The novel “Cositas”, by Benoît Coquil, nominated for the Femina Des Lycéens 2023 award, began to take shape in 2019 when the French writer acquired in the great market of Oaxaca a shirt with the printed face of the shaman María Sabina, who in the last century used the hallucinogenic mushrooms Psilocybe for his “little things”.
Latin American associate professor of Spanish and civilization and literature at the University of Picardia Jules Verne, Coquil explained on Monday in Barcelona that he conceived history as a “adventure novel” in which he contrasses this figure with that of the American couple fond of mycology formed by Gordon and Valentina Wasson, all of them real characters.
At the same time, not without humor, deems what he has done over the West centuries when he runs with native cultures beyond the seas and how he “markets and turns exotic.”
Published in Spanish by Seix Barral and in Catalan by Periscopi, in “Cositas” the reader will know the trips to Mexico, in the fifties, the Wasson and the “discovery” that they make there of the Psilocybe, the seed of the psychedelic counterculture, which will arouse both the interest of the CIA and the pharmaceutical laboratories and of Walt Disney and the hippie movement.
Fascinated by María Sabina, the Half of Huautla, spent months documented on her, appearing at that time the marriage formed by Gordon, a banker in New York who became vice president of JP Morgan, and Valentina Wasson, her wife of Russian, pediatrician origin, and that always appeared in a second term, when she was the “family scientist and the one who had the intuition that the mushrooms used. they could use for therapeutic uses. ”
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On Gordon Wasson, he pointed out that he took some love, although he was someone “contradictory”, whom he calls, not without irony, as “Christopher Columbus of hallucinogenic mushrooms.”
However, his figure likes him for his “curiosity and his ability to go to the bottom of a subject, in addition to being fun between his banker’s life and his passion for hallucinogenic fungi, which proved the same as his wife.”
As for María Sabina, she said that from the first moment she caught her attention that was for years a “powerful” figure to be the “healer” of her community, but with a life “marked by misery, which lived the end of his excluded days, being high post Mortan, becoming an iconic figure of the twentieth century.”
Showing her among clouds of smoke, she did not want her to be seen as someone of an “impeccable purity.”
One of the requests that María Sabina made to the Wasson when she saw the interest they had for the Psilocybe was that they did not disseminate or explain to anyone what happened when it was proven, something that was not fulfilled, because Gordon Wasson wrote an article in the magazine Life and the life in Huautla changed forever.
“The discovery of the fungus came when everyone in the West was very attentive to new experiences and eager to try new things and to experiment. It was a perfect time,” he described today.
With EFE information
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