Eugenia Pérez Tomas: "Becoming a mother is the act of making space"

Writer, playwright and editor, Eugenia Pérez Tomas arms in her second novel, "La canción del día", a narrative voice that gives rise to motherhood as a role that needs space and time to take shape, and from that key she stages the sequence of a family tradition in which there are perspectives like that of the grandmother who is revisited again.

In the book edited by Paisanita, motherhood is defined as "the most unnatural thing in the world" and, between the essay and the narrative, she assumes the discomfort of opening the plane on the care and transformation that this task implies.

The also author of the poetry book "Los buenos deseos", the collection of works "Make a fire" and the novel "Frutas tardías" spoke with Télam about her trades linked to writing and the process that gave rise to this recent work.

-Télam: Your writing came hand in hand with dramaturgy, how was this narrative writing process? "The song of the day" can be read as a novel but can also be three independent stories with their own construction that have a separate meaning. Were you interested in that hybridity?

-Eugenia Pérez Tomas: I think I am a playwright who does not write theater. A little funny, a little true. Why am I saying this: when I started writing playwriting I had close experience with the scene, I was studying acting, directing and that theatrical language was in my semantic field. Over time I was removing the body from the scene to fall into a deep interest in writing and that allowed me to dedicate myself to observing. I discovered that this was a great passion. Observing the bodies was a source of conversation from which I drank to write. The passage to the narrative unfolded from that game. Maybe that's why my writing has a hybrid spirit, because of the way I connect with literature. I am interested in the fact that the novel can be read from a lens where the promise, more than a plot intrigue, is a promise of language.

-T: The book aims to open the focus on motherhood. "Becoming a mother is one of the most unnatural things in the world," says the narrator. But the maternity-time, maternity-space axis is also built, as if the narrator's writing made space and time for maternity. Do you agree? How were you interested in thinking about motherhood from writing?

-E.P.T.: Yes, I think that the perception of time changes like never before after the birth of a daughter and that is what reveals a new personal paradigm. Motherhood brings a new logic of chronological time and symbolic time. Writing is a kind of grasping the hourglass with your hands, of entering into that contact, which does not mean being in control, of course. There is an idea that I like and it was brought to me by writing; Becoming a mother is, in concrete terms, the act of making space: in the body to make room for pregnancy, in the house to make room for things in life to come, in thought to invent the intimate and family narrative . It is giving place and cumming. This movement inaugurates a new time of fascination and discovery. Writing is a table to cross to the other side, to test.

-T: You are one of those responsible for the Energetic Forest label dedicated to intimate diaries and this book can be read in that registry.

-E.P.T: When we began to think about the editorial project with Andrés Gallina, I had been working on the novel. These were times of pandemic confinement and our daughter was just one year old. The will to put together a catalog that would be dedicated purely and exclusively to personal archives appeared very forcefully in our minds, we could no longer imagine our library without the Energetic Forest newspapers. What we do or what we want and seek with the publishing house is to illuminate that edge between the personal archive and the essay on certain clippings from the world. A newspaper does not seek centrality and this exploration of the record interests us. There is a clear relationship with my novel.

-T: What readings accompanied you during this writing?

-E.P.T.: There are many that were key in the writing and I am never sure whether to repeat the same ones that took center stage or share the long list that slipped through while I was writing. In fact, there is a lot of motherhood literature inspiring my observation ("Single Mother" by Marina Yuszczuk; "A Job for Life" by Rachel Cusk; "We Are Born of Woman: Motherhood as an Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich" …). And, also, other types of non-specific texts that accompanied me to think about the form and enable divergences in the narrative. For example, "On Drawing" by John Berger is a reading that I never stop consulting.

-T: It is a book about motherhood, but also about writing. Do you think there is a literature that comes to question the idealization of motherhood? I am thinking of recent novels such as "In vitro", by Isabel Zapata, or Fantastic Land" by Ana Wajsczuk.

-E.P.T.: I like to think that "The Song of the Day" is a book about desire. The writing is born as a response or overflow of the scenes that move me. The books that we have been reading where non-idealized maternity and puerperiums appear are the choral construction of the possibilities that each one finds in her experience. Birth is horizontal, it goes through all of us, but it never happens in the same way. It is the desire to narrate and rehearse around the beginnings, the founding myths, the body and vital links. Sometimes the arrival of another book on motherhood is thought to be detrimental, as if it were attached to a passing current. Far from it, these types of appearances multiply my curiosity.