Fernanda Trías: "I needed to write about the uncontrollable rage forbidden to women."

Before finishing Mugre Rosa (2020), a novel that presaged the rise of COVID-19, Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías had already witnessed the voice of a hybrid woman, made of mountain soil and poisoned blood. This wrathful, poetic language is the focus of El monte de las furias (Mount of the Furies ), her most recent book, written out of a need to capture the "uncontrollable fury forbidden to women."

"I needed to write an entire novel about that uncontrollable fury . Fury, rage, and anger are emotions forbidden to women , when, paradoxically, if there is anyone who has the right to anger, because of what has historically been done, it is women," says the winner of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (2021) in Mexico.

To find the fury of her nameless protagonist—the caretaker of an Andean mountain— Trías dismantles the "hegemonic paradigm" of humankind over nature and observes with microscopic and poetic attention the mystical majesty of the green forests that swell with rain in Colombia, the country where she has lived for ten years.

The most avid readers of the 2024 National Book Award nominee know that decoding silences is one of her greatest literary obsessions.

Through messages read between the lines in this work, the writer reveals that the main narrator's silenced fury is also fueled by a "violent patriarchal system that functions like a perfect machine."

Because even though the caregiver lives at the height where the clouds sleep, she does not escape the violence exercised by men, not even by her mother.

" The patriarchal machine is perfect because it gets inside women, and we use it against ourselves and others, without the need for a man to be around," she says.

Furthermore, she notes, this "violence is internalized" in the victim , and when the aggressor is no longer there, "you direct the violence: you become your own abuser and continue abusing yourself, whether by seeking out other violent relationships or through self-abuse," like the one the protagonist inflicts on herself.

" That's why there is a huge need for support for the victims , and that support doesn't just last until they manage to get rid of that man; it has to be there afterward," the 48-year-old novelist concludes.

Since her beginnings with The Rooftop (2001), the novelist explores different aesthetic horizons and "imaginative exercises" to narrate the silences of physical, psychological and political violence, as happens in The Mountain of the Furies and its connection with the more than 100,000 people who have disappeared during the armed conflict in Colombia since the last century.

Faced with the horror that persists on Colombian and Mexican soil, the latter with more than 133,000 missing people , the creative writing professor confesses that, among female writers, there is a reflection on "whether it is possible to convey that dimension of horror, of a nameless pain."

Especially when " the spectacularization of violence – through crime reports, movies, or TV series – has exhausted language to such an extent that it is impossible to convey the pain to others."

Despite the regional panorama, the writer emphasizes that, with the writing of this novel published by Random House, she understood that by exploring the "limits of language" it is possible to "communicate unspeakable experiences," particularly when the "tremendous" reality is disrupted with poetry.

"Poetry gives language an importance that it has lost, because a poem is irreplaceable. You can't paraphrase a poem, and that's great . Each word has a weight. In the end, I think we're returning to poetry at this point, which is quite ironic and beautiful: it's poetic justice," he concludes.

For Trías, contemplating the fury of the mountain from his window, those days of forced confinement due to the pandemic, offered him a refuge to imagine, in an act of lyrical psychomagic, that "the disappeared from here, there, and from times past" will one day have a decent burial.