From her home in the Andes, Ecuadorian author Natalie Garcia Freire discusses religion, ecology and feminism, with Litro’s Book Review editor Jane Downs. Freire’s latest novel ‘This World Does Not Belong to Us’ was published in English by World Editions on May 5th 2022.

J.D:  I wanted to start by saying how much I enjoyed the novel. It’s very eerie and feels very much like a fairy tale or a fable. I think it’s largely because you describe so much vegetation and make it feel so very alive. It reminds me of fairy stories in which plants and trees grow up very quickly around people and loom in the background as a potentially menacing presence.

N.G.F: Well, that’s partly because I live in the highlands in the Andes. My city is 2500 metres above sea level, so we have a lot of vegetation. It’s a very green place, with a lot of mountains and animals and a lot of different ecosystems. When I was writing the book, I was reading Ursula K Le Guin’s collection of essays, and there’s one in which she mentions Sylvia Townsend Warner who I’ve loved ever since. She wrote a very beautiful poem about Sleeping Beauty, in which she says that when the prince showed up, he kind of ended the princess’s peace. Sleeping Beauty was lying there all quiet, in a very peaceful environment, but then the prince appeared and put an end to it all! I was very impressed, because I realised that fairy tales can have a lot of different interpretations, and that no single interpretation is necessarily right. You know, Beauty was kind of happy, sleeping in the forest, surrounded by birds, where everything was quiet …

J.D: She was much better off like that! And, in fact, for a lot of the women in your novel, existence isn’t that wonderful, is it? They’re having a pretty hard time. They are mostly women who are taking care of their menfolk or they’re taking care of the land – they are caretakers. The only woman who has any sort of life in her own right is Lucas’s mother and she pays a very high price for her intellectual life. So, maybe it would be better for them not to be disturbed by the prince or by the menfolk that surround them?

N.G.F: You know, Latin America, Ecuador and especially my city Cuenca is a highly religious and conservative place. It’s hard to be a woman here. I was very influenced by my grandmother’s and mother’s stories, because they are just that – caretakers – they have been taking care of men their entire lives. I’ve always been really angry about that. I reject it, partly because I’m part from a different generation, but also because I’ve become very close to my mother and part of that closeness comes from understanding her caretaker role. She’s always tired and she’s never even asked herself what she wants or what she desires out of life. The four women who work in Lucas’s house and that serve his family, they represent just how things have operated here right up until today. Servants are seen as objects, as part of the house…

J.D: As property perhaps?

N.G.F: As property, exactly. Not as people. These four women don’t have any kind of will of their own and I think I made a kind of collage within the novel: combining what happens in my city with what happened when I was little. Now things are changing, but in the book it’s like a collage of all the things that I’ve seen and heard.

J.D: At one point in the novel, your narrator accuses men of killing words and illustrations and paper – all of which are things that matter to you – they are the things that you live by as a writer. Would you say that it is difficult to be a woman writer in Ecuador today?

N.G.F:  Well, I think that it would have been really difficult to publish my book here, because there is a kind of circle of people – mostly men – who publish books and get a lot of reviews, whilst most Ecuadorian women writers have published their novels outside of the country. I know that Monica Ojeda tried to publish her work here, but either she couldn’t, or she was made a really poor offer. I think things are changing though because there are a lot of Ecuadorian women writers who are doing very well, but it’s still kind of difficult, there’s still this circle of masculine power and I don’t think I could have published my book here. I’m so glad that I found a publishing house in Spain.

J.D: And I believe that the book has also been published in French as well, is that right?

N.G.F: Yes, in French and in Italian.

J.D: Congratulations! It must be exciting to have it come out now in English too.

N.G.F: It’s like it’s not happening to me, because I’m here on the other side of the world, but what’s been really nice for me has been my contact with the translator, Victor. He was very enthusiastic about the book from the beginning, and we have become very good friends. We talked a lot about the story. It’s been great working with him – it’s a really important part of the process.

J.D: It’s a big show of trust, handing over your work and trusting someone else to capture your vision.

N.G.F: Yes, you have to have a bond and also, I think, be really open to the idea that the translator is going to write a story that is a little different and maybe even a little better than your own! It’s the only way he/she can communicate it to another country because language structures the world we live in. For me translators are like magicians; they take hold of one world and then translate it into another.

J.D: I wanted to come back to what you said earlier about religion, because religion is a big theme in the book, and you mentioned that the community you live in is very conservative. The novel takes quite a critical view of formal religion and I wonder if you could say something more about that critical stance, that suspicion of the church?

N.G.F: Well, religion here encroaches upon quite a lot of intimate spaces, familiar spaces, and public spaces. Religion has been everywhere for years, and for the past thirty or forty years we’ve been trying to fight this intrusion. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but here in Ecuador we are trying to discuss legal abortion, but it’s still something we have to fight for, because religion is present in every sphere of life. Here in Cuenca, because of its colonial history, religion has stayed as a kind of supreme power. In every family there is like a religious Big Brother, people watching everything you do, judging you and even your language. In my city, there’s a strong religious influence and we are always talking about God keeping an eye on us. I was educated in a Catholic school run by nuns, and it was very oppressive for us as women. Religion has permeated a lot of spaces making it hard for us to move on, but it’s hard too, because it’s so closely tied to many of the very wealthy families here and is linked to ideas about class and race.

J.D: Does it uphold perhaps the system that you mentioned earlier, with regard to publishing? Does it contribute to the regulation of who can write and what they can write about?

N.G.F: Yes, because you know in the 20th century there were a lot of famous poets here in Cuenca, and they were thought of as close to gods! They wrote a lot about the Virgin Mary and that kind of thing, which was considered to be the very best but it was really awful! There are even photographs of these poets with their muses, surrounded by women, so yes, religion has even permeated the literary scene, but it is changing – even though change has come at a cost.

J.D: I am interested in the in the way that you replace religion in the book with nature. Did you set out with some sort of ecological idea in mind? The title, The World Does Not Belong To Us suggests that the planet belongs to insects and to plants, and I wonder to what extent you feel that perhaps we as people don’t deserve the world that surrounds us?

N.G.F: One of the main ideas I had when I was writing the novel, was that we as humans are kind of intruders – that we are dangerous to the world of animals and insects. I think it’s partly because I am mestiza – of mixed Spanish and indigenous heritage. Throughout my life I’ve stayed really close to the indigenous vision of the world, which doesn’t see humans as the owners of the land. The indigenous people here believe that they serve the land and are part of the ecosystem, part of the environment, so they feel that they have to take care of it. A lot of people here – particularly for the mestizos – are always caught in the struggle between western religious ideas and indigenous ones. In the novel this is captured in the struggle between Lucas and his religious, land-owning father. The father sees the earth as only a piece of garden and is always wondering what he can he get out of it, whereas for Lucas it is a place where millions of insects are making miracles. Really close to my city there are big mining projects that threaten to destroy our mountains, so I guess I was trying to reflect that on a really small scale, by showing how land can either be destroyed by humans or it can be seen as a miracle. I tried to replace religious meanings with Lucas’s more cosmic vision of the world.

J.D : I think my favourite image in the book is when Lucas goes up to the mountain to the cave and he comes back down to confront his enemies totally covered in insects. It’s the image from the book that has stayed with me most.

N.G.F: For me Lucas is this little boy who is trying to create a new story for himself.  He’s trying to leave behind his father’s story and the only way he can do it is through insects. The cave is a cave that is located about two hours from my city and is a sacred place for indigenous people. Often when I have visited, I have emerged with the feeling that something has changed. So, for me writing Lucas, it was important that he not only carry the insects, but he that he let them affect him and transform him and that he become their servant.

J.D: I think you achieve this very well and it ties in perfectly with the book’s title, and the idea that the world is not human property.

N.G.F: You know, in these times we are living in, I think we should repeat it to ourselves over and over: ‘This World Does Not Belong to Us’, ‘This World Does Not Belong to Us’, This World Does Not Belong to Us….’

Jane Downs

Having grown up in the south of England, Jane went on to study Arabic at university, travelling extensively in the Middle East and North Africa before putting down roots in Paris. Her work includes short stories, poetry, reportage and radio drama. Her audio drama "Battle Cries" was produced by the Wireless Theatre Company in 2013. Her short stories and articles have been published by Pen and Brush and Minerva Rising in the US. In August 2021 she joined the Litro team as Book Review Editor, commissioning reviews of fiction translated into English. Other works can be found on her website:https://scribblatorium.wordpress.com

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