The Art of Fiction No. 238
Elena Poniatowska is one of the few survivors of her generation of Mexican writers, which includes Carlos Fuentes, Jose Emilio Pacheco, and Carlos Monsivais. In Mexico, she is most often called “Elenita”—perhaps dismissively years ago, but now with all the affection and respect a diminutive can imply. Her name is a byword throughout the Spanishspeaking world, though English-language readers know her only from the small percentage of her work that has been translated. Her more than forty books encompass a great many genres (“though not science fiction,” she quips); she is best known for fiction and nonfiction based on interviews “collaged,” as she puts it, into a seamless whole with a skill that reminds one of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.
Poniatowska’s focus is almost exclusively on the most marginalized of Mexicans: women and the poor, who, together, make up more than half the population. She has chronicled oppression and military brutality (La noche de Tlatelolco [Massacre in Mexico, 1971]) and natural disaster coupled with government corruption (Nada, nadie: Las voces del temblor [Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake, 1988]), as well as the daily lives of the working class in novels such as Hasta no verte Jesús mío (Here’s to You, Jesusa!, 1969). For her outspokenness, she has been placed under police surveillance (“certainly not for my protection”) and jailed twice, though briefly.
She is now eighty-five and, having been diagnosed with cardiac illness, has agreed to take things easier to avoid hospitalization. But it is impossible to imagine this famously energetic woman putting her feet up. In fact, she has not. She maintains a demanding schedule of lecturing and remains a working journalist, while at the same time completing a biography of Stanisław Poniatowski, the last king of Poland, from whose brother she is descended. In 2013, Poniatowska was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world. In a country in which most people of means engage domestic help, Poniatowska shops, cooks, pays her own bills, and employs no secretary. She has lived in the Chimalistac neighborhood of Mexico City for more than twenty-five years, in a modest, book-filled house. It is there that we met for our two principal interviews in 2013, later supplemented by emails and conversations on the phone; we spoke in English. She arrived to our first session straight from an event at the British embassy, yet immediately ready to begin.
INTERVIEWER
So many of your books, fiction and nonfiction, are explorations of the lives of very poor people. What makes it possible for you to cross the boundaries of social class so gracefully?
PONIATOWSKA
I think of the Surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington. She was my great friend and I wrote a novel about her, called (2011). She was born into an upper-class English family and was even presented to the queen,though she took along Huxley’s to pass the time waiting in the line of debutantes. Typically, young women of and painted works that expressed her experience.
