Inés Arredondo

The Mexican writer Inés Arredondo (1928–1989) in her apartment in Mexico City, May 1989

Inés Camelo Arredondo (born March 20, 1928 in Culiacán , Sinaloa , Mexico , † November 2, 1989 in Mexico City ) was a Mexican writer .

Life

Inés [Camelo] Arredondo was born on March 20, 1928 in Culiacán, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, into a middle-class family who later became poor. Her father, Mario Camelo Arredondo, was a doctor and known for his liberal attitude; Little is known about her mother, except that she bore nine children to her husband, Inés was the eldest, and that she encouraged her daughter to love literature and further studies.

The Hacienda epitome - her grandfather, where she spends the most important time of their childhood, "Eldorado" was utopian thinking since the discovery of America . The most important figure in this mythical universe is her maternal grandfather, Francisco Arredondo. In his honor, she renounced the first surname, Camelo, which is otherwise more important in the Spanish-speaking cultural area, and only calls herself Arredondo. In addition, “camelo”, which means either “love affair” or “newspaper duck” in Spanish, would have had a negative connotation.

The girl was first sent to a Catholic convent school in Culiacán, which was run by Spanish nuns, the Colegio Montferrant, which she attended between 1936 and 1944. From 1945 to 1946 she graduated from the Colegio Aquiles Serdán in Guadalajara . The real clash with the traditional values ​​of her previous world occurs when she decides to study in the Mexican capital; Together with a friend, she became a pioneer in women's education in her home town: in 1947 she enrolled at the UNAM Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities in Mexico City .

The clash of different worldviews could not be more blatant: The young girl, who was brought up to date strictly Catholic, ends up in the skeptical and atheistic circles of her fellow philosophy students and deals with Friedrich Nietzsche and Sören Kierkegaard . The sudden realization that “God is dead” plunges her into a deep crisis, unsettling her to the extent that she is specifically thinking of suicide . On a doctor's order, she decides to change subjects and begin a literature study that appears to be better tailored to the needs of the “female spirit” (she reports that she was always discriminated against as a woman by professors and male classmates).

In 1948 she began the “Licenciatura” in Spanish and Latin American literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, which she completed in 1950 with a thesis on Mexican theater from 1900 to 1950; from 1950 to 1951 she studied theater studies , and in 1953 she took an intensive course in library science.

During her studies, she also made the acquaintance of the exiles from the Spanish Civil War , who determined the intellectual and cultural climate at the faculty and in the informal groups in the coffee house. For the young Inés, the Spanish Republicans are an important counterweight to the nationalist undercurrents in Mexico, which she deeply detests. If she manages to think outside the box of mexicanidad , it is thanks to these contacts, through which she also comes into contact with French existentialism .

At the age of 28, she went through a second life crisis, which also triggered her urge to write: in 1953 she married the writer Tomás Segovia ; marriage is supposed to be a human catastrophe, but at first the common interests for literature predominate. But after the birth of their first daughter Inés, their second child, José, is stillborn - an almost insurmountable trauma for the young mother. To get over the pain, she throws herself into more professional activities. She had worked at the Mexican National Library before, from 1952 to 1955. She is now taking up a chair at the theater academy and is intensifying her work as a translator. As if by chance, as if she had been infected by the translation, her first own story, “El membrillo” (The Quince), “happens” to her. At around the same time, she was also involved in the creation of the Diccionario de Literatura Latinoamericana published by UNESCO . From 1959 to 1961 she worked as editor of the Diccionario de Historia y Biografías Mexicanas and also worked as a commercial writer for radio and television (1961).

During all this time - hardly interrupted by the birth of two more children (Ana and Francisco) - she works, incidentally and without her work being mentioned by name, as a collaborator in the magazine Revista Mexicana de Literatura , which is mainly designed by her husband Tomás Segovia typical women's fate according to the motto "Behind every important man there is a woman". Segovia certainly asserts his influence in the magazine to the effect that he repeatedly prints Arredondo's stories in it, but at the same time, paradoxically, he develops a kind of professional jealousy, as if he sensed that his wife (who in 1961/62 received a scholarship from the prestigious Centro Mexicano de Escritores for the genre "Narrative" and received a scholarship from the Fairfield Foundation in New York City in 1962 ) as an author could grow over his head.

To get the growing marriage difficulties under control, the two decide to change the scene: They move to Montevideo ( Uruguay ), where Inés Arredondo works in the Asociación Latinoamericana de Libre Comercio ( ALALC ). But there it finally came to the final separation in 1962. After her return to Mexico and the eventual divorce (1965), Arredondo met the typical fate of a single mother with three small children: In order to provide for her family, she took one job after the other, rubbing herself between teaching, translating and working Journalism - there is little time left for your own writing. Among other things, she has the following functions: Member of the editorial board of the Revista Mexicana de Literatura until it was hired in 1965, lecturer at UNAM (1965–1968), critic in the culture supplement of the magazine Siempre! (1965 to 1967), employee at Radio Universidad UNAM, 1965 to 1970, lecturer at the theater school of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), 1965 and 1967, screenwriter, lecturer in theater history at the Universidad Iberoamericana , 1970, researcher at the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México (CONDUMEX) 1966 to 1973.

In addition, in 1965 she published her first volume of short stories, La Señal (The Sign); It almost seems as if it first took the separation from the overpowering shadow of her first husband in order to stand on her own literary feet. The relatively short prose texts should remain her trademark in the future , which is also due to her precarious living and working conditions; only Op. 123 appears as a somewhat longer, independent novella .

This gigantic workload, together with the psychological problems after the divorce, also begins to have a negative impact on her health: She has five spinal operations and still has to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair . In 1972 she married her attending physician, the surgeon Carlos Ruiz Sánchez. This second marriage should bring her some financial security, but the mental depression is gradually becoming chronic and there is increasing talk of an alcohol problem .

In spite of everything, Arredondo resumed her literary studies and in 1973 wrote a master’s thesis on the Mexican essayist and poet Jorge Cuesta , who fascinated her with his mysteriousness and contradiction. Many years later, in 1980, she was supposed to take her final exam, which she passed with distinction. But in between there was practically no radio news until the publication of her second book, Río subterráneo (Underground River) 1979. He was greeted enthusiastically by the critics and awarded the most prestigious literary prize that Mexico has to award, the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia , which was previously awarded by Juan Rulfo and Octavio Paz . This also attracted international attention: in 1979 she was invited to tape three of her short stories for the Library of Congress in Washington, DC , and in 1980 UNAM published a record in the series Voz Viva de México . Translations into different languages ​​and honors from various organizations follow immediately. In 1983 the publishing house Oasis brought out her novella Opus 123 , a year later her youth book Historia Verdadera de una Princesa was published as a joint production by CIDCLI and SEP, and in 1988 her third and last volume of short stories, Los espejos . In the same year the collected works, Obras completas , are published; at the publisher Siglo XXI.

Around her sixtieth birthday, the academic awards and manifestations of public recognition pile up, of which the honorary doctorate awarded to her by the Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa on May 27, 1988, certainly has the greatest weight. The television channel "Canal 11" devotes a long interview to her, and in November 1988 a festival of her own is held in her hometown of Culiacan in her honor.

Inés Arredondo spent most of the last years of his life in a sick bed; she died on November 2, 1989 in her apartment in Mexico City.

Prizes and awards

• Premio "Xavier Villaurrutia" 1979 for Río Subterráneo
• Medal of Honor "Bernardo de Balbuena", 1986
• Honorary doctorate from the University of Sinaloa in 1988

plant

Inés Arredondo is one of the main authors of Mexico in the genus narrative and short story to watch. Problematic female characters are almost always the focus of their stories, and the narrative perspective is usually a female one. This focus on the problems of women and - even more specifically - those of a woman who has been disappointed, even destroyed by the heterosexual couple relationship, turns her into a reluctant feminist at times, even though she never saw herself as such. What's more, is that Arredondo in their lyrics also venturing to the field of sexual relations, especially in their abysmal, perverse or macabre varieties what Mexican at the time of their first publications in the late 1950s and early 1960s, for Author inside still a taboo showed. Incest , prostitution , sadism , masochism , sex in old age and other “forbidden desires” that are not officially approved by society are subjects that recur in her narratives. On closer inspection, the break-in of uncontrollable sexual impulses into a stable order (mostly that of the family) naturally means a violation of prevailing laws; In this respect, Arredondo's narratives are also based on a subversive tendency in terms of their latent content , which, however, will never manifest itself in explicit social criticism . On the contrary: throughout her life she has vehemently rejected any connection between literature and morality or literature and politics. She is repeatedly reproached for this attitude by representatives of committed literature. Her stories and short stories, on the other hand, are based on an almost mystical search for the sacred and the transcendent , a component that is particularly important for understanding Inés Arredondo's work. It is about the encounter with the absolute, which in itself is value-free and can be both extremely positive and extremely negative. Inés Arredondo does not see herself as a simple “storyteller”, but as a “seer”, as a mediator of a metaphysical “message” that is given her in a mysterious way by the muses or gods. Very often, “la señal” (the symbol), the distinction or stigmatization that happens to her characters in the stories, is related to physical “touch” in the broadest sense: in “Mariana” it is the gaze that reveals the depths of the hereafter explores, in the cover story “La señal” the kiss acts as such an initial spark for an encounter with the mystical. So with her the spiritual is always connected with the physical, indeed the physiological; Arredondo's erotic literature is ultimately a spiritual search for meaning, an instrument of knowledge, part of an initiatory rite . Ultimately, this truth is located in the realm of the unspeakable, at the dividing line between desire and restraint, purity and depravity, guilt and doom, which in many cases brings it close not only to ancient tragedy, but also to existentialism . A “ happy ending ” is therefore unthinkable in the stories of the Mexican woman; the fatality of the clash between desire and necessity, pleasure and reality principle, individuality and collectivity, rebellion and subordination, always leads to the failure of their central figures.

From a literary point of view, Arredondo belongs to the Mexican "Generación de medio siglo" (generation of the middle of the century).

Volumes of stories

• Los Espejos . México: Joaquín Mortiz / Planeta 1988 (= Serie del Volador).
• Río subterráneo . México: Joaquín Mortiz 1979 (= Col. Nueva Narrativa Hispánica).
• La señal . México: Era 1965 (= Colección Alacena).

Novella

• Opus 123 . México: Oasis 1983 (= Los Libros del Fakir, 23).

essay

• Acercamiento a Jorge Cuesta . México: SEP / Diana 1982 (= SepSetentas, 317).

Children's literature

• Historia Verdadera de una Princesa. Cuento para niños . México: CIDCLI / Secretaría de Educación Pública 1984 (= Reloj de Cuentos).

Complete edition

• Obras completas . México: Siglo XXI / DICOFUR 1988.

German translations

• "Die Sunemiterin", translated by Barbara Kinter, in: Alcántara, Marco (ed.): Women in Latin America 2. Stories and reports . Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983, pp. 80-91 (= dtv, 10522).
• "Summer", translated by Erna Pfeiffer , in: Pfeiffer, Erna (ed.): AMORica Latina - My continent, my body. Erotic texts by Latin American authors , Vienna: Wiener Frauenverlag, 1991, pp. 55–64.

English translations

• The Underground River and Other Stories . Trans. Cynthia Steele. Lincoln / London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

literature

• Albarrán, Claudia: Luna menguante. Vida y obra de Inés Arredondo . México: Ediciones Casa Juan Pablos, 2000.
• Bradu, Fabienne: La escritura subterránea de Inés Arredondo , in: dies., Señas particulares: escritora. Ensayos sobre escritoras mexicanas del siglo XX . México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987, pp. 29-49.
• Crelis Secco, Susana: La búsqueda del paraíso. La narrativa de Inés Arredondo . Tesis para obtener el grado de doctora en letras. México: UNAM, 1995.
• Dórame-Grajales, Patricia Dolores: “La Sunamita”: de la rebelión a la resistencia, una narración de la “pureza degradada” , in: dies., Escritura y erotismo en la literatura mexicana contemporánea . Austin: UMI, 1989, pp. 110-167.
• Pérez Pavón, Alfredo: Hacia el Sistema Literario de Inés Arredondo. El universo narrativo de “La Sunamita” (tesis de maestría). Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 1978.
• Pfeiffer, Erna: EntreVistas. Diez escritoras mexicanas desde bastidores . Frankfurt a. M .: Vervuert Verlag, 1992, pp. 13-24. ISBN 3-89354-051-2
• Pfeiffer, Erna: Territory of women: body experience as a cognitive process in texts by contemporary Latin American authors . Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1998. ISBN 3-89354-098-9

Web links

• El poder de la palabra (texts in Spanish)
• Article by Lillian von der Walde (in Spanish)
• Sepiensa.org (in Spanish)
• Literature by and about Inés Arredondo in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin