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“I write to say that our times are not worse than others,” Ángeles Mastretta Says at OAS

The Mexican writer and journalist Ángeles Mastretta spoke today about the art of writing and her decision to be a writer during the Organization of American States’ (OAS) Forty-Second Lecture Series of the Americas.

Titled, “Deciding Our Destiny,” the event was held as part of the celebration of the Inter-American Year of Women “to reflect above all on the achievements and challenges in the search for equal participation of women in all sectors of the economy and society,” according to OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza. He added that “it is difficult to find a woman that better represents what we wish to reflect here than our friend Ángeles Mastretta, writer and journalist.”

Mastretta is “famous for her gift to artistically use fiction as a medium to comment on the political and social reality of her country, and for having created some of the most memorable female characters ever captured between the covers of a book,” said the Chair of the Permanent Council and Permanent Representative of El Salvador to the OAS, Joaquín Maza.

The writer is better known for her novels “Tear this Heart Out” (1985) and “Lovesick” (1996). The latter received the Rómulo Gallegos literary prize.

“I am going to tell you how once I decided to be a writer I decided how to be one,” Mastretta said at the beginning of a narrative on the work of the writer, her own trajectory and the destiny of every individual. “Less accurate than physicists, more indebted to magic than physicians, we writers seek to dream with others, to improve our destiny, to live all the lives that it wouldn’t be possible to live being only ourselves,” she continued. “We write to remember that life as it is has a remedy, with all its beauty, its savagery and its difficulties.”

Furthermore, the internationally renowned writer said that, “I think I write, besides for the enjoyment and the pains of doing it, to express my conviction that our times have a remedy and are not worse than others, that our children will have passions, futures and rifts, as did our grandparents and as we are having them ourselves.” On her success as a writer when compared to that of other writers of great talent who did not receive due recognition, she asked herself, “How can I say that I decided my destiny when it was my destiny that decided for me that my books coincided with my epoch, that my books coincided with my readers?”

And on the subject of destiny, which titles the conference, Mastretta used a metaphor, “I don’t know if stars dream or decide our destiny,” she said. “I do think that our destiny is unpredictable and hazardous like dreams.”

The Lecture Series of the Americas was created in 2004 by the OAS Permanent Council to promote democratic principles and values in the countries of the hemisphere through monthly conferences on the key issues of the hemispheric agenda, such as the strengthening of democracy, human rights and social development.

The event was held in the Hall of the Americas at OAS headquarters in Washington, DC.

A photo gallery of the event will be available here soon.

For more information, please visit the OAS Website at www.oas.org.

Reference: E-366/10