Nerea Pallares: "In feminist self-defense groups they teach you how far you are willing to go"

BarcelonaFishermen, witches, and bobbin lace. Perhaps no one foresaw a novel with these ingredients. But surprise and risk are a statement of intent, in Punt d’aranya (published by Periscopi in Catalan, translated by Eduard Velasco, and by Asteroide in Spanish): at the heart of the book are the most particular and identifying elements of life on the Galician Costa da Morte. Nerea Pallares (Lugo, 1989) has woven a novel about a violent world that doesn't seem so and about a revenge that can turn reality upside down.

Bobbin lace and edgings seem like small things, because they are women's things and, on the contrary, you place them at the center of life in Camariñas.

— Lace is associated with the domestic sphere, with an activity typical of the elderly, because it is true that the women in the novel are more or less 50 years old, but in reality, right now, those who do bobbin lace in Costa da Morte are older ladies, and it is easy to associate them with something harmless. I really liked the idea of reversing this symbol and making it so that from women who get together to knit, a possible revolution derives. It is a power that we truly have, the question is giving ourselves permission to exercise it.

As Maria Arnal sings from the poem by Joan Brossa: "People don't realize the power they have".

— Yes. Because they are women who are sustaining an entire reality and, if they stopped doing so, the system as such would collapse. Sometimes I think we don't realize it. I have been many times in feminist self-defense groups, where they teach you techniques to protect yourself in case of suffering an assault, but they also teach you, and it is very important, how far you are willing to go: will you give yourself permission to defend yourself? Because it is also a matter of changing your mindset and thinking that you have the right to exercise this situation to defend yourself.

If we would already find it difficult to dare to tell a stranger that we do not want to share an elevator with him so as not to be rude or cause discomfort.

— Female anger is not tolerated much. Nor do we give ourselves permission to be angry, nor to be violent. Imagine if this situation you mention involved violence.

The novel connects the real world of fishermen, net makers, limpet gatherers, fishmongers and cannery workers, with telluric forces that have to do with this wild landscape and also with ancestral beliefs.

— Since I set the novel in Camariñas, it seemed organic and very evident to me that the sea, the wind, and the environment –not just as a landscape but as a living force, because I think it has a lot of presence and you realize it immediately if you set foot in it–, it seemed to me that it had to take physical form with the spiders, which materialize this wild force, and it had to be another character.

In this closed world arrives a girl, Ari, to work at the lace museum and be a tourist guide. But the day comes when they bury a dead girl, who had gone out to sea with her father to do a job. An accident that is the last straw.

— For there to be a click is that we come from a situation of prior structural violence: the glass was about to overflow. There is a reflection of many types of sustained daily violence that all the protagonists have suffered, with different situations. But the seriousness of what is happening is a kind of upheaval that makes them say "enough is enough" and sets them in motion. It is a collective response to a problem that is also collective. Even though we might think that the problem belonged to one person, they all make it their own and respond to it as a community.

Everything happens in a town of 5,000 inhabitants. From the smallest and most concrete point, a structural and universal reading emerges.

— It is a very local, concrete story in a very recognizable setting, but this unequal structure is transferable to many simultaneous presents, to many other contexts. That is why I am interested in the crossroads between the mythical and the everyday, this intersection allows you, from the local, to explain the universal. It connects something that happens in the present and is immanent with something more transcendent, in the sense that it comes from afar and continues to flow over time. That is why the novel is circular.

The book stretches the symbol of thread, which has to do with mythology; also with language, because there are many expressions about following the thread or losing the thread; it refers to the network that women form, and there are also real threads, those of the laces and nets they are sewing.

— For me the trigger is embroidery as an expressive form prior to the word and the relationship between text and fabric. There are many expressions in everyday speech that make this evident and, specifically, I wanted to look for a cause-and-effect relationship for the expression losing the thread. What would happen if, by weaving and unweaving, there was an implication of another kind here? This leads me to the question of who the weavers are and, therefore, who holds everything together in an invisible way. There are two realities coexisting, the more mythical and the more everyday. On the one hand, the weavers are the spiders, which refer us to all that mythical part that the novel collects. On the other hand, they are the women who are related to the fabric of the sea, the redeiras (net makers) and the palilleiras (bobbin lacemakers). And this is where the novel also takes on its most political dimension.

The novel just gives voice to those who didn't have it and takes it away from those who held it, like a curse.

— The total paradox is that those who sustain the voice of others are those who have no voice of their own. I make a continuous exercise of making the invisible visible, of making present what is taken for granted and not valued. Because silence is a form of punishment. Yes, there is a political dimension in the choice of point of view: I wanted it to be a choral novel, in the mouths of the women of the village, women of this age and this type of occupation who are not very present in fiction. I believe that fictional spaces are spaces of representation, they collect what happens in reality, but they also end up influencing it.

The novel gives hope in an apocalyptic moment.

— I was the first surprise that something came out of me that I don't know if it was optimistic, but it was certainly proactive. I think we are now very clear about what is not going well and it seemed to me that, as a gesture, it was interesting to say: perhaps there is a possibility of reversing a situation and doing things differently. Let's not give up everything. At a time when we feel that the apocalypse surrounds us imminently, that there are many threats and that there is no possibility of thinking of new ways of doing things, I think this also leads to a certain reluctance and immobility, and a work of utopian construction from fiction is nothing less than even subversive.

You had already published two collections of short stories, Sidecar (2015) and Los ritos mudos (2021) in Spanish. Here you opt for Galician, which is the language mostly spoken in Costa da Morte. And you do it in the Fisterran dialect, which moves away from the standard, and with concrete idiolects, because there are percebeiras and reggaetoneras. How did you work on the language?

— I choose Galician because it is my language and because it is a novel very linked to the territory, tied to orality and that thinks a lot about language, reflects on where the word comes from to name pre-existing realities... It was the most natural and logical. And attending to orality involves collecting different idiolects, effectively, because 50-year-old women do not express themselves the same way as their teenage daughters.

I don't know if there is an awareness here regarding the Galician language.

— It felt very organic and it's a line I'd like to follow. I couldn't tell you why not before and now yes. I think in Galicia we are in a good moment, there are many authors who are releasing their first novels and it's an interesting moment, especially fertile, for very different voices. This novel came out in Galician in June and worked by word of mouth, and now with the release of the book in Catalan and Spanish, there is indeed a lot of visibility thanks to editorial support, but it is also true that the amount of books that arrive in bookstores is overwhelming. I published previous books with very, very small literary labels; in fact, one no longer exists. You can never predict the reception and I don't think you should think about it: it's not characteristic of literature and it can condition you in a way that is counterproductive.