“Literature is extremely political, but it is a politics that works best when it comes in spaces where no other politics can go, a more delicate space that doesn’t require the precision of saying, ‘OK, we’re going to talk about glyphosate because someone has to,’” said Schweblin.
True to form, Schweblin’s social commentary in “Fever Dream” straddles the space between the fantastic and the everyday, written entirely as a dialogue between a dying woman and a young boy who could be real or imagined. In a similar vein, Ojeda’s “Jawbone,” which centers on the kidnapping of a young woman by an obsessive teacher, uses horror to explore the anxieties of adolescence and womanhood in modern Ecuador.
“We always link fear to ugliness, but I think above all it is linked to beauty,” Ojeda said via email. “The biggest fear we can experience is the loss of beauty. It seemed natural to think about adolescence from that perspective.”
Like Dueñas and Dávila before them, Ojeda and other contemporary writers in Latin America use different means to confront the often fraught realities for women in the region. But their form of feminism, such as it is, represents an “evolution” from the writing of the last century, said Alemany Bay.
“Writers like Dávila incorporated the interior world, the world of the nightmare, the world of madness. And that interior psychology can be characteristic of women’s writing,” Alemany Bay said. “Current writers also incorporate this internal world, but now they are in a different place, one where they no longer have to vindicate the fact of being a woman. So in that sense I think there’s a step forward.”
For Schweblin, that more personal form of feminism has taken time to fully understand.
“In ‘Mouthful of Birds,’ all of the issues that feminism has been preoccupied with in the last 10 years are there, but written with the naïveté of someone who was 18 years old,” she said. “So I’m not sure if it was feminist, but there was exigency, there was anger.”
Still, recognizing those realities can be jarring. Schweblin said that when she first moved to Berlin, she didn’t understand why it filled her with happiness to ride her bike home alone at night without worrying about the consequences. Her friends didn’t understand why she would send them text messages after getting in late.
