depicts the sexual abuse that three of the friends experienced in childhood. The author names the unnameable, seared onto the reader’s brain by fire, branded like livestock. The reference to the animal world is not coincidental: there is a moment in which, in order to keep reading, you’ll have to let out a howl. Any adjective we could use to describe this novel, even the most brutal, would be crushed like a tiny crumb between the thumb and index finger of Mónica Ojeda’s writing. Maybe that’s why the author christened the book with that powerful descriptor. So that you, the reader, won’t have to come up with a term to name it. Because, after reading, she knows you won’t be able to pull any more words from your parched, lacerated throat that feels like it has swallowed an entire desert.
Mónica Ojeda (Guayaquil, 1988) is very young and very pretty. She has straight white teeth, long black hair parted down the middle, almond-shaped eyes under square glasses, minimal makeup, nondescript clothing. There is nothing jarring about her physical appearance or her moderated, academic way of speaking. The only thing jarring, terrifying, about Mónica Ojeda is her literature. It is the black hole out of which all the world’s nightmares escape.
We meet in Madrid and go into the first bar we find. It’s happy hour and “Back to Black” by Amy Winehouse plays over the speakers. The place—unoriginal, expensive, minimalist—boasts an expertise in cocktails and every alcohol in the world, but Mónica Ojeda orders a water.
María Fernanda Ampuero: What did it feel like to write something like Nefando, such a brutal story about pedophilia, child pornography, and the wounds and scars this can leave forever?
Mónica Ojeda: It was very intense. I don’t want to say that it’s something that leaves you speechless because that would be the opposite of having written it. I obviously wasn’t left without words because I was able to write it. Maybe because I haven’t personally experienced in flesh and blood the kind of violence that’s described in the book; I’ve been a kind of witness to it, which isn’t the same thing.
MFA: How did the idea come to you?
MO: I wanted to explore the ways we communicate experiences that are psychological but are corporal too. Traumas that are of both the mind and the body: the body as a living organism that also houses memory, and this body as something that we as human beings feel the need to share with another person. Even if we’re scabbed and bruised, we want someone to see us, to explore us, and to see that damage too. It’s very frustrating when this connection can’t be established, when you’re unable to share your psychological and physical experiences. It’s a problem of language, how to make language into something material. Experiences are nontransferable, but we try to use language to imagine what the other is feeling and sometimes there’s a magic thread that allows us to span the abyss between us.
The experience of writing Nefando helped me to overcome certain recurring obsessive fears or fixations that I had regarding this topic: Why did certain people I know feel like they couldn’t establish a connection with the world? And the longer these people were left without words, without language to communicate their experiences, the more isolated, more destroyed they became. Writing was that exploration. I don’t think it answered my question on how to connect with someone, but it helped me see how life is a struggle to try to connect, using words.
MFA: Do you think the writing helped you overcome that obsessive fear?
MO: I don’t know if I’ve overcome it, but it no longer causes me so much anxiety. In general my novels or poems stem from my moments of greatest anxiety, obsessive fears, nightmares around certain topics with very vivid imagery. That’s when I ask myself: Why am I having nightmares about this? Writing is almost a psychoanalytic exercise that I use to try to understand why something hurts or bothers me so much. I write to try to answer that and sometimes I don’t come away with any answer but the very exercise of having thought it through to the end seems to help.
MFA: It sounds like a kind of writing that doesn’t produce any pleasure.
MO: Writing is like going under water, like the girl on the cover [of the Spanish edition] of the book: she’s drowning. Writing, for me, is like drowning. It’s not a comfortable experience, but I need to do it so that afterward I can come up for air. When I finish writing I can breathe again.
MFA: How does it feel to place your fears in the readers’ hands?
MO: It makes me very nervous because this is a novel in which I expose a lot of who I am. Not literally, I’m not a character, but there is a very intimate part of me, so every time someone reads it I feel like they’re looking inside of me and that’s terrifying and it makes you feel very fragile. Now this book is circulating and people will say what they want to, but it’s hard for me to hear certain comments: they fling open certain closets inside the narrative of my life, how I narrate myself. Those doors are always shut and in Nefando I’ve opened them wide. There are things in there that are hard to look at, working with them was painful, and I’m glad to be finished with it so I don’t have to spend all my time rummaging through that closet.
MFA: What was it like to sift through that monstrous hell that is the dark web, the internet within the internet, littered with child pornography and illegal services?
MO: I got on the dark web knowing that I wasn’t going to let myself see any child pornography, not only because it’s a crime, but because I didn’t think I could bear it. But I was interested in something incomprehensible to me: What is the language used by the people who do these kinds of things? I didn’t want to approach it in an obvious way and make these criminals into despicable monsters without any other facets to them, because that’s not the way it is; in fact, that’s the most terrifying part. I needed to know what they were like and the closest thing I had at hand was the dark web. So I found some open forums where no material is posted, just texts about what happens, experiences narrated like stories. These forums have lists of “classics” and that was . . . [Long silence.] It was very hard to read because it was a list in which they mentioned classic videos of child pornography that had circulated widely on the dark web. Many people said they enjoyed them and considered them to be good videos in their twisted idea of what good child pornography is. I was shocked at the way the list was written. These people said this happens and this happens like they were listing off hamburger toppings: tomato, lettuce . . . it was so brutal . . . to think that there are people who have had their sexual assault uploaded to the internet, to know that not only were you abused by your father or your mother, but that many other people participated in that assault. The others weren’t there, but they watched it and enjoyed it . . . it’s a whole sea of eyes watching you. Right after reading all that I had a nightmare: I was in a place that was very dark, and like in some cartoon, there were eyes everywhere. I’m talking about the aggression implied by watching certain things, that a person’s pain could be made into a spectacle for others to enjoy. I think seeing that helped me feel even more empathy for the people in my life who have experienced similar abuse.
MFA: In Spain, Nefando has been well received, with great admiration for your enormous talent, your ability to name the unnameable. Have you wondered how it’ll be received in Ecuador?
MO: No, and I don’t want to think about it. [Laughs.] I’m glad that my family doesn’t usually read what I write. [More laughter.] I don’t know how they’re going to take it; I hope that the effect of the writing will be more important than the horrific topic, because it’s the world that’s horrific, not a book. What’s in here is nothing compared to what’s out there. I’d like the effect of the writing to be what it was for me: a moment in which we’re forced to avoid certain horrific truths. Because that’s what we’re always trying to do, we don’t have enough empathy to face it. We say “I’m sad that this happened to this other person.” But it’s not true, we’re not even remotely close to being able to feel what another person feels. I think that art, not always, but sometimes, can be a platform to try to expand our empathy.
MFA: Does writing something this dark affect your day-to-day life?
MO: When you write, the first thing you have to do is think about why you’re writing. Maybe for recognition, because you want someone to think positively of you, I don’t know. You have to consider what your motivation is: Do I write because I like to think about the world and this is my way of thinking about the world? All these answers, which are myriad and infinite, lead to the particular literature of an author. I asked myself why I was locking myself away and writing and feeling bad, closing the door on my family, spending less time with my husband, whom I love, why? The answer was that I needed to face my own darkness. I compare myself to my husband a lot and I think he’s so full of light and I’m much more opaque, so I feel like writing is a healing process for me: I expulse the negative things that torment me and make me so unhappy. Also, writing allows me to give some order to the chaos I have in my head and then, once I do that, I can breathe.
MFA: Seeing you, seemingly so serene, it’s hard to imagine you giving birth to something like Nefando.
MO: I’m a very reserved person, but I don’t want to be reserved in my writing. If you don’t write in a genuine way, why write at all. You have to write without fear or at least accept your fears, knowing that what people are going to read will be something they don’t like. If you try to write something too clean, that’s not authentic. You have to accept what you are: your repulsive ideas as well as your generous ones. It’s not that you’re a monster, but that maybe those monstrous things are inside you.
MFA: It’s a great act of courage to speak the unspeakable.
MO: The idea of empowerment through language feels very necessary. There’s a text by Luisa Valenzuela, La mala palabra [The bad word], that says, “Good girls can’t say those things; elegant ladies can’t either.” It’s talking about how women have been taught that it’s bad for us to speak about certain topics. So a whole sector of the language is off limits to us and also the part of our bodies that we use to communicate with the world is restricted. It felt very satisfying to be able to break that linguistic repression. It’s important to me that my literature be genuine. Not that it has to say something true necessarily, but for that contact with another person to truly exist through my words. When I’m writing, I’m no longer a daughter, a wife, a sister, a professor; those are titles related to the identities that I inhabit. What I am, stripped bare, is something else. The words that a daughter, a wife, can’t say, that naked version of me can speak them, can say: “If this is what I want to write, why write anything else?”
María Fernanda Ampuero is a writer and journalist, born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1976. She has published articles in newspapers and magazines around the world, as well as two nonfiction books: Lo que aprendí en la peluquería and Permiso de residencia. Cockfight is her first short story collection, and her first book to be translated into English.
Frances Riddle has translated numerous Spanish-language authors including Isabel Allende, Leila Guerriero, and Sara Gallardo. Her translation of Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022 and her translation of Theatre of War by Andrea Jeftanovic was granted an English PEN Award in 2020. Her work has appeared in journals such as Granta, Electric Literature, and Southwest Review, among others. Originally from Houston, Texas, she lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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