Challenge

Peru | ‘Dreaming of Sunday Afternoons,’ by Giovanna Pollarolo (chapter 24)

By John Turnbull ⋅ October 6, 2008
⋅ ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

Editor’s note

Pollarolo

“When my day comes there will be no ironing / or soccer or deep sighs,” writes Giovanna Pollarolo in Toshiya Kamei’s translation. The poem comes from Pollarolo’s collection Entre mujeres solas (Among Solitary Women), published in 1991. She has written film scripts for former husband Francisco Lombardi and has been working toward a Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American literature at the University of Ottawa.

The work, originally titled “El sueño del domingo (por la tarde),” may reflect Pollarolo’s experiences growing up in Tacna, Peru, as the daughter of Italian immigrants. Certainly the text represents weekend routine—including the present, with television or online streaming substituting for radio—in vast portions of Latin America. As family lunch concludes the father “lies in bed barefoot … / the radio at full volume / Mom irons and grumbles.”

The football is on.

Colombian anthropologist Beatriz Vélez has devoted the past decade to researching gender-based separation that soccer both borrows from other aspects of daily life and that it perpetuates. She, too, remembers a childhood in which girls were not allowed to play. In Medellín, where Vélez teaches at Universidad de Antioquia, girls in physical-education classes were barred from playing soccer until 1986. Similar restrictions have existed elsewhere.

But the inequities came across starkly within the much-lauded Fútbol por la Paz (Football for Peace) program, developed in 1996 by Jürgen Griesbeck of Germany, now managing director of streetfootballworld in Berlin, to offer an alternative to gang violence. The murder of Andrés Escobar one week after Escobar’s own goal led to Colombia’s elimination at the 1994 World Cup also influenced Medellín’s selection as base for the experiment.

Yet the gender gulf that Pollarolo captures could not be bridged even within this peace-making effort. “In 1998,” Vélez writes, “a group of young women who wanted to participate in a community program centered around soccer reported being harassed by their fathers or other male relatives. Field research in Medellín in 1999 turned up other girls who were beaten, mocked, or insulted just for playing soccer.” Sometimes they are called marimachos (dykes).

Such prejudice seems “natural”—part of the order of things, Vélez says. While women are tolerated as spectators at football matches, female sportswriters and players remain targets of discrimination. “In this world,” Vélez continues, “men are supposed to choose a team and passionately support it, while women must resist the desire to participate.”

For the husband in Pollarolo’s poem, football represents freedom, writes critic David Wood. For the woman, the sport means servitude, the quotidian having become personal tragedy. Wood calls attention to other female Peruvian writers who have included the sport as part of the national literature’s embrace of populism. Blanca Varela, who died in Mar 09, wrote “Fútbol” in 1972. Like Pollarolo, Carmen Ollé in one of her poems, “Damas al dominó,” emphasizes football’s masculine associations by describing men mesmerized by a televised match, “oblivious to the sensuality of the female narrators and to their discussion of sexual relations” (Wood, 277).

In both Ollé’s and Pollarolo’s poetry, mass media elevates football’s prominence. The announcer in “Dreaming of Sunday Afternoons” is the only one who speaks, narrating missed opportunities and peppering the presentation with commercials. One interesting reference is to Inca Kola, the omnipresent yellow Peruvian soft drink brand that Coca-Cola locally has never outsold (see Daniel Titinger and Marco Avilés, “El imperio de la Inca,” Etiqueta negra 7, Dec 03).

The interview below appeared originally on the Global Game site on 25 Mar 03.

Interview with Beatriz Vélez

Beatriz Vélez provided an e-mail interview expanding on the excerpt from Hemisphere: A Magazine of the Americas that appeared in the Global Game’s issue 3 (Mar 03). Vélez, pictured below, led a three-year university study, “La escenificación del género en el fútbol, hermenéutica de la feminidad y la masculinidad en Colombia” (The Staging of Gender in Football: Hermeneutics of Masculinity and Femininity in Colombia), into the intensely masculine world of Colombian fútbol. Thanks to Buddy Hughes for the translation from Spanish. (The original Spanish version is also available.)

GG: What personal experiences have you had with fútbol in Colombia, either as a player or supporter? Did any of these experiences lead you to conduct research into the relationship between gender and fútbol?

Vélez (© 2002 Alma Mater, Universidad de
Antioquia; used by permission)

BV: My personal experience relates basically to my childhood days and early youth. Like every middle-class Colombian girl, I had to prepare myself to be a woman, helping my mother with household chores when there was not enough money to hire a maid. My only brother was not required to help out around the house, but was encouraged to go out and play football with his friends. Often he would come home with his clothes and football cleats full of mud, and it did not seem to bother him to leave a trail of dirt and grime across the floor which I had cleaned. This infuriated me, and I asked myself why he had the right to mess up what I had worked so hard to clean, and why he and his friends never ceased to tell a thousand and one times the same old stories about their games and the goals they scored.

In my position as a university professor, women’s studies became contagious for me, and I began to study the meaning of sexual identity and the way the society defines the potential or capability of the human body—for example, women as fit to produce children, men fit to be athletes or soldiers.

GG: You write in the fall 2002 issue of Hemisphere: A Magazine of the Americas that “field research in Medellín in 1999 turned up … girls who were beaten, mocked or insulted just for playing soccer.” What was the social situation of these girls? Did they continue in their efforts to play fútbol? If so, what was their motivation to keep playing?

BV: During 1997–1998 [Ed.: 1996] or thereabouts, a program was developed to reduce the level of violence among young people in the city of Medellín, Colombia. The program was called Fútbol por la Paz (Football for Peace) and used football as its mode of operation. Among other objectives, it sought to train young people how to negotiate their conflicts, and dealt with decision making and the establishment of rules for interaction. Taking into consideration the role and importance of women in the community, symbolically at least as mothers, it was deemed necessary to invite females to participate. One of the principles was the mixing of sexes on the teams; another was that the first goal in the game had to be made by a girl; and there were some others.

The persons I interviewed, who were responsible for the program, confessed that after a girl had scored the first goal, the boys would say, “Now we are going to play real football,” and thereafter the girls on the team would hardly ever get to kick the ball. On many occasions, the fathers would run onto the field and hit or mistreat the girls, and prohibit them from continuing with the program in spite of the fact that the program had the support of the mayor of the city.

Other studies carried out by my sociology students (both women and men) at the Universidad di Antioquia where I work, also denounced those actions as insidious violence. The same was true in the interviews I conducted during the empirical research about the game, of the advantages and disadvantages for women and men who play football. Despite all of this, the women are still determined to continue playing football. The integrity of many women has made it possible for more and more girls to become interested in football, and there are now several football schools for girls. Perhaps because of the work of the feminists, relations between the sexes are also changing in the Colombian urban sectors.

GG: You mention the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano in an article in Alma Mater. He writes about the soccer ball as a feminine object—“la pelota es femenina …”—which you interpret as another way that fútbol operates as an agent of the masculine. In your view, do South American men such as Galeano think this way unconsciously, or is there a deliberate strategy to exclude?

BV: The ball or football seems to have a symbolic feminine value by being the object for which various men from different teams dispute over, because one cannot overlook the fact that football—like sports in general—is an activity which operates under the agency of the masculine identity, the same as weapons. Football permits a man to demonstrate, in front of other men, his virility, endurance, strength, and capacity to develop physical powers which lay dormant, through a regime of training which blends together enhanced bodily hormones—testosterone in particular, but also sweat and blood. For that reason, men—particularly South American men, but not only so (let us remember the work of Eric Dunning about English football players)—whether consciously or not, want to preserve football for themselves.

In Colombia this is very pathetic since some men even reached the point of telling me that women lack “the balls” to play football, that they lacked something, and that something is corporal and refers to the potency of the masculine sex. There are also men who are not sufficient for the sport, according to some.

GG: What is the importance for broader society of women being able to play fútbol in Colombia and elsewhere in South America?

BV: In my judgment it would make society more equitable, less sexist, more democratic, and would put an end to much suffering for women who play football. It is evident that the Colombian girls who emigrate for example to the USA—where the idea that soccer is masculine doesn’t exist since soccer has not been as popular for men as American football or baseball—feel better about themselves when they play soccer. I have interviewed some who confessed to me that they feel proud to play soccer in the cultural milieu of the USA, which is different from that of Colombia, and they openly express their pride, whereas in Colombia they hide their interest in football by lying or keeping silent.

Sources

Sjef van Hoof, “Shot through the Heart,” FourFourTwo, Aug 04, 119–21; Beatriz Vélez, “El fútbol en Colombia ¿Un escenario para el juego de género?” Revista Nova y Vetera (Instituto de Derechos Humanos, ESAP) 36 (Aug–Sep 99); idem, “Where Are the Women?” Hemispheres: A Magazine of the Americas (Latin and Caribbean Center, Florida International University) 11 (fall 02): 12–15; David Wood, “Reading the Game: The Role of Football in Peruvian Literature,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 22 (Mar 05): 266–84.

Tags: Andres Escobar, Beatriz Vélez, Buddy Hughes, Colombia, Eduardo Galeano, Eric Dunning, Football for Peace, Fútbol por la Paz, Giovanna Pollarolo, Medellín, Peru, Universidad de Antioquia, women's rights, women's soccer