Shadow Over Argentina: Mariana Enriquez's "Under the Black Water" Table of Contents: Things we lost in the fire - Schlow Library . This river has been polluted for many years, just as I reference in my story. Enriquez: A very long and complex novel, but I cant tell you more than that. Spoilers ahead. Then she runs, trying to ignore the agitation of the water that should be able to breathe, or move. But then, that sort of thing happens a lot in the Villa Moreno slum, and convictions are few. And it definitely shouldnt be swelling. So, the articulation of a univocal female community is an aporia becauseas if positioned within a materialist feminismthe problem of class permeates the problems of women, preventing a true sisterhood, as is illustrated in La Virgen de la tosquera [The virgin of the pit], a story in which bourgeois teenage girls seem to fight over a man when what is really at stake is class struggle: the war against his girlfriend, Silvia, a vulgar, common, dark-skinned girl. To what extent do neoliberal politics bring about the appalling precarity of social classes and individuals? Borges and his friendsthe writers Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampowere so fond of horror that they co-edited several editions of an anthology of macabre stories. I mention speaking with Argentine author Csar Aira just the week previous. We are delighted to offer a range of residential and online programs to support writers at every stage of their writing journey. In one story, "Under the Black Water," a severely polluted river that has become a dumping ground for victims of police violence becomes a source of a zombie cult. Then, when I was a bit older, 8 or 9, this was the time when the crimes of the dictatorship came [to public knowledge]. "The Intoxicated Years" - MarzAat Then she runs, trying to ignore the agitation of the water that should be able to breathe, or move. I think that most readers think that the first story in the collection ('The Dirty Kid') is the best one, and indeed - it's a great story. No matter how weighty her themes, Enriquez readily references genre fiction and popular culture in her work; films such as Kiyoshi Kurosawas dread-soaked internet ghost story Pulse and the new flesh of Cronenbergs Videodrome. He passes her, gliding toward the church. Adam Vitcavage: This short story collection has a lot of reoccurring themes related to the horrific and the mysterious. Either way, its good to read a story with different settings from our usual selection, different points of view, different horrors. I didnt do it, the cop says. I dont have a problem about being called a horror writer, she answers directly when I ask. Hes only been back a little while. Much of Black Waters horror is the surreal constraints of poverty, pollution, and corrupt authority. That boy woke up the thing sleeping under the water. Enriquez: In Argentina everything is political. Dont you hear them? For years, he says, he thought the rotted river a sign of ineptitude. In others, "Adela's House" and "An Invocation of the Big-Earred Runt," past crimes reach out from the past to claim new victims. Hes in Villa Moreno. Author: Mariana Enriquez Author Record # 265086; Legal Name: Enrquez, Mariana? Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories ( Spanish: Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego) is a short story collection by Mariana Enriquez. In Under the Black Water, a female district attorney pursues a lead into the city's most dangerous neighbourhood, where she becomes trapped in a "living nightmare". As it is, the cows head, and the yellowtainted cross and flowers, dont promise a happy relationship, regardless of who worships what. He laughs. It was like the Furies. Except these teenagers are thoroughly unlikeable, and they take teenage callousness and self-centeredness to unusual levels. The blend of horror, fantasy, crime, and cruelty has a particular Argentine pedigree. The chairs have been cleared out, along with the crucifix and the images of Jesus and Our Lady. For her part, the Mexican activist Sayak Valencia proposes the category of gore capitalism to interpret the modes in which Latin American subjects and their bodies are disciplined: especially the working classes, which are allowed both to die and to kill. The women who immolate themselves in the purifying ritual of fire draw attention to their own scars as a feminist victory, standing up to chauvinist violence, stepping up and publicly displaying their deformed and mutilated bodies: They have always burned us. under the black water mariana enriquez Never mind how the priest knows shes there about Emanuel, or knows about the pregnant girl who pointed her this way. There are hints of sacrifice, mysterious deaths of the young. Enriquez: No, theres not. I adopt this term from Achille Mbembe, who uses it to define the way in which states regulate death in the Third World (femicides, the sex trade, disappearances, kidnappings, drug trafficking, etc.). The truth is that I dont think too much about readers from any part of the world. Eventually, still unable to reach anyone, she tries to find her way to Father Franciscos church. But what is the cause of this resurgence and predominance of the gothic in recent years? Enriquez, Mariana. In this case rather than Lovecrafts racism and terror of mental illness, we get ableism and a fun-sized dose of fat-phobia. How can the well-known and familiar become strange and dangerous? Mythos Making: The graffiti on the church includes the name Yog Sothoth amid its seeming gobbledygook. Her most recent published books areLas novelas argentinas del siglo 21:Nuevos modos de produccin, circulacin y recepcin(2019) andOtros:Ricardo Piglia y la literatura mundial(2019). I like dark themes, and I would say that its my way of looking atthings. The themes of horror and fantasy work for me in two ways. 780 Van Vleet Oval The boy opens the door; she goes in. Dissipation and Disenchantment: The Writing Life in Argentina in the 1990s. New York. What makes you do something like that? Argentina is a theme and a character in my stories. Originally published in Spanish, it was translated into English by Megan McDowell in 2017. Through them, Enriquez explores tourism in Argentina, the rich visiting the slums, plus so many more dynamic perspectives on her homecountry. [2] " Spiderweb" appeared in The New Yorker. In the distance, she hears drums. Meet Mariana Enriquez, Argentine journalist and author, whose short stories are of decapitated street kids (heads skinned to the bone), ritual sacrifice and ghoulish children sporting sharpened teeth. Defiled churches, shambling inhuman processions hey. And for those boys? The protagonists in Enriquezs stories are mostly aware of their privilege, if its a privilege to have a place to live, food to eat, a face thats not grotesquely disfigured. New York, NY: Hogarth Press, 2016. Its stench, he said, was caused by its lack of oxygen. Enriquez places feminisms struggle against capitalism in the foreground, given the impossibility of gender equality without class equality, through a gothic that opens up to more complex interpretations, in which women and marginalized classes, rendered ghostly, become dangerous harbingers of horror, even while being the most vulnerable and castigated subjects under capitalism. Thus, resistance is body politics, and its goal is empowerment through control of the body, which becomes a dissident political subject (an allegory of movements like NiUnaMenos or the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) in order to articulate womens sovereignty: a new ideology, a new way to fix the value of the body, of life, and of death. Argentina is a theme and a character in my stories. Enriquez: I always write for myself. Its just that even the weirdest fiction needs a way to elide the seams between real-world horror and supernatural horrorand many authors have similar observations about the former. An emaciated, nude boy lies chained in a neighbor's courtyard. Enriquez wants to tell us about poverty, gentrification and a crippling economy, but first and foremost - she wants to scare the shit out of us, and does it marvelously. And of course, whatever lies beneath the river might have been less malevolent, if it hadnt spent all that time bathing its ectoplasm in toxic sludge. The Old Book Appreciator The world demands their sacrifice. angelita" [The little angel's disinterment], . And in trying to make those insular locals truly terrifying, the narrative gets problematic as all hell. Influenced by the works of Stevenson, Poe, James, Lovecraft, Bradbury, Silvina Ocampo, and Stephen King, she takes up the North American gothic and deterritorializes it toward an Argentine setting and toward Argentinas history, drawing on a feminist perspective that revises and broadens its meaning. That is not hyperbole. Whats Cyclopean: This is very much a place-as-character story. She tries to get them out of there, and he grabs her gun. But I have to be careful that my personal passions and obsessions dont take over my stories and make them all sound toosimilar. The river itself has been the chosen dumping site for waste from cow offal up through the tanners heavy metals. Yamil Corvalns body has already washed up, a kilometer from the bridge. The Villas not empty any more; the drums are passing in front of the church. Most dont. For some reason that river to me always hid something very ancient, very evil, suggests Enriquez, a cosmic evil. You can be afraid of a monster and fear can also turn you into a monster. Dont you hear them? For years, he says, he thought the rotted river a sign of ineptitude. She met Father Francisco, who told her that no one even came to church. What he separated from Argentinian literature was the obligation to be solemn, to talk about politics to put imagination aside because these things were too serious to be contaminated by genre, let it be horror, fantasy, humour, whatever I can cross it [the socio-political situation] with genre and not be scared and think, 'Ah, Im going to talk about the disappeared in a horror story, this is totally disrespectful.' I write for myself, thinking about my country and its reality.. Well, maybe not always that last. Her narrators have to shrug past almost unbearable sights as part of their everyday routines. You shouldnt have come, says Father Francisco. I mean, one of the places where I had the most fear in my life was a Backstreet Boys concert, Enriquez says, with no hint of mockery. She met Father Francisco, who told her that no one even came to church. The psychic interiority of broaching ones own darkness is the mainstay of horror fiction, the genre to which these stories clearly belong. Madness Takes Its Toll: Father Francisco doesnt handle his parishioners new faith well. And her gun, of course. Every author is very different but they account for the wide breadth of current Argentinian literature. Here Enriquez creates a terrifying scenario where reality is suspended and the crimes the Argentinean authorities have committed rise up to take revenge. In the middle of the night, invisible men pound on the shutters of a country hotel.
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