Share

Share

Share on Facebook Share on Facebook Tweet Share on Twitter Share on WhatsApp Share on WhatsApp

SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER

Last week, writer and journalist Patricia Kolesnicov gave a talk at the Neuquén Book Fair about her novel "I Fell in Love with a Vegetarian," a love story between two teenage girls. Students from a religious high school were forced to leave the event by their teachers.

By Patricia Kolesnicov *

Photo: Agustín Sohn

One goes through life without thinking that one is "different", that one is "weird", that one is, bah, second-rate.

One goes through life believing that she is like anyone else, just another middle-class woman from Buenos Aires, who even has a family membership card from the Automobile Club with her spouse, spends Sundays with her family, and has a grandson who shouts "grandmothers!" when he sees us at the school gate.

One forgot that "that" is a topic.

What's more, one thinks she's just one of the "ordinary" people in society, that the odd ones out, if anything, are those who raise their hands and sing in choirs in places with windows that say "Church" and almost always say "love." Sometimes she looks at them condescendingly, even with sympathy. Choir aside, she's seen them on the street in simple clothes, in small groups, with their pamphlets that we, the common folk, almost always reject. One has thought that these churches serve a purpose, that with so many lonely people, so many unnecessary people, so many without a future, so much dead-end work, a group that needs you and makes you sing is worthwhile. And it even says "love."

That's how one is caught off guard.

I was recently invited to participate in the Neuquén Book Fair with my novel, "I Fell in Love with a Vegetarian." The invitation was very appealing because it included two talks: one with teachers, the other with students. It couldn't have been better.

"I Fell in Love with a Vegetarian" came out last year and tells the story of Martina and Aldana, two high school girls who seem destined to fall in love, or at least kiss quite a bit. Or rather: Martina tells Aldana's story. She arrives at school in September—September!—and speaks with a peculiar accent. We soon learn that she's from Spain, but she's Argentinian, the daughter of a couple who left during the 2002 economic crisis and returned to Spain during the crisis about a decade later. She hates being here, far from her beloved Sitges, her friends, and her boyfriend, Elías. She's always rejected her parents' nostalgia for Argentina: it's in opposition to the Barcelona barbecues while listening to Rock & Pop online that she became a vegetarian. That's how she defines herself; if you ask her what she's like, Aldana says "vegetarian." And that says quite a lot.

So I went there with my girls, who are already making the rounds in schools across the country, and everything seemed calm. Monday, 9 AM, I was glued to the radio because there were going to be announcements from Olivos—they were delayed—and the students arrived. Some were wearing red sweatshirts and others light blue ones. The red ones, they said, were from the "Sacred Heart" school. The light blue ones were from the "AMEN" school, a clever play on words that includes the end of prayers, the acronym of the Neuquén Evangelical Mutual Association, and, rejoice, the verb "to love." I was surprised, to be honest, that two religious schools were invited to this talk, which I gave with the green scarf around my neck. I said so. "We are secular!" several students in red sweatshirts shouted from the back of the room.

Let's get started.

For the first 15 minutes or so, nothing happened. The presenter introduced the show, I explained the plot, and the kids asked things like why I'd wanted to write for teenagers. The fact that it was a same-sex couple, they said, was nothing to them. It was all for nothing. Maybe, like me, they hadn't realized that "that" was still a topic of discussion.

But then, suddenly… a woman came in, whispered something in the coordinator's ear, who turned around, I'd say annoyed, and announced that the AMEN students had to leave. The students looked at each other: "Seriously? Seriously?" one of them said, standing about a meter away from me. "Why?" They'd been told they had a test in a little while. The students denied it. They weren't happy. "Don't worry, you can't hide the sun with a finger," I told them as they were leaving.

We rearranged ourselves, sat down—now that there were only a few of us—in a circle, and the conversation continued. But for the AMEN kids, the incident wasn't over. So, at the end of the activity, they started to appear in groups of three or four. They apologized to me, they were ashamed, they took responsibility. "It's not against me," I told them. "It's against you." Several brought me books to sign: they had taken advantage of the expulsion to find "I Fell in Love..." at the stand, because—as everyone knows—nothing is more intriguing than the forbidden.

And on Instagram, a former student – ​​@nosoymarlonbrandon – recounted his suffering at the institution. “I am a former student of AMEN. I am gay, and I can say with certainty that they punish anyone who seems ‘different’ from the dogma they want to encapsulate.”

One could argue that parents who send their children to a school that calls itself Baptist do so because they want them to be shown one side of the world while others are hidden from them. They want them to feel—hello @nosoymarlonbrandon—how much they will suffer if they don't live up to the teachings there. One might think they are devout Christians, I mean, without even considering how many witch burnings, how much torture during the Dictatorship, how many stolen children, and how much child abuse that dogma tolerates.

But it's not even like that.

During this brief visit to a province rich in oil, with more immigrants than traditional values, I had the opportunity to meet some parents from the AMEN school. They didn't talk to me about Christianity, but rather about school days and access to tuition. The government maintains a constant conflict with teachers and has decided that not a single drop of the oil royalties will go to their white school uniforms. The teachers protest, they strike: the days without classes accumulate. Sometimes, a journalist from Neuquén told me, parents transfer their children to private schools even if they agree with the teachers, because they have to make ends meet.

Thus, while meticulously accounting for every penny of teachers' salaries, the State subsidizes private schools, which, as in this case, are religious and, thanks to this public money, end up being affordable. It promotes them, if one considers the facts.

After the students were taken out of a talk about the love between two women, someone also mentioned "values" to me. A school that, in addition to curriculum, offers "values." Which ones? The Book Fair incident and the @nosoymarlonbrandon thing make them clear.

Those values ​​won't make the students happier; they'll make them suffer more. They're not better than mine; they're worse.

*Patricia Kolesnicov is a writer and journalist, Culture editor at Clarín, author of I Fell in Love with a Vegetarian , It's Not Love and Biography of My Cancer.

http://www.patriciakolesnicov.com