Pamela rodriguez has been in A Coruña for a year and he published his first novel a month ago, Riot, in which she frankly narrates her relationship with motherhood. This 38-year-old Peruvian, nominated for two Grammy Awards and vocalist of Los Pilotos, presented her work on Wednesday, December 15 at the FNAC of the Herculine city in the company of a great friend, the creative director of Adolfo Domínguez, Tiziana Domínguez.
The protagonist of the novel is Camila, a woman from Lima who opens a Tinder account and meets a businessman from A Coruña with whom she begins a relationship. Shortly after making contact and meeting in person for the first time, they discover that they are going to be parents. And this story, in which it is mixed what Rodríguez experienced with the designer Ton Pernas, tell what it means motherhood and life as a couple and expresses it without complexes, honestly reflecting the good and bad of this experience.
The work, which “It has no other claim than to open the heart a little and to sincere the experience of motherhood and the couple”, has been edited by Contraluz publishing house. Rodríguez, who is the niece of the Nobel Prize winner in Literature Mario Vargas Llosa, spoke with Fifteen thousand about her experience with motherhood and life as a couple that led her to write the book, as well as her future plans and the good reception she had in Galicia.
Who is Pamela Rodríguez?
A new acquisition of the city of A Coruña. I am a person who does many things: I like to sing, record records, compose, make music for movies, write … I have published a book and I have written articles for various magazines. I am a mother, I have a 12-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old daughter, and I have been married several times. This has been a great year, with many opportunities for both music and writing and other projects that are opening.
A Coruña has received you well.
I have a lot of relationship with A Coruña. The father of my first daughter is from Vigo but he grew up in A Coruña and the father of the second is from Coruña. I don’t know what hit me with the Galicians. I am Peruvian and I have lived in the United States and Canada, but I have not had any ties with Galicia beyond my husbands.
“Coming to Galicia, which has the best quality of life in the world, is unsurpassed. I am in one of the happiest moments of my life”
You came and posted Riot. What other projects do you have ahead?
In reality, my arrival was tremendous, with a pandemic, when nothing was being done. I didn’t come up with any kind of planning. Thanks to the Contraluz publishing house, the possibility of taking the book forward was opened. Also, I collaborated with Banin and Florent, who are members of Los Planetas who have made a new band called Los Pilotos. Now I am the singer of that band. In the next few months, if all goes well, there will be many book presentations and concerts to come.
I am very excited. Spain is an incredible country that as soon as I arrived, it gave me opportunities that I didn’t even imagine. I left Peru, where I have a career built all my life, because the pandemic was being handled very badly. Really, arriving in such a welcoming country … and arriving in Galicia, which has the best quality of life in the world, is insurmountable. I am in one of the happiest moments of my life.
It is important to find a place where you feel comfortable and that allows you to perform.
The opportunities here are being fantastic and it is a culture that I relate to. Riot It is a book to give a perspective of another type of mother, because the mother is always devoid of pleasures, she is at home, sacrificed for the family … And I am the complete opposite of that. I am not at all calm, I do not sacrifice myself for anyone. I love and adore my daughters, but not from that ancient and patriarchal perspective. In Peru go with that speech and that way of nurse you are crazy, but here in Spain I have found much more resonance with that way of seeing things, because there are more people seeing them that way.
There is already a rethinking of what is the woman in the family and the woman as mom. I feel very comfortable and happy to be in a place where we are moving forward as women and perhaps not as backward as Peru, where you cannot even think about things other than the traditional.
Search Riot demystify the role of mothers?
Demystify and modulate it, change it. I do not propose a way of being a mother because I think there is a long way to redefine things and I don’t even think it is necessary. I believe in the individuality of each one. The way of being a mother has been standardized: you stay at home, sacrifice yourself and take care of housework. That has been the discourse for more than 20 centuries and now that we have an independence, a professional life, our passions are active … The average is going to get married two or three times: now we handle ourselves more in serial monogamy and not in one partner for life. That also brings a reformulation of what the family is. My daughter has another father’s sister and another mother’s sister and at the same time the sister’s sister … Families change a lot.
How much fiction and reality is there in Riot?
It is my personal story with certain creative licenses and from my point of view, which in itself is a fiction because if you ask any of the other characters they will have another perspective. It is what is called autofiction, which allows fiction within the autobiographical to take it out of a sense so literal and real, so rigid.
Do you think that motherhood is still a taboo subject?
Of course it is taboo. Everything that is not beautiful about being a mother is taboo. I love being a mom. I am neither in favor nor against it, I do not have a radical position, it is rather complex. I inhabit complexity. I am the happiest person with my daughters, but this is a pain in the ass Also, an inescapable responsibility, the first postpartum months are hellish and pregnancy doesn’t seem like a sweet wait to me.
I think there is a certain obligation to be a mother. I find that my daughters have given me a lot, but they have also complicated my life at the individual level because I do not have the same freedoms or times, I have these responsibilities that I cannot and that I will not avoid because I like to be a present mother. We must begin to walk in the middle ground, seeing the good, the bad, the difficult, the frustrating and what can be done better to feel freer as women, because we have not had freedom. We have not had it for many centuries.
You tell your experience with total sincerity.
I think that if there is something that characterizes me, it is that I say things as I feel them, I am not a person who wants to lie or be false. I am always sincere because I believe it is to give a gift to others, to really tell them how I am feeling, the challenges I am having and the shadows that haunt me … I will not tell you that everything is beautiful because life is not So. For me sincerity and openness are fundamental, it is what I have to give to the world.
The cover of the book is also very sincere. Is it a selfie you took shortly after giving birth?
That photo is from when I was pumping my milk the day after my first party after giving birth. I had to go back to breastfeed my daughter. He had had a party, had not slept at all all night. It was about six in the morning, it was dawn and I was expressing my milk to go back to bed. It was my first postpartum party and it had to be reflected.
And it also reflects what you explain: there is room to be a mother, to be a woman and to be free.
I love making breakfast and taking care of my daughters, taking them to school, but cone, I like to party, have fun, have a life that is not devoid of this. I’m not on holiday all day, nor do I go on Tuesday and I don’t take the girls to school the next day. I am a responsible girl, I exercise motherhood from absolute responsibility, but a dance does not hurt. Why do I have to become a mom and get boring? I don’t like boredom.
The writer Pamela Rodríguez in A Coruña: “Everything that is not beautiful about being a mother is taboo”