Marcela Del Sol is an Australian/Chilean bestselling writer and is known for her views against Patriarchy and abuse towards children and women.
1. Marcela, you were born in Chile but now, you live in Australia. Tell us more about your experience in Chile. How did your experiences in Chile and Australia shape up the personality that you have?
I am very grateful for the opportunities to explore such different ways of living. It has helped me understand how cultural bias is still a tremendous enemy of emotional progress. How, even nowadays, people are concerned with preserving what was instilled as “right”, rather than conceding validity to ways of expressing, living, other than their own.
I wish territory and identity weren’t as bonded as they are. Perhaps people like me, migrants, would not have to face the tribulations that come with belonging “elsewhere”.
These things, alongside many others, have taught me to listen and observe, to accept differences. Having lived more than half my life in Australia, I have been able to learn a lot of practical things that perhaps I wouldn’t have accessed if I stayed in Chile. Being away from my native place has also shown me the importance of returning, the greatness that resides in the origin and in the affection that is so underestimated in the first world.
However, my experience has been extremely challenging, permanently so, as my children are Australian but my whole history derives from my motherland, where I would love to live with them one day. That is how you realize that home really is where the heart is.
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You are known for your strong feminist voice along with your views on how to fight child and women abuse. How do you think we can fight against the evil of abuse towards children and women?
Wow! Women fight every day, tirelessly so. Living in a patriarchal state means you leave home having to fight for a dignified and rightful place everywhere. However, I believe silence is the strongest accomplice violence has and that is why is so important to speak up.
As a community, we all have the responsibility to eradicate the stigma and negative attention that is placed upon victims and redirect it to the perpetrators of these despicable acts.
There is a strong need to implement services that allow survivors of all types of violence to live safely. It is also time that punitive measures are accordingly adjusted, giving tougher sentences to the guilty, which will impact in an elevated sense of safety and a more comfortable time for healing for those who endure this type of torture. Sexual violence, gender violence is a torture, an endless pain you learn to tuck inside a box somewhere, but that comes flying out eventually.
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Kindly describe what being a successful author is like for you.
It is such a lonely profession, yet I am always full of stories and scenarios that I collect almost incessantly. It is like living into a silent world, even for people who have many people inside their head!
Every person I meet has something that I would like to incorporate into my work. Writing has been my exorcism and, after my children, my greatest reason to keep on going: there is always an unfinished manuscript that needs attention. The past few months have been very “dry” in a literary sense because my father, a cousin and then my uncle died and I still cannot mourn properly.
Poetry is proving to be quite benevolent with my soul and perhaps that is where I will find space to finish enough work to publish again soon.
I think the act of writing is very brave on its own and bravery is a faithful example of success.
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Your Book Kaleidoscope: My Life’s Multiple Reflections is highly appreciated by critics. Tell us more about it.
Kaleidoscope was a labor of painful love. A therapy without knowing it. It tells the story of a Lucia, voraciously sexual and atypical as she lives with Dissociative Identity Disorder (like I do) as a result of a series of traumatic experiences in her life.
The book has highly explicit sexual content but you need to read beyond that, you have to be an insightful reader and discover where all the angles intersect. It is a book that leads you into deep despair but with many shades of bright colours that accompany you through.
I must reinforce the fact that the book isn’t biographical, despite Lucia and I sharing the same personality disorder.
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You have launched “InmorTal”, a book that is currently only available in Spanish. Can we expect an English version soon?
It is not in my immediate plans but it is certainly something that I will look into. InmorTal contains real life stories of sexual abuse suffered by Chilean women in their childhoods and also their stories of strength. It highlights how women have an almost indefinable power to raise after almost anything. However, it almost always is because or for someone else and we need to shift the focus towards ourselves, women must live for and because of us, firstly, and for what we determine to be our reasons, beyond those that we have been tamed to believe as such.
For more Information on Marcela, visit her website.
