The first thing that should be said about the recent scandal caused by the words of Paco Ignacio Taibo II, director of the Economic Culture Fund when announcing the editorial collection 25 for 25 in the morning, is that it started from a decontextualization of his sayings. It is incredible, dear reader, how networks are capable of producing fake news that in turn generate greater scandals, and how opportunists take advantage of the confusion to advance their political agendas. Professional activists, dedicated to hunting opportunities for visibility of their causes, quickly jumped on the Protestant and outraged bandwagon, without being writers or poets. A whole phenomenon where the important thing was, obviously, neither the poetry nor the women writers, but to attack rabidly.
In case you don’t know, this happened because, to a specific question from a journalist and in a long response about the donation of books, the director of the FCE, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, said that even though the book clubs, mostly run by women, requested books written by women, he could not send them “a collection of poems written by a woman; horribly disgusting and bad” just because a woman wrote it. He was obviously referring to gender quotas and the quality criteria that must prevail in these decisions. Before, he had already criticized “junk” works that the FCE could not absorb from other publishers.
Of course, the fragment alone, decontextualized, seemed like an absolutely misogynistic “explanation” of why in the editorial collection that was presented that morning, 25 for 25 there are only works by seven women, which evidently would have been a total insult.
But that did not happen, even though it was presented that way and generated a whole wave of protests online, demanding her resignation and even demonstrations, pamphlets and letters to the President who, on the other hand, tried to save the issue by saying that an editorial collection would be made only of women.
Quite a disaster, dear reader, and also a sociological phenomenon, due to the way in which information currently circulates and is responded to.
This does not mean that there is nothing criticizable in the statements of the director of the FCE, nor in the collection of books, of course. His comment on the hypothetical work of a woman certainly has a misogynistic charge, due to the emphasis and contempt, and because it reinforces sexist prejudices that Mexican writers of past generations shared for a long time and that served to make works by women invisible.
However, this does not mean, dear reader, that there cannot be horribly bad works, written by women (and by men), and that artistic and cultural institutions should promote them for reasons unrelated to literature, such as gender quotas. In that, the director of the FCE is naturally right and President Sheinbaum is grossly wrong: our works do not need the graceful condescension of an exclusive collection of women, but rather meritorious works, by women and men, take their rightful place in the catalogs of the public publishing house. Which must be said, it had already been happening at the FCE, which has published many relevant authors from the last century, fortunately, but which the current administration of Paco Ignacio Taibo II has left aside.
It would be a major setback, a disgraceful offense, to create an exclusive corral for works that already occupy their rightful place within Mexican literature composed of both men and women, or to subject works by women to extra-literary criteria, assigning them nicknames that the authors themselves did not choose (“women’s literature”), to justify an inclusion that should only be justified by the quality of the works. “Positive discrimination” should not be used to avoid correcting the sexist criteria of officials because the only thing it achieves is reaffirming them. It is a sexist and discriminatory vision, unworthy of the best literary works. A sexist public humiliation “you don’t enter the general catalog of authors, but rather the catalog of women.”
Worse still, selecting other women just because they are women so that they take charge of promoting women, imposing criteria other than the artistic criteria that should prevail in art, would be another bad idea. In fact, part of the degradation that occurs in the literary institution currently is due to the imposition of criteria unrelated to the artistic in awards and institutional activities that have been taken over by ideology and political correctness and that, unfortunately, have evidenced the destruction of artistic values.
On the contrary, what is needed are competent officials, capable of discriminating between good and bad deeds. Officials capable of explaining the criteria that guide their decisions, as the director of the FCE should have done with the 25th collection for the 25th. The explanation he gave did not shed any light: why are there only works by seven women and why those women and not others? what were the criteria? Honestly, they look free. Not only of the works of selected women, but of all the authors and the titles themselves. Why a title by one author and not another? Nothing, it was not clear what criteria they used and how many of them were actually determined by the difficulties of a project as ambitious as it was risky, to the point of compromising its original idea, its viability.
It must also be said that this is not new in the FCE. Before, it used to be much worse. Secret committees made up of mafias that had taken over the state apparatus shamelessly selected and benefited their friends. Their decisions, arbitrary and mafia-like, were made in complete darkness and there was no possibility of holding them accountable.
And yes, many of us hoped that with the arrival of the left, the FCE would change, become plural in its decisions and open itself to all those authorships that were erased by the official PRI apparatus. Authors who suffered disdain before and continue to suffer it, because there has been no one in the most important state publishing house in the country capable of reviewing Mexican literature beyond the phobias and ideological philias of its director. A huge missed opportunity, a waste.