Borgo turns family home into a metaphor for an authoritarian society

“Hit is a concrete starting point, that is, the number of family members, the family history. This is the story of my maternal family, which always seemed to me to be a huge political history”, said the writer and journalist, in an interview with the Lusa Agency.

Published in Portugal by Alfaguara, “Nazarena” recovers a history of the author’s mother family, a descendant of emigrants from Veneto who arrived in the Caribbean and then married Creole women, although the mother did not allow her to reproduce the real story.

However, fiction allowed him to work on what he identified in this family memory: “the tradition of where I come from, the cultural tradition, the Caribbean tradition”, but also to make “an allusion very indirectly to what is an authoritarian country, to what is an authoritarian home, to what is not desired to inherit, to what is desired to be rejected”.

At the heart of the novel is Nazarena, a woman who presents herself right at the beginning of the novel as someone who sweeps the courtyards at night and bites her mother.

Inspired by a real woman called Emma, who lived between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, had a daughter about whom little is known, was away from the family and, when she returned, presented “a psychotic and depressive picture” and compulsively cleaned.

“ It always seemed to me that she was an misunderstood figure, that they had labeled her as the crazy one, as the one who sweeps the courtyards, and that she probably was the one who had tried to break some family rule”, he told.

Emma was hospitalized several times and aged without anyone understanding what had happened to her, said the author, admitting as a hypothesis that she might have suffered postpartum depression.

Karina Sainz Borgo wanted to give voice to a woman whose story had never been told and to question family silence around mental illness.

“Why did they leave her locked in that house?” he questioned, considering that, in addition to a “very political practice about who runs a family and what hierarchies” there is “a story about the disease that does not count”.

According to the author, the figure of the person considered “crazy” and distant because it does not adapt reproduce mechanisms of power existing in human groups, with the particularity of, in a family, assuming the existence of affection.

The author thus wanted to question an idea transmitted in her own family: “I was raised with the idea that all the women in my family were very strong, but what I thought was that they were deeply unhappy” and “I tried to imagine what they would feel, what they would think, what they would expect.”.

The house where the characters live is one of the central elements of the novel, simultaneously origin and closure, a place that can be loved for being the one where you grew up, but also hated, dangerous and threatening.

“The house is that place where you can’t get out, but where you don’t let anyone in,” he said.

For Karina Sainz Borgo, in the novel, the house goes beyond the family dimension, representing “a kind of metaphor of how a country works, how a society works”.

Although Venezuela is not named in the novel, and La Araira, where the action takes place, is a fictitious location, the country is reflected in that universe, marked by the arrival of Europeans and oil exploration, while the house remains closed abroad, he explained.

In this way, Karina Sainz Borgo sought to make “an account or an outline” of the 20th century in the Caribbean, “a very curious century, when progress seemed to be coming, but eventually it did not arrive”.

Venezuela goes through the entire work of the writer, who has explored in her novels the uprooting, loss, memory and relationship with the country of origin, in a path that Sainz Borgo compares to “an excavation”.

In “Night falls in Caracas”, her first novel, the author says she has dug “the most superficial layer of the earth”, represented by “a country that expels you, a country where you cannot stay”.

In “The third country”, published later, the excavation descended to the border and to the relationship with the dead and memory, through a mother who seeks a place where to bury a child.

“ And I think that ‘Nazarena’ is getting to the heart of the issue [...], the house, the mother, the aunts, the courtyards, that is, everything that is disappearing and only remains in my memory”, he said.

“I would like to know what the next membrane is, because I go down and find more things, I find pieces of things, pieces of bones, pieces of objects, that tell me about a completely extinct world.”.

This descent also corresponds to a transformation of language, which in “Nazarena” became “more gloomy, more violent, more irrational”, recognizes the author, who has sometimes been associated with the so-called new Latin American Gothic, a current in which authors such as Argentinean Mariana Enríquez, Ecuadorian Monica Ojeda or Mexican Fernanda Melchor are often integrated.

“Somehow, I really feel that there is a group of writers who took the floor in a Latin America that had not been told by women our age,” he said, pointing out that almost all these authors were born between the 1960s and 1980s, “an extremely troubled, extremely violent moment from a political point of view, in which many things were revealed to them since they were little.”.

According to Karina Sainz Borgo, violence, land, darkness and darkness arise in these authors transformed in different ways by writing, from the experiences lived.

The writer recalled a phrase she heard from Mónica Ojeda, and she never forgot, when the writer said she saw “the first beheaded at 11.”.

“ It's clearly the street, when you look at the street and you see violence, like an almost unreal scene, because the violence on the front line is so horrible, it's presented to you as an image. In us, it acquires another symbolism that seems gothic, but, in fact, I think what is, in reality, is violent ", he said.

Among the literary references present in the construction of “Nazarena”, Karina Sainz Borgo highlights Juan Rulfo and Federico García Lorca: “It would be absurd to think that one can narrate death without seeing how ‘Pedro Paramo’ approached it,” and “I cannot speak of women confined to a house in the 20th century without referring to ‘The house of Bernarda Alba’.”.

“Nazarena” also marks a change in the approach to sexuality, absent in previous novels or mainly associated with violence.

“ In my novels children are not born, nobody touches themselves”, he said, explaining that he wanted to realize why he was “close to life”.

Journalist by profession, Karina Sainz Borgo believes that journalism increasingly influences his fiction, highlighting the discipline and control of the language imposed by the profession.

“Nazarena”, the shortest novel he wrote, began by having about 500 pages, then reduced to less than 200.

On the other hand, he says that what made her start writing fiction was “the true pain, the true anguish”, associated with the awareness of uprooting and the conflicting relationship with Venezuela.

“ My novels are always very critical of the country and I am very critical of the country”, he said, telling that there are Venezuelans who tell him to “stop writing and doing psychoanalysis once and for all”.