Rachel Cusk: “At age 20, if I could have become a man I would have done it”

It seems incredible that this small, nervous and elusive woman is Rachel Cusk, the most celebrated British author of her generation, the one who is not afraid to put her own life on the dissecting table, sink the scalpel deeply and draw conclusions far from what we have taken for years as good: matters such as what is expected of them in spaces such as motherhood or marriage, substantial to women. Because you have to have a lot of courage to delve into these aspects using your existence as material, with a cold and sharp prose.

15 years ago Cusk was a bright young woman, married and the mother of two daughters, who saw her relationship as a couple fall apart. The society of the moment could not accept that Cusk presented himself as a victim because her lawyer husband had agreed to stay at home and take care of the little ones, but when the moment of the breakup came she realized her failure. He had struggled to occupy a place that was not quite his own. Socially he had behaved like a man and as a woman he had abandoned aspects of femininity that ended up revealing important. He told it in ‘Despojos’, shamelessly displaying those contradictions. Cusk is not afraid of them and has received for it. As when long before she decided to talk about her experience as a mother in a way far removed from the obligatory self-denial. She was the first to point out the darkest aspects of motherhood – the dissolution of identity in caregiving – and very soon she experienced widespread rejection from a press that relentlessly crucified her. Cusk was the great villain of literature at the time.

Cultural disagreement

“I think the British are bothered by the seriousness,” he explains, “the questioning of taboos, especially when it comes to private life. So they look down on self-examination, they can only admit it in a frivolous or satirical tone & rdquor ;. Now, on his visit to Barcelona on the occasion of his latest novel, ‘Segunda casa’ (Asteroide / Les Hores), he remembers that with a half smile, because things have changed a lot, he feels that History has ended up proving him right. “For a long time I believed that the problem was mine, that having been born in Canada to English parents, I did not understand well the social keys, but it was not like that & rdquor ;.

That rejection, which must have affected a shy person like her in no small way, generated the new fragmentary and deconstructed form, full of silences, of her acclaimed trilogy ‘A Contraluz’, where she explored in a fictional key and with little argument the voices that spoke of to what extremes “the trap of love” can take us. It is, it should be, the great conquest of the new literature written by women, which in recent times, at last, can be perceived as a universal value.

Her disagreement with Great Britain has increased with Brexit, which has ended up expelling the writer, who now lives as a refugee in the center of Paris with her second husband, the plastic artist Siemon Scamell-Katz. “Britain is adrift, in a moment of tremendous decline, and I feel fortunate to have been able to leave.”

Juzgando a D. H. Lawrence

Shortly before arriving in Paris he wrote ‘Second House’, a curious artifact that rewrites the chronicle in which the American patron Mabel Dodge Luhan recounted the tumultuous visit that an unbearable and narcissistic DH Lawrence -author of ‘Lady Chaterley’s lover’- realized the colony for artists that she had founded in Taos. “My book tries to compare how male achievements are valued in relation to female ones. Those of them are gigantic and permanent while those of women, more ephemeral, are usually linked to nature or the creation of places to live and human bonds & rdquor ;.

Cusk’s characters are usually women who make a place for themselves in the world with the rules of men, something that the 54-year-old author interprets in a generational way. “There was a huge gap between my mother and me. She adapted to her role as wife and mother without giving her the slightest satisfaction and that dissatisfaction was transmitted to me. It was not a model for me, but a constant bitterness, an unconstructive criticism & rdquor ;. Now as a mother and as a non-orthodox feminist, she in turn faces this transmission: “I have had to think from a moral and philosophical perspective how I can teach my daughters to be truly equal in the world& rdquor ;. Cusk claims to know the formula for that freedom – in fact she tried it with her first husband but it didn’t work – and her statement sounds challenging and radical: “You have the children, you give them to your husband so that he can take care of them and you, to change, go out into the world to do business and earn money. Of course this means sacrificing your most sacred and intrinsic maternal instincts. The real problems arise when women want equality but are not willing to sacrifice inequality. & Rdquor;

Fluid genres

Naturally, Cusk is seeing how in recent times the genders are diluting their borders, with the current debate of fluid genders: “It is very interesting to see how all this will end but at the same time I understand the more mature feminists who are feeling how their political identity as women is in danger if becoming a woman depends on a decision, an act of will. Criticizing trans women is something that young women are very upset about and I have no answer. It remains to be seen whether in the long run fluidity is an escape route from gender or just another form of consumption & rdquor ;.

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If she had been able to choose, Rachel Cusk is clear: “At age 20, if I had had the opportunity to become a man, I would have done it, and not because I felt bad about my body, but because I understood that femininity was a handicap and masculinity, freedom. Luckily, that doesn’t look the same anymore & rdquor ;.