La escritura de la historia en Ecuador tiene cuerpo de mujer. A propósito de Baldomera de Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco

Abstract

"The language stripped from realism serves the author, a survivor just like his character, to think of a representation of the facts when the worms have destroyed the substance of bodies and testimony.» In Baldomera, local references gain universality in regards to genre: the story of this failed heroine can be seen as that of the nation, written into the body of a poor woman, black and ugly, who finishes out her last days in jail. Though she is strong and fights (she survives the November 1922 massacre without being armed), in her encounters with the law-with the rational violence of her weapons-, she loses; this adds another element to the tensions between the small and the large, that are present throughout the novel. A bit like the author himself, survivor of the Guayaquil Group, who testifies for the literary work of the los Cinco como un Puño (Five Like a Fist), modern intellectuals with a critical voice when 1acing the contradictions and social reality 01 the 1930's.