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Outlook: Cristina Rivera Garza: ‘Grief becomes a forced silencing’

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Cristina Rivera Garza

23/04/2024 GMT

Cristina Rivera Garza: ‘Grief becomes a forced silencing’

BBC World Service - Outlook, Cristina Rivera Garza: ‘Grief becomes a forced silencing’

The Mexican author whose younger sister Liliana was murdered at the age of 20 in 1990

Cristina Rivera Garza's younger sister Liliana was murdered in Mexico City in 1990. It took Cristina 30 years before she was able to talk and write about it.

Whenever Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza tried to write about the murder of her sister Liliana, who died aged 20 in 1990, the words failed her. Cristina is a successful novelist and poet who's won national and international awards for her work. She’s also a professor at the University of Houston, Texas. But she describes her grief for Liliana as a kind of forced silencing. No one has ever been brought to justice for the killing, but it seems likely that Liliana was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. In 2020, emboldened by the rise of feminist movements in Latin America, Cristina started to look for answers and began by opening up the untouched boxes of her sister’s possessions. The papers she found helped her find new ways of talking about what had happened. In writing her story Cristina wants to give voice to the stories of thousands of other women lost to femicide. Her resulting book is called Liliana's Invincible Summer.

Presenter: India Rakusen
Producer: Jo Impey

Get in touch: outlook@bbc.com or WhatsApp +44 330 678 2707

(Photo: Cristina Rivera Garza; Credit: Juan Rodrigo Llaguno)

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