Mónica Ojeda is one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today. With influences spanning from H.P. Lovecraft, to Stephen King’s Carrie, to anonymous internet horror legends called “creepypastas,” Ojeda’s novel Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021), translated expertly by Sarah Booker, explores the darkest aspects of relationships between women, amidst the suffocating atmosphere of an Opus Dei school for girls in Ecuador.
In Jawbone, popular girls and best friends Annelise and Fernanda have created a religion of their own, outside of the classroom. The girls set up camp in an abandoned house, form a secret cult that worships “The White God”, and engage in a series of increasingly dangerous dares that threatens to tear their friendships apart. Meanwhile, their Spanish literature teacher, Ms. Clara, haunted by the ghost of her dead mother, begins to lose her grip on reality. Things take a sinister turn when Ms. Clara takes Fernanda hostage in a deserted cabin, intending to show her pupil the true meaning of fear. In her multivocal and lyrical prose, Ojeda demonstrates the pernicious ways that violence against women can be exercised, and reveals how victims can be transformed into perpetrators. I was lucky enough to be able to meet with Ojeda in person at a coffee shop in Madrid. Over orange juices, we discussed psychoanalysis in language, the implications of Latin American gothic literature, and her favorite horror films.
Rose Bialer (RB): The first book I read of yours was the poetry collection, Historia de la Leche, which investigates the strange violence of family relationships—specifically those between mothers and daughters. What drove you to return to this theme in Jawbone?
Mónica Ojeda (MO): I don’t remember if I first wrote Historia de la Leche or Jawbone. Well, I know that Jawbone was published first, but I don’t remember which book I wrote first. I could have been writing them at the same time. However, I do know that at the time, I was very interested in the violence within passionate relationships between women. I think the relationships between best friends, or sisters, or mothers and daughters are intense, and so of course there are a lot of possibilities for violence to get in. I’m kind of obsessed with how desire and love can be taken to the next level—the next level being sometimes absolute violence.
RB: I think your poetry comes through in your writing, especially in such highly imaginative phrases such as “mother-God-of-the-wandering-womb,” “umbilical-cord love” and “that sleeping-angel-of-history voice.” Tell me about the process of constructing these new terms.
MO: I think invention comes to me because I do see the act of writing as a way of putting language in some kind of crisis. In conflict. So sometimes, you have to develop some new forms to express certain things; that is something which pulls me back to poetry even when I am writing narrative. Because I think that poetry does that. Poetry reverts language, re-births language. Sometimes when words join together, developing new concepts and images, it can sound strange because you have no familiarity with something which has just been born. As such, it develops some kind of extrañamiento (estrangement), which also provides an atmosphere that I like, having to do with the strange and something that Freud called lo siniestro (the uncanny), which is when something unknown reveals itself in the middle of what is ordinary, during your daily routine. That is scary: when you are surrounded by the things that you know and then the strange comes in. I like to do that not only in the story of my narrative or my novels, but also in language.
RB: To speak more about syntax and language and how it corresponds in the characters’ personalities—Ms. Clara has an inner monologue where she ruminates on how one’s writing can reflect their inner-self. “Clara, for her part, was convinced that it was possible to know a person through their writing. She liked to think that deep down, her work made it possible for others to discover and show their true character—her mother’s, for example, was rhythmic, definitive, sibylline; hers, disorganized, digressive, populated by subordinate clauses and parenthetical remarks.” In which ways do you embody characters through writing in Jawbone?
MO: I think I’m very interested in the relationship between psychoanalysis and writing because they both see language as something that has shadows; they don’t see language as something straightforward. As a writer, language is not transparent. It has shadows and its own mysteries, and sometimes it can hide things about the speaker but also reveal a lot. So that’s some ambivalent value that language has, and I’m interested in how some characters—like certain people in real life—are capable of revealing themselves in their language without even realizing that they are doing so. Sometimes words speak beyond oneself, and that’s kind of strange and disturbing; in a way, it is like you are your own medium. I create characters and write them with that thought in mind, thinking of language as some kind of darkness, a dangerous place—like the sea.
RB: Yes! I was thinking about Freud a lot while reading this, especially in the sections of Fernanda’s therapy sessions, where she processes repressed childhood memories.
MO: I love the point where psychoanalysis and literature converge. In my novels, the unconscious level is very latent in all of the characters’ actions, so I do find it very interesting in the way that psychoanalysis just seeks the conflict in words.
RB: Repression also figures prominently into the curriculum of the Delta Bilingual Academy, where discipline and purity are lauded by the teachers. How does this oppressive environment contribute to fear? Or is religion a response to it?
MO: I don’t believe that religion is only a response to fear; it’s a very complex thing, and it embodies many of the wishes, desires, and thoughts of society. However, the ideas I work on in my novel happen at the points in which religion becomes not a space of thinking, but a space of cultism: making a language that has no way of being penetrated, stating that something is here and you can see it—but you cannot touch it. And these high school girls in the novel want to touch everything. I think they have a thirst for touch and for genuine experiences. They don’t want to just experience religion in that unalterable way, so that’s why they go to a building in ruins, and they develop their own cult that actually follows from Christianity; they change the content but the structure is the same. For that, I was really inspired by Lovecraft, because I think his work also has a lot of interest in religion as something really mixed up with the symbolism of fear.
RB: Jawbone contains a fascinating mix in referencing both classic literature, i.e. Poe and Lovecraft, and the internet horror legends of creepypastas. Tell me about your choice to work with these distinct interpretations of horror stories in literature?
MO: For me, it was very natural, because that’s how my mind works. I can be reading Edgar Allan Poe and creepypastas at the same time, and also watching horror movies. I think that’s actually how everyone’s mind works. But it’s important to note that the characters from the novel, they are teenagers and they go to a high school for the rich, and a very religious one at that. Though it’s a place where they can have access to a lot of things—such as literature—they are teenagers with cellphones, who read creepypastas and watch horror movies. They are reading Edgar Allan Poe for their classes and then in the afternoon they listen to Selena Gomez. So I wanted to reflect that—I didn’t want to make the distinction between high and low culture. It really isn’t important to me.
RB: You also seamlessly weave together indigenous mythology, such as the tale of La Llorona, with urban legends and memes on the dark web. Does Latin America lend itself to the certain fusion of the ancient and the modern?
MO: In the Andean world in Latin America, a shaman can be playing chess on Looney Toons themed chessboard; it’s something I’ve witnessed. A while back, I actually saw a shaman making a limpia—a ritual—and he was mixing the herbs in a Coca Cola can. That’s how it works right now, and it’s very interesting because it forges new legends, new oral stories, and transforms these symbols. I really think that amalgamation is interesting and necessary for understanding the present world; you can’t understand the present if you cannot understand this mixture.
RB: Many of your female contemporaries in Latin America—such as Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enríquez, and María Fernanda Ampuero (to name just a few)—have been turning toward horror and gothic genres in their writing. One article even labeled this wave “The New Latin American Gothic,” signifying the rise of a new genre. Why do you believe so many women writers in Latin America are being drawn to this literary movement?
MO: I think there are a lot of reasons, but the most important one is that it’s very difficult to write about anything that is not violence and horror when you live in Latin American societies. I came here [to Spain] because I wanted to have a normal state of mind; I was going crazy back there. To speak about my own writing, I don’t consciously choose to write about certain concepts—I simply can’t write about anything else. Maybe if I was born in some other place, I would be writing about something else, but I do believe that Latin America is a very violent continent, especially for women, and in all of our traditions of women’s literature, there have always been women writing horror stories in Latin America. Even if you can’t necessarily define certain novels as horror novels, you can take a title of one of the best writers in twentieth century Latin America, and see aspects of horror in it—even if the novel is not pure horror.
I do believe that it’s because you can’t write about anything else. That’s how you live life. You are afraid for your life. You are scared of the violence in your family, the violence between your friends, the violence in the street. You can’t think about anything else except how to protect yourself from violence.
RB: So the fantastic and horror genres are actually a reality?
MO: It’s a reality, and it’s filled with the awareness that horror is a genre which gives you a lot of instruments to develop those stories in a very fresh way—not necessarily by taking away realism in writing, but in a refreshing way where the fantastic can seep in.
RB: It is clear from reading Jawbone that you are no stranger to reading horror. When did you first become interested in the subject?
MO: Right now, I’m not a very prolific reader of horror; actually, if I’m being honest, I don’t read horror. I have read some of the classics and a few contemporary stories, but I don’t know that much about horror itself. Mariana Enríquez—she consumes horror like a beast. So does María Fernanda Amperuro. Every time I talk to her, she is reading horror or watching horror movies. But I don’t. I do believe that the horror in my writing doesn’t come from being a horror fan, but simply from having problems in my head. The horror is because it’s real for me. I write about these topics because I’m scared, or because I’ve had some difficult experiences. So it comes from another place.
I’m an eclectic reader. Right now, I’m reading a lot of essays—some about occultism, or about music, magic, and dance. Horror isn’t a genre that I am passionate about as a reader, but as a writer, I’m interested in studying fear. I want to know what fear is. Why are we so afraid? What does fear make us do or not do? How does fear change our bodies?
RB: As an avid horror movie watcher, I must ask: What are your favorites?
MO: I’m a really big fan of Ari Aster and his films, Hereditary and Midsommar. I like Egger’s The Witch and The Lighthouse. Antichrist, with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, is amazing. María Fernanda Ampuero also told me about a great horror movie she saw at SEEFest called The Innocents, directed by Eskil Vogt, that hasn’t come out yet.
RB: It’s a different type of fear between watching a horror movie or reading horror, as opposed to writing it.
MO: It’s very different. I have anxiety so for me, writing about fear is like having a prolonged physical panic attack. When you go to a movie and you get scared, it’s immediate, and then you get out and think about something else and forget—but writing is not like that, because language contaminates your mind. Writing about such things stays with you. Even when you are not physically writing, your mind is in that atmosphere.
I don’t know, maybe some writers can write about horror and go to sleep and be happy, with nothing disturbing them. But for me, it’s very intense.
Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador, 1988) is the author of the novels La desfiguración Silva (Premio Alba Narrativa, 2014), Nefando (Candaya, 2016), and Mandíbula (Candaya, 2018), as well as the poetry collections El ciclo de las piedras (Rastro de laIguana, 2015) and Historia de la leche (Candaya, 2020). Her stories have been published in the anthology Emergencias: Doce cuentos iberoamericanos (Candaya, 2014) and the collections Caninos (Editorial Turbina, 2017) and Las voladoras (Páginas de Espuma, 2020). In 2017, she was included on the Bógota 39 list of the best thirty-nine Latin American writers under forty, and in 2019, she received the Prince Claus Next Generation Award in honor of her outstanding literary achievements.
Rose Bialer is the Assistant Interviews Editor at Asymptote and lives in Madrid, Spain. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as The Kenyon Review Online, Full Stop and Rain Taxi.
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