Imagine a jungle. Not just any one, but one that transforms into a hungry goddess and allows anyone who wishes to live safely in her domain as long as one condition is met: that people give up their children as part of a cyclical cannibalistic tribute. . In this dystopia, mothers are forced to raise their children as future food and no woman is given the option of not giving birth. They are the archetype of womb women taken to the extreme. So why not run away? As contradictory as it may seem, the jungle, as long as it is fed, guarantees the safety of its inhabitants. Beyond its borders, guerrillas and drug traffickers make life impossible.
This is the premise from which The Sky of the Jungle (Lava), the new book by Elaine Vilar (Havana, 1989), begins. The author, who aims to “at least equal” the success of her previous novel, The Tyranny of the Flies (Barrett)—which is now in its sixth edition and won the 2021 Cálamo Prize—intends to talk, among other things, of maternity wards. Of all of them, “including those who act as mothers even if they do not have children of their own.”
Motherhood, she says, “is one of those topics that until now have been sugarcoated and that we now want to address. The same thing happens with childhood and, for that reason, I make children take center stage in this terrible fable. We live in an adult-centric world and we believe that the big problems are those that adults have. What happens with abandoned children or bullying? These are topics that are now beginning to be addressed in a still timid way but that have always been there. They tell you that it’s normal to be made fun of at school, that it’s like a rite of passage that you have to go through. But it’s not normal. Nor do we treat them like dogs and ask them to dance, play the piano or show off their skills in front of our friends.”
Vilar remembers his childhood as a happy period, but it is literature that makes him pay attention to “nuances that I had not considered until now. Like, for example, there were many electricity outages in Havana in the late 80s and food was scarce and my family sacrificed so that I could eat. Or that my grandfather accompanied me while he wrote. I would stand under the light of a kerosene lamp while he made little wooden boats so I could sell them and eat. They are memories that mark you even if you don’t realize it from your childhood body. Writing has allowed me to acquire another perspective and give the less heard voices the prominence they deserve, which are usually those of mothers, children and the elderly. We should listen to them and give them the opportunity to shout and say what hurts and bothers them.”
Authors in general, and Latin American authors in particular, are in that same process. “We have been putting violent issues on the table in recent years. We have been denied for a long time feeling fury, heartbreak and rage. Literature then becomes an escape valve that allows us to scream and that grants us the right, which we always had but was denied, to get angry and to bring out what we have inside. Our voice matters and it is now when it begins to be heard. The time for whispers is over. “It’s time to scream,” Vilar insists.
Her lines are dedicated to her aunts, “who decided not to give birth,” and to her great-grandmothers, “who gave birth too much.” “One of them had ten children and she could never say that she was tired and overwhelmed by her motherhood. That is why, in one way or another, my literature, and especially this last book, tries to rescue from historical memory the voice of my dead and those of others who, like them, were denied the right to speak and give their opinion by society.”
He thinks about them, and in particular his great-aunt Cuca, when he writes. When Vilar decided at the age of seven that she would be a writer in the future, there were many who tried to get this idea out of her head. “They told me to focus my efforts on studying to be a teacher and not to waste time. But there she encouraged me to be. Cuca always wanted to write, but in her time that was considered worse than her going into a brothel. As an adult, she realized that she should not have listened to people. So, so that the same thing wouldn’t happen to me, she showed me the bookcase at her house and she told me that she would fill all those shelves with my books when she wrote them. Today I say proudly that I have been able to fulfill her wish.”
