Antonio Daniel García Orellana: “We authors have to react to social problems through writing”

The CajaCanarias Foundation announced at the end of last month that the winner of the XXXIV edition of the Benito Pérez Armas Award, the most prestigious and longest-lived award of the Canary Islands, fell to the Lanzarote-based author, Antonio Daniel García Orellana for his novel ‘Fuchsia eyelashes’. The awarding of the prize includes an economic donation of 12,000 euros, as well as the publication of the work. García Orellana, author of other works such as ‘Ícaro’, hopes that the publication of his new novel will take place next February.

Why that title? Do you intend to divert the attention of the reader?
The title was my big headache with this novel, but she asked me to do it herself. ‘Fuchsia eyelashes’ is the nick of the narrator of the work. All the characters are going to have theirs because everything happens around a web page. When I have asked some people what the title suggests, some have dragged it into the world of transformism, others into the world of the mask, cosmetics, … And another one towards the computer windows. Well, there’s a bit of all that in this novel so I think the title was a hit.

So, how would you summarize the work?
Using a clandestine website, users take care of a girl through the hands of her kidnapper. Through these users criticizes the current society throughout the novel.

The jury of the award defined the novel as a “work with great originality of the fable, with the right words and through an essential criticism of the consumer society without having to go into common places.” How about?
To specify the novel in time, we must use a specific lexicon that is where I believe that all these characters have created their place in urban society. The characters are real references, unfortunately.

The jury also talks about the critique of capitalism that makes the work.
Either you go down the sidewalk of the sedatives, or you go down the sidewalk of those who have awake the critical neuron. Writers and dramatists must react to all social problems. It is impossible for small boats full of inmigrants to arrive and not react to that, for example. The authors have to react to these problems through plays, novels or stories. In this case is the abuse, the sensationalism, the trash TV … Much of this contains this novel.

Valid people is discarded in society, something that is also played in the novel.
Everything has to do with that sedation, it keeps the public asleep. I call it desacralization of art. Today it seems that everything is worth it. There is no critical selection of the argumentation of the sources, a blogger is at the height of a Nobel prize, today everyone is an actor, writer or painter because you spit on a canvas the first thing that comes to mind.

Is the analysis being lost in the media?
The broadcast of news or the edition of a novel clings to codes of morbidity, dramatic tension or conflict. What is being done is to recruit audience by alienating the main values ​​of communication such as the promotion of freedom and democracy.

What problem do you find to the cultural offer of Lanzarote?
It is an open secret that this island practices cronyism. It is happening that the culture of the island is put in the hands of unskilled people so we can not be surprised by the educational failure.

Before being a novelist, you have been a writer of plays, was ‘Fuchsia eyelashes’ also conceived as a work to be represented?
My work is that of author. Although my beginnings were with poetry, I crawled to the theater that has that transmedia part that leads to the narrative. I like to touch all the fields. The theater is my passion, but I am a hybrid between who studied dramatic art and Hispanic philology, then the theoretical part and the experiential part come together at some point generating my own optics.

What consideration do you have of the poetry that is currently done?
There is a lot of versifier and little poet. The Internet gives voice to everyone, that’s why you have the right to usurp professions. But I understand that everything must have its space.

Is not that space being “usurped” by that poetry?
Criticism will come to name it, be it high, low or pseudo poetry. Nothing is more or less than anyone. This is another type of poetry. There is poetry for readers who demand and another for readers who demand less because there are poets who do not reach them. Society has a desire for uniformity and that entails damage such as our best playwright, Angelica Liddell, having all the European prizes and making thesis about her, became French because her works were not programmed in any Spanish theater. Like this case, many more.

Can it be the case of writers who have to go down a step to make a living riting?
I value that writer who is able to chameleon to what today is asked by the reader today. You can not write for the reader of 80 years ago, or be writers who say that the reader has to understand what they write or look in the dictionary. Neither one thing nor the other. ‘Fuchsia eyelashes’ is risky: it is written in the second person and in the present tense. I like a play that stops me in each sentence and rewrites me. But when you write you have to give a dose of speed and detail.

The jury also spoke of the “fair words” used in the novel. Do you believe in the economization of language in literature?
Here we find what is called decorum, which is the range of words of each person because a prostitute does not speak the same as a councilor of Culture. At least they should not. That adjustment of the words in the story that is going to be told is what matters. In ‘Fuchsia eyelashes’ everything is absolutely measured, very thought, I spent seven years writing this novel and each word has its meaning. It’s my personal puzzle.