Tales from Mexico

It's his very first visit to India. Mexican author and publisher Eduardo Rabasa says he is very glad. Someone he met at the Krithi Art festival in Kochi had told him that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the most famous 'Malayalam' writer here.

"That Latin American literature is so popular here is a matter of pride. Even the young generation Mexican writers' works have got Malayalam translations," he speaks in awe.  

Rabasa, whose political satire A Zero Sum Game and Black Belt, another satire on corporate ideology – made him feature among the top 20 Mexican writers under the age of 40. "My first book deals with political dystopia in a fictional community. An election in a residential committee and a take on the system that supposedly believes in quality democracy, but in reality, is very different. It's more theory-specific," he says. His second, Black Belt, talks about corporate ideology – how success mantras blur the line between personal and professional lives. So it is always satire? Laughing, he says, "No, I am working on my third. It's a short story collection. It's good to break the serious mould and this time, it's a less serious subject."

The founding editorial director of Sexto Piso, the most prominent independent publishing house in his country, Rabasa knows that the image of Mexico for outsiders is that it is a crime hub with migrant issues. He agrees that it is a sad reality, but adds that's not the only thing about Mexico. 

Explaining how difficult it has been to make a space in a civil war-torn country, he says, “Our people don't read much. On an average, a person reads 3.5 books a year. There are 120 million people, 50 million living in extreme poverty. Only 10 per cent of the whole population has ever visited a bookstall.”

When he joined publishing business 15 years ago, he started with zero knowledge and as he puts it, their first book was very 'amateurish'. But among the traditional publishers whose focus were on local books – printing their own works, or of their friends or budding writers, Sexto Piso decided to take things one level up. “When we started, publishing was a local effort. We started publishing interanational authors and went to book fairs like Frankfurt – an uncommon practice in those days. Slowly, we got attention and connected with the readers,” he recalls.

From translated works of Morris Berman, George Orwell, and Somerset Maugham to publishing contemporary Mexican authors and translating their works into other languages, Sexto Piso grew to a wider space. “A lot of books get translated into Spanish, but never reach Mexico. We tried to bring in a difference. And now, we translate more than our books get translated,” he smiles.

They have brought out around 400 works – almost 45 books a year. “In Mexico, people buy book in book fairs and not book stalls, because discounts really make a difference. The government spending on education is very low. I was lucky to have a privileged background that helped me travel, study political science in an international university, where less than 10 per cent of the applicants get in every year. The majority doesn’t have such privilege.”

Literature, in his country, doesn't have a threat from the government. “Because they don't really care. Fiction writers, novelists, are safe, whatever they write. But the ones who are under threat are journalists. The government is openly spying on them. Mexico is the second most dangerous place for journalists,” says Rabasa, who delivered a talk at the Krithi fest on contemporary Mexican literature.

Contemporary Mexican literature, he says, is going through the best phase. “Of course, there hasn't been another Juan Rulfo, whose Pedro Páramo is still the greatest Mexican novel of all time. The last 10-15 years has been horrible. With civil wars and 1 lakh people killed, the general climate has been worse, but in Mexican literature, almost every writer of my age and younger are writing about the lives in the country, our culture and the migrant issue and has been producing good books.

People are searching for answers everywhere in these trying times. Literature is the testimony of the age. For us, it's very difficult to not write about the country in such a situation. I'd call these one of the best times for contemporary Mexican literature in the last few years.”