The writer, the saint and the thorn: the creation of Camila Sosa Villada

Camila Sosa Villada says that she is a lucky transvestite. Her parents crossed the desert to ask the Deceased Correa for her daughter to leave prostitution, for her to find another job, and the popular saint granted them. Sosa Villada is today one of the best-selling authors of the Planeta publishing house in Argentina. his novel The evil onesfor which she won the Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Award in 2020, has sold more than 100,000 copies in Spanish and has been translated into ten languages; I’m a fool for loving you, his most recent book, has sold 30,000 copies in just a few months in the South American country, an unusually high figure for a collection of short stories. The writer, who has been everything – street vendor, house cleaner, prostitute, actress, singer – is also a literary phenomenon.

-The freak Camila – she proposes. The English word, freak, translates as a phenomenon, but not a literary one but refers to a different, unusual, rare person. -I like more: the freak Camila–, she says and laughs with her mouth open.

The author came clacking her heels on red stilettos to the interview with EL PAIS, which took place at the end of October in the courtyard of a hotel in Mexico City while the writer was promoting her new book in the country. Her long steps and slow cadence, her black dress, the silver jacket, the sunglasses that cover her gaze and she doesn’t take it off. The aura is that of a star although she says that she doesn’t believe it.

“No, no, what a shame. A literary figure is Mariana Enriquez. Other than that I don’t deserve it. No, I arrived by chance. I’m here now and it’s what I do because it’s giving me money. Surely if being a prostitute gave me money, more money than being a writer, I would be a prostitute again. Or to be a maid or to act or sing.

Sosa Villada was already famous in Argentina when she published The evil ones in 2019. He had starred in the solo Toledo meatsthe movie Minewith Rodrigo de la Serna, and the television series Raphael’s widow, and at literary festivals his name was already circulating among publishers. But the novel, which follows a group of transvestites who prostitute themselves in a park in the city of Cordoba and was published the same year as his essay Thesis of a domesticationreleased it internationally.

I’m a fool for loving you (Tusquets, 2022) is his first publication since then. Paola Lucantis, editor of the book, says that the success of The evil ones “It was a very heavy backpack” for the author and the publisher. Lucantis compares the reception that Sosa Villada has received with that received by Pedro Mairal with The Uruguayan or Tamara Tenembaum with the end of love. “It happens that Camila adds prizes, translations and sales, it’s a combo,” says the editor. “It was a challenge with which she presented herself again to her reading public, to the critics, to the journalists. It was important to her to test what other universes she was comfortable with,” she says.

The book brings together nine stories in which the narrator tackles new characters, settings and genres: two Mexican transvestites meet Billie Holiday in Harlem’s dens, the order of the Sisters of Compassion captures prostitutes with acts of witchcraft, a woman wins life as a girlfriend of gay men, two brothers protect themselves from a violent father. Under always red skies, the characters move between reality and fantasy and express themselves, like her, in a disrespectful language.

“Many journalists speak of my writing as marginal, as if my characters were outside of society. How much passion for ignorance is there to think that they are not central, right? ”, She said in an interview with EL PAIS in June. She feared, then, that she would be pigeonholed as “the author of the margins, the one of the transvestites.” But she now she says she doesn’t care anymore.

The author rejects any type of definition and assures that identity ceased to be important for her: “It is as if today everything revolves around identity and a single word: either you are black, or you are a transvestite, or you are a woman, or you are a transgender woman, or you are white, or you are cis, or you are heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual or asexual or pansexual” “Being a writer is also nothing,” she continues. “I mean, I work as a writer, but I don’t know what I am. That would be to define a person through her work, and it is not enough to define anyone”.

A canon “under construction”

Sosa Villada was born 40 years ago in La Falda, Cordoba, a conservative province in central Argentina. In her teens, she had to hide to dress in women’s clothing. Her father, who knew what she was doing with her, warned her: “One day they are going to come knock on that door to tell me that they found you dead, lying in a ditch.” Until she went to study Communication and at the age of 18 she began to prostitute herself. When she came back to her house, she still felt like writing, and so she started a blog that she wrote by hand and then typed in an internet cafe. That was the origin of The evil onesaccording to Juan Forn in the prologue of the book.

Many times in these years he has had to explain that the stories he narrates are not chronicles of his life. “Let me right to fiction,” she claims now during the interview. The landscapes in her books come from “little wounds that appear in memory”: “La Duras [Marguerite Duras] he talked about Indochina; the berlin [Lucia Berlin] over Mexico or over the border.” She describes the thorn, the mountain, the streams, the nature that is not kind, and also the icy early mornings in the city, the deserted and dangerous streets while most sleep.

He chooses the characters for “the things they do,” he continues. “By the line of action, you know? The Martel [Lucrecia Martel] says it well in a conference. How does someone take a shower? What you always see is that she goes to the bathroom, turns on the faucet and the water falls on her. But if you have to film the shower of a person who lives in a shantytown, you have to see that they have to go get water, come back with the buckets, bathe with a jug, heat the bathroom or the place where it has to be bathe”, he says, and continues: “Those marginal transvestites, who are working as prostitutes, are more interesting. I need more elements to attend to, not that bourgeois comfort of saying ‘just take a shower’.

Spanish writer Marta Sanz pointed out in a review of the new book in Babelia that the experiences that the author narrates have been “little traveled in literature”. “The characters in these stories are part of their author, they are close to her, and that does not delegitimize her literary gaze, but rather gives it political force,” she wrote, adding: “It makes us feel that it is important to know who has written a book and from where, correcting the idea that a literature, always identical to itself in its demands, ahistorical and impossibly hermaphrodite, transforms all its subject-objects into sexless beings, archangels and owners of fat capital”.

“His literature is not disruptive because of the issues it deals with,” says Lucantis, who coordinated The evil ones after the death of Juan Forn and that accompanies Sosa Villada in Mexico. “That seems to me to be a bit behind with the second book. As much as they are universes from which she draws, the important thing is the power of a voice that dares to play with other universes and other genres without having too much… Respect is not the word. She is not afraid to be outside the literary canons in which authors generally try to place themselves”. For Lucantis, the canon of Sosa Villada “is under construction”.

“I made myself”

–Grandma Why are we brown?

Grandma interrupts the cleaning of the rifles. She is sitting at the kitchen table with two rifles and the box of bullets.

-What did you say?

Why are we brown?

-We are not brown, we are brunettes. Where did you get that?

–We were in gym class and Tati yelled at me: “Yuck, you have brown nipples!”.

Thus begins one of the tales of I’m a fool for loving you. the snack It is a short story that Sosa Villada read in 2021 at the Guadalajara Book Fair as a preview of the book that had not yet been released. Then a young woman came up to him crying. She “she had felt very touched. A brunette just like me”, says the writer. But Sosa Villada believes that the success she has had is also due to the fact that in her literature “there is a bit of novelty” and that among some readers “there is a bit of snobbery” that she plays in her favor. “With the stories I feel that I have tuned myself in”, says Sosa Villada, “but I don’t get hung up on it being just my literature”.

“I am aware, I am not a fool. I do understand that I am a transvestite brunette in a very privileged world, like that of literature, the publishing world. It is a very privileged world where people live well, eat well, drink well, dress well Not funny, but well, ”she says, this time without laughing. “I always feel like the dumbest, the most toolless. I see even your hands [a otras escritoras], who do their nails. I always have them made a mess, ”she says. “The only thing I believe in is the money,” she says, and continues: “I love it, and I know I’m earning very well. Despite the fact that being a transvestite involves a structural poverty that does not allow me to buy a house”.

When she received Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, she congratulated the jury for giving the award to a transvestite writer and read: “Societies have not improved. We have improved the transvestites. We are already talking to each other, to you, to the world and everything that could be divine (…) As Susy Shock, my friend, says, the revenge of the transvestites is inaugurated where they least expected it, which was through the word”. She now she no longer believes in what she said. “It’s very selfish of me to say that when it’s a very personal triumph, you know? A possible transvestite revenge would be for all the old transvestites to have money,” she explains.

She says that if she has to name herself at some point, she hopes to be able to say: “Yes, I am a carefree transvestite.” “My search is being how to solve an old age. I don’t want to have children, surely I’m not going to get married and I’m not going to inherit anything. My concern is, if I live 10 more years or 20 more years, not going through the poverty that I went through, not having to work 50 hours a day to pay rent or to eat. I like to live in a nice apartment, with a balcony, with a comfortable bed, with a big TV, and have free time. My search is that, in whatever way.”

Writing is what he keeps doing because it gives him money, he insists. Write “to publish”, with schedules, with a dictionary, with your notes, with grammar classes, filling “pages and pages and pages”. Another thing, she clarifies, is to write “as an intimate exercise”, which is for her “an involuntary act”, “like being a slave to something superior, or inferior”. Which is what she did secretly at her parents’ house dressed in the clothes she sewed herself. In an interview, she said that she had to “make a woman with her hands” to get to where she has come. “Nobody discovered me, in any case I did it alone,” she says and remembers that a few years ago she saw an interview with Maria Felix in which the Mexican actress was told that the public had done it: “And she says: ‘What is the public going to do to me? In any case, he made me a great god. Which is like saying: ‘Luck made me, chance made me’.

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