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Antonio Paniagua
Madrid
Viernes, 24 de enero 2025, 19:10
When her mother fell ill, there were doctors who didn't even want to touch her. They ignored her. The reason she was treated like a pariah was because she was black. This is one of the arguments invoked by Rachel Eliza Griffiths, poet and visual artist, to denounce institutional racism in her country, the USA. Griffiths, married to Salman Rushdie, has just debuted in the novel with the fiction 'Promise' (Random House), a work set in the 1950s that dissects the anxieties of an African American family struggling to survive in Maine, in the northern USA.
"I've always doubted the American dream, because it has a total dissonance with immigrants, poor and racialized people," says the writer, who argues that oppressed minorities in the USA must always be alert. "Some of us have to be very awake, because that bad dream could cost us our lives."
In a telematic press conference from New York, Griffiths claims she was encouraged to make the leap from poetry to fiction when her mother died in 2014. It was grief that encouraged her to venture into prose. "I had something to say that I couldn't express with photography, poetry, or as a teacher. That was the moment the novel took off."
The novel tells the childhood of sisters Cinthy and Ezra Kindred, whose lives have been surrounded by love. They grew up under the protection of their parents and the shelter of the Junkett family, with whom they form the small black community of Salt Point, a small fishing village in Maine. But when summer ends and they return to school, the sisters are met with hostility.
This animosity against the black community is the same that the writer has experienced firsthand. "There is nothing as degrading as someone looking at your skin, your body, and deciding you are not human. Or treating your mother or father as if they were slaves or unworthy animals," says the novelist, who does not hold back in describing this affront: "It's disgusting and repugnant. The United States is by no means isolated from racism."
Born in Washington D.C. in 1978, Griffiths maintains that she loves her country, a circumstance that gives her the right to criticize it. "We are living through very complicated times in the history of the USA, in American memory. I have nothing new to contribute, but I do think that art and fiction offer new ways of seeing it," argues the writer, with the recent inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the USA still fresh.
"Does that 'Make America Great Again', that supposed greatness, mean going back to the 1950s? Is the great moment slavery, when we had to drink from different fountains? Is that the 'Great America' we want now? That dissonance continues to fascinate me," she concludes.
For the writer, the 1950s lend themselves to ambivalent readings: it was thought that everything was possible—the expansion of the railroad, the growth of New York—phenomena that coexisted, however, with the silence imposed on women and the violation of their rights.
Author of four books of poetry, Griffiths does not forget the role of her mother, who instilled in her the inner fire to face life's inequities. "She was a fierce person, had a vibrant personality. She was a born survivor."
The writer dismantles the myth that the northern USA is a haven of anti-racist peace. In the collective imagination, the idea of an atrocious, slave-holding South, with blacks hanging from tree branches, persists. But on a trip through Long Island and Maine as a student, she was surprised to travel through towns and regions where she found no trace of any black people. That spurred her imagination and led her to wonder: "Gosh, how would someone like me grow up in a place like this, where there is no community of black people?"
When asked about possible solutions for the USA, the author advocates for pride, although she dismisses the formula of cancellation, a maneuver that, according to her, hides a deep laziness. "Canceling someone is a way of not wanting to do the work of communication. You can cancel a check, but cancel a human being? What does this kind of moral guillotine mean?"
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