Cantoras

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I think I just can’t help myself! Language is a crucible of power. It can reveal; it can erase. It can oppress; it can liberate. “We do language,” Toni Morrison said in her Nobel acceptance speech. “That may be the meaning of our lives.” I feel that way too,” Malena said, reaching her palms toward the embers. “As if part of me won’t ever leave.” Unfortunately, the author didn’t trust readers to do their own research and added “2013” (26 years later) and like Harry Potter, sometimes the way later stuff just is death to the previous well done denouement. Maybe the USA part of Ms. de Robertis felt her Norte Americana readers couldn’t take the sadness of the Latin American 1986 ending, but I wish she had left it there. When translating this book into Spanish, could you say a bit about your decision to leave some Spanish words untranslated in the English? The novel follows five queer women living in Uruguay in the 1970s, through the dictatorship, who find a sort of refuge in a small seaside hamlet where they can truly be themselves - cantoras, slang for sapphics at the time.

What a plot! Five very different Lesbians living through the military dictatorship years of the 1970s and 80s in Uruguay, a country with less deaths and disappearances than Argentina, but a much higher percentage of imprisonment and torture. One of every 50 Uruguayans was tortured. So all of their friends, families and acquaintances got to live that, too. From the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of The Gods of Tango, a revolutionary new novel about five wildly different women who, in the midst of the Uruguayan dictatorship, find one another as lovers, friends, and ultimately, family. Cantoras es audaz y desacomplejada, un reto a la noción de normalidad y un tributo al poder del amor, la amistad, y la resistencia política. Es una fábula revolucionaria, ideal para este momento, escrita con sabiduría y amor”. —Dina Nayeri, The New York Times Book Review initial thoughts): In my 22 years of being alive, I have never once cried over a piece of fiction until today. Carolina de Robertis has accomplished the impossible... Una novela lírica, profundamente sensorial sobre un grupo de cantoras renegadas que reclaman un refugio en la costa durante los peores años de la dictadura en Uruguay… Carolina de Robertis nos ha entregado una obra maestra sonora de la imaginación, un manual de supervivencia para todos”.–Cristina GarcíaAs I said above, I was a bit wary about the author reading her own work as I’ve found that authors usually cannot achieve the same level of excellence compared to professional narrators. I have to admit that this is not the case, Ms. De Robertis nailed this narration. I’m sure she did some kind of voice coaching because all the five characters’ voices are distinctive and her performance of the ample range of emotions is as good as any narrator’s. It’s also an advantage that she can pronounce the Spanish terms as they should sound, and even though she never lived in Uruguay, she sounds like a native. Cantoras is a stunning lullaby to revolution—and each woman in this novel sings it with a deep ferocity. Again and again, I was lifted, then gently set down again—either through tears, rage, or laughter. Days later, I am still inside this song of a story." —Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award–winning author

Paz (16): She’s the youngest, but she’s far from naïve. She’s a dreamer, a hustler, and everything in between. Her vulnerability twisted my heart, made me protective, made me want to fight the world for her.Most of my novels have gone through a long litany of titles before settling on a final one. This book is no different! The title Cantoras came at the very end. And yet, now, it feels like the truest title possible: this word a group of lesbians, queer women, used to refer to women like them in a time of intense repression. De Robertis’ ( The Gods of Tango, 2015, etc.) latest novel starts in 1977 with the Uruguayan military dictatorship suppressing dissidents and homosexuals through rape, jailing, and disappearing. Calling themselves cantoras, or women who sing, five queer women begin to carve out a place for themselves in the world: Flaca, Romina, Anita “La Venus,” Malena, and Paz. Brought together by Flaca, the women take a weeklong trip to Cabo Polonio, a sleepy, secluded coastal village, where they find a haven among horrors. On the beach, the women laugh late into the night, make love unabashedly, and share secrets over whiskey and yerba maté. The friends become family. On their first trip, Paz, the youngest, begins to discover an alternative way of being: “A secret way to be a woman. A way that blasted things apart, that melted the map of reality.” Rich and luscious, De Robertis’ writing feels like a living thing, lapping over the reader like the ocean. Carefully crafted and expertly observed, each sentence is an elegant gift: “Stars clamored around a meager slice of moon,” and “she was keenly aware of [her] movements...as if a thread stretched between them, a spider’s thread, glimmering and inexhaustibly strong.” Over the course of three decades, the women fall in and out of love; have brushes with the brutal regime; defy familial and societal expectations; and, most of all, unapologetically live their lives as cantoras. At one point, the unhappily married La Venus wonders: “Why did life put so much inside a woman and then keep her confined to smallness?” De Robertis’ novel allows these women to break those confines and find greatness in themselves and each other. As they come to know one another, they make plans for a weeklong trip away from the peering eyes and potential for gossip close to home, and head to Cabo Polonio, a remote village along the coast where, it is rumoured, where they feel they will be safe from prying eyes, somewhere they can still feel alive.

This book made me feel so deeply, so wholly, that it can’t not be my favorite book of all time. Reading it has made me grow as a reader, as a thinker, as an empathizer, and as a human. This isn’t a book for everyone; it explores some very heavy topics. But if you’re up for it, if you’re in the mood to feel a queer literary story with every cell in your body, then Cantoras may be the perfect book for you. The story opens with the five women—Flaca (21), Romina (22, Jewish), Anita/La Venus (27), Paz (16), and Malena (25)—traveling to Cabo Polonio from Montevideo for the first time in 1977. This beach, relatively untouched by the Uruguayan regime, becomes the cantoras’ refuge for years to come. When I originally wrote the book, in English, I included words in Spanish because they’re part of the characters’ inner ecosystem, part of how they would hear their own thoughts. My early drafts often have a lot more Spanish in them, especially in dialogue, and especially as inflected with regional Rioplatense Spanish colloquialisms. Then, later on, I weigh each word for what it’s doing in the text, and for which rendering might best serve what I’m hoping to portray. Written in stream of consciousness narrative, Cantoras flows perfectly, weaving between the present and the past, and from person to person. The writing is breathtaking; the five women, connected through their identities, their shared desire for freedom amidst the suffocation in the era, are distinctly beautiful. The ocean sings, the waves unconfined; the cantoras deserve freedom, too.Sounds and Colours spoke to Carolina about Cantoras and her literary work. Set in Carolina’s native Uruguay, Cantoras tells the story of five lesbians through the dictatorship years of the 1970s and 80s, inspired by real women who set up a community in the coastal town of Cabo Polonio.

It’s impossible not to fall in love with these fierce ‘girlwomen’—queer, courageous, and adventurous—as they find freedom in their relationships with each other while living under a ruthless dictatorship.”— Angie Cruz, Vanity Fair Tl;dr (aka my reading experience summed up in Spongebob gifs (because sometimes this guy expresses emotions better than I do)): Over the course of 35 years, De Robertis charts the fortunes of these women as they fall in and out of love and navigate the country’s tumultuous politics. That [Cantoras is] written in such lovely prose is an added bonus.” —Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed It seemed, at times, that this was the only way the world would be remade as the heroes had dreamed: one woman holds another woman, and she in turn lifts the world." There has never been another book that hit me so hard, that I cried and sobbed because I personally felt connect to all of the characters, not just the five cantoras but all of them. My heart broke for them as they suffered and soared when they were free. I’ve gripped the fabric of the shirt on my chest so many times I couldn’t tell if it was my fingers clenching or my heart.Cantoras is the second book that I’ve read by this author, The Gods of Tango being the first and that one took me two tries to finish because both stories are heavy reading. Cantoras, which is the Spanish word for female singers and old timey slang for Lesbians, is a telling of five women who discover each other the way women do, by a glance, certain body language, or via a few choice remarks. They’re very young and desperate to breathe and be who they imagine themselves to be. But this is the 1970’s in Uruguay and South America during the rule of heinous military dictatorships when ordinary people living ordinary lives were disappeared and tortured in prisons simply for the crime of existing. In addition, being a Latina woman brings about its own “esposas” or handcuffs, the obligatory pathway to being a man’s wife, most certainly not a lover of other women and especially not in those times. After Beth and I finished this book, we eagerly added all of de Robertis’ other books to our TBRs. We recently read her newest, The President and the Frog, and next, we will be reading her debut. This type of immersive storytelling with formidable characterization is our absolute favorite type of book to read. Flaca (La Pilota), Romina, La Venus (because she is La Venus to me and never Anita), Paz, and Malena. They are the very definition of a found family. Over the years, their love for each other shifts and reforms, their dynamics fierce and strong. And their names. Whenever I read their names, my heart jumps as if I were reunited with long-lost friends. Perhaps I am. Over the course of the book, we grew to understand them like close friends, and there is something intimate about that. I feel especially connected to Paz for her introversion, love of both literature and physical exertions. Also maybe because she started out as a baby gay, stealing my heart. Cantoras is a wise, brilliantly compassionate, wide-ranging novel about women in Uruguay, and about the power and realities of love. Carolina De Robertis is a force: prepare to be astonished.” —R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries With the above said, this book is deep, sad, frightening, loving, happy, infuriating and a host of other emotions. Because this book partially takes place after a coop, there are many horrors that happen but not necessarily given in detail. Some is eluded too and some are explain during the course of the book. If I went into detail, I would be giving up things you need to discover on your own. I truly never anticipated that I would touched like I was reading this. In many ways, it reminds me of the Color Purple. Anyway, I loved this book!