ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
In the new novel "No Place To Bury The Dead," a plague that causes amnesia is rampant in an unnamed Latin American country where a young mother - a hairdresser - named Angustias lives. After the birth of twins, she uproots her family and travels to a border area, seeking a safer life for them. When the twins die, she goes on a journey to bury them. She seeks the help of a larger-than-life woman, Visitacion, who runs a cemetery on contested land and finds a refuge of sorts. "No Place To Bury The Dead" is translated by Elizabeth Bryer and written by Venezuelan journalist Karina Sainz Borgo, who joins us now. Welcome to the program.
KARINA SAINZ BORGO: Thank you. Thank you so much for invitation and the opportunity to talk about this novel.
NADWORNY: So tell us about this woman who runs the cemetery and why authorities consider her an outlaw.
SAINZ BORGO: Well, in a way, I try to - this novel is based on true fact. I traveled to the border between Venezuela and Columbia in which there exists a woman that did this kind of things. She had a cemetery in which she buried people that had no money enough to get a decent burial. Suddenly, I felt I was talking with Antigone, this tragedy written by Sophocles based on the myth of Antigone, this woman that disobey the law to make possible to bury her brother, that I really wanted to explain this idea of the duty and how can we help other people.
NADWORNY: So this woman kind of inspired this whole story for you?
SAINZ BORGO: Yeah. Women used to do this in very different conflicts during the history, to bury during wars, during civil wars, during catastrophe, disasters. Of course, this is a novel as well as fiction, but I really found this huge and important role of taking care of someone even when they're dead. So they're taking care of their memories. They're taking care of the place in which they will rest. It's an exercise of citizenship, in a way.
NADWORNY: Yeah. Wow. I love that phrase - an exercise of citizenship.
SAINZ BORGO: I really believe that the way a society treats its dead says a lot about it. I mean, when Sophocles already spoke about the tragedy of not being able to give a burial, we're talking about things that happened cycles ago. And we are having the same problem nowadays. If you think about - I don't know - maybe you can think about the borders between Mexico and the United States or between Ukrainia and Poland, a lot of people die trying to get to Europe looking for a better life.
And if we think about this tragedy of dying in this struggle of looking for something new, no one will never know where you are, where your body is. You died twice. And for me, it's a very powerful image, and I think it's a kind of universal thing that we all experiment, that we all can see nowadays.
NADWORNY: I want to talk to you about the contrast between genders in the book. The women are frustrated by the men, you know, the main character's kind of hapless husband, faithless boyfriends. And yet, the women are also kind of the heroes, the ones who are standing up to the gangsters. How are you thinking about gender when you wrote the book and thinking about female characters?
SAINZ BORGO: Women are the strongest voices, the strongest characters, are the most brave one because I think I was raised in a society in which we had this idea of the men as a powerful figure outside the house. But inside the houses, women are very important to raise family, to overcome to poverty, to create a real home. And I really was raised by these strong women. And I always felt that they could not have the same power they have inside their houses. They were not able to use it outside in the street because they would not respect it as they deserve it. So that's why I tried to explain that in the novels I write.
NADWORNY: I want to ask you about this contemplation of mortality and how the rituals of death are perhaps a way to understand life. What do we learn from this tale?
SAINZ BORGO: I was writing this novel at the same time of the pandemic. When we suffer the pandemia (ph), and we finally get to know that we could not bury the people we wanted and we really loved because of the medical recommendations, we get - finally get to know what this huge tragedy of not being able to give a burial. We have to deal with the idea of death normally in our lives. We all die, and it's a natural fact.
But when you think about being killed or maybe someone is dead because of the violence, of a massive violence or trying to get real to escape from a place and these people die, when you're not able to find a place in which there's the memory of what happened, it's completely difficult to deal with the fact of those dead that are related to other issues as a moral issue, political issue. So this is the fact of having memory, to create a monument, to create a place in which remember and try to understand what happened in the history of a country, of society or even a family.
NADWORNY: That was Karina Sainz Borgo talking about "No Place To Bury The Dead." Thank you so much for being with us.
SAINZ BORGO: Thank you for the conversation and for your time.
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