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She appears with determination. The flower room at La Sinsorga is packed, awaiting her arrival. Before launching the presentation of Atusparia in Bilbao and after conducting a radio interview, she is photographed for a newspaper. The publication of Atusparia (Random House, 2024), Gabriela Wiener's new novel , has sparked interest among both readers and the media, and has garnered widespread acclaim.

With her long, straight hair loose, she wears black, matching her hair. She responds with aplomb to everything related to her new book, the least autobiographical, she says, although she has lent her childhood school to the protagonist. “The key to the personal is political; here it has another dimension. Intimate disputes have the power to demolish spaces, communities, collectives, militancy, dreams, ideals, even a country,” she shares. And while Atusparia features lawfare, it also features bollodrama, a bit of dystopia, and a lot of history. This interview is conducted in three stages: it's part of the Bilbao presentation in December; it's a bit of the subsequent, more private conversation; and an email exchange around Christmas. Despite her firmness, Wiener reviews the nuances and rethinks her answers.

– Atusparia is a rather provocative name, one that sparks curiosity. Atusparia was a 19th-century indigenous revolutionary leader from what is now Peru. He was also a school, and now he's even more: a novel and a character. Who is Atusparia?

– Atusparia is the name of an indigenous leader and the name of a school in Lima that operated in the 1980s and paid tribute to Pedro Pablo Atusparia . It's the school where I studied until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I've lent it to my character. I always wanted to write about that school because it was very unique: founded by people who had studied in the USSR and subsidized by the Russian Fishermen's Union that roamed the waters of the Pacific, it sought to fuse Russian Sovietism with Peruvian indigenousism. It was a different world; there were two sides, not just one as there has been since the fall of capitalism. This girl, who isn't a reflection of me, studies at that school. This is perhaps my least autobiographical book. In fact, this girl doesn't have a name, nor does she talk so much about herself as about her school and its ideology: there, they didn't advocate the dictatorship of the proletariat but of the peasantry; they read José Carlos Mariategui , the most important Marxist in Latin America, and indigenous literature like that of José María Arguedas or Manuel Scorza . Atusparia is also the name that the protagonist of this story uses when she begins to become an activist and politician. The novel follows the journey of this left-wing woman, from her education at that school until she ends up in jail for trying to become the people's candidate.

There is a fascinating character who demonstrates how important school and teachers are in childhood.

A lesbian teacher, moreover. Asunción Grass represents the counterpower, the dark and revolutionary side of Atusparia; she is her nemesis and her teacher. She is her Literature teacher, the one who teaches her to read the indigenist classics. She is more than a teacher because she is also her mother. The school, in general, mothers Atusparia because she has a dysfunctional family; she is one of the few girls at school not born into a politicized home. Given her helplessness, the school and Asunción have become her primary tutors. But when the Berlin Wall falls and they begin to teach English at that school and revolutionary ideals disappear into the Pacific, she also falls into adolescence, which is to say that she has her own perestroika, a drift that distances her from the revolutionary ideals of her childhood. This is how the book represents the arrival of capitalism in Atusparia's life. The action moves to the neighborhood, to this place known as the Resi, which is like a city very similar to the cities abandoned by communism: terrifying, ghostly, post-apocalyptic. There she gives in to wild consumerism, turning to the consumption of bodies, sex, drugs, and discovering desire, romantic love, and evil. She reunites with Asunción much later, in Puno, a city in southern Peru, in the midst of social uprisings; they become comrades. And they fall in love, not just with the revolution. There will come a time when politics will separate them, and although different, in both cases they will be paths of no return: Asunción will choose the path of clandestinity and armed struggle, and Atusparia that of liberal democracy. For her, accepting to play the game of democracy by its own rules will mean persecution, lawfare , and imprisonment. In some ways, the novel positions itself outside the board where the two protagonists' dispute takes place, and from that perspective, it becomes clear that as long as they remain within the system's chessboard, neither will achieve their goals.

“There are bollodramas that have undermined struggles”

It's a drama that only one of the parties experiences, which is also common. For me, it was very interesting to work with Asunción's grief in political terms; it came very naturally to me, flowing like dark vomit. I translated almost all the references to heartbreak into political language. It's clearly an attempt to translate the discourse of romantic love into a revolutionary love that's betrayed, battered, and hurt. Asunción speaks from that political wound, which is why I say that romantic betrayal is almost indistinguishable from political betrayal in this book. I think it's the most literary and confident voice in the book. I trembled many times while writing this book, but not in that part; I was very clear about what I wanted to say. The key to the personal being political here has another dimension. I wanted to talk about when the personal destroys something more powerful than love itself, something that is beyond and involves more people. How intimate disputes have the power to demolish spaces, communities, collectives, militancy, dreams, ideals, even a country. What happens between them truly puts a country in jeopardy. We all know there's no turning back from those sorrows and those griefs. We know that, because of broken loves, ruined desires and friendships, and turmoil in collectives, movements have been split apart, transformative horizons have been cut short. Bollodramas that have undermined struggles. All that personal baggage that gave identity to anti-racist feminisms also made us more vulnerable. And the enemies know where to aim to deactivate us; it's so easy, we made it easy for them. So, how impolitic the personal can also be. In the novel, of course, there are other perspectives as well. Attempts to deactivate the transformative, that which questions structures, can come from within, from our self-destructive impulses, and from without, through strategies like lawfare or the criminalization of protest.

– "A leftist politician, a victim of lawfare , finds herself imprisoned in a high-security prison deep in the Amazon rainforest." That's the first sentence on the back cover. Without dismantling the book too much, there's not only lawfare but also a bit of bollodrama, right?

"Right now my country, which no one cares about, is being ruled by a dictator who has a 4 percent approval rating."

Why did this book come about? It was because of the need to talk about Peru after your previous novel, Huaco retrato , or because of everything that's happened in Peru in the last couple of years, such as the violence against indigenous people in Puno, which you covered as a reporter.

– Huaco retrato is told from here, from a migrant identity. Beyond Peru, there was a history of broken, lost, erased identities, which goes beyond a Peruvian or Latin American identity. In Atusparia, there's a bit more Peruvian history, but to the extent that this experience allows me to speak about a series of broader struggles or ones that convene at a continental level—internationalist, anti-imperialist struggles. For example, the struggles of the Latin American left in the 60s and 70s, when they had to confront murderous dictatorships, when we were the United States' backyard, although we still are in many ways, but also the fake of the 90s. I wanted to commemorate that solidarity between sister peoples and the memory of the Indigenous movement, which ranges from anti-colonial struggles, from the uprisings of Túpac Amaru or Atusparia, Micaela Bastidas and Rita Puma , through the struggles for agrarian reform and peasant revolutions against extractive multinationals to the Zapatista, Mapuche, Aymara, Colla, Andean and Amazonian Quechua resistance of today. What Atusparia denounces is how the State has historically had and has only one way of resolving Indigenous conflict: with massacre. The colonial strategy par excellence. Right now, my country, which no one cares about, is being governed by a dictator with a 4 percent approval rating. Two years ago, in Puno, a territory with a large indigenous population, Dina Boluarte didn't hesitate to order the deaths of more than 60 people for whom no one has been held accountable. A month after that massacre, I was sent as a journalist to cover the protests. When I was writing the article, I was thinking about how to bring that part of the history of my country, of our territories, into fiction, what literature could say about it, how literary language could contribute to understanding our conflict as it was happening, our pain as it was hurting. If there's one thing that's strangling Peru, it's the highly effective strategy of Fujimorism/fascism to criminalize the left, the popular, and the social, reviving the specter of terrorism whenever it's electorally convenient—like here, everything is ETA—what we call "terruqueo," the inability to bring closure to the internal war process toward national reconciliation. The current repression and massacres of Indigenous people and land defenders are connected to these strategies.

– You tell a story of a country, which is a story of a continent, which is a story of the left…

– I think it's all of that. These stories and memories are more or less captured. I wanted to write a book about what breaks us from the outside, but also about the experience within activism, where we hurt ourselves. I wanted to return to those disputes, to question the role of power, of the institution, of what breaks us apart, of whiteness, of leftist patriarchy. I wanted to talk about how politics is experienced from the inside, telling the story of a woman. It's a left, which could be Peruvian, Latin American, and global, as a place that has been atomized by its sectarianism until it's reduced to its barest minimum. I make my critiques from a place of laughter and love. I'm interested in raising issues about this political moment, in which we see the right and the far right appropriating the language of social struggles. How are you going to allow Milei to call herself a revolutionary? They've been quite successful at criminalizing and plundering experiences from struggles that aren't theirs, cultures that aren't theirs, epistemologies that aren't theirs. Perhaps the world can no longer be explained from the Western left-right dichotomy. At some point, Atusparia speaks of other experiences, like that of the Zapatistas, and speaks of these other possibilities of doing politics without seeking to seize power, but rather building autonomy and communitarianism on the margins. I also wanted to draw a connection between the old anti-colonial resistances of leaders like Túpac Amaru or Atusparia and those of the defenders of the land, who are currently the ones putting their bodies on the line for the life and continuity of the planet.

“Elections are won by shouting ‘I’m a rapist’”

– You portray the left, and we're now learning about cases of sexual abuse within left-wing organizations and parties. Are you surprised that this happens to people with whom you supposedly share a certain ideology?

– No, the left, like the right, is full of macho men. The problem is that cases like Errejón's make one think that only the former pretend they aren't. And hypocrisy could seem politically suicidal. It turns out that electorally today, shamelessness, brutal honesty, Ayusoism, and Trumpism are valued. It turns out that elections are won by shouting, "I'm a macho rapist" or "I'm a president who murders the elderly." I think Errejón should return to politics as an experiment; I think he could be very successful, taking on those he truly represents. Anyone would say that someone who committed harassment or abuse once, who becomes a representative of the people, especially if they were voted for by the white feminist left, would become more moderate; but what we see is the opposite: they become worse. Power brings impunity, hence the reason why there are every now and then a wave of MeToo attacks to remind them, at least symbolically, that women remember and together they can bring them down in an exemplary way. But oh, women! change, but now we can see that some of the most recalcitrant figures of the far right and the status quo : Meloni , Le Pen already in our colonial position, Dina in Peru. Let's see if we can bring them down once and for all. Nothing—not being an ally, a comrade, a woman, a lesbian, a queer woman, a sister, an Indigenous woman, a Black woman, or a brown woman—frees you from doing evil. Hopefully, questioning the leadership within our movements, among like-minded people, does so internally in the least destructive way possible, on the path toward a different kind of justice, without being accused of playing into the hands of the right. In that process, we must understand that these people have no interest in women's rights, Indigenous rights, migrants' rights, or the rights of individuals. What they want is to overthrow the revolutionary of the moment and continue perpetuating themselves. If someone powerful makes headlines, the issue of gender violence suddenly seems to matter to everyone, but they don't care at all. Does the fall of one person improve the lives of the vast majority of women? If these years of struggle have taught us anything, it's that there are other revolutions underway that we must articulate and organize with. We have to be able to work with others, able to nuance and delve deeper, to listen to those who are arriving, to allow ourselves to be transformed by what we don't yet understand. We have to stop prioritizing violence and suffering, as racism has always done. Do you know what surprises me most? That the left in government doesn't think about improving migrant life. Well, it doesn't surprise me anymore; I'm used to it. Let's talk about other forms of violence and other victims too, about how migrants, who already suffer administrative violence, economic violence, labor exploitation, are raped and no one takes to the streets to help them. People are dying at the Melilla fence because of the State, and Marlaska remains steadfast in his position. That gives you an idea of ​​the level of elitism in these struggles; what are the privileged struggles that have all the television, all the media, and all the loudspeakers, versus the second-class struggles and victims? Who is falling and who isn't, and who benefits from all this political engineering.

• “It is in literature that history is re-judged, where the case is reopened. (…) Atusparia, I know that one day literature will reopen your case and justice will be done. Don't lose faith. I would be waiting,” you write in the book. Does this book seek justice?

– Asunción Grass, the writer in the novel, constantly admires Manuel Scorza, who has this discourse of literature as the last resort when all other places fail. Scorza truly succeeded; one of his novels tells the story of a peasant leader who stood up to a terrible extractive oil company and is imprisoned. A leftist dictator, Velasco Alvarado , read Scorza's book and decided to free that peasant leader. He knows what he's talking about when he says that literature can be a key to unlock a prison.

– And do you think that literature can judge history?

Obviously. I've given quite a few headlines about that, basically to counter the infamous amount of headlines about literature being useless, that it should just be literature and that's it. We have to keep making books that open doors.

– Continuing with the importance of literature and the importance of opening doors, what is Sudakasa?

– Sudakasa is the village house of the sudacas, a house in Castilla-La Mancha, an hour from Madrid, which aims to be a space for migrant creation. We grew tired of the Spanish not inviting us to their villages, and since ours are crossing the pond, we decided to make our own. We've achieved this through books, prostitution, and the return of the gold. We are several writers, artists, all migrant, all sudacas, we have reclaimed the insult, we have turned it into resistance, into pride, and we have several projects that are working there. There are residencies, meetings, meals, workshops, mentorships. We have a very large support network of all the Latin American writers of today, and it's a way to become self-employed and to do something collective, which sounds really strange with literature, because we've been sold the idea that it's a solitary job, the blank page, you and the window facing the sea. It's all a lie. We want to create together. We're there having a good time, and we hope to get more serious about delivering a lot more political discourse from there, which is needed in the publishing world, in the book industry in general; there's a lot to be said about regularization, justice, identity, and racism.

– One thing that worried me about the book: there's a moment when you imagine a future and Putin still comes up!

– It's dystopian, but only slightly so; it speaks of an almost immediate future. I also said it's my great Russian novel, so how could Putin not be there?