No prosperity without women

I must have been very, very young when I realized that I didn’t want to be a victim like my mother. I wanted to be powerful like my grandfather. Very young I rebelled against all forms of authority, especially male authority. That means my grandfather, my uncles, my stepfather, the police, the church: every kind of male authority. In Chile at this time all authority was male because it was a real patriarchy. I was very rebellious without being able to articulate why I was so angry. I was an angry girl and then a very rebellious teenager. Rebellious intellectually because I never did drugs or ran away from home, not those kind of things. But I was always challenging and arguing. Then I discovered feminism. I discovered that I was not inventing anything. There were books, there were women feminists that had a particular kind of language to express all this that I was feeling.

Even in Latin America there are great differences between the status of women in one country or the other. In Chile we are very advanced in that sense. We have a woman president who is a doctor and a socialist—and this is her second term. She has stressed family and the situation of women. That’s the focus of her government. So a lot has been achieved. But still when I go to Chile I find it very patriarchal. It’s still a very male, chauvinistic society.

I don’t know. There is a new wave of young people that I meet all the time that just do their work. They don’t go out and they are not proclaiming anything. The only ones fighting and proclaiming things today are the people who have differences in gender, lesbians, gays, and transgender for example. That movement is very strong and outspoken, at least in the United States, not so much in Latin America. They are in a way replacing that way of very combative feminists of my generation. You already mentioned your foundation that works on empowering women and girls in the area of reproductive rights, economic independence and freedom from violence. Is there one project that you remember as particularly important? There is one project that embodies what we are trying to do. Let me tell you the story. There is this little old lady Olga Murray who, when she was 60, went to Nepal as a tourist. She was tracking in the mountains there, broke her leg. A Sherpa carried her in a basket on his back on the way to a village. In this village she had to stay until they would pick her up. There was a festival in which busses came from the cities to buy little girls from the fathers, sometimes eight, sometimes six years old. And they would bring them to the city and sell them as domestic servants. They would be slaves for 10 to 20 years. They will have no education, they will be treated as dogs, eating the scabs of the family, beaten up and raped. Olga alone with her Nepal Youth Foundation has saved around 12,000 girls from domestic slavery. She is now establishing nutrition clinics for the starving children in Nepal. This is what one person can do. She changed the culture in the country. Because now the government has declared the practice of selling children for domestic slavery illegal. This is why I believe in the grassroot concept. They begin at a very basic level and then things start to happen.

No, I don’t believe that. We are progressing. Look, I am 75 years old. I was born in the middle of the Second World War when there was no declaration of Human Rights. It was the time of the Holocaust and the time when we were throwing atomic bombs on Japan. No one was talking about women’s rights or children’s rights then. In my lifetime I have seen how the world has become better not worse. We still have wars, we still have discrimination, we have torture, we have executions, we have terror, we have a lot of stuff . But more people are educated today than they were when I was born. And more people have access to the resources than they had before. The great education that was before was available only for privileged people.

I think that they feel that they can control their lives. And this started with birth control. When women can control their fertility they feel empowered. They have less children, they have more education. Usually they can work. The first step for feminism is birth control.

I’m not always inspired. When I finish a book and the book is in my agent’s hands I feel this emptiness. What I’m going to do next? I need that passion inside me to dedicate myself to a project. Sometimes I think there is a book that I will write about something and in the process it turns out to be something completely different. For example: There is this book of mine called “Island Beneath the Sea”. It’s a novel about the slavery in Haiti in the 1800s. I thought I would write a book about the pirates of the Caribbean set in New Orleans. But when I started to research about New Orleans I found out that much of the French favor that this city has came from 10,000 white colonists from Haiti that ran away from the revolution. They were French people, they came with their French customs, and they changed the city completely. Before it was a city of 3,000 people only and 10,000 immigrants came in just one year. So I thought: Why did they run away from Haiti? Then I got completely hooked by Haiti. My book is about that and not about the Caribbean set in New Orleans. But you need to be disciplined. You need to show up in front of your computer daily and you need to be patient. It doesn’t happen if you are not disciplined in your work.

Many. I think that the influence of many Latin American writers is present in my books. I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers to grow up reading other Latin American writers. García Márquez was writing when I was in my twenties. So I could read him. I could read Vargas Llosa, I could read Donoso. They had been writing before but their books were not well distributed. So in Chile we couldn’t get Carlos Fuentes until the publishing houses in Barcelona started publishing this great Latin American writer and sending the books to Latin America and distributing them. I grew up with everything available. Then there are other influences like movies. A scene in a movie can trigger a book or a story, also the news in the newspapers. And then there are influences that are not literary. I remember the first time that I thought that I could do anything was when I saw a painting by Chagall. I thought that Chagall was a kid. It didn’t cross my mind that this is a real painter. By that time he was 90 years old. I thought: if this kid can do this, I can do too. The freedom, the color, the abundance of the painting took me like a rock. It sort of liberated something in me. Art didn’t have to be realistic. It didn’t have to be what my teacher was expecting. It could be whatever I wanted.

I want a fair world and also a joyful world. That people laugh more, enjoy more. A fair world where all of that is available for anybody. I cannot fully enjoy what I have if I see that other people around me don’t have it. When I think of the refugees from Syria and the horrible things that are happening to the people in the world, I feel that sort of hardness inside me that doesn’t allow me to be fully joyful about my own life.