Canada Reads contenders Tasnim Geedi and Silvia Moreno-Garcia discuss why we should read what scares us
The great Canadian book debate takes place March 27-30, 2023
TikTok star and nursing student Tasnim Geedi will champion Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia on Canada Reads 2023.
Mexican Gothic reimagines the gothic horror novel, in this story about an isolated mansion in 1950s Mexico and the brave socialite drawn to its treacherous secrets. As Noemí begins to unearth stories of violence and madness, she is slowly drawn into a terrifying yet seductive world — a world that may be impossible to escape.
Geedi, who gained popularity on TikTok through her love of fantasy novels, was excited to champion Mexican Gothic, a novel in which she empathized with many of the protagonist's experiences of young womanhood.
Canada Reads will take place March 27-30, 2023.
The debates will be hosted by Ali Hassan and broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem, and on CBC Books.
Moreno-Garcia and Geedi got together virtually to discuss Mexican Gothic before the debates on March 27-30.
Tasnim Geedi: Hi, my name is Tasnim Geedi. I am championing Mexican Gothic on Canada Reads 2023. I'm here with Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the author.
Hi, Sylvia. How are you?
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia: Hi, I'm okay!
TG: I wanted to tell you the reason I chose Mexican Gothic. It immediately reminded me of Scooby Doo from when I was a kid and immediately bought it. Then as I was reading it, it's one of those books where it's 1 a.m. and you have school or work in the morning, but something crazy happens and you have to postpone sleep and read it all in one night. So I definitely want to share that experience with everybody.
I want to ask from you, what inspired you to write this book?
SG: Well, one of the things that I have enjoyed for a very long time are gothic novels. The gothic genre is very old, it goes back to the late-1700s. There are a lot of tropes or motifs that we use nowadays still in our fiction, and we don't really know where they come from. They harken back to gothic fiction because it's been so old and some things have been incorporated into our culture almost by osmosis.
One of them is the Scooby Doo mystery. There are two types of gothic, what is traditionally called by scholars, "the male gothic," which would be the horror gothic and the one that has supernatural elements. Those are your Draculas of the world. Then what has been called by scholars, "the female gothic," or it is sometimes also called the romantic gothic, your Scooby Doo plots. That's where a young, Jane Eyre-type of woman goes into a mansion and she thinks there might be a ghost. But it turns out it's a madwoman in the attic. So there are mysteries mixed with a sense of Romanticism. So they're very interesting for that reason, because I find them to be a hybrid category that encompasses many things. You've got your Dracula in one corner, but you also got your Jane Eyre in the other.
Because it's so old there's things that you don't even know where the idea comes from, like the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know man, for example. That you should fear him or desire him. But it harkens back to a lot of those gothic tales. Because of its long history, I wanted to do something with it and Mexican Gothic was my way to tackle that.
TG: I always felt like horror is kind of an underappreciated genre, or at least in the reader spaces that I occupy. Why do you think it's important to read books that scare us?
SMG: Horror is one of those very maligned genres. I think romance is also overly maligned. But horror probably gets the worst, the lowest of the low. When I tell people I read horror, that I enjoy writing horror, or I watch horror, the question is always, "Why?" People think there's something wrong with you.
But what we call horror has a long tradition. One of the things that we like to do is carve things out of genres. So we take the things that we think are good horror and we try to put them aside and say, "That's not horror." We don't say, "Well, Edgar Allan Poe was a horror writer," although he wrote a number of horror stories. We don't like to say, "Oh, Henry James is a horror writer," but he wrote a bunch of ghost stories.
We like to parcel out certain people and say, these are good literary people and then there's all this garbage. That distinction often places horror in a bad light. But if you look at horror as a broad spectrum, you realize that it's a rich category that people don't explore because they have all these biases against it.
Sometimes I meet people and they tell me, "Oh, I don't like horror or horror is nasty." But then they love the TV show Supernatural or Carmilla, as a vampire lesbian story. They enjoyed that Shirley Jackson collection, and Carmen Maria Machado. And I'm like, "Then you read horror. You're just not wanting to admit it." I think it has its bad reputation.
TG: One thing I didn't expect when going into it was how you use the horror genre as a vehicle to explore the themes of colonial violence and its effects. What are the biggest lessons in Mexican Gothic for Canadian readers?
SMG: Traditionally, gothic fiction has a long relationship with the concept of the other in its fiction. The way it manifests is that in gothic fiction, the other is a threat that's always coming in from the periphery and threatens to infect white Protestant upper society.
Dracula, for example, is an Eastern European-type that is literally infecting people with vampirism. So he is an "other" and there are other kinds of others, as gothics evolve. In the beginning, the others were Italians, Spaniards and Catholics. There's a lot of evil mustache-twirling Italians in early gothic fiction. They represent the other in that space of people that are not like us and that threaten us.
As the British Empire expands, the other begins to emerge in other places. You can see it in Indian magic, like some kind of a monkey paw from India that could cause demise. And you see it in shady characters, maybe from the Caribbean. Jane Eyre, the madwoman in the attic — she's a Caribbean Creole. She's a white woman, but she has been raised in the Caribbean. There's a lot of fear in that time period, in the 1800s, that people who were raised in the colonies were tainted by their association to the locals. They've "gone native" in that sense. So there's something bad about them. You see that reflected repeatedly in gothic fiction and with Mexican Gothic.
What I was trying to do was to invert that really old relationship. The space that is the other is the British space that Noemí is entering in in this novel. She heads into a village that has a British mining past, which is based on a real village in Mexico. She becomes "the normal" that, in these stories, would be the white Protestant male dominant character and and the source of fear comes not from a Black body or from a brown body, it comes from people who are literally embodying colonial forces.
Gothic fiction has a long relationship with the concept of the other in its fiction.- Silvia Moreno-Garcia
TG: Speaking of Noemí, one of my favourite things about her is that she's a lot like me. We're both in university, we're both women in academia. I think one could have easily written her off as someone who is a socialite who doesn't know much about the world. I want to know, what was it like building a character like that?
SMG: Noemí is really fun because she is a woman who wants to explore the opportunities that are becoming available to her. Women have not earned the right to vote in Mexico in 1950, yet, but society is changing. She's exploring some of that with the opportunity to try out certain career choices and perhaps pursue a master's degree. But she also has a lot of what might be considered frivolous pastimes or interests.
She likes fashion a lot and she obviously enjoys parties. At one point, she says that it's a situation where a woman has to be one or the other. You can be an intellectual but not a fashion guru or you can be a fashion guru but not an intellectual. You're in a 'babe or a brain' situation. She's navigating both of these spaces. I wanted to do that because I do think that even nowadays, women are often asked to just embody one aspect. I wanted to explore that, to have somebody that has a lot of traditionally feminine pursuits, but also some traits that don't quite align with what we perceive femininity to be.
LISTEN | Silvia Moreno Garcia in conversation with Shelagh Rogers:
TG: Even though this book takes place in the 1950s, I still go through a lot of that and I know a lot of my colleagues do. That's why it resonated so much with Noemí, because she's a fashionista and was able to outwit everybody.
Also, Mexican Gothic was the book that first got me into BookTok. I don't know if you're aware of the impact that it has in that community. How do you feel like a small town in 1950s Mexico resonates with people today?
SMG: I don't have a TikTok account, so I don't hear about anything unless one of my friends forwards me something.
In general, I like historical fiction. I like going into the past and finding the commonalities between that and the present or finding the threads that tie us to our present. My master's degree is in science and technology studies and my thesis work focused on eugenics, which is one of the topics of the book. I remember when people would ask why I was studying that. They'd say, "What is the relevance now of eugenics? You're talking about something that happened 100 years ago or more." Since then, every few months I find some article or some new story that somehow ties to eugenics in the present sense. I can say that is a eugenic thought at work and some of it crosses a lot into racialized categories, racism and colonialism and the role that eugenics plays in those kinds of discourses. But I've also found it in medical discourse and things that creep in.
The past is still in the present existing as a ghost, as a haunting that's still resonating through and echoing throughout our present.- Silvia Moreno-Garcia
I'm always quite happy to look at those connections and look at the past. The past is very much not the past in many times and especially for certain people. It is not really the past for a lot of colonized people. If you asked Indigenous people in Canada about the past, the past is still in the present existing as a ghost, as a haunting that's still resonating through and echoing throughout our present. I love history for that reason and I don't know, maybe other people also find it interesting for that reason.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
