María Fernanda Ampuero (Guayaquil, 1976) is afraid to write. And that, she admits, “is not so easy to cope with if you are a writer. The book is a monumental thing. What you publish stays there forever. It’s total nudity and sometimes it hurts. But it is important that it hurts so that it is of real use,” confesses the author, who has just published Visceral (Páginas de Espuma), an essay in which “I open myself up more than ever.”
In its pages, the Ecuadorian author pours all her fears, experiences, memories, and also desires, into a kind of manifesto that constantly covers past and present. “If anyone has read my previous fiction stories, they will now understand many things. And, whoever hasn’t done it, will know me from scratch. Ladies and gentlemen, this is me, with its lights and its shadows. Many shadows, which I have come to talk about.”
One of those dark corners lies in her childhood, and in how terrible comparisons between women are, “especially if one of them is your mother. When she was young, she was a goddess and had a stunning body. I, on the other hand, was chubby. “I went out to my father’s side.” Ampuero recounts his family’s efforts to help him lose weight. “The mothers of my generation gave us drugs to lose weight. I took a lot of amphetamines and sleeping pills in order not to eat anymore. It’s funny because, if I were a junkie now, my parents would be scandalized, but for the sake of being thin, they didn’t care, even though I was a minor.”
Despite the “barbaric” nature of the situation, “I don’t judge it. I mess with her, but not out of her resentment, but out of the misguided concept of love and care that she grew up with. You have to understand that being a mother is very difficult, and of a woman more than that. I feel that she was wrong about many things and it is legal for me to express it. Of course, I asked him not to read the book. I hope you listen to me. It comforts me to know that she has made a mea culpa. Or so I think, wow.”
Social pressures also affect the author of Cockfight (2018) and Human Sacrifices (2021) from postcolonialism, ecopolitics, feminism, desire and sexuality. “It took me a long time to realize that I was raped. And I think it’s important to tell it because more than one person will be able to identify with it. This is what happened recently with the filmmaker Carlos Vermut. It makes me feel very bad to see how people criticize the victims for not giving their names and for going up to their house. They think that because he was famous, they wanted something from him. I don’t know why it’s so hard to understand that women also want sex and it seems like we deserve punishment for it. But sex doesn’t have to be synonymous with carnage.”
Ampuero reflects on the “constant guilt” that women feel “no matter what they do. Since you went to the VIP section where a soccer player was, you deserve for him to do anything to you. I have to be able to go and, if I regret it or change my mind, be able to say no and be understood without problems. We ourselves have internalized, because of society, that we deserve everything bad. It is important to stop and become aware. Say no, I didn’t deserve that. I don’t have to endure rape, nor do I have to endure looks, jokes or comments. “Believing it is the great outstanding debt that women have.”
