Yuliana Ortiz Ruano is an Ecuadorian poet and writer. She has published poetry in  Sovoz, Canciones desde el fin del mundo (Libero Editorial, Madrid) and Cuaderno del imposible retorno a Pangea (Cajón de Sastre, Bogotá). She was selected in the Translator Choice II of the Latin American Literature Festival LATINALE, organized by the Cervantes Institute of Berlin. Carnival Fever (Himpar Editores, Colombia) her first novel, won the IESS Primo Romanzo Latinoamericano prize in Italy, the national prize for best novel Joaquín Gallegos Lara in Ecuador and the PEN Presents, and PEN Translates Award. Winner of the International Writers in Residence Program in Granada, Unesco Literary City 2023. Her poetic work has been translated into Portuguese, English, Finnish and German.

To draw coordinates between the birth and the outlet of pleasures, or events that brought me closer to it, I first expand my possibilities of the self. I cross that threshold as a disembodied experience. A shedding of dead skin, as if the self were a transparent, even unbreakable membrane that, when permeated, creates a collective body. This way of conceiving myself as a multiple body, a herd body; a populous mass of beings coursing through the veins, panting behind my cells is, for me, the closest thing to the first perception of pleasure in my beach-girl child's body.

As if two legs were not enough, I would run like mad from my mother's car to the beach, with a desperation that my body couldn't contain. A strength that made my legs shatter as I fell. An unbridled force that my anatomy could not process. So much entanglement could not fit into a small body: to protect itself it aborted the mission of the trot. It collapsed.

Everything that gave me pleasure was outside my body and in relation to other bodies. The burn of stepping on the boiling sand, then digging a small hole with my feet, until I found relief in the damp sand below. A core of cold sand inhabiting the soles of my feet. The sting of opening my eyes under the salt water, to then lie face up on the shore crying a microscopic sea. The miracle of observing up close for the first time, the carcass of a whale stranded on the beach of Las Palmas.

Although I couldn't name what I felt, the touch and the encounter of the body with other bodies, I was nevertheless certain that those bodies were mine as much as I was theirs. A mutual belonging and a way of acquiring different forms. The sand passing through my dermis was also my dermis making way for the inert particles/cells of the beach. Despite having no rational memory of my first ever glimpse of the sea, I never stopped viewing it with awe. It never ceased to move me, with the indescribable intensity of one who becomes a girl in the jaws of a giant beast.

The skin is the largest organ of the body, but that skin attached to our bones is not a skin alone. I could never understand or feel the state of loneliness as something valid. I was never alone; there were the objects exerting their sidelong gaze on me at night. The books in a filial relationship of hatred with dust and lint, waiting to be picked up. The porcelain cups to play at eating also penetrated my eyes until they screamed inwardly. And the trunks from my grandmother's house, filled with fabrics that my fingers were desperate to touch. Sometimes it was not me reaching for them but them demanding to be touched.

The question about the edges is, in turn, one of taking pleasure seriously. My mind does nothing but take me back to childhood, which is so far for me, the age of imperceptible enjoyment. In the house where I spent my first years there was a guava tree, a custard apple tree and innumerable vegetable beings imposing their presence in the yard. But the guava and custard apple trees were the gods of that green and brown kingdom. My body moved involuntarily toward them with such force that sometimes I didn't know who was climbing whom. Sometimes I dreamed I was a tree and saw how from my hands, from my fingers, from my hair, guavas fell singing like moons full of little white worms that I still devoured urgently.

Those trees were my other selves, I thought. They were brown and shiny, their trunks sometimes turning green. Sometimes they were swarming with ants; other times the leaves fell to the ground, while I, from the back door leading to the courtyard, let out a high-pitched scream. I would think: the fall of a leaf is the fall of a lock of hair, like the ones I pull out when I untangle myself in the shower: then I would pick up the leaves and bury them in the same secret hole where I buried my hair. Together, both bundles of hair and leaves formed a greener, more disintegrated me.

I would also spend endless hours climbing on their branches, talking to myself. The trees would respond by shedding their skins on my body or on the ground. There was a whole array of encounters between the earth around the trees, my thin, almost vegetable body and the other bushes. Sometimes I wanted to reach out to hug both trees against my chest. I would try so hard, I would spread my legs and arms trying to expand to bring them closer to me. The pain after the ritual of trying to be one with them was also a precious encounter with joy. A crab-like walk until my legs returned to their natural state again.

If I speak of pleasure I return to childhood, to the never innocent encounter of the first ways of exploring my body in relation to the living bodies that surrounded me. In relation also to the non-acting bodies, which for me were so present that breathing and beating would have been an unnecessary scandal. Things were born and lived from my eye to my tongue. My tongue also lived with those things to which it adhered in order to recognize them, to know they existed. Childhood is the excessive touch of the world, that is: the eye touching the water, the water looking closely at the iris; the iris tormented by the salt that enters; the earth entering the corner between my nails and my skin, making my crevices and hollows an infinite home; the wormy fruit populating the inside of my throat. The invertebrate body of a slug slipping its moisture between my fingers; my fingers twitching at the moisture; a worm the colour of a tomato digging a hole in the top of the leaf, my nose breathing in the sound of the insect. The sound of a pipe opening at the sharp blow of a machete, pouring its water like a woman's waters breaking; the skin shed by the tender, transparent pipe sticking bit by bit onto the roof of my mouth.

The smell of wood being broken by the hands of grown men, the earth that served as a home to the splinters of a tree trunk giving off a new smell of earth and cut wood. The sea trying to enter whole through my legs, through my mouth; the sand that filled my hair and never wanted to leave; the stagnant water resting greenish in an empty flowerpot, a living and invisible ecosystem; a green stain screaming to be looked at, to be breathed. All that, palpable in the past that is my most latent self, is still, the pleasure unfolded before the bodies.

To write I locate the body in geography, unfolding it in my mind like a map, that is, the abstraction of geography. I am not sure if I access reality through what maps show me; as a child I thought maps were a tactile truth. I accessed the world, or filled my head with acoustic images of what I thought was the world, through the maps that came in atlases. I grew up with teachers who relied on books as a possibility of the real.

Maybe it was at the age of eighteen, almost too late, when I realized that Limones, La Tolita de los Ruano and Canchimalero were not on the maps I'd thus far had access to . I had walked along the shore of Canchimalero on more than one occasion. I had crossed from its shore to the Limones dock, I had also slept at my grandfather's farm in La Tolita de los Ruano. Where were those shores subsumed by non-existence in the maps? Mapping, I thought, is also to exclude, beyond the need of time for those who make the cartography or the territorial ignorance, of good or bad intentions. To map is to exclude and the shores where I had felt life were not on maps or in books.

To write, I place my body on the shore, a shore that changes because what is near the sea is always subject to rapid and radical transformation, this ever-changing shore, which my infant body perceived as infinite.

As a child, the shore was the closest thing to freedom. At the edge of the sea you could do anything: build absurd structures, only to see them fall, swallowed by the water; swim naked while watching distant giant manta rays jumping, from which you had to flee; find flattened sea urchins - I would later discover in a marine biology book that this type of urchin was called the five-hole sea dollar, ellita quinquiesperforata and that it is only found in the Atlantic - but I was sure that those were the sea urchins my feet experimented with as an infant.

What were the books telling me again?

The shore was the space of celebrations, of running without limit from end to end, and the border of the sea could be circumvented by submerging the body, becoming one with the creatures that inhabit the water. But to think of the shore is also to remember that in the colonial cities the powerful were not near this space bordering the sea, for fear of being invaded by pirates. How is it that now, the daughters of black women and pirates have been displaced from the shore?

To reach the shore you had to walk many kilometers under the sun and the shade of the trees, because even though close, the shore was not entirely accessible to us. From the beach you could see the houses of the owners of the shore, who deep down dreamed of closing it forever, preventing the daughters of the abusive black proletariat invading their landscape.

But my young self, guided by the pack of aunts, the ñañas, cared little or nothing about what those eyes, from the comfort of the balconies, would think of us. We would grab our bikinis, sunglasses, straw and chonta bags and set off on foot to the shore.

The first public photos I have of myself as a baby were taken on the shore of Las Palmas. My naked body that had barely learned to sit, rested on a football jersey. A strategically placed Pilsener bottle kept it from blowing away in the wind, and in the background were many dancing, half-naked bodies, enjoying the sovereignty of the shore.

I speak of a self in relation to other non-humans, because being born on an island and living near the shore does not guarantee an inherent filial bond with it. There were some people in the neighbourhood where I grew up who hated the sand and detested going into the sea. Others were even afraid of it. Still others couldn't stand the partying, the noise and the scandal that the shore brought. Perhaps that is why in the 2000s there were private beaches in the province of Esmeraldas, closed to people who had grown up and lived there all their lives - they could neither enter nor dream of settling down to enjoy their beach.

My childhood self felt that I belonged to that space adjacent to the water and mollusks. That there had to be some way to stay on the shore, a territory that felt like home, a place of shelter and fun, but also of event, with all that events entails: that which is difficult to grasp with words. Everything that empties us of language.

From my personal perception, and perhaps influenced by my being a resident of borders, to be a black woman of African, palenquera descent, is not to have a country, but to fluctuate between the shores, enabling nonverbal encounters with everything that composes it. That shore that has so often burned my feet, that sea that on more than one occasion has wanted to swallow me and returned my panting body to the exoskeleton-strewn sand.

It is from that territory, which is being so stolen from us by drug-trafficking, violence, and also tourism, that Ainhoa's voice was born. My daughter has emerged from the shipwreck of the sea inside me to reactivate a possible way of existing through literature.

A girl who overflows and changes constantly like the sea, who knows she has come from the depths of the ocean, from those temperatures and atmospheric pressure that a human body cannot withstand, therefore, she always claims to return to it. On the shore I am always another, I disrobe and resignify myself and even lose identity... from that loss, from that not knowing. From that groping, like walking on hot sand at noon, from that constant doubting of language as a liberating device, I write.

I write full of questions and sinuosities. Dreaming, perhaps, of inventing another language.