Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato).
hor discovered a young Mexican writer Jazmina Barrerahe bewitched me with his direct and rhythmic prose so much that it seemed to me to embrace a sister or a friend of adolescence first lost and then found by magic in the mature age.
And his latest beautiful book speaks of sisterhood and friendship Cross-stitch (The New Frontier) which I read with great pleasure but now in my rambling Dadaism I would instead like to tell you about his penultimate work black line (The New Frontier). I think they should be read in sequence to enter his literary world.
Cross-stitch narrates the life of girls in that particular moment of existence when one begins to breathe freedom: «Even though we were still nineteen (years old, ed) we seemed to have the world at our feet, to fly over it as we really would in a matter of minutes».
“Cross Stitch” by Jazmina Barrera (The New Frontier)
While black line is a pregnancy diary by the author until the birth of your baby, including breastfeeding. It’s been a long time since my pregnancy but like all I keep some patchy memories, many things are forgotten like the pains of childbirth.
Everyone who’s been there says it no matter how much we suffered we see each other again in the moment of pain, but the physical sensation does not come back to mind, it has been magically erased. It’s amazing how the genius of nature creates this sectoral amnesia that allows women to still get pregnant.
I didn’t keep a pregnancy diary at the time and found myself in Barrera’s ramblings, intuitions, musings magically reliving moments I thought I’d forgotten. Thanks to his brilliant and curious report, I remembered many sensations such as setting off on a science fiction journey like a space Odyssey.
“Linea nigra” by Jazmina Barrera (The New Frontier)
Barrera tells the incredible sensation of the body that changes and catapults us every other day into a dystopian horror like Aliens or in a fantasy where we begin to rise as if we had swallowed the biscuit of Alice in Wonderland.
His diary has become mine, the one I never wrote just as I went on a trip with her rambling group of friends in Cross-stitch: the first trip alone is never forgotten and the magical power of sisterhood – Barrera’s favorite theme – helps us to overcome life’s billows. Perhaps it is precisely this feeling of multiple and non-canonical affects in which we can mirror ourselves that makes Barrera’s books so fascinating.
All articles by Serena Dandini
iO Woman © REPRODUCTION RESERVED