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Dystopian Futures: A Climate Chat with Agustina Bazterrica, author of “The Unworthy”

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You're listening to Climate Decoded, the podcast that deciphers climate change communication. We untangle how different narratives illuminate or obscure pathways to climate justice. We talk about how we talk about climate change. 

And Welcome to Climate Chats, a series in which we have casual conversations with the top climate experts, authors, and activists from around the world. 

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Today I’m chatting with writer and novelist Agustina Bazterrica. Agustina’s writing fits into more than the category of horror and dystopia, but I do want to warn listeners that the content we’ll be talking about today with her is fairly dark. To give you an idea, her second book, “Tender is the Flesh,” is about industrialized cannibalism and her most recent book, “The Unworthy,” is about an abusive religious cult in a post-apocalyptic world. I was interested in chatting with Agustina about “The Unworthy” because it’s been classified as “dystopian climate fiction,” and I was curious to learn more about this genre. 

I met with Agustina in a cafe in Buenos Aires, Argentina. So there are some cafe background sounds you might hear throughout our chat. Agustina is Argentinean, born in Buenos Aires in 1974. Her published work includes two short story collections: “Before the Fierce Encounter” published in 2016, “Nineteen Claws and a Dark Bird” published in 2020. Her first novel was published in 2013 and is called “Killing the Girl.” “Tender is the Flesh” was published in 2017, garnered international acclaim, and is now being adapted for the screen. If you’re just reading Agustina for the first time, I definitely recommend starting with “Tender is the Flesh.”  

We’ll start off this chat by listening to Agustina read the first section of her new book, “The Unworthy.” She’ll start off the reading in Spanish, then we’ll crossfade to English. Without further ado, Agustina Bazterrica.

Agustina (reading in Spanish): “Alguien grita en la oscuridad. Espero que sea Lourdes. Le puse cucarachas en la almohada y coci la funda para que le cueste salir. Hablo nos dijo que para llegar a ser iluminado…”

Agustina (reading in English): “He called us unworthy, like he always does, like he does whenever we gather in the Chapel of Ascension after three days, or nine, we never know exactly when we will be summoned. He uttered the word unworthy again, and it reverberated against the walls as though his voice had the power to mobilize the inert stone. The minor saints sang the primary hymn, the original hymn, and one of the most important, the one that confirms the brush of divinity. We don't understand it. The hymns are sung in a language known only by the Chosen. He explained the hymn to us again, said it speaks to how our God protects us from contamination through the enlightenment and proclaims that without faith, there is no refuge.”

Agustina: Of course, I have to assume that I like dystopias because this is my second dystopia. The first one I didn't republish it because it's really bad. This [Tender is the Flesh] is my second. The Unworthy is my third, and now I'm writing another one. So I mean, I like dystopias, yes. And maybe I think that I go there because on some point I would say that I need, like a team of psychologists to understand why I go there. But I think, on the other hand, there is something that Flaubert said, the author of Madame Bovary, he said, “I'm writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire”. So what I think that I do in an unconscious way, and now I'm like trying to understand, is trying to write about the nature of fire in the sense of the nature of violence, the nature of why we live in a world so violent, yes, in so many different ways. And although human beings are like magnificent, and there are people that are luminous and great persons and whatever. But the actual thing is, yeah, there is violence.

Agustina: You know, I was, in 2018 I went to a book fair in Peru. And since I studied art history, I love art, and I went to a monastery there like a tourist, because they have

the Cusco art that it's a really particular art that I love Cusco. So this type of art, you have it there in that monastery and all around Cusco, and also in the north of my country of Argentina. And I went to visit churches in the north with a friend, just to see, for example, one of these pictures in one church. Some are really fun. So I was there in the monastery, and I was really concentrated, and there were no tourists. And this monastery, it's like a museum. There are no nuns living there. And suddenly I turn around and I see a nun praying, and I almost died of a heart attack because it was really sinister. And when I get near the nun, I see that it is a mannequin. So I get out of the monastery saying, I have to write about nuns because of that experience of what I felt like something really sinister, and that is why I wrote The Unworthy. Because, of course, I'm criticizing religions, and I'm working with the concept of, where can you find the sacred?

Agustina: I don't believe in, how you say it, originality. I don't think it exists. No, not today. You know, everything is written. Everything is written. What can be perceived as originality is the way you're going to write that theme. So until I get to the way I want to write it, I can think about the idea for years or months, you know, because I have to get to a place where the way I write it is the only way I can write it like this is the way. And that takes a lot of decisions, yeah, macro and micro decisions. What POV are you reading it from? Is it third person, what kind of language, what is the texture, the tone, everything. Yeah. So in the case of this book, there are two books that were really important. One is “Calibán y la bruja.” Caliban and the Witch. From Silvia Federici. She’s a feminist and an intellectual. She lives in the United States, and she wrote, she's originally from Italy, I think, and she wrote this book where she analyzes why, during a lot of centuries, men burned women and they accused them of being witches, yeah, and one explanation. It's a really long book, like 600 pages, but one explanation is because of capitalism, because capitalism needs cheap, how you say, mano de obra, cheap labor. So capitalism needed women to stay in their houses and just raise kids and have kids so you have more hands to do the labor. Yeah, more people. Of course, it's more complex than that, but that is one of the explanations.

Agustina: And the other book that was really important, it's also from United States. She's called Rachel Carson, and she wrote it in the 60s. Yeah, Silent Spring, yes. So with that tool, like big ideas, I think that even though when I started writing I didn't have a clue I was going to go where I went. I have like the tone, I have images. And then it came. But it didn't come, like a magical fair, yeah, it came because I work, like reading or whatever, you know, but in some point when I'm writing, I need, like, I need to leave my brain working alone. You know, I believe a lot in intuition. Hard work, of course, but also like, I let myself go with the writing. There are writers that are mappers. They have a map. They plan everything before. And there are others that they just, they go, and I go, it's also important the music of the text. Maybe when you read it, translate it, you will listen to another music because it's another language, and most of the decisions go to the translator. In the case of The Unworthy in English, the translator is Sarah Moses, and she's the best, and she's so good that I gave her the draft of The Unworthy in Spanish for her to read it and to give me her opinion. Yeah, so she's really good, but you will lose like the music that I tried to create with this language, and I always write different. For example, the novel that I'm writing now is not as dark as these ones, and the language is pure Argentine, like you have all the insults you have, all the slang, you have everything. These are like more general, you know, they reference mate and barbecue, yeah, but that is not, and you have some insults. But the novel that I'm writing now, it's like 100% Argentine and Porteño, from here, from Buenos Aires.

Agustina: And that is because the character leads me there. It's a character in first person you're listening, like what he thinks. So I cannot put an Argentine person thinking as as Spanish from Spain, you know, like, so, yeah, I get really obsessed with that, because I think that one of the most important things when you write, it's to get the plausibility. If you have errors in the book, like, I don't believe you, like a typo or no typo. For example, I will give you an example of a book I read from an Argentine writer. I won't tell the name the book. It's well, doesn't matter the plot, but the principal character, she has to do like a witchcraft so she needs blood from her period. But this author, he puts that she takes the blood of the period from her, how you say, from her pad. Huh? How can you do that? Yeah, you cannot do that. So there we have a really big mistake and really unfortunate that it's a male writing, yeah, and you say, I mean, I don't believe you now, yeah. So that type of things,

I'm really obsessed with. So when I read other authors, I'm unbearable. I’m really meticulous, I'm the worst. All my friends, they don't want to give me books as presents, because I’ll tear them apart. But also, when I think the book is great, I'm like the first fan, and I always recommend the great books. 

Kim: You bring up art and music. And one of my questions was, what you think the value of writing specifically is, other than if you wanted to tell the story in a musical form, for example, if you wanted to put it into a painting. Why is writing the best medium to get this message across? And one answer I've heard to writing that makes the most sense to me is it's the only form format where you can have real interiority. You can get into someone's head, and I really appreciated that with Tender is the Flesh, because the protagonist is someone who doesn't really share his real thoughts with other people, but in the book, you get to understand him and see his interactions with everybody else. So extending that to something with climate fiction and a young female protagonist who's dealing with this post-apocalyptic world. What value does her interiority offer to this story?

Agustina: I think it all depends on the art or the music or the book. I mean, you can have this same theme and it doesn't work. I'm thinking of Guernica of Picasso, you know, you have their painting, and it's a world. It's so profound and so shocking, and it's talking about also the violence of the world, and at that moment, the war. And you have a lot of paintings like that. But in my case, not only because I don't know how to draw, but also because I love words, and I love creating worlds, worlds where there was nothing there before, and also these imagining things, like I see the the novel in my head like a movie, you know, but it's not as simple as that, because maybe I see something or I feel something, but then translating that to the paper is a lot of work, because it will never be the same as what you saw, maybe it would be better, but generally it's worse. And also what fascinates me is how the language, it's so rich, and at the same time, is so limited. So that ambivalence, I think it's marvelous. And there you have a literature, if you work with ambivalence, that is why I'm not interested in best sellers. I'm really bored with best sellers. Like I get that people need to entertain themselves, and I think that they're great for that. But at this point, I cannot read a bad story because I get really bored really quickly, because I need more, you know, like I need to work with the text. I need to understand why the author used some words or repeated some words or not others, and I think that is fascinating.

Kim: And that’s our episode for this week. Agustina’s latest book “The Unworthy” is out now, about a religious cult in a convent in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by climate change. Catch you next week, and as always, keep up the creative and constructive climate thought, conversation, and action. 

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You’ve been listening to Climate Decoded. Climated Decoded is produced by Chantal Cough-Schulze, Lara Heledd Davies-Jones, Isabel Baudish, Greg Davies-Jones, Jens Wendel-Hansen, Jamie Stark, Alex Teske, and me, Kim Kenny.

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