Alejandra Kamiya: The complexity of the simple

Finding a short definition with adequate words for Alejandra Kamiya’s literature has been a challenge. Therefore, and above all, I want to reiterate to the reader not to take the title lightly (which is so far from the wonderful ones of the author). I gave a lot of thought to that last adjective: simple. An alternative was “easy”, but it evokes, even more, an idea of ease that is opposite to the approach I am trying to reach. “Stripped” was another, but it brings more questions than answers. Stripped of what? If everything is there, even tacit. Simple, in this case, does not mean easy, does not mean stripped, it does not mean facile, it does not mean attainable, imitable, nor trivial. Kamiya’s literature is a glass and a mirror, it is something naked dressed in thousands of layers, it is something crystal clear with the depth of an abyss. That disguise is what disarms me after every reread, that narrative that pretends to be simple and is, in reality, infinitely complex.

Alejandra Kamiya was born in Buenos Aires in 1966. She participated in different anthologies, such as Los que vienen y los que se van: historias de inmigrantes en Argentina [Those who come and those who leave: stories of immigrants and emigrants in Argentina] (Editorial Fundación El libro, Buenos Aires, 2008) and Por favor, sea breve [Please, be brief] (Editorial Páginas de Espuma, Spain, 2009). She published, to this day, four books: Los restos del secreto y otros cuentos [The Remains of the Secret and Other Stories] (Editorial Olmo, Buenos Aires, 2012), Los árboles caídos también son el bosque [The Fallen Trees are also the Forest], El sol mueve la sombra de las cosas quietas [The Sun Moves the Shadow of Still Things] (both with Editorial Bajolaluna, Buenos Aires, 2015 and 2019) and La paciencia del agua sobre cada piedra [The Patience of Water on Each Stone] (Eterna Cadencia Editora, Buenos Aires, 2023). She attended Abelardo Castillo’s literary workshop between 2009 and 2014 and has received a huge number of prizes and awards both nationally and internationally.

Recently, Alejandra Kamiya participated in “Narradorxs” [Narrators], a cycle of interviews and classes created and coordinated by Federico Aicardi, which takes place in the city of Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina. The meetings of this cycle propose a dialogue between the invited writers on different topics of literature. There I had the opportunity to listen to her and learn from her teachings taught with excessive humility.

For this text, I want to recover some of her thoughts, advice, and ideas from the two meetings of this cycle.

“To dance nobody thinks they have to be Julio Boca, or that they have to eventually dance on a stage. We can all dance at home or a party, dance badly or very badly. The same thing should happen with writing.”

About Ideas and Writing Times

Kamiya, quoting Ryuichi Sakamoto, says that in everyday life there are many sounds with great musicality and we just don’t pay attention. But, when we do it, we can find very interesting things. This must be taken to writing: in our day to day, we are surrounded by stimuli and situations that can be triggers or the very core of a story. We must only be perceptive enough to notice them, to find the pearl within that everydayness. Beyond this, and often, what we end up writing may be something very different from the idea that acted as a trigger. But we must not miss it, because that trigger can become an excuse to sit down to write what we really want to.

She says that the idea for the short story The Pit came from a notebook by Nathaniel Hawthorne that Borges and Bioy Casares* rescued. The idea was: one man gives an order to another, the first disappears and the second continues to execute the order in eternum. She thought that the second man must be Japanese, because of its culture and the responsibility that characterizes it. By the time she read the note from Hawthorne, the media was talking about Japanese soldiers who had been left in the Philippines fighting the Second World War unaware that the fighting was over, and that some of them had been there for fifty years. Then, combining those two ideas, and with a lot of mental work involved, she wrote the story in a half hour, on a lunch break, after having “written” it almost fully mentally. But she lacked the final sentence. She didn’t know how to close the story. And it took her months to find that last sentence. Alluding to this case, as there must be so many others, she argues that the time a short story can take to write is impossible to determine.

How stupid it is to think that war does not exist just because at this point he does not see it. How foolish to think oneself on the sidelines of war being a soldier. He will have to repeat to his foolish head that war exists even if he does not see it, and that he is a soldier, although at times he enjoys privileges such as being far from the front, or in such a rich land, and having new elements and everything he needs.

(The Pit, Alejandra Kamiya)

About the Writing Process

“Use the word as bait to attract what is not the word,” she says, quoting Clarice Lispector. “Being on that hunt is like being in a place so dark I can’t even see my hands. And there I begin to walk, and by walking, I recognize what I do not see. ”

The writer says that she approaches her writing process in two stages: first, she strips herself of all filters, and tries to write without any kind of shame, “like undressing, but taking out even the body itself, like becoming what is being written”. And then bring back to the table all those filters to judge in an impious way every line and every silence.

Speaking of the first draft as a necessary evil, as postulated by Liliana Heker, Kamiya argues that it would be best to start that draft with absolute freedom, without shame, and without political correctness. Make it visceral. It is about letting all out as wildly as possible and then working in the exact opposite way.

Despite this, Kamiya says she doesn’t work too much with first drafts, because once she defines an idea, she works it a lot internally. This way of working is a consequence of an old office job, because of which she did not have enough time to sit down to write and exteriorize that first draft. For her, that first draft is that tangle of ideas that she works on mentally until she can turn into proper writing. So much is the mental work that the author carries out, she says, that many of her stories have been published as she wrote them for the first time, but that, at the same time, others have changed completely during the process.

The first one she wrote within her most “literary” stage, as she defines it, is Partir, which in her own words is an absolute exposition of herself. Partir, in Spanish, could mean depart, split, break, divide, and some other meanings with which the author carries out the idea of the story. “Over time you learn to hide, to put yourself in characters, to invent sceneries, but you’re always talking about yourself.” She asserts, like so many other writers, that all writing is autobiographical. And these autobiographical traits can be traced in many of her stories.

As for her ways of writing, she explains that, sometimes, it is about processing a sensation without judging it, without having a defined direction of where the story can go (as happened with the story The Monkey), and other times, to work in a more focused way with the words, write (mentally) with certain words, terms or ideas.

After washing and changing I don’t see it. The hammock made with a sheet is empty in the corner. He must have chosen another place. Sometimes he hides.

I’m tired too, I think. Where he will be, I keep thinking as I fall asleep. I sleep until something scratches the silence.

I can hear him breathing: he is by my bed. I know I must not move.

I cannot see him, but I know by heart the curve of his back, his hanging arms. Now shuffle his feet as if they weighed on him. I know what I do not see. He climbs to the bed. I know I should not talk to him.

He is sitting on the edge, next to my feet. It is as if we are both waiting and what is about to happen is inevitable. Yes, we wait. I remain very quiet: it may not happen. Even fear waits, crouching.

(The Monkey, Alexandra Kamiya)

About Correction

“One publishes to stop correcting,” she argues. As long as writers have access to the text, they will correct it. This is almost a law written in stone. But sometimes it is necessary to interrupt the process to move on to another text.

Abelardo Castillo, whom she quotes repeatedly and affectionately, said that to correct is to correct oneself. A maxim that invites any writer to an extended reflection.

Regarding her process, Kamiya says: “I try not to look away, not to think about the reader, not to think about publishing. Those detours are noted in the writing. Do not look away from Hemingway’s iceberg**. I do not think. Thinking only leads to making mistakes. Not think, correct. Do not explain, correct. Do not emphasize, correct.”

About Space in Writing

Kamiya does not like those writers who leave no room for the reader, for their interpretation, for their voice, for their contribution. That is why she always works consciously to leave that space in her texts. In a workshop she attend, with a Japanese literature professor, that professor, speaking about this, gave as examples Western art and Oriental art: in Western paintings, there is a saturation of everything, and there is no free space, instead in the Oriental, especially in the Japanese, there is a total dispossession in what is represented. One only needs to compare two paintings, no matter what they are, and the evidence will be in plain sight. “Westerners fill and Easterners dispossess.”

Taking up Hemingway’s iceberg, she expands: “The icebergs are submerged about nine times for their over-the-surface visible part. That is what we have to do when we write. We need to know a lot more than what is being said. ” It’s about knowing how to hold up information and let it be there, floating. This is seen in the silences, in the unspoken; a very important factor in her literature. “I take my life as raw material for my literature, and silence has a very important place in it. Being silent has a strength and a forcefulness that is often not in the word. Silence has a force that no word has.”

The flowers, day by day, change. Petra and the whole town attend to their aging and that slow dying that hurts them all. Each falling petal makes a hollow silence that expands into concentric circles of sadness.

Enrica, one day, cries. Clara caresses her, but that night she wakes up with nightmares and asks to go see the roses. Atanasio asks every day how the flowers are.

“Beautiful” is always the answer. “So beautiful,” says someone one day, “that this cannot be good.”

Until one evening, in front of several neighbors, the last of the flowers dies. The brown petals fall and everyone lowers their heads.

Then, in silence, they return to their homes. Only one says, so that others may know: “The flowers are dead.”

(The Gestures of Salt by Alejandra Kamiya)

About Ends and Structures

From a question in the second meeting of the cycle, Kamiya answers that it is characteristic of Borges, or Poe, to understand the story as a line that goes towards the end. Sometimes it is so, as in the case of her stories Desayuno Perfecto [Perfect Breakfast] or Separados [Separated], where she already knew what was the end she wanted to reach, and what she had to do was build the road to it. But some stories have no end, like Las grullas de Idemizu [The Cranes of Idemizu], which is a small scene and nothing more. His father gave her a translation of an article he had read, and the idea came up and ended up there. Kamiya doesn’t think one has to have totally strict rules regarding whether the narrative arc should be this or that way. She emphasizes, clarifying that she likes them very much, the stories like those of Kjell Askildsen: stories where there are no curves, stories with an even tension from beginning to end, and whose end is in the air, sudden, abrupt. “The form is brought by the story itself.”

Speaking about climaxes and how to get to them, Kamiya says that “When you’re really engaged in writing, it’s almost like you see it and you just have to take note. Yes, I can notice climax moments, but I’m almost a witness when I’m writing it. I’m not a great creator or anything. I’m like watching and taking notes.”

You are going to see Hiro finish waking up when he chews, and you are going to perceive that he realizes that this is a perfect breakfast. Your husband will eat the last grain of rice, the last grain of natto, the last fiber of mackerel, and will nod as he does so.

“Oishi” Hiro is going to say, and you are going to be satisfied and you will thank, just tilting your head and smiling more with your eyes than with lips that do not separate from each other. “Oishi” is going to repeat the child, and you are going to feel a blowfish in your chest. Your husband is going to nod again.

The table is going to be empty. Just the bowls, cups, little plates, empty as skeletons. And the flower opened like a screaming mouth. Mute and senseless in its beauty.

(Perfect breakfast, Alejandra Kamiya)

About Influences

Everything she has read, she maintains, has influenced her in some way, but she highlights Clarice Lispector, in whose writing she felt for the first time that freedom she likes to find in texts; and Abelardo Castillo, as someone who, in addition to being her mentor and teacher, lived for literature. Also, perhaps the latest finding she feels like influencing is Annie Ernaux.

“I never thought I wanted to be a writer.” In her own words, she says that she wrote always, from a very young age, but she had never taken it seriously. One day, shopping in a supermarket, she saw a literary contest, advertised right there. She participated and, of course, won. Subsequently, she began to attend the literary workshop of Inés Fernández Moreno, which eventually led her to Abelardo Castillo, where she perfected her writing.

Nothing of all the previous things should be taken as rules. Nothing of all the previous things indicates that another way of doing things is wrong. Kamiya shared all of this with those of us who hear her as a guide, as brief glimpses of her own experience to help those in need, to guide those who are lost, to orient those who do not know how or where to go. At no time was writing named without care, as something casual or that does not require sacrifice. As she recounted, quoting once again her teacher, Abelardo Castillo, an ex-student of the writer told him in a class of his workshop that she enjoyed writing, to which Castillo replied: If you enjoy writing, dedicate yourself to something else.

About all of this, in Cómo escribir. Consejos sobre escritura Vol. II [How to Write. Advice on Writing Vol. II], edited by China Editora, Kamiya wrote a text she titled Ars Caótica, and closes the same by saying:

“I write so I can stop writing. The first and only advice would perhaps be to destroy these rules. Tarkovski says that the rules of one artist make no sense to another. Yes, the first thing would be to destroy the rules. Look for your own during the writing and follow them in an unhinged way, knowing that the attempt is vain, but knowing that deep down shines a minimum possibility of beauty.”

* Hawthorne did not publish his diaries during his lifetime, nor did he leave them ready to be edited posthumously. It was her widow, Sophia Peabody, who after the death of her husband, in 1865, made the resolution to make them public, based on a proposal by James T. Fields, editor of Hawthorne and head of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. In all, Hawthorne went on to write three volumes of journals. The North American Notebooks cover the period from 1835 to 1852, a period of training and literary maturity. Then came the English Notebooks and the French and Italian Notebooks. The American Notebooks correspond to when Hawthorne lived in the United States and end with his trip to England, where he fulfilled diplomatic functions in Liverpool, from 1853 to 1857. Filled with hidden treasures, the Notebooks amaze with their quality and variety, as they include isolated phrases, extensive fragments, numerous narrative ideas, or purely descriptive paragraphs. Except for a dozen fragments translated at the time by Borges and Bioy Casares; except for the passages translated by Carlos José Restrepo for his version of The Holocaust of the World; except for a long stretch (July-August 1851) known under the title of Twenty days with Julian and rabbit (Anagrama) and which in rigor constitutes almost a separate book, the American Notebooks remained unpublished in Spanish.

** According to Hemingway, every story must reflect only a small part of the story, leaving the rest to the reader’s reading and interpretation, without evidencing the true ending, as happens with an iceberg.

Sources:

Narradorxs: Alejandra Kamiya/Marcelo Britos. On Spotify. June 13, 2023. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6UnnyuwF5ucMO6biNxOEg2?si=kc8313fXTCmdZJmydWX5FA

Los cuadernos del ermitaño [The hermit’s notebooks]. By Eduardo Bert. On Página 12. October 28, 2007. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/libros/10-2779-2007-10-28.html