Liliana´s Invincible Summer LONG-LISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD in NONFICTION

 

LILIANA GOES PLACES!

Two Longlisted titles collect, inspect, and make meaning of documents of the past to imagine new futures. Ordinary Notes gathers personal and public artifacts that cover everything from history, art, photography, and literature, to beauty, memory, and language. Across 248 notes, Christina Sharpe examines the legacy of white supremacy and slavery, crowdsources entries for a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and presents a kaleidoscopic narrative that celebrates the Black American experience. Inspired by global feminist movements, Cristina Rivera Garza travels to Mexico City to recover her sister’s unresolved case file nearly 30 years after she was murdered by an ex-boyfriend. Drawing on police reports, notebooks, handwritten letters, and interviews from those who were closest to her, Rivera Garza preserves her sister’s legacy and examines how violence against women affects everyone, regardless of gender, in Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice.

Read full article here. 

--crg

REJOICING MATERIALITY

"Rejoicing Materiality: A Geological Writing by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara," Latin American Literatures in Global Markets. The World Inside, ed. by Mabel Moraña and Ana Gallego Cuiñas, (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 78-87.  

--crg

GEOLOGICAL WRITINGS

"Geological Writings," Latin American Literature in Transition, 1980-2018, ed. by Monica Szurmuk and Debra Castillo, (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 15-29. 

  

--crg

Kein Verbrechen aus Leidenschaft

Interview by Diana Nava and published by Taz on August 8, 2023, this article was translated into German by Sophia Zessnik.

 

Read full article here. 

--crg

FEMICIDER: We Can Only Fight against What We Can Name.

"Femicider: We Can Only Fight against What We Can Name," was published by Words Without Borders. The Home for International Literature, on August 7, 2023.  

A translation embracing the radical meanings of a word, carrying with it the wound and the rage and the hope, all combined, will be able to advance, for example, networks of solidarity across borders. Such translation may well teach us to see violence—specifically gender violence and femicide—not as an essentialist trait belonging, and limited to, certain countries or communities, but as a structural wound stemming from inequalities we can rally against as we amplify calls for gender justice worldwide. He is a femicider, not a killer, and he is no longer laughing, I will say, without vacillation, next time I am asked, hoping, with Max Granger, “to play a small role in ushering the term into the English language and normalizing its usage.”

Read full article here 

--crg

LAS CHICAS MUERTAS HABLAN AL UNÍSONO

 

YA PRONTO! 

Mi traducción al español del poderoso libro de la poeta nortemericana Danielle Pafunda. 

Publica Dharma Books. 

--crg

NADIE ESCRIBE EN SOLEDAD

Escribí este texto para la última sesión del Laboratorio de No Ficción Creativa del 2022-2023. Lo publicó la revista Anfibia de junio 2023, en la sección de ensayo, Fronteras Narrativas Contemporáneas.

Gracias a Cristián Alarcón y Matías Máximo desde Anfibia; y a las que dirigieron los talleres durante el año: Ana Laura Pérez, Nona Fernández, Yasnaya Aguilar, Gabriela Wiener.  

Toda escritura es escritura de la imaginación. Pero en el plano de las definiciones -siempre oscilantes- el vínculo con lo real es la línea que divide ficción/no ficción, y es allí donde aparece una de las primeras disputas: ¿Quién tiene derecho a imaginar? ¿Quién puede producir presente? “La ficción ha reclamado egoísta y tramposamente a la imaginación solo para sí”, dice la escritora Cristina Rivera Garza, directora académica del Laboratorio de No Ficción Creativa y fundadora del doctorado en Escritura Creativa en Español de la Universidad de Houston. En este ensayo Rivera Garza resume algunas de las tensiones que surgieron a lo largo de las seis conferencias que dictó en el Laboratorio, y deja claves para pensar las fronteras narrativas contemporáneas, donde “el valor no está en la novedad del cruce de géneros, que nos viene de tiempo y no hemos descubierto ayer, sino directamente de su roce con la materialidad, entendida ésta como un trabajo colaborativo de afecto y sentido en comunidades específicas”. 

Lo pueden consultar aquí. 

--crg

TRES TARDES DE LLUVIA CON JULIA O´BRADEIGH

Fui a Belfast, y me acordé. 

Y luego escribí esta crónica que es, como todo lo que tiene que ver con la memoria, mitad ficción y mitad deseo y mitad algo más. Julia O´Bradeigh--la pelirroja atroz, la tránsfuga, la cómplice--apareció por primera vez en La guerra no importa, mi primer libro de cuentos (publicado de nueva cuenta no hace mucho por Dharma Books como Andamos perras, andamos diablas). 

Gatopardo publicó el texto el 7 de junio del 2023. Lo pueden leer aquí. 

--crg

ME LLAMO CUERPO QUE NO ESTÁ

Me llamo cuerpo que no está (Lumen/Random House, 2023), contiene los libros de poesía La más mía (Tierra Adentro, 1998); Yo ya no vivo aquí y ¿Había estado usted alguna vez en el mar del norte, inéditos hasta ser publicados (junto con el anterior) en Los textos del yo (FCE, 2005); La muerte me da por Anne-Marie Bianco (Bonobos, 2007); El disco de Newton: Diez ensayos sobre el color (Bonobos-UNAM, 2011); Viriditas (Mantis, 2011); La imaginación Pública (CONACULTA, 2015). 

 

 

"El diminuto mecanismo de las máquinas que sueñan", prólogo de esta edición, es de la poeta mexicana Sara Uribe. Muchas gracias. 

Gracias también a Fernanda Álvarez y su equipo por el cuidado editorial. 

Aquí vamos. 

--crg

DIE FRAU AUS DEN KARPATEN

 

Thanks to Petra Strain for the German translation of La mujer de los Cárpatos / The Carpathian Woman, a short story included in La frontera más distante, published by Tusquets in 2008, and again by Literature Random House this year. The English translation, by Alex Ross, is included in New and Selected Stories (Dorothy Project, 2022).

Thanks to Lettre International, of course. Summer issue 2023.  

Feel free to take a peek here:

 https://www.lettre.de/beitrag/rivera-garza-cristina_die-frau-aus-den-karpaten

--crg

L´ÉCRIVAIN EXPÉRMIENTAL: JUAN RULFO

 

Con traducción al francés de Jean-Baptiste Para, aparece "L´écrivain expérimental" en Europe. Revue littéraire mensuelle, juin-juillet-aoüt 2023, 146-163. 

--crg

MIGRATION AND BORDERS: A conversation and a watercolor

 

I talked at length about migration and borders with visual artist Ekaterina Murumseva. She transformed our words into this watercolor (318 x 200 cms).

--crg

The O. HENRY AWARD 2023 : Dream Man

 

The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Lauren Groff; series edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, will be published in September by Anchor Books.

Cristina Rivera Garza
“Dream Man,” translated from the Spanish by Francisca González-Arias, Freeman’s

Announcing the Winners of the 2023O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction here

--crg

LITERATURA, REBELIÓN, Y GÉNERO EN BERLÍN

--crg

 

TURBAR LA QUIETUD: GESTOS SUBVERSIVOS ENTRE FRONTERAS

 Ya en librerías este Turbar la quietud: Gestos subversivos entre fronteras (Katakana Ediciones, 2023), con edición de Gisela Heffes y Cristina Rivera Garza, y ensayos de: Marta Aponte Alsina, Gabriela Wiener, Giovanna Rivero, Cristina Burneo Salazar, Stalina Villarreal, Amaranta Caballero, Selva Almada, Magela Baudoin, Verónica Gerber, Claudia Salazar Jiménez. 

--crg

#LILIANARIVERAGARZA por Eréndira Derbez

--crg

 

FOREIGNER

 A short story translated by Sarah Booker at The Yale Review. 

The person who was driving these narrow country roads, now skillfully avoiding the body of some nocturnal animal, was as bitter as the saliva he couldn’t swallow. I screamed it to the heavens: I am not a happy man. I shouted it out to the deer that forced me to screech to a stop in the middle of the road, the deer that kept look­ing at me with its big, bright eyes as I got out of my car and fell to my knees on the asphalt, crying. Who are you? I yelled. What the hell are you doing out here? I realized it was just a fawn, cocking its head to the left. I said it once I could finally stand and get back in the car, looking into the rearview mirror: I am not a happy man. I am barely a man.

Translated by Sarah Booker.

Full text: The Yale Review. 

--crg

WHAT DO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT FEMICIDE?

 INSITE is pleased to announce the fifth issue of the INSITE Journal: Speech Acts. The publication, edited by Andrea Torreblanca, explores speech, language, and the performative as forms of political action. It includes the script and documentation of Speech Acts, a short play that was developed from fragments of writings and recorded dialog culled from the INSITE Archive, and presented in Mexico City (2021); a conversation between Museo Jumex Chief Curator Kit Hammonds and Andrea Torreblanca; a recent interview with the artist Andrea Fraser; a text republished and translated for the first time into Spanish by author, curator, and filmmaker AriellaAïsha Azoulay; and commissioned essays by theoretician and architect Keller Easterling and writer Cristina Rivera Garza. 

In “Art and Enactment” (2022), Andrea Fraser explains her interest in using the term enactment as a process that occurs and evolves from the psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious and the compulsory. In the essay “Another Part of Speech” (2022), Keller Easterling outlines forms of sovereignty as solidarities that are not reduced to specific places but are rather atomized and mobile. In “Unlearning Our Colonial Languages, On Language and Belonging” (2021), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay traces in retrospect the complexity of her genealogy and identity that she describes as “impacted by two colonial projects: a descendant of the colonized in Algeria, and a daughter of colonizers in Palestine.” Cristina Rivera Garza writes the text “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Femicide?” (2022), which departs from the infamous case of the murder of her sister in the 1990s, to speak about how narratives, which only recently were defined as femicides, have focused on the perspective of the perpetrators, including the grammar used to prosecute them, and on literature, where the stories fictionalize—if not justify—the motives behind a crime.

INSITE Journal 05 Speech Acts here.

--crg

PREMIO BBK GUTUN ZURIA BILBAO 2023

 

Bajo el piso transparente de la alberca que se encuentra en el edificio donde se entregó este premio que reconoce a la literatura vasca e internacional.

Gracias, Bilbao! 

Artículo completo aquí. 

--crg

LAS PANCARTAS DEL 8M MÉXICO

María Teresa Priego registró el lenguaje de las pancartas de este 8 de marzo, incluidas las que invocaron a #LilianaRiveraGarza. 

”La hermana asesinada de la escritora Cristina Rivera Garza está presente: “Liliana, tu verano es invencible”. Qué libro extraordinario el que Cristina escribió para ella/con ella: “El invencible verano de Liliana”. 

Artículo entero aquí.

--crg

8M

&

 

--crg

Review of LILIANA´S INVINCIBLE SUMMER Boston Globe

By Hamilton Cane 

March 2, 2023

Just before the world locked down, Rivera Garza canvassed the capital, accompanied by her husband and friend as they tried to locate files connected to Liliana’s murder. Despite three decades her agony was — is — still raw, as is that of her aged parents, and her quest for justice is re-created in her punctilious, fury-driven, incandescent memoir, “Liliana’s Invincible Summer.”

Despite her furnace of rage, Rivera Garza maintains perfect composure throughout “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” her first written in English without the help of a translator. (A Spanish edition, “El Invencible Verano de Liliana,” came out last year.) Each tightly drawn chapter showcases an array of gorgeous images or cadences; few authors deploy fragments as brilliantly, like grenades.

Full text by Hamilton Cane here

--crg 

Review of LILIANA´S INVINCIBLE SUMMER New York Times

A SISTER´S MURDER AND THE LANGUAGE OF VIOLENCE

New York Times, Sunday, February 26, 2023

 "This collaged portrait is one of the most effective resurrections of a murder victim I have ever read (and I have read many). Rivera Garza draws her sister, then complicates that drawing and then complicates the complication, creating layer upon layer of nuance."

Katherine Dykstra 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/books/review/lilianas-invincible-summer-cristina-rivera-garza.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

--crg

LILIANA RIVERA GARZA GOES PLACES!

#JUSTICEFORLILIANA                  #JUSTICEFORALL

 LILIANA´S INVINCIBLE SUMMER (Hogarth press, 2023)

Special thanks to Marie Pantojan, editor extraordinaire.

Thank you everyone at Hogarth Press. 

--crg

WHAT IS THE KILLER LAUGHING AT?

[Translated by Max Granger]

In May 2021, only a few days after the publication of El invencible verano de Liliana – the book, available in English on February 28, in which I explore the femicide that claimed the life of Liliana Rivera Garza, my younger sister, on July 16, 1990 in Mexico City – I announced that I had created a Gmail account (elinvencibleveranodeliliana@gmail.com) with the intention of collecting any information on Ángel González Ramos, my sister’s ex-boyfriend at the time of her death, who still had (and still has) an arrest warrant out as her alleged murderer. I knew that Ángel González Ramos had evaded justice, but I had no idea how he had done it. In August of that same year, an email appeared in the inbox stating, plainly and succinctly, that Ángel González Ramos had been living in southern California under the name Mitchell Angelo Giovanni and had died on May 2, 2020 after drowning in Marina del Rey. Could this be true? Wasn’t it too much a coincidence that after 30 years, and just as the case had finally been brought to light, the alleged murderer would die under such strange circumstances? Was it possible he had faked his own death to evade justice?

The message came with a link to access his digital wake (it was 2020, and we were beginning to witness how the pandemic would affect our funeral rites) that included, in addition to condolences written from Mexico by people with the surname González Ramos, a series of photographs that documented the life of Mitchell Angelo Giovanni, from his birth on April 18, 1967 (the same birthdate as Ángel González Ramos) to the present. In the photographs was the boy with light eyes and blonde hair; the teenager in his leather jacket; the grown man with his thick neck and thinning hair, who, in different poses and among different company, never once stopped laughing. In all of the images of Mitchell Angelo Giovanni as an adult, he is smiling indiscriminately. Over and over again, as if it were a tic. He would peel back his lips and show his teeth, big and blindingly white. He would laugh at long-haired little girls, alongside young women, in the middle of family gatherings. He would smile next to Christmas trees and smile looking out at the ocean. Was he smiling at justice, knowing he had outwitted the law once again? Was he laughing at Liliana, telling her how after all these years he had come out on top – that he was still alive, while she lay, forever silenced, in a grave? Was he laughing at me, for failing to track him down? Was he laughing out of shame?

Was he laughing at you?

r

Full text: https://english.elpais.com/society/2023-02-05/what-is-the-killer-laughing-at.html

--crg

 

You can preorder #Liliana´sInvincible Summer here: 

https://sites.prh.com/cristinariveragarza

--crg

#LILIANARIVERAGARZA PRESENTE!

Liliana Rivera Garza va de regreso a la UAM-Azcapotzalco este martes 22 de noviembre y todos están invitados. 

 

Se develará el mural que pintó Rocío Martínez con base en una fotografía que tomó Othón Santos Álvarez hace tantos años, y hablaremos de El invencible verano de Liliana en el mismo lugar donde #LilianaRiveraGarza estudió, conoció amigos, creció como arquitecta y persona, y fue feliz. 

Gracias a la Rocío Guadalupe Padilla Saucedo por la organización de este evento desde la Unidad de Género y Diversidad Sexual de la UAM-A.

Habrá transmisión en vivo. 

#JusticiaParaLiliana

#JusticiaParaTodas

--crg

 

AUTOBIOGRAFÍA DEL ALGODÓN

 Un adelanto de Autobiografía del algodón en Confabulario, el suplemento cultural del periódico El Universal, Septiembre 13, 2020.  

[un viento loco, sin freno; viento del norte]

Primero se escucha el ruido de los cascos sobre el suelo arenoso. Luego, agazapada y tensa, la respiración. Un resuello. Un resoplido. La tierra blancuzca se abre y emergen así los huizachales con sus copas redondas y sus raíces bien hundidas en la tierra, los mezquites con esas ramas espinosas de las que cuelgan vainas estrechas y largas y, ahora, a inicios casi ya de la primavera, estas flores amarillas. El galopar no cesa. Las herraduras del caballo eluden las biznagas que, esféricas, coronadas de espinas bruñidas, aparecen aquí y allá en el camino. Las flores blancas de la anacahuita. Los correcaminos. Las culebrillas. ¿No le habían asegurado que esto era un desierto? No hay tiempo para quedarse a mirar. De arriba cae la luz de un sol impune sobre la gobernadora, el coyotillo, la uña de gato. Y el viento, que levanta el polvo rosáceo, gris y canela de la llanura, choca contra las agrestes pencas del nopal que se elevan poco a poco, escalonadamente, hacia el cielo. La tierra se desmorona a su paso y todo a su alrededor tiene sed. Su boca, sobre todo. Su laringe. Su estómago. No sabe con exactitud cuántas horas lleva sobre el caballo—los muslos alrededor del torso colorado, los hombros echados hacia adelante, las manos acalambradas sobre la brida y los zapatos atorados en los estribos—pero quisiera estar a punto de llegar. Le han dicho que allá, a un día de camino si consigue cambiar los caballos, las cosas están que arden. Le han dicho que si quiere ver acción directa, si quiere cambiar el mundo de verdad, debe arrancarse más para el norte. Allá, a un paso de la frontera, encontrará Estación Camarón.

 

Allá acaba de estallar la huelga.

 

El artículo completo aquí. 

--crg

¿ACASO NOSOTROS SABEMOS MIRAR EN ESTE MUNDO PALPITANTE?

Un ensayo sobre el libro de cuentos Los árboles, de la escritora boliviana Claudia Peña Claros: 

Además, y de manera audaz, Peña Claros también ha trabajado estrechamente con la perspectiva de otros componentes del campo: los árboles, sí, pero también el monte en cuanto tal, las fuerzas del desatadas del agua, los perros, e incluso los insectos. Esto ya no es la jungla del siglo XIX, denunciando a la barbarie que amenaza a la civilización a su paso, sino un campo que es un territorio donde la soberanía y la propiedad siempre están en disputa, al igual que todos los procesos de producción, extracción y acumulación. Estos son los territorios en donde habita un buen porcentaje de los grupos populares, donde viven y prosperan, resistiendo, y con frecuencia fracasando, ante los desastres naturales, la embestida desnuda del capitalismo, y una serie de políticas neoliberales. Muchas de las así llamadas revoluciones verdes han surgido en estos sitios, desatando por igual prácticas agrícolas depredadoras que invaden violentamente el mundo natural y su delicado equilibrio, así como diferentes formas de insurrección popular. En este abarcar de la materialidad del territorio en toda su complejidad, en su voluntad de ir hacia abajo, escarbando en capas de tiempo que son, a su vez, capas de experiencia, Peña Claros encara el tiempo profundo de la tierra, identificando las acciones que conciernen y afectan a una multiplicidad de seres humanos y no humanos por igual. Lo de Claudia Peña Claros es una escritura geológica que sigue preguntándose: ¿cómo se las arregla una escritora para encarnar de la mejor manera posible, de la manera más crítica posible, estas múltiples perspectivas animada e inanimadas de un mundo en constante agitación material?

In addition, and boldly, Peña Claros has also worked closely with the perspective of other constituents of the countryside: trees, indeed, but also the monte as such, the forces of water unleashed, dogs, and even insects. This is no longer the jungle of the nineteenth century, espousing barbarism and threatening civilization in its wake, but a countryside that is a territory where sovereignty and property are always in dispute, as are processes of production, extraction, and accumulation. These are the territories where a good percentage of the poor live and thrive, resisting—and often failing against—the onslaught of capitalism and a host of neo-liberal policies. Many so-called green revolutions have emerged in these sites, unleashing predatory agricultural practices that violently intrude upon the natural world and its delicate balance as well as different forms of popular insurrection. And, by encompassing the multi-layered materiality of the territory, through her willingness to dig deeper and deeper, uncovering experiences that concern and affect human and non-human beings alike, this becomes a fine example of geological writing. How can a writer better put across the manifold perspectives of a world in constant turmoil?      

Full text in Spanish and English versions in Literal. 

--crg

TOUCHING IS A VERB: THE HANDS OF THE PANDEMIC AND THE INESCAPABLE QUESTIONS

An essay I originally wrote in Spanish for Revista de la Universidad: Del verbo tocar.  Here translated into English by Sarah Booker and published by 3am Magazine (Whatever it is, we area against it): Touching is a Verb. 

Take a peek: 

Touching Is a Verb
As the virus is spread through proximity, especially through the respiratory system and touch, we have to be aware that we are bodies. It seems like a simple operation. It isn’t. The machine of the production of goods has accustomed us to living under the illusion that we are incorporeal. We can work endlessly. We can consume endlessly. If we were in a story by the Salvadoran writer Claudia Hernández, we would be those characters that, even when dead, even when already turned into cadavers, continue swiping our entry card to get into work or pulling out our credit card at cash registers. Capitalism in the US style is like this: literally disembodied.

The illusion of not having a body, which pills and various medications contribute to, leads to the illusion of having no other connection to the world besides the electronic connection. From the spell of abstraction hangs the absence of solidarity with our surroundings and, at the end of it all, indolence. That which does not touch us—that which we do not know touches us—does not hurt us. But now that we are stopped, now that we know that our hands are lethal weapons and not just, as Kant wanted, what differentiates us from animals, we cannot not think about it. The re-materialization of our worlds in times of deceleration forces questions that are political at their very root: who has touched this object that I am touching? Which is another way of asking: where does it come from, who produces it, in what conditions of exploitation or sanitation is this that comes into my hands created, with what quantity of virus? It took the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing years and many pages to answer those questions in relation to the matsutake, the mushroom revered in Japan that grows in wooded zones that have survived processes of devastation. Indeed, there are a ton of hands in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins: those of the migrant workers, those of the businessmen, those of the forest rangers, those of the police, those of the immigration agents. Calloused hands and soft hands. Hands accustomed to caresses or hands that have never felt moisturizing lotion. Tracing the labor of hands in the processes of production and reproduction in the world we live in is an imminently political task. And, right now, it’s an inescapable task. Our lives depend, in fact, on asking those questions and paying full attention to the answers. Everything we have close by—and right now we know that we are always, that we always have been, close to so many hands—affects us because it concerns us. This could well open the door to the end of indolence.

--crg