Mariana Enríquez

Mariana Enríquez (born 1973) is a journalist, novelist, and short story writer who lives in Argentina.

I think no one really chooses their tastes or their modes of expression: One day a language appears, and finding a language is a lot like finding a home. When I discovered horror cinema and literature, I found my language — the one that allowed me to talk about the terrors I have known. My language was formed by Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”; the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Stephen King; “Frankenstein”; “The Exorcist”; “Jaws” and “E.T.”; and later by “Twin Peaks”; rock and punk music; David Cronenberg; Clive Barker and fanzines.

I grew up in a shadowy world where death was all around, but it was secret — disappearances have all the direct cruelty of sadism, as well as a particular aura of the sinister unknown.

to a large extent, this is the fear that I summon and depict, a feeling of simultaneous imminence and abandonment that is difficult to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

When I’m asked who I am, I say, “I am a Latin American.” The experience of being born and living in my country shaped me as a person — often a problematic one — and as a writer. I am a Latin American woman, which also implies a number of challenges: growing up without laws that allowed us to make decisions about our bodies (those laws exist now, but I am 50 years old) and fighting in a labor market that, in addition to being sexist, is scant and limited. Not only are jobs given to men because they are men, but because there is a lot of unemployment in general, and the chain breaks at its weakest link.

I am a writer who works in her country, who never lived anywhere else, who maybe will one day, but whose life has transpired in a large American metropolis with all its intensity, its often joyful — and other times desperate — people, its power outages, its bodies in the streets, its beauty and its horror.

Translated from Spanish

It’s very difficult to write about Argentina using only realism. In the 50s and 60s there was a strong tradition of fantastical fiction here: Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Julio Cortázar. Then the whole region became politicised with the dictatorship [1976-1983], the consequences of the Cuban revolution and the intervention of America.

I think what happened to people like me who grew up in the 80s and 90s is that slasher movies, Stephen King and Twin Peaks all got mixed with our reality, which was already full of the language of horror: the disappeared, the children of the dead, children of the lost generation…

I understand the [notion of] respect but I don’t want to be complicit in any kind of silence; to be timid about horrifying things is dangerous too. Maybe I turn up the volume to 11 because of the genre I like to work in, but the genre puts a light on the real horror that gets lost in [a phrase like] “political violence”.

One issue is that we’re used to reading in translation and other countries aren’t. We know more about your history than you know about ours. There’s two ways to deal with that. Get angry at the inequality. Or try to explain what’s going on.

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Mariana Enríquez

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