"I'm going to keep my curly hair, my exploding head"

"I think we can win so many readers because we have the same emotions, the same desires, the same fears, the same guilt in our hearts.

There is always a moment in a woman's life when we ask ourselves if we really want a child. This question is crucial for women. This book is a response to the question of how a woman can face her life when she longs to have children of her own but struggles to achieve it.

I think so many female readers from all over the world have been touched by this book, probably because it shows

Motherhood is complex: it has both good and bad sides. ”

When asked why "The Female Dog", a novel set on the jungle coast of Colombia, has been published in more than 20 countries and resonated with readers around the world, author Pilar Quintana replied.

Contemporary Colombian writer Pilar Quintana

"Female Dog" tells the complex emotions between a woman and her dog, and how a group of people surrounded by nature, society, and even the inner world struggle to survive in a harsh, oppressive environment. Here, the terrifying depths and jungles seem to devour life at any moment, and love will show its claws after repeated defeats.

On the occasion of the launch of the Chinese version of "Female Dog", the Colombian Embassy in China invited author Pilar Quintana to Beijing to communicate with Chinese readers. On the evening of December 13th, Pilar Quintana, contemporary Chinese writer Zhang Yueran, and literary podcast anchor Yang Dayi gathered at the Wudaokou PageOne bookstore to spend a warm and pleasant literary evening with the readers in the heavy snow, and launched a wonderful conversation around the jungle, motherhood, loneliness and madness.

The scene of the dialogue event

When she was followed by a group of tall male writers

She's like a sheriff

Yang Dayi: When did Zhang Yueran first learn Pilar's name, and did the two writers have any previous relationships?

Zhang Yueran: I would like to start by talking about my friendship with Pilar. She and I met twelve years ago, and in the same year we participated in the International Writers' Program in Iowa, USA. It was a very crazy time, and thirty-seven writers were invited to Iowa and lived together for about three months. At that time, my impression of Pilar was that she was thin and fast-moving, and when she was followed by a group of tall male writers, she was like a female chief. During the three months in Iowa, we drank, played, and got to know each other, but we didn't really write anything. We all felt that time was too luxurious. At the time, it was difficult for us to really know who the real writers were. But at the time, I hadn't read a single word written by Pilar, but I felt that she was a real writer. I guess it's one writer's instinct against another.

I want to explore

It is the beast in each of us

Yang Dayi: After reading "Female Dog" for the first time, if you used an adjective to describe it, what would it be like for you to feel?

Zhang Yueran: If I had to describe it in a few words, I would say "painful" and "mysterious", because there is a lot of blank space in this book, including people and natural things. What it doesn't say is more moving and worth thinking about. "The Female Dog" is such a book that it contains and leaves you with something thicker and bigger than it seems. The book is not very long, but there is a lot of white space.

Yang Dayi: (My feelings) As Yue Ran just said, the imagery of the sea and the jungle always affects everyone in this land. The sea brings oppression to everyone on the shore, childhood playmates are swept away by the waves, and the sea is unreasonable when it devours life. In the jungle, it seems that there is always a pair of eyes watching her. The book is very broadly written, and there is a feeling of "horror" when reading it.

Event guest Zhang Yueran

Yang Dayi: I would like to ask Pilar, six years after the publication of this book, what impressed you the most when you looked back at the work and the creative process of "Female Dog"?

PILAR QUINTANA: I wrote this book because I wanted to explore the beast in each of us. We know that Colombia is a country full of wars and conflicts, and we often feel that the evil people are someone else, someone else, and that "they" are killing each other far away from "us", while "we" live a peaceful and even somewhat boring life. But in fact, the evil people can also be ourselves, and we will have the same violence. We were no different from them, and I was sometimes very angry and wanted to attack people, and I used to live in the jungle with my husband, and I would even want to kill him with a knife when we got into an argument.

"The Female Dog" discusses the question: How far are we from being a murderer, from actually killing a person?

Pilar Quintana's to-sign to readers

After living in the jungle

I found everything I Xi in the city middle school useless

YY: Pilar once lived in the jungle, which is a legendary experience, how did you decide to leave the city and live in the jungle in the first place?

Pilar Quintana: The days in the jungle were a very important, if not the most important, experience of my life. I wanted to go to the jungle life because I wanted to live a simple life. The cost of living in a big city is very high, and I want to reduce my expenses as much as possible to support my writing.

After living in the jungle, I realized that everything I had learned in the city middle school Xi useless there. I had to learn to live in harmony with nature. After I lived in the jungle for a week, my husband was so frustrated with mosquitoes that his skin was infected with germs, I had to go to the city to buy insecticide, I had to get rid of all the bugs, I felt as if I had become a beast, and my daily life was always vigilant, facing the jungle with a long scimitar in my hand, with the belief in my heart that if you dared to hurt me, I would want you to look good.

So what I want to say is that I didn't take the initiative to go to the jungle to find the theme of writing with a conscious awareness. It was the experience of living in the jungle that helped me discover my most important subject of writing: animality.

Pilar Quintana once built a house on the coast

She is in a particularly tense relationship with the world

Yang Dayi: Damaris, the heroine of "Female Dog", lives in a natural environment with the sea and a jungle, and she also has a husband, friends, and some relatives around her. How do you see her relationship with the world around her?

Zhang Yueran: She has a particularly tense relationship with the world, and the dog has become her protector to resolve this tension. The dog had an interesting relationship with her, a forty-year-old woman with no children, who now had a very cute puppy. We will think that this dog took the place of the child, gave her maternal love an outlet, and made up for her motherhood. But when the puppy grows into a female dog, has a gender, what he wants to do, and when the dog also wants to become a mother, for the heroine, the dog is no longer her child, but a female she envies. There are comparisons or more complex feelings between females, destroying the motherhood that previously wanted to be calm and wanted to live in harmony. Calm, harmonious motherhood, hostility, and desire to compete tugged at Damaris.

Pilar Quintana: Damaris grew up in nature, which is cold and evil, and always seems to want to kill her. She was "abandoned" by her mother when she was a child, and she was not happy to live in her uncle's house, and after getting married, her husband was away for a long time, and she also felt abandoned by her husband, and she always had a strong sense of abandonment. She has her own body, but her body cannot fulfill and fulfill her desire: to have children of her own. After so many betrayals, Damaris decided to get a puppy, because people always say that dogs are the most loyal animals, but in the end, even dogs abandon her. And the environment in which she lived—the sea and jungle around her—was extremely dangerous, lurking, ready to devour and take her. That's her situation.

The same is true of my understanding of Damaris's relationship with nature: she had to fight against its cruelty in order to survive. I love Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, so I wish I could see Hen Dog as "The Woman and the Sea, and the Jungle." The "nature" that I want to present and explore in this work is not only the jungle, but also the nature of man, that is, human nature itself.

Zhang Yueran: As a woman who can't have children, the heroine actually has a sense of abandonment, so I really can't accept this dog abandoning her again. She had always had a great fear of being abandoned. Damaris is a great female figure, she has many fears inside, but she is very strong on the surface. She is a very powerful figure. One of my favorite details is that when Damaris was a child, she took a rich boy to the beach to play, and he was swept away by the waves. This incident had a big impact on Damaris. Many years later, Damaris called the boy's father, and she was terrified because she felt that she had killed his child, but she was calm on the phone. My favorite was one of the questions that the boy's dad asked Damis on the phone: "You're thirty-three, aren't you?" because if the boy were alive, he would be the same age as Damare. There is both a kind of sadness and a kind of reconciliation in the blank space. It's reminiscent of the friendship between Damis and the boy, those warm things. I think it's very literary.

"Female Dog" Spanish version, English version, Chinese version

She admitted

She just wanted to be a mother

Yang Dayi: Do you think that in the novel, Damaris eventually becomes a "mother"? If you want to add an adjective, what kind of mother do you think she is?

Zhang Yueran: No, I feel like this is an unfinished process. I think this book is quite close to Chinese readers, and it will make people feel very intimate. When I read some British and American novels now, I often feel that in the wave of feminism, people often do not want and refuse to admit that they want to be mothers, and there is almost no such expression in advanced thought. But Damaris has such a sincere desire, and her body also wants to be a mother, and I believe that this mood is actually very compatible with many women in China. So I'm sure Damis will find a lot of Chinese readers.

PILAR QUINTANA: I agree with Yue Ran. Damaris didn't really become a mother. I think there is a key problem with Damaris's relationship with dogs: she can't accept dogs as they are, and her desire to let her frustration be fulfilled and fulfilled through dogs, which creates contradictions.

Dayi Yang: Speaking of motherhood, we have also noticed that the marriage rate and fertility rate continue to decline, and this problem seems to have become a global phenomenon.

Pilar Quintana: It's a similar situation in Colombia, where people are increasingly inclined to marry later, to have pets instead of having children, and to live with animals rather than with people. I think it's interesting, and it makes me wonder what is happening in this society, where people don't want to interact with people anymore, but they want to have relationships with animals like cats and dogs. I think there will be more books on this in the future.

"The Female Dog" by Pilar Quintana

We're working very hard to prove ourselves.

Because we always feel that we are not so "worthy"

Yang Dayi: At the end of the novel, it is written that Damaris "wants to exile himself to the most horrific depths of the jungle", and I felt a chill down my spine when I read this sentence. I would like to ask you how you feel and how do you understand this ending?

Zhang Yueran: I think this is the abandonment of the self, the erasure of the self. It reminds me of the first time I watched Grimm's Fairy Tales, and a common ending was "This woman ran into the forest and no one has seen her since". I think it's a punishment for women – the civilized world erases her name, her presence, she goes to the other side. This is a fate more tragic than death, a kind of disappearance, self-abandonment. I feel that "making myself disappear" is Damare's last desire and sustenance, and it is also her last wish.

Pilar Quintana: In addition to motherhood, I wrote this book on another important theme: guilt, where sometimes we feel guilty for a mistake that we didn't commit. In this society, especially women, we usually grow up with a sense of guilt, and we try very hard to prove ourselves because we always feel that we are not so "worthy". Damis shares the same knot, and she blames herself throughout the novel, with a lingering sense of guilt.

She felt guilty for the death of little Nicholas, and she wanted to spend her life proving that she was a good person and did not do those evil and terrible things, and after the Nicholas family left, she also did her best to serve them, cleaning and keeping the house tidy. But the appearance of the dog broke it all. When she kills the dog, she realizes that she has done the worst and most terrible thing of her life, and that she can no longer be a good person.

So she chose to go to the jungle in the end. Because she felt that being swept away and swallowed by the sea was an instantaneous thing, and it would soon be over, but if she chose to go into the jungle, she could delay the punishment inflicted on herself for a longer time, which was the most "vicious" way she was punishing herself.

Therefore, Damaris's choice at the end of the novel shows that we women, including Damaris, are the harshest judges of ourselves, and our punishment of ourselves is always the severest.

The inside of the real picture of "Female Dog".

"Crazy" is just a label

Sticking to people who don't conform to the norms

Yang Dayi: Just now we mentioned the dog and the heroine in the novel, and there are actually many other characters in this work who are also very interesting. There is a kind of crazy literature that is very popular in China now, and in Pilar's book, many women are not "normal people" in our conventional sense, but are outside the norm, I want to ask you what you think?

Zhang Yueran: I think there will be some "crazy women" in Pilar's works, and there is also a "crazy woman tradition" in our literary history, but the question is who defines "crazy". Does "abnormal" mean "crazy"?

The novel unfolds from the perspective of Damis, but can the heroine really be considered normal, or has she become a little "crazy" under the harsh environment and rules? After little Nicholas was swept away by the waves and beaten by her uncle, she was not so "normal" and could not be in a "whole" state, she lived in fear and guilt all the time. Our requirement of "normality", i.e., maintaining a complete sanity at all times, is something that most people cannot achieve.

PILAR QUINTANA: I think the reason why I'm not "crazy" is because I write. When I write, I present a lot of extreme situations so that I can keep my sanity and stay on the "normal" side. I've always lived a life with open senses and strong perceptions, but I've never crossed "that line." Writing is a way for me to stay sane in real life. I really wanted to cross the line, and the way I crossed the line was to let my characters do it, to perceive such an extreme emotion through them.

I think "crazy" is a label that is attached to things and people that are supposedly out of the norm. But who defines norms and madness? Why are those so-called "norms" normal and reasonable, why do people have to conform to norms, and I don't think I can be such a proper woman. I don't think we have to be a person who behaves appropriately and behaves appropriately. For example, in the city where I was born and raised, straight hair was the norm, and I never wanted to straighten my hair, I always had curly hair. So I told my friends from elsewhere that the most radical and rebellious thing I've ever done is that I didn't straighten my hair and kept my exploding head. My friends would laugh at me and think I was joking. But that's just the way it is. I'm going to keep my curly hair, my exploding head.

Pilar Quintana

in life

Maintain a state of progress

Yang Dayi: The whole book of "Female Dog" reveals a sense of loneliness, do you have lonely moments in your daily life, and how do you deal with loneliness?

Zhang Yueran: There will be times of loneliness, but this is not necessarily a bad thing for writing, although it is also a kind of cliché. In writing, when you are able to describe a certain loneliness, writing and creating such a space of your own, it is also a kind of healing for yourself. Loneliness is actually hard to write about, and when you write about it, you feel relieved, and it can be more effective than when you get along with other people. Writing about a character, and the empty space around him, just like the space around Damaris in the book is a very lonely space for her, and she fights against other people, against nature, and I think when Pilar writes it, there must be a certain relief in her heart.

PILAR QUINTANA: Yes, I also feel lonely, but at the same time I feel like real communication is happening, like the one I'm having right now. I think writing does mean creating a lonely place for me, but writing itself, communicating the world created through words, communicating with the reader, all of this keeps me in a state of being in progress at all times in my life.

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