It’s with nice pleasure that we interview Dr. Nadia V. Celis Salgado, a delightfully inspiring colleague with whom we’ve shared tutorial explorations and adventures in conferences and occasions [shout out to the Caribbean Studies Association!] by way of Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporic facilities around the globe.
Nadia Celis is professor of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Research at Bowdoin Faculty (Brunswick, Maine). With a PhD in Literature from Rutgers College, she additionally makes a speciality of Gender and Girls’s Research. Her analysis explores embodiment, subjectivity, and intimacy in Hispanic Caribbean literature and widespread tradition. Her publications embody articles on authors corresponding to Marvel Moreno, Fanny Buitrago, Mayra Santos-Febres, and Gabriel García Márquez, essays on dance and efficiency, and articles in media corresponding to Huffington Put up España, Doppio Zero (Italy), and El Tiempo (Colombia), amongst others. Celis’s e-book La rebelión de las niñas: El Caribe y la “conciencia corporal” (2015) acquired the Nicolás Guillén Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Affiliation and an Honorable Point out for the Premio Iberoamericano from LASA. Her newest e-book, Crónica de un amor horrible (Lumen, 2023), focuses on García Márquez’s deployment of affection to look at the relation between intimate violence and social energy. [See our previous post New Book: Crónica de un amor terrible.]
Here’s a transient interview with Nadia Celis for Repeating Islands [interviewed by Ivette Romero]:
Ivette Romero/Repeating Islands (IR/RI): Gabriel García Márquez’s work will at all times have a particular place in my coronary heart, and I’m one of many many readers drawn to the primarily “Caribbean” sensibilities that permeate his storytelling. I’m reminded of Antonio Benítez Rojo’s allusion to motion within the Caribbean archipelago as speaking, strolling, transferring… de cierta manera [in a certain kind of way]. How would you characterize this “sure sort of” Caribbean core or spirit in Crónica de una muerte anunciada and Crónica de un amor horrible?
Nadia Celis (NC): I’m a daughter of Macondo. Not solely I grew up studying García Márquez but in addition my mental formation is anchored in the identical social milieu that he stamped on the world map, the Colombian Caribbean. By the point I went to school in Cartagena, García Márquez had made a legend of our “sure sort of” being, consuming, dancing, pondering, and feeling, and I may relish on the sense of pleasure his open protection of Caribbean tradition, and his world stardom, had helped to consolidate. Across the similar time, I began to really feel betrayed, as a girl, by a few of the cultural options that others discovered so mesmerizing within the work of our favourite patriarch. However it wasn’t till I began instructing García Márquez in the USA and witnessed the reception of his readers past Colombia, that I spotted how distinctive he was, how distinctive our personal repeating (continental) island is, and the way properly positioned I used to be to learn García Márquez’s world –as each an insider and a feminist critic of the society that he portrayed.
Crónica de una muerte anunciada is an tour round that island. Past all of the fascinating options that readers affiliate with García Márquez’s fiction, on this novel he offers us with a really reasonable map of his actual obsessions: energy, violence, and love. My very own non-fiction chronicle shares these obsessions. Just like the novelist, I additionally relayed on a first-person narrator to information the reader by way of an intriguing sequence of occasions which fact might solely be grasped by partaking with a number of analysis and a number of gossip. However Crónica de un amor horrible is extra like an embroidered mosaic, centering the voices of the ladies who helped me to reconstruct the actual story of the bride whose rejection triggered the “dying foretold,” Margarita Chica—from García Márquez’s sisters to his nieces, from Margarita’s shoppers to my hairdresser, from my favourite feminist writers to my most intimate mates.
IR/RI: Crónica de un amor horrible has been described as “an interesting investigation of the locations, characters, and actual occasions that impressed certainly one of Gabriel García Márquez’s most famous novels: Crónica de una muerte anunciada [Chronicle of a Death Foretold].” I additionally see it as a labor of deep love, which we are going to deal with shortly. I’m inquisitive about your analysis into the unpublished manuscript of Crónica on the Harry Ransom Heart (College of Texas at Austin). Are you able to inform our readers which had been the phrases that struck you within the “uncommon epilogue” and the way they triggered the impulse to unravel the consequences of violence on the precise characters who impressed that story and on girls generally? Had been you referring to the consequences of systemic, institutional violence? Unconscious, intimate biases? A collective outlook?
NC: The epilogue was the opening part of what appeared to have been the second to final model of García Márquez’s Cronica, which he ended suppressing within the last manuscript. It contained fascinating last-minute crossings, such because the suppression of the rumor on the bride not being a virgin that had been of public area in the actual city and within the novel’s one till then. Within the epilogue, the narrator and reporter, García Márquez’s alter ego, mentioned he had been accumulating testimonials of the unique occasions for over 25 years with out having the ability to write it, till he heard from certainly one of his shut mates that the bride and the person who returned it, had gone again collectively. The truth that the e-book was primarily based in an actual crime was well-known, a minimum of in Colombia. The concept the love story subplot, which is tough to imagine even in fiction, may very well be true, was one thing I couldn’t resist exploring. Apart from unveiling the reality behind that declare, I felt compelled to interact the implications he credited to the alleged return of the spouses:
“Todo estaba entonces muy claro: por mi afecto hacia la víctima, yo había pensado siempre que esta period la historia de un crimen atroz, cuando en realidad debía ser la historia secreta de un amor horrible.” [Everything became very clear: Due to my affection for the victim, I had always thought that this was the story of an atrocious crime, when it should be really the secret story of a terrible love.]
A “horrible love,” García Márquez recommended, as a result of it originated within the violence that took the lifetime of his good friend. A “horrible love,” I argue in my e-book, as a result of it’s grounded within the conjunction of affection and violence that continues to pervade the sentimental training of women and men within the Caribbean and Latin America.
IR/RI: Are you able to clarify how/why you selected the title? What did you wish to convey through the use of un amor horrible [terrible love]?
NC: By tracing the actual story of the bride returned and her amorous affairs, I spotted that every one the boys concerned in Margarita’s tragedy enacted violence on this girl. These included her first boyfriend who deserted the younger Margarita after they’d intercourse, the husband who publicly rejected her, the brothers who avenged her honor, and even the writer who devised a personality, Angela Vicario, whose “lie” is the origin of the “dying foretold”, and who’s dubiously redeemed with a “fortunately ever after” ending. All these males acted on behalf of “love.” Finally, my e-book is a critique of the concepts that body our intimate relations making invisible the violence that Margarita and many ladies at the moment proceed to undergo on behalf of the equation of affection with domination.
IR/RI: In 2015, I reviewed your e-book La rebelión de las niñas: El Caribe y la “conciencia corporal” for Caribbean Quarterly (61) and I used to be struck by the freshness and interesting relatability of your theoretical method. What I cherished concerning the e-book was that feminist idea was introduced in a world framework and firmly anchored to the realm of lived psychological and bodily expertise. Now, your newest manufacturing, I see a fil conducteur that not solely serves to present coherence to every work however that pulls an undulating twine, linking every article and e-book. This twine—which I see as each “spinal” and “umbilical”—goes past idea. How would you determine it? How would you describe that underlying thread that animates your writing?
NC: I outline myself as a feminist critic and theorist whose work lies on the intersection of literary research, Caribbean research, and gender and girls research, and whose main focus is the works of Hispanic Caribbean authors. Over the past decade, my analysis has developed primarily in dialogue with transnational feminisms of coloration and with postcolonial and decolonial feminisms. Again to the fundamentals, the experiencethat initially moved me and that continues to gas my scholarship and inventive explorations, was turning into a girl within the Hispanic Caribbean. It took me some time to articulate my discomfort as two basic questions: what situations body the event of feminine subjectivity beneath patriarchal and (submit)colonial energy and the way do people partake within the copy of these situations?
In La rebelión de las niñas I attempted to make sense of my very own expertise as a type of younger women who knew “an excessive amount of” and needed to battle a world denying me the appropriate to claim my voice. I additionally responded to the trivialization of probably the most pervasive technique to scale back younger women and girls, sexual abuse, which I had witnessed in actuality and in literature. In Crónica de un amor horrible, I’m processing what intimate relations have meant to me, my good mates, and many ladies writers, in face of the mental {and professional} bold of a “fashionable” girl. Whereas feminist idea has been basic in my quest, literature has been at all times forward of the sport. Therefore, I’ve made idea of what fiction illuminates of lived expertise.
Whereas I used to be writing my doctoral dissertation, I discovered a clue within the tales of women and girlhood amongst Caribbean girls writers. I requested myself and the Colombian, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan, Cuban and different writers I learn, why did they returned to girlhood even when their lady characters appeared so indignant, what had been they in search of in that journey. The reply was, surprisingly, freedom. Younger women had been freer than the adults, largely as a result of, regardless of the efforts of their dad and mom, schoolteachers, monks, and prolonged households to “cultivate” their wild impulses, they had been cussed sufficient to comply with their our bodies—to run, scream, chew, climb, contact. I additionally concluded that the trepidation exhibited by many of those writers’ adolescent characters was the results of the discount of these our bodies to things of want, manipulation, and consumption, as demanded from their standing as “señoritas.” My first e-book helped me to grasp that behind the surrendering to patriarchal gender hierarchies of many heterosexual feminine adults, there may be the truth that girls’s personal sexual want continues to be constructed as the will of being desired, and subsequently subordinated to what males need of their girls. Crónica de un amor horrible, and my complete analysis on García Márquez, is an exploration of the cultural anchors of the 2 forces that I imagine safe girls’s compliance with such order of want: violence and romantic love.
In short, I’m involved with unfolding the forces that safe our compliance with oppression, in its many kinds. Whereas my expertise and unique coaching allowed me to see extra clearly the position of gender and sophistication in that course of, within the newest years I’ve been working additionally on the query of race.
IR/RI: Since I do know that you’re a very dynamic thinker, at all times engaged on one thing thrilling and new, I need to ask you: What’s the subsequent challenge, the subsequent fruit of your labor of affection (and sweat), the subsequent present that you’ll provide us within the close to future?
NC: I nonetheless have yet another feminist essay on our Macondian Caribbean on the make, primarily based on One Hundred Years of Solitude and preliminarily titled The Solitude of the Buendía Girls: Intimacy and Violence in García Márquez’s Caribbean. However probably the most thrilling subsequent step is my first novel, the story of an enslaved girl within the late 1700’s and early 1800’s in Cartagena de Indias, my hometown. It’s, once more, a narrative about rising up as a girl within the Caribbean, and a return to my obsession with love, intimacy, and energy, from a distinct angle. I wish to discover what freedom meant and costed to black, mulatta, and white girls at a interval in time—earlier than abolitionism, earlier than Independence—when free girls of coloration had been a superb half of the inhabitants within the port of Cartagena. These girls had been manufacturing unit employees, breadwinners, and enterprise homeowners. Nonetheless, they aren’t within the census of the time, nor within the textbooks at the moment, and they’re simply beginning to achieve visibility as a result of work of some historians. Tutorial information travels very slowly and I’ve at all times been impatient. Since I can not wait to see the tales of these girls acknowledged, I’m making an attempt to put in writing them myself.