Pilar Quintana on her new novel: "It was inevitable to explore the mechanics of racism."

During the nine years she lived in the Colombian Pacific jungle , writer Pilar Quintana found inspiration for her latest novel , Noche Negra , in which, she stated in an interview, it was "inevitable to explore the mechanics of racism in the country."

"If I'm going to put a white character in a Black fishing village and if I'm going to set my novel in a place far from populated centers, from cities, in a place where the majority of its population has been racialized and excluded , I think it's inevitable to investigate the mechanics of racism in this country," says Quintana.

Black Night (Penguin Random House) tells the story of a woman named Rosa who decided to move to the Colombian Pacific jungle with Gene, her Irish boyfriend, to build her own house by the sea.

" This novel is about a mixed-race woman who has always believed herself to be very white , because in her house she is the whitest and her mother and grandmother have told her: 'Oh, you are very white' (...) Suddenly she falls in love with an Irishman and he is really white and she begins to see that she is suddenly not so white," she details.

Then, explains Quintana, winner of the 2021 Alfagura Novel Prize with Los abismos, Rosa "comes to live in a Black fishing village in the Colombian Pacific, where she is already seen as if she were also a foreigner ."

"She's faced with living in a majority-Black community. She discovers that while she may not have the same overt racism as her grandmother, she also carries internalized racism because she grew up in a racist society," Quintana adds.

The book, as revealed by the author of La Perra , is based on an experience she had when she left Cali, her hometown , to go "live in the jungle in circumstances similar to those of Rosa," as she decided with her ex-husband, who is also Irish like Gene, to "build the house" with their own hands.

"Now, Rosa is a woman of another generation. She was born in 1941, I'm from '72. We belong to different universes, but I think it was a tremendous experience to live in the jungle ," the Colombian woman says.

The experience, which "had a profound impact on her," led her to write this novel in which, she adds, she makes " an interesting exploration of loneliness , of what happens in our heads when we are truly alone and silent."

" In the jungle, we sometimes hear strange noises and we don't know where they're coming from . So all of that comes together when you're left alone in an unfinished house in the jungle, and I wanted to portray that experience in a fiction novel," Quintana says.

To make the reader's experience more vivid, the writer dusted off a photo blog in which she recorded "the fauna, the flora, the landscapes, the sunsets, the rain —a record of natural life."

"And that blog, which I created because I wanted to capture the place where I lived, helped me a lot in discovering the colors of sunsets , in remembering certain sensations, in reconnecting with certain plants and animals," she emphasizes.

Added to this is the author's research on the Colombian context of the 1980s, a period in which the country experienced "an extremely difficult public order situation."

Quintana describes herself as "one of those adventurous writers who went far away to explore life in nature," as had already been done by Americans Ernest Hemingway and Jack London, or the Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad.

"That's an experience that (...) has made me wonder about the distance between civilization and barbarism , which has been a big theme of nature. I think I'm an heir to that tradition of writers who have explored that," she says.

However, this has been a very masculine "tradition" , since the protagonists of this type of work tend to be "men and with problems traditionally considered masculine."

"I haven't found many books written by women with female protagonists in that tradition. I feel like it was a space that wasn't occupied in literature and that I could fill," she emphasizes.

In Black Night , Rosa "is in a hostile environment" where she has to deal with the problems of nature , to which are added other fears "more exclusive or more typical of the genre."

" These are fears that women experience, not just in the jungle, but every day. She's afraid of the neighbors because they were extremely respectful to her while her husband was away. Rosa's husband leaves, and suddenly they start acting weird and harassing," she notes.

The novel, Quintana concludes, ends by portraying the fears that women have: "We are always wary of the looks and we always perceive the constant threat of men and Rosa is the one who passes on those threats."