SOURCE: An interview in Belles Lettres, Vol. 7, No. 2, Winter, 1991–1992, pp. 41–4.

[In the following interview conducted in May 1991, Conde and Poniatowska discuss the female protagonists in Poniatowska's stories.]

Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska was a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz campus last May when she spoke with Susana Conde.

Elena Poniatowska was born in Paris in 1933, to a Mexican mother and a French father of Polish origin. During the Second World War, her father was a soldier and her mother drove ambulances. At eight, Elena and her family emigrated to Mexico. Because she then spoke only French, her first acquaintance with Spanish came through servants in her household. That first connection with poor or marginalized people influenced her writing deeply. In La ‘Flor de Lis,’ a highly autobiographical novel, Poniatowska presents an account of the contrast between the imported French Enlightenment culture in Mexico and the existing Mexican culture.

As well as being a journalist, novelist, and essayist, Poniatowska is one of Mexico's most important interviewers. Her book Todo Mexico (1991) includes interviews with such notables as Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, Mexican actress María Félix, and Spanish torero Manuel Benítez. Her journalistic interest prompted her to write La noche de Tlatelolco, a record of the October 1968 massacre of protesting students at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco; Fuerte es el Silencio, a chronicle of the unsung everyday heroes and martyrs of Mexico; and Nada, nadie: Las voces del temblor, an account of the devastation generated by the 1988 earthquake in Mexico City.

The testimonial character of her works appears in one of her earlier and most accomplished projects: Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, a first-person narrative engendered by personal interviews in 1966 with an Oaxacan woman whose life spanned eighty tumultuous years of Mexican history. This novel is an example of the testimonial literature prevalent in Latin America at the time of its publication (in these works a literate writer interviews a nonliterate person and takes down the story of her or his life, preserving that person's voice in the resulting written account).

[Susana Conde:] In your works of fiction you display an uncommon ability to give your characters an authentic, resonant voice. Do you think that your experience as a journalist has given you that aptitude?

[Elena Poniatowska:] I believe that I owe almost everything to journalism, through which I learned to handle dialogue. Listening to so many voices throughout thirty-five or forty years has helped me to capture men's and women's voices, an essential process in the writing of fiction.

It has been said that it is not Jesusa's voice but that of Elena Poniatowska that is heard in Hasta no verte, Jesús mío. Do you think that is true?

The voice is almost always Jesusa's. Jesusa was a real person I interviewed in 1966. We spoke every Wednesday for a year, at the end of which I wrote the novel; but there are passages that were not part of her testimony. She rejected the novel when I wanted to read it to her. “Those are all lies. You didn't understand anything,” she said. “You are no good. How is it possible, all that study, all that schooling, and you don't understand things?”

Do you think that it is more important in testimonial literature to attempt accuracy or artistic unity?

Accuracy may compromise the artistic unity of the work—something that happens in the testimonials in which the author writes exactly what the interviewee says. In the case of Jesusa, there were Wednesdays in which she spoke about how bad the owner of the building was, that the neighborhood was very dirty, and that the gutters flooded when it rained. Because I was mainly interested in the story of her life, I deleted those tiresome tirades.

That may have been the reason for her telling you that what you wrote were all lies.

Yes. Besides, she resented that I had said so little about her “spiritual work,” which is a practice based on mesmerism and communication with the supernatural.

Was that a kind of spiritualism?

It is a doctrine that many Mexicans follow. It is called Marian Trinitary Spiritual Doctrine. This religion is very gratifying for women, because they go to holy places where they can be priestesses. They can deliver homilies, as well as perform spiritual cures: they “sweep” people with bouquets of baby's breath in order to eliminate their bad spirits and their infected humors. They also perform spiritual operations: they open the stomach and remove tumors and appendices. They use a perfumed lotion called Siete Machos (Seven Males) that they say cleans the brain and makes it lighter, more apt for thought. But the best thing for Jesusa is that she saw this work as the psychoanalysis of the poor. The “protector” comes from the sky and penetrates the top of the woman's head; as she closes her eyes, she talks about all her aches and pains as well as about all that makes her feel ill or depressed in her life. As she does this, she rocks back and forth, and thus empties herself in a sort of catharsis.

And what does the Catholic church say about all this?

Many of those temples are registered with the secretaries of state. And because many of their rites are similar to those of the Catholic church, it does not object.

Just as you were interested in recording the voice of Jesusa, a non-literate, marginalized Mexican woman, you also gave voice to a woman belonging to the literate, Europeanized Mexican society. Is Mariana, in your novel La ‘Flor de Lis,’ a purely Mexican protagonist?

Mariana does not reflect the reality of many Mexican women. Mexican women have a warmer home. In general, the Mexican extended family forms a clan that gets together on Sundays and holidays. I don't know if this happens in your native country as well.

Families function like a large tribe. What one adult does not give a child, maybe another one will. Children always have their favorite aunt, or their cousin, with whom they may temporarily fall in love. In the case of Mariana, we have a child who is not born in Mexico, who loses her childhood somewhat, and who enters her adolescence in a very rigid and rejecting world. She is the victim of the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nobody talks to her about a career, and married life is her only hope.

So that she is not representative of the modern Mexican woman.

No, because the modern Mexican woman is born, frankly, after the 1950s. Today's young women, as well as couples, have changed a lot. Although there are still traditional couples where the woman stays at home to raise children, the young couple who attends the university is very different: If they have a child, they both take care of it; they also take turns attending the university and doing the household chores.

What is the meaning of the persistent sadness of Mariana at the end of the novel?

That is the sadness provoked by her departure from her childhood world. In Mariana's time, the Mexican woman thought that she had to take life as it came and that she could not be the captain of her destiny because in any case life would see to it that her decisions were never realized. When a woman wanted to study medicine in Latin America, she was told that it was a man's profession; if a woman thought of being an engineer or an architect, she was mocked. A woman was always relegated to the professions that had traditionally been linked with her gender: nurse, teacher, secretary. This has totally changed. In Latin America, women now practice the professions of their choice, for the most part.

The protagonists of some of your novels, for example Lilus Kikus and Mariana, go through a time of confinement, control, and frustration. Do you believe that these are necessary stages or experiences for the revelation of a personal interior force in fictional characters?

Those who have had a Catholic education have been told that resurrection is achieved through personal sacrifice. Like the phoenix, if one goes through sacrificial stages, eternal rewards will follow. Not too long ago, women were still tying ropes to their waists to push the barbs into their flesh. They also flagellated themselves or they wore bras made of a coarse material as a ritualistic penance. I studied in a convent in Philadelphia, and I remember that when we played hockey, the nuns made some of us do sacrifices so that our team would win. And I always volunteered, masochistically, to kneel on an anthill with tiny pebbles, until they penetrated my skin. During Holy Week the nuns were particularly ill-tempered. An image is clear in my mind: after eating blueberry pie, all of us would have blue lips, of course, but not the nuns, who would sacrifice and skip dessert. In this way a feminine culture around the need of sacrifice for spiritual growth was transmitted to us. But no human being needs confinement, control, or frustration. It's no good for anyone.

Do you believe that there are differences between masculine and feminine themes in literature?

Female writers deal with themes that male writers don't. Because women's point of departure in our society is different from men's, we arrive at a point that men don't reach. I don't believe that the result can be called feminine writing, but it is writing based on feminine interests. Men can write and have written splendidly about feminine characters: Flaubert and Stendhal, for example. But some topics have been dealt with only by women. No man has written about lesbianism, for example, the way Gloria Anzaldúa or Cherie Moraga have.

But homosexual men have written about their experiences.

Men often do not deal with it as deeply as do women. Chicanas, for example, write about their mothers and say that they don't want to be like them, and they accuse and reject their fathers. They tell of the drunken father hitting the submissive mother, and also accuse the mother for having stayed in such a situation. Some lesbians don't want to choose another possible father, another drunken, unscrupulous man who will abuse them. They want to choose a woman, and through that woman save the mother that they carry inside.

Is the function of the female writer different from that of the male writer in our time?

That depends on the writer. There are those who are interested in social problems, and see their writing as a way of exerting some influence. In general, Latin American women writers have allied themselves with the cause of the oppressed. Marta Traba, the Argentine writer who later declared herself Colombian, or Luisa Valenzuela, who lives in New York, have written about torture. Marta Traba, in Conversación al sur (Conversation in the South), has written about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina who protest the “disappearances” of friends and family. These writers have been linked with a very important social movement for Latin America. “Disappearing” people is a political phenomenon that we seem to have invented in Latin America, and it is one of the most atrocious forms of torture.

The idea of a writer living in an ivory tower would be rather strange in Latin America now, wouldn't it?

The idea of the ivory tower was fashionable in the fifties. Nobody talks about it in Latin America now.

In A Room of One's Own, written in 1929, Virginia Woolf says that a woman must have money and a room of her own in order to write fiction. For the vast majority of women that aspired to a life of writing, that was an impossibility. In the intervening sixty-three years, has the situation changed for the majority of women who want to devote their lives to letters? Is the situation different in Mexico or in Latin America from that in the United States?

The situation of women in Mexico and in other Latin American countries is different. We live in countries that suffer a very high index of illiteracy. Frequently, women who aspire to become writers belong to the bourgeois class: they do have rooms of their own and the means to buy typewriters and paper. Often these writers become interested in the lives of women of little or no means, and they lend them their literary skills so that their voices can be heard. This happened, for example, with Yo soy Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (I … Rigoberta Menchú) by Rigoberta Menchú, edited by Elizabeth Burgos Debray; or Carolina María de Jesús in Brazil, who wrote her own novel; but, in general, Latin American women writers are women of some means. The case of the Chicanas is different: they do not belong to the bourgeois class.

What they have done has great merit because through literature they have been able to spin straw into gold.

What is your advice to Latin American or Anglo American women who want to devote their lives to letters?

Their integration with their lives in the present, what life gives them, what they see everyday is most important. Latin American women tend to believe that reality is placed in their navels. The more a woman opens herself to other realities, the wealthier she is.

Works By Elena Poniatowska

Nonfiction

La noche de Tlatelolco/Massacre in Mexico (1971) Translated by Helen R. Lane. University of Missouri Press, 1992.

Fuerte es el sílencio/Silence Is Strong (1980)

Nada, nadie: Las voces del temblor/Nothing, Nobody: Voices of the Earthquake (1988)

Compañeras de México/Women Photograph Women (with Amy Conger) University of Washington Press, 1990

Fiction

Líus Kikus (1954)

Hasta no verte, Jesús mío/Until, I Don't See You, Dear Jesus (1969)

Querido Diego, te abrara Quiela/Dear Diego (1978)

De noche vienes/You Come at Night (1979)

La ‘Flor de Lis’/The ‘Fleur de Lis’ (1988)

Testimonial

Gaby Brimmer (with Gaby Brimmer) (1979; this book was the basis for the movie Gaby, about a woman who suffered from cerebral paralysis)