“I am very interested in achieving a language that brings the subject closer”: Fatima Vélez

Laguna Libros published Fatima Velez's first novel in 2021. It was news because it was the first and because it had been written by a poet. Galapagos climbed on the shelves with stealth and as the days went by, it ended up making noise. At the end of the year, it was chosen as one of the best books published in Colombia. It started in 2022 and the voice was spreading. “Have you read Galapagos yet?” , “There is a novel you have to read, it is called Galapagos”, Have you read Fatima Velez yet?” , “You have to read Fatima Velez.” Just open the book and read the first few lines to stay there. “Something tiny like the fall of a nail: one day a cut where the nail of the little finger begins, the finger becomes infected, fills with pus, I press, right thumb on left little finger; leaves a white tip, stronger, stains the fist of my shirt, eagerly grows, becomes strong and you look at the nail and try to clean it and you realize which is loose, like a tooth at the age of seven, like this, (...)”.

The novel is divided into two parts: From how an earthling gets the skin, which focuses on Lorenzo and he himself tells the story. A type of the most complex, like adrift, in the midst of uncertainty due to not knowing precisely what to do, between wanting to go out and try everything, at the time when he is afraid of absolutely everything that is unknown to him; and Galapagos, where Lorenzo is also, but Paz María, Galaor, Juan B appear strongly. Characters that emerge from a collage of conversations and concerns.

Often, the year-end lists that choose the best that was published during that time, propose readings guided by interests other than what should be usual among readers and are more like cronymisms, to that whiff of exalted poets who praise each other and ripen like avocados in the middle of newspaper, even knowing that without being able to pronounce the r correctly they dared to write a novel about rats and rumors. Beyond that, the fact that in all the proposed lists the same novel appeared again and again, and that that novel is Galapagos, assumes something that had not happened before and is happening now.

“We are not the royal academy of language. We are more like the crater that we dare not look at in fear that it will suck us or expel us into its lava, that crater that reminds us that we are the desire to be hollow and that the richest thing about the holes is to be able to put whatever we want”. Fatima Velez's entry into the narrative may have been dire, but it has ended up being a wonder in everything that fits. The novel sweeps, and sweeps as good and transgressive. It's too early to say it, but in a few years it will be one of the most important novels in Colombian literature in the 2020s, for sure. After a couple of comings and goings, of waiting that had to happen like this and not otherwise, I interviewed the author in the middle of her visit to the Bogotá International Book Fair, where she was one of the guest authors, she talked with Infobae about the process of writing her novel and her conceptions about what it meant to give it to light, to that chaotic Galapagos that could not have been more perfect.

- How do you manage to profile a character like Lorenzo's in such a marked way?

I think I did it because I gave it a wide enough space. I gave him the opportunity to express himself through the monologue, which I didn't do with the other characters. I think everyone deserves to be well defined. It was a challenge to give each one a voice, a different voice. That is one theme of the novel, precisely, the difference. What is it that makes one thing one way and not another, what is it that makes a human being, or a living creature one way and not another. It's something that, personally, haunts me. And it's still an unanswered question. The subject of giving characters humanity is not so interesting to me, but rather to give them a form that allows us to say about them that they are in certain ways, but there comes a time when everything merges. Ultimately, that's life.

-In addition to being very well built, not only Lorenzo, they are all quite imperfect, chaotic characters. They burst out suddenly, they spoil, and around them the story revolves, because this is a story of characters.

-I was interested in exploring certain concerns I had, describing images I had in my head. The idea of Galapagos, almost everything that happens in the novel, comes from a very personal anecdote. When I started thinking about this story, I had just seen Luis Ospina's documentary about Lorenzo Jaramillo, in which he is dying in front of the camera and Luis asks him how he wants us to tell this story. “I don't want him to tell what I did in my life or what I didn't do, how did I paint these pictures, whether they are beautiful or not, I want him to tell what is happening to me now, that I'm dying,” is more or less what he says. When I saw this, I found it impressive how everything was arranged. This guy dying, staring at the camera, so starkly and at the same time exhibiting so much vitality... That gives him some very intense nuances as a character. Obviously, this Lorenzo doesn't look like the Lorenzo in the novel, but it comes a little bit from there. It's a starting point.

All the characters emerge from some reference that, later, ends up turned into a shell and detonates other things. I am very interested in that when writing, taking things from other parts and deforming them, making them work in other ways. When I was thinking about writing this novel and I told him about Lorenzo Jaramillo, I told my dad that he was on it and he told me that he had a trip with the painter and other friends to the Galapagos Islands. On that trip, all the people who went, died of AIDS, later, except one of them, who was my dad. I had that in my head and that was the first impulse to start writing.

-The novel drinks a lot of poetry, it has a musicality, a defined rhythm. Is it something you were aware of during the writing process? Does it have to do with your journey as a poet?

-It definitely comes from my training as a poet and from my desire for language to do things. My bet on poetry is that, and in the novel it couldn't be different. I am very interested in achieving a language that brings matter closer to the subject, not so much of representation, that things are as they are, but more of the possibilities of a subject becoming concrete. Try to poke around, to explore in the same thing, obsessively. Stick your finger in the yaga, puncture the wound, remove the pus. It's like an exacerbation of something. Pus, matter, is a manifestation of something that breaks down, an infection of the immune system that fights against something external that seeks to make you sick and ends up causing the body to produce things. The same thing interests me with language.

-The narrative is punctilloso.

It couldn't be different.

-The novel has had too good a reception and it is inevitable not to wonder what is to come.

-Not everyone thinks the same. The book has moved well, but it is not easy for all readers. He proposes a complex reading and I was looking for that too. I'm not interested in how easy it is, I like the idea that the reader can demand himself with the novel. But I don't do it with the intention of confusing, but because I am interested in what is there, in the fact of working with complex things. At the same time, I really like what lies in the colloquial, in how people talk. The thing is that I don't want to please anyone by giving him the already worn structure of start, knot and end, where everything is digestible.

Regarding what is coming, I am interested in continuing to explore this concept of the collage of voices. I've been recording conversations for many years, recording them. Very casual things I'd like to build something with. Now I cannot, nor do I want to reveal anything, but I already have a very strong image in my head that I am interested in developing. We'll see what happens.

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