«And That’s the Story…» Auto/biographical Praxis in La Mio Vida Ye una Novela

Abstract

At the last turn of the century, when her grandmother was about to turn 100, New-York-based Asturian philologist and writer Paquita Suárez Coalla felt an urgent need to recover her memories and to leave a trace of her roots. To do this, she interviewed her relative, alongside a group of women from the area with similar ages and experiences. The result was published in 2001 under the title La mio vida ye una novela [My Life Is a Novel], which constitutes the main item of our corpus. The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, analyzing the thematization of female knowledge in Suárez Coalla’s book, exploring how women who insist that they know nothing or very little due to their lack of formal education nevertheless prove to have a kind of knowledge that is very useful for their everyday life. Furthermore, they display an outstanding ability to make gender-conscious analyses, both of the past that they recollect and of their narrative present. On the other hand, this paper approaches the formal aspect of life narratives, with the intention of proving that the dynamics between the interviewer and the interviewees results in a challenge to the traditional boundaries of the genre. Through a subtle interaction with the person that compiles the stories –who is very rarely visible in the text– these women adopt a (more or less consciously) transgressive politics of location, and they situate themselves on hybrid territory. They combine actively elements that are constitutive of different subgenres, such as auto/biography, collaborative life writing, relational life writing, oral history, testimonio, and autoginography. Thus, they contradict with their actual praxis the ideas of resignation and lack of agency that explicitly permeate most of their testimonies.