They presented “Pluma Negra” by the writer Luis Lira at Filven 2024

The writer and psychiatrist Luis Lira Ochoa presented last Wednesday at the twentieth edition of Filven his first novel Pluma negra, in which, based on the stories of his grandparents, he portrays how Venezuelans in the mid-20th century resisted foreign intervention. through the history of a town and its people affected by oil companies, reported AVN.

Published by the Koeyú Latinoamericano publishing house, this novel is part of the so-called Petroleum Novel, which documents the stigmas of social exclusion, classism, plundering and loss of sovereignty, themes cultivated in the tradition of Venezuelan narrative by authors such as Ramón Díaz Sánchez, with Mene; Rómulo Gallegos, with Sobre la misma tierra and Miguel Otero Silva with Oficina N°1.

With Pluma Negra, Lira addresses this issue by portraying human subjectivities, such as the stereotype of rural hegemonic masculinity, with the suffering and violence that as a gender had to be endured and inflicted, while portraying the psychosocial obstacles to encountering femininity.

The author explained that the idea of ​​this book initially arose as a third collection of poems, after The island that you were and Trazos limbicos (Koeyú, 2023), but its focus changed when, during a family meeting, the youngest members began to ask him questions. about his grandparents and their experience. There arose the memories transmitted from generation to generation by their ancestors that today are gathered in this story.

“I told them that I was about nine years old and I heard my dad say that his grandfather said that we were not from a better social class, that we were poor, because the gringos stole our lands, always cheating us. And so the work began on how to tell that,” commented the author, who detailed how the work took shape and the narrative experiments he went through to obtain the novel.

In the words of its editor, Carlos Ortiz, this novel has features of the costumbrista or venezuelan narrative and also contemporary elements that serve to tell an epic centered on women from the mid-20th century.

“We are facing a novel that is much more than expected (…) The original is not the new but the unexpected and here there is a lot of that, the unexpected,” said Ortiz, who accompanied the author in the presentation of this book, together with the vice minister of Promotion of the Cultural Economy and president of the National Book Center (Cenal), Raúl Cazal; and the historian Luis Pellicer.

Cazal highlighted the dynamic and fresh style, along with the use of symbolic language to describe cockfights as a tool to represent a daily life associated with the masculine condition, without ignoring the same disputes and conflicts that occur in the feminine context in the face of impossibility of finding a full life.

Luis Lira Ochoa was born in Pariaguán, Anzoátegui state, a land that bears the imprint of oil and its meaning in the social life of Venezuelans born in the 20th century. He ventured into writing as a teenager, motivated by that youthful impetus that guided him towards literary creation, participating in workshops and poetry contests.

With Pluma negra he presents us with his role as a narrator, after having shown us his talent as a poet, in a prolific period as a literary creator that he has combined with his work as a public servant.

Lira studied at the Central University of Venezuela, where he received his degree as a psychiatrist. He is currently director of the University Clinical Hospital. He was president of the Barrio Adentro Foundation, vice minister of Hospitals and creator of the Psychiatry Service of the Los Samanes Hospital in Aragua state.

He was interim mayor of the Libertador municipality of Caracas and vice minister of Communication of the Ministry of Popular Power for Communication and Information.