"The New Earth" by Sebastiano Mauri: A novel about self-destruction and the future of the planet

“I lived in New York for 15 years, grew up in Milan, and have been coming to Argentina every year since 1983 , ever since Alfonsín,” says the visual artist , writer , and filmmaker Sebastiano Mauri . An Italian-Argentine , he is in Buenos Aires to present his second novel, La nueva tierra, published by Adriana Hidalgo. It tells a story of shamanic introspection : a man named Leone who arrives in the Amazon at the request of his cousin Nur to try ayahuasca and embark on a mystical journey that will lead him to explore his feminine side and his own identity.

In his previous novel ( Disfruta del problema, same publisher) , he addressed the issue of sexual identity in a coming-of-age story . The rubble of his own life forges the building blocks of his literature. In this conversation with Clarín , he analyzes his prose, shares his world, and reflects on his own condition of being a bit of here and a bit of there; a foreigner anywhere. Meanwhile, he emphasizes, “I have a whole family and friends; part of my customs and my heart are here.”

–How does that creep into your literature? The protagonist of The New Land, for example, is also half Argentine.

–Everything that's important in my life and part of my identity becomes material for my literature. It's very clear to me that the reader reads things as if they were presented as fiction, even though not all of them happened to me. In fact, not all of them happened to me. I sold in a credible and consequential way something that I may have invented, but they always have to do with me, and I'm sure that aspect has a lot to do with my literature, which in fact, my character is even broader. He never feels completely at home alone. It also happens when you speak several languages. I lived in the United States for 15 years; when I lived there, I thought in English, I dreamed in English. When I went to Italy, they would ask me, "You speak Italian very well, where did you learn it?" I like to immerse myself in a new environment where I know something but have a lot to learn, and it keeps me alive because I'm always in a somewhat unfamiliar place. So, you're seen as a foreigner even in the workplace. Then, in sexual identity, another place where you obviously feel in the middle, in a gray area distinct from others, of not fully belonging, of not meeting the definition of normality. From that perspective, it's an aspect that features heavily in my literature.

–Identity appears in both novels. I was thinking about it in relation to the foreign, which you just described. Does this appeal to you? Does it make you uncomfortable?

–It's part of me, it's something I'm happy about because I also think it helps me put things in perspective. I began to understand my own country, Italy, since I left. When you start looking at it from the outside, confronting other customs, other cultures, you better understand yours. Not feeling completely at home is always feeling a little uncomfortable. You never have all the necessary cultural codes. Now I've returned to live in Italy, but to maintain my English, I read almost only in English. I watch a lot of movies and series in English. Perhaps because of my sexuality, because I knew from a very young age that I was gay and not like other people, and feeling different at times, you hated it, you wanted to change until you realized that good and evil produced what you are, and if you don't want to completely abandon yourself, you have to love that part too. Now I'm used to never feeling completely at home.

–You've worked in different disciplines—film, visual arts, literature, teaching—what's your creative process like? Do you have a method?

–There isn't just one. First, because there are multiple disciplines, and each one can require different needs, and it also depends on the period. For example, in art, there was a time when I was thinking about what my new series would be, and it was always changing. I try to expose myself to life as much as possible, say yes to programs, not be so reckless, always staying locked up at home, go out, meet people, listen to music, read a lot, watch a lot of movies, expose myself to stories, go to exhibitions, museums, and also revisit things I've already seen. I try to expose myself to the art of others and try to live fully. Later, when things are going well and you start doing something meaningful, sometimes obsession enters the game, which is also a beautiful moment that is very valuable. Obsession can be a novel. I wrote this last one in quarantine; I was very alone in the countryside in Entre Ríos, without television, almost without Wi-Fi, and it was my salvation. But that was also a period. So, for me, there isn't much of a routine. Sometimes you write out of duty, and other times you have to constantly slap yourself to avoid getting distracted.

–Returning to your two novels, in the first, Enjoy the Problem, sexuality appears in relation to identity. Here too, but there are other layers; there's the question of nature, a spiritual, shamanic quest. How did this quest emerge in your second novel?

–They can be read as two stages of the same journey. It's said in curanderismo that every healer must first heal himself. The first is a classic coming-of-age story in which the protagonist went from having a longtime girlfriend to accepting his attraction to men and having his first boyfriend. There's a whole journey from accepting his own homosexuality, from telling everyone. In this other story, the character already has a male partner; the fact that he's gay is taken for granted; it's not presented as a point of conflict. What is represented is the healing of what we might call his wound with the feminine, which is more common than we think, in the sense that all men are taught from a young age that anything associated with the feminine is wrong. My character confronts his own internalized toxic masculinity because, as a middle-aged gay man who, in theory, is already completely resolved, he realizes that he still carries a lot of toxic masculinity. Through ayahuasca ceremonies, he aims to heal his wound with the feminine. At the end of the journey, we also understand—just as the healer works, who must first heal himself in order to have a positive influence on others—that this is the same wound that society needs to heal: the wound with the feminine. We will not stop mistreating nature until we stop mistreating the feminine.

–How did you become interested in ayahuasca? You mention it in the Author's Note at the end.

–As I describe it there, quite by chance, at the insistence of a cousin of mine, Leonor Caraballo, who was filming a movie about ayahuasca in Iquitos, in northern Peru. I didn't even know what the ceremony was; it was very improvised; I hadn't done the necessary preparation. That's when the doors to a world I hadn't imagined opened up for me, which I discovered little by little, in the countryside, performing ceremonies. That gave me what I describe in the book. That's why it's easy for me to identify with this character because she doesn't arrive knowing everything but rather discovers it alongside the reader.

–This relates to autobiographical literature. What do you think about that?

–There are actually a lot of inventions. The cousin's character is the result of three cousins working together. My own alter ego is inspired by me and another person. That goes for almost every character. There are a lot of things that aren't really invented. What interests me is being able to express the things that were important to me in my life. If you lived it, you're not going to lie; you're going to describe something you know very well. For me, it's a great gift we have: power. If we have a story to tell, it means you possess the necessary details to tell it, and literature, like the devil, is in the details. But life doesn't present the story the way you want to tell it. The story adapts to or deviates from reality, but it's good that the reader doesn't notice. In the end, the reader takes almost everything as true, but I swear not everything is. Autofiction until it works, otherwise invention comes in.

–Another characteristic of your literature is humor and irony. What do you think about this?

–Yes. It has to do with a Pirandellian school of thought. The more tragic what you have to tell, the more comical it must be. Oscar Wilde said that if you have to tell the truth about others, you'd better make them laugh. Stand-up comedians know this very well. It's a way to talk about more serious or heavy things without necessarily communicating that seriousness or heaviness. Also because writing can be therapeutic for someone. Often the stories that make people laugh were tragic at one time. Ethel Barrymore said, "We grow up the day we learn to laugh about ourselves."

–Your novel also engages with certain narratives about nature and its collapse. Dystopian fictions are proliferating these days. What's your analysis of this?

–There's an Amazonian vision, for example, that they tell you with a happy ending, where it says we're now in a cycle in which there's a total imbalance of the eagle over the condor, of materiality over spirituality, of the masculine over the feminine, and that this has to come to a head. That system is self-destructing. This could lead to the extinction of human beings and most life on Earth. It's not all bad news, though, because it's already happened five times in the past. Just as lives returned in the past, in a few thousand years, lives will return. We'll return too, not necessarily with this body, perhaps as beings with a different aspect, but by now we'll have learned our lesson. We'll live with respect between materiality and spirituality, we'll live respecting the masculine and the feminine, and the world will be happy and eco-compatible. So, a happy ending… spanning the expanse of everything we know.

–Regarding the balance between masculinity and femininity, discourses questioning aspects such as gender inequality have proliferated recently. What is your analysis of this?

Unfortunately, this isn't just happening here or in Italy; it's also happening in the United States, India, the Philippines, and Australia. In Germany, the second-largest party is far-right; in France, Le Pen almost won. Scientists have been saying that behind the climate crisis lies a social crisis. Human beings are living beings like everyone else. We see economies affected by climate tragedies, immigration, and land redistribution. These are necessary elements for the return of fascism. Greta Thunberg understood very well that climate justice and social justice are one and the same.

The New Land , by Sebastiano Mauri (Adriana Hidalgo).