State’s madness and crimes. Notes on Rebellion in the Backlands, Os Sertões (1902), Euclides da Cunha, trans. Samuel Putman

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Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, Rebellion in the Backlands, from 1902, tells the story of the military campaign the government of the young republic of Brazil undertook against the Sertões, a set of rural communities in the Northeastern region of Canudos at the end of the nineteenth century. In an introduction from 1943, the Brazilian homme de lettres Afrânio Peixoto considered da Cunha as Brazil’s “number one-geographer and sociologist” (xxvii). Peixtoto goes as far as to say that if “the Book of Genesis may be said to be, in the symbolism that it holds for the faithful, a biography of earth, Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões is a Genesis which in epic accents tells of the meeting of civilization and barbarism; it is a saga of the first flaming days of the earth and of man and of primal man’s first direct contact with other men known as civilized” (xxix). What, perhaps, Peixoto misses in his laudatory “Preface,” is that the da Cunha’s text is the genesis of the Brazilian modern state.

The conflict between the Brazilian state and the sertões is not directly presented. Da Cunha digresses into observations of the landscape and the people of the Backlands. In an environmental determinism key, da Cunha presents a people that is strongly tied to the geographical conditions of the space they inhabit. That is, since the Canudos is a region of extreme climates, in which the dry season is unbearable because of its lack of “natural resources,” and the rainy season is chaotic due to the constant floods, the dwellers of these areas have, as well, an extremist and fatalistic behaviour. Nature, for da Cunha, has an energy “it shares with man” (37). And the people from the Backlands, the sertanejos, are a very particular type of people, for Cunha. They are mestizos, miscegenated individuals, but contrary to other mestizos in Brazil, for da Cunha, the sertanejo is “above all else a strong individual […] he is ugly, awkward, stooped […] He is the man that is always tired” and by the same token is “an amazingly different being, capable of extraordinary feats of strength and agility” (89-90). Between admiration and contempt, da Cunha paints an ambiguous enemy of the Brazilian state.

If the military campaign against the sertões marks the birth of modern Brazil, then, to some extent, the campaign is not only against a particular group of people, but against nature. Da Cunha empathized with the belief that in Latin American nations, at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a struggle between civilization (European values and traditions) and barbarism (the values of the peripheries). Just like Domingo Sarmiento in Argentina, da Cunha would champion civilization over barbarism. The rebellion in the Backlands ran for almost two years. And the event that triggered it was a dispute over the purchase of lumber between Antonio Conselheiro, a priest, leader of the sertanejos, and founding father of the settlements where the sertanejos dwelled, and Arlindo Leoni, the magistrate of the Joazeiro. Da Cunha states that Conselheiro had purchased “a certain quantity of lumber which the extremely impoverished caatingas of Canudos were unable to furnish him” (178). The purchase was legal and in good faith, but “when the time agreed upon for the delivery of the material, which was to be used in the completion of the new church, came around, there was no lumber in sight” (179). There was a pre-existing beef between Conselheiro and Leoni, so da Cunha tells us, and by not delivering the lumber, the magistrate was “evening the score” (179). So Leoni sent a telegram to the respective authorities informing of the possibility of an imminent attack from the setanejos. With this, several expeditions and four regular expeditions begun against the sertanejos. And while surely, in early October 1897, the dwellers of the Backlands were fully defeated, how did these enterprises of civilization had such a hard time defeating the poor barbarians of the Canudos?

“Nature protects the sertanejo” (195), tells us da Cunha. And it is not only nature that aids the setanejos. After the defeat of Moreira Cesar, a commander who was supposedly undefeatable, may of the soldiers became disappointed. These soldiers were all “mestizos, of the same racial stock as the backwoodsmen; and in their discouragement over the inexplicable defeat which they had suffered […] they fell victim to the power of suggestion and, seeing in it all an element of the marvelous and the supernatural, were filled with an unreasoning terror —a terror that was further increased by the extravagant stories that were going around” (369). As the campaign continued, the warfare increased its affects. During the last days of the struggle, the state forces used dynamite as a way of fully destroying the sertanejo’s labyrinthic settlements. For da Cunha, this was “fitting enough” because “the sertanejos had inverted all psychology of ordinary warfare; their resistance was stiffened by reverses, and they were strengthened by hunger, hardened by defeat” (464). With the bombing of the houses, the violence of dynamite was bringing hell on earth, and as da Cunha puts it the bombing was both “a recognition and a consecration” (463). From this perspective, then, just like the sertanejos had inverted all “psychology of ordinary warfare,” they had also inverted the dichotomy between civilization and barbarism. If civilization reveals to be destructive and annihilating, then on what grounds can it place itself superior to barbarism? And more importantly, how can civilization offer anything appealing to the barbarian? The Canudos, the sertanejos, da Cunha tells us, “did not surrender” (475). At the very end of the conflict when Conselheiro was already dead, “an old man, two other full-grown men, and a child, [were] facing a furiously raging army of five thousand soldiers” (475). While da Cunha tells us that what happened next “we could not describe” (475), the horror is alluded. The campaign against the sertanejos, then, had the “essential outlines of crime and madness,” and as the last two lines of the text suggest, (“The trouble is that we do not have today a Maudsley for acts of madness and crimes on the part of nations…” [476]), how can one determine that a nation-state is insane or has committed a crime when it is the nation-state who seeks civilization, order and progress?

Notes on Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, a Study in Sociology (1897)

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Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, a Study in Sociology, from 1897, is both method and study. That is, the book is not only presenting a sociological approach to the study of suicide, but it is also teaches what is the use of sociology. As Durkheim’s first lines to the book put it, “sociology has been in vogue for some time” (35). The discipline is on a stage of development, at the stage of “system-building and philosophical synthesis” (35). What sociology attempts, then, is to provide a study of society of philosophical consequences, one is tempted to say of ontological consequences.

Divided in three books, Suicide traces the way different sciences have approached suicide; it revises what physicians and other sociologists have written before Durkheim (notably these perspectives will be refuted); it also offers statistics and data to chart the number of individuals who have committed suicide. The chore of the argument is that suicide is socially caused. That is, while there is a form of suicide that is manifested by purely “personal” reasons, i.e. suicides that Durkheim’s attributes to an unstable mental health, suicide, in general, is prefigured by social forces. To determine these social forces, Durkheim begins by comparing the suicide rate of different areas in a country. In the states of Germany, for instance, he notes that there are notable differences between the suicide rates of the provinces of Rhenish Palatinate and Bavaria. While the latter has the lowest number of suicides between 1867 and 1875 (19 in total) in the German states, the former has one of the highest number of suicides (157 in total). For Durkheim, the number of suicides in a state is relative to the number of Catholics and Protestants in each state. So, Catholicism socially cancels suicide, while Protestantism propitiates it, to some extent. For Durkheim it is the values of each of these religions what determines the predisposition of people towards the act of suicide. That is, while for the catholic all form of suicide is “abhorrent,” the Protestant is more convinced that each individual is “the author of [their own] faith” (158). Since Protestantism embraces the “spirit of free inquiry” (158), then, when one starts thinking for themselves, one quickly realizes that life does not make sense. It is not that Protestantism “kills,” but that by the fact that individualism becomes crucial for Protestantism, excessive individualism results in egoistic suicide. As Durkheim would put it “the more the believer doubts, that is, the less he feels himself a real participant in the religious faith to which he belongs, and from which he is freeing himself; the more the family and community become freeing to the individual, so much the more does he become a mystery to himself, unable to escape the exasperating and agonizing question: to what purpose?” (212). The individual becomes less integrated and regulated by society because individuals can integrate and regulate themselves on their own, and by extension, they can decide if life is worth living.

It would seem, then, that behind the sociological inquiry, at least as presented by Durkheim in Suicide, there is a defence of traditional values, or more precisely to Catholicism. But, far from it, Durkheim also charts the existence of suicide within traditional values. That is, if egoistic suicide is tied to Protestant values of individualism, altruistic suicide would be tied to the excessive presence of the social group. While egoistic suicide is a matter of decision, altruistic suicide will be a “duty” (219). In other words, whereas egoistic suicide results from an individual decision, altruistic suicide depends on a collective decision. Egoistic suicide is no sacrifice, but a refusal to keep living within a particular social context; altruistic suicide is, above all, a sacrifice for the greater good. The former is an excessive manifestation of the self, the latter does not question if life is worth living, they simply give their life for the good of the socius, society. In a society where individuals are both highly regulated and integrated there is a “joy of sacrifice,” because, even with no particular reason, renunciation [to life] in itself is considered praiseworthy” (223). Durkheim proposes a possible history of this type of suicide, from ancient societies to modern ones. If in ancient societies religion was tied to altruistic suicide, in martyrdom, in modern society, it is the army the institution that embraces altruistic suicide.

Durkheim proposes that there is a third type of suicide: the anomic suicide. This suicide seems to appear only in periods of acute crisis. But Durkheim would argue that this form of suicide, at least at the end of the nineteenth century, has become normal, especially in people in the fields of trade and industry. “For a whole century, economic progress has mainly consisted in freeing industrial relations from all regulation” (254). And with this, religion “has lost most of its power. And government, instead of regulating economic life, has become its tool and servant” (255). So, if egoistic suicide derives from the maximization of individual doubt and open inquiry, and altruistic suicide is motivated by the duty to sacrifice an individual life for the good of society, anomic suicide combines both individual duty and individual decision. That is, anomic suicide is tied fully to the revolting forces of capitalist accumulation. While Durkheim does never mention the word capitalism, his diagnosis of the late nineteenth century is akin to Marx’s. Since there has been a “liberation of desires” that “has been made worse by the development of industry and the almost infinite extension of the market” (255), anomic suicide is what comes when both egoistic suicide, the informed decision of kill oneself, coexists and antagonizes with altruistic suicide, the self-sacrifice for a bigger good.

To some extent, Durkheim is already challenging Max Weber’s explanation of the rise of capitalism. It is not the protestant ethic, as described by Weber, that is behind the expansion of capitalism (the liberation of desires by the infinite expansion of the market), but the conflict between traditional (Catholic) and modern (Protestant) values. If capitalism, as described by Engels and Marx, is characterized by the revolting and revolutionary forces of the bourgeoisie, mixing the old and the new, then, anomic suicide lies in-between the intelligibility of both traditional and modern values, anomic suicide is the grammar of capitalism (since grammar is the unseen infrastructure of enunciation). It makes sense, then, that Durkheim has a hard time typifying anomic suicide. He relates it to both egoistic suicide and altruistic suicide (258), but he insists on the radical difference between them. While both altruistic and egoistic suicide “draw their chief recruits from the same social environments [army men, for the altruistic; intellectual careers for the egoistic] […] the other [anomic suicide draws from] the industrial commercial world” (258). What is the industrial commercial world, at the end of the nineteenth century, if not a combination of both militarism and highly educated elites? The anomic suicide is the suicide of the soldiers of capital: individuals who are the byproduct of the intellectualization (Protestantism) and sacralization (Catholicism) of capitalist relationships, a society both modern and traditional, and in perpetual change.

In the last section of the book, “Practical Consequences,” Durkheim tries to solve the problem of anomic suicide, and of suicide in general. He stresses that since anomic suicide goes against society, or more precisely against the forces that guarantee the cohesion between individuals (integration and regulation), a form of socialization should restrain the centripetal force of anomic suicide. While religion, the family, and politics have been key in restraining anomic suicide, in the late nineteenth century, for Durkheim, none of these institutions can restrain anymore the anomy. With the emergence of capitalist relationships (though capitalism is a concept alien to the book, as mentioned before) where can one find a restrainer for the anomy? “The only way to resolve this antinomy is to set up a cluster of collective forces outside the State, though subject to its action, whose regulative influence can be exerted with greater variety” (380).

Durkheim’s distrust of the state derives from what he sees as an ambivalent transformation of political power since the French Revolution. That is, Durkheim believes that since the state was the only institution that survived the ancient regime, the state’s own survival and perseverance made of it an institution that “tended to absorb all forms of activity which had a social character,” and no other social institution was able to challenge this because the rubble of the ancient regime was but “an unstable flux of individuals” (389). Modern society, then, is a state society, “Individuals are made aware of society and of their dependence upon it only through the State [sic]” (389). As a consequence, “While the State [sic] becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them” (389). If the state cannot make of the individual but “liquid molecules,” what can guarantee grip, solidity, restraint and order in society? Durkheim’s proposal is to provide the restitution of autonomy to local groups, he proposes a “decentralization” of society from the state, a decentralization that would “simultaneously produce a greater concentration of social energies” (389). This decentralization then is meant to not loose “the bonds uniting each apart of society with the State [sic], moral powers must be created with an influence, which the state cannot have, over the multitude of individuals” (390). It would seem, then, that Durkheim is appealing for the emergence of an autonomous multitude of individuals, such multitude is open to building bridges for the sake of taming anomic suicide. Since moral power is the only power that holds people together, for Durkheim, then, it is not by abolishing the state, or the market, or capitalism, that one cancels anomic suicide. If one cannot control the flows of the “luquid molecules,” one can at least try to direct their fluidity, one can bet on hydraulics as sociability. But would this end for good anomic suicide? And more importantly, what would happen if moral power become anomic itself?

From Euphoria to Boredom. Why did a teen drama turned into a show about narcos? A review to Euphoria’s third season

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The last season of Sam Levinson’s Euphoria (2019-2026) changed drastically its narrative arc. From being a teen drama or a coming-of-age television show that dealt with addiction, gender issues, and, to some extent, the “American dream,” the show turned into a show about narcos and cartels. And while shows about narcos promise entertainment and high emotions, many of them are simply boring: Euphoria is not the exception.

The third season kick-starts with Rue being a drug mule for Laurie, the emotionless drug dealer who Rue tried to outsmart in the previous season. If during the first two seasons Rue was trapped in the cycles of addiction and the almost death of her social existence (that is, of being detached from her capacity of socializing due to her addictions), now she is trapped in the cycle of exploitation that cancels her social life outside of the cartel she works for. From recovering addict, she became less than lumpen worker. In some way, all the main characters of the show follow Rue’s path. Nate piles up debt with the Armenian mafia because his major investment, the construction and development of a retirement home has been truncated by a protected species of flower that grows where complex would be built; Cassie feels Nate is not delivering his promises, she wants more money and more attention so she opens an only fans account; Maddy is stagnated in her career, she is close to the glamour and wealth of Los Angeles, but she is nothing but smoke and mirrors, she barely makes it to the end of the month, and her boss over exploits her; Jules has found a sugar daddy, and while are their needs are taken care of, and she is free to paint whatever she wants, all her paintings are but the repetition of the same motif, trans-gendered generic bodies. To add to all this, all the characters are caught up in a feud between Alamo Brown, a human trafficker and narco, and Laurie’s cartel, made up by her neo-nazi accomplices.

All of America’s problems lead to the narco. Or rather, all of America’s problems have become a matter of a narco anti-sociability. If the main intention of the genre of the “teen drama” or the coming-of-age television show is to teach audiences about the way society “receives” or “makes” a new member, Euphoria has always been a show concerned on the radical changes that have transformed sociability in the last twenty years. Indeed, for much of the way the show explores on the ambivalence of addiction, as an aesthetic, or as an ontology, the show also explores addiction as the limit of sociability. After all, addicts have been historically ostracized and placed at the margins of society. And while the first two seasons of the show demonstrate that addiction does not cancel sociability, since a precarious sociability is ambivalent, and at times, productive, the third season tosses all sociability away. One can see this clearly expressed in Rue’s transition from addict to drug-mule. While Rue’s addiction was the triggering point for ending the relationship with her mom, and ultimately with Jules, once she is a drug-mule, her relationships are out of bounds: she does not listen to her friends, and her friends do not listen to her. At a point in the season, she is chatting with Lexi, Cassie’s sister, that now works as an assistant in Hollywood. While the two friends are trying to reconnect, they hardly talk. In fact, this interaction is but a mis-encounter: Lexie expresses her concerns about her sister, Cassie, and Rue tells her about a miracle she witnessed. They seem to be having a conversation, but they are not. They are asocially interacting or are together in an anti-social way.

If the addict allowed some sort of precarious sociability, a narco does not. A narco is worse than an addict, seems to be the morale of the show. But for much of the show’s effort in describing what the narco can do, the show delivers a heterogeneous cocktail of canonical tropes of the US: the frontier, the old west, cowboys and Indians, racial issues, mafia, Christianity, and so on. If anything, the show tries to tell us that the narco does not make sense. Rue and Ali, Rue’s sponsor at the AA meetings, have a conversation about the fentanyl crises. Ali wonders why traffickers would sell a product that kills. “Why kill the consumer?” Ali wonders. “It does not make sense,” he concludes. And precisely, the narco does not make sense. If anything, the show would suggest that the narco would be not only the business of killing, a business that mixes human trafficking with sexual enslavement with territorial control, and drug-trafficking, but that the narco, ultimately, is to deliver death at all levels, even at the level of consumption and intoxication.

While for sure the show gives much to think. It is rather boring and dull. And to some extent, it also mimics what it tells us about the narco: it kills its main character and resolves a la Tarantino the tensions between drug lords (Alamo and Laurie). Why kill Rue? With Rue’s death the show shifts from the euphoria of the first season to a boredom that dully gives much to think but little, if not nothing, to enjoy.

9 to 5 (1980): liberation, fantasy and women empowerment

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The saying “behind every great man is a great woman” has always been a euphemism of the domination of men over women. In more than one way, the film 9 to 5 (1980) directed by Collin Higgins deconstructs this common saying. The film kickstarts with the busy streets of New York City, as masses of women dart into their jobs. As the lyrics of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” accompany the opening sequence, the film presents one of its main characters, Judy, a recently divorced woman who is about to begin her first ever job. Once Judy finds her way into the right building and the right floor where her new employment waits for her, she is introduced to her direct supervisor, Violet, a widow who runs diligently a crew of secretaries under the supervision of Mr. Hart, the vice-president of the company. As Judy’s first day begins, she soon realizes that her new work environment is far from perfect.

One day, Judy finds out that there is a rumour around the professional relationship between Mr. Hart and her personal assistant Doralee. The rumour has it that Doralee is sleeping with her boss. To make matters worse, the rumour was spread by Mr. Hart himself. And not only that, but gossip around the office is also surveyed and policed by Roz, Mr. Hart’s hardcore loyalist company associate. By extension, women cannot openly confront Doralee, nor they can speculate much about what happens at the office. While it would seem that Mr. Hart has a tight grip over his women employees, and in general all his subordinates (professionally and personally [that is, including his wife]), one day things fall apart. Once Violet’s ideas, yet again, were stolen by Mr. Hart and the long-waited promotion that she was seeking will not come, since a less experienced (and completely absent from the plot) man will be promoted instead of her, Violet explodes in anger and frustration. She threatens Mr. Hart, accuses Doralee of being her lover, and storms out of the office to the closest bar. This triggers a chain reaction in which Doralee and Judy will follow Violet as they both raise their voices and concerns: Doralee confronts Mr. Hart about the rumour he made about her, and Judy speaks up her frustration over the firing of a co-worker.

At the bar, somehow, liberation begins. That is, once the three women are confronted with the fact that their boss is, as the film would say later, a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” and they start talking about it, they start discussing the possibility of changing their conditions of exploitation. Surprisingly, the film suggests that to liberate oneself, one should talk with others, and more importantly, share their dreams about change. After the three women, Doralee, Judy and Violet, decide they would spend the rest of the day drinking and chatting, they smoke a marijuana joint. Later, they share their fantasies of getting rid of Mr. Hart. All their dreams coincide that the boss should be better gone from the office. As the story continues, Mr. Hart is deprived of her putative power to command. After he fails to blackmail Violet, Judy and Doralee, Mr. Hart is abducted and restrained at his house since his wife is away for a month.

Without bosses, the workplace flourishes and things improve, including the productivity at the workplace. In fact, the women quickly realize that the boss is but a signature, a ghostly presence that becomes irrelevant when workers gain agency, freedom, and support. Having a boss at the boss is, then, not only unnecessary but also unproductive. Doralee, Violet, and Judy create a flexible work environment in which workers go to the office whenever it fits better with their own personal schedules, they also encourage workers to decorate their own workspaces (something forbidden when Mr. Hart was around), and they establish a day-care at work. Even more, Violet has found evidence that Mr. Hart has been stealing from the company by keeping a double booking of items sold by the company. In short, all is perfect without the boss.

While bliss and productivity grow at the office, the wife of Mr. Hart returns early from her trip. And she liberates her husband. Angry and ready to take revenge, Mr. Hart goes back to the office. At gunpoint he forces Violet, Judy and Doralee to renounce to their ambitions. His revenge will be served, and the women will be punished. But then, almost by deux ex machina, the chairman of the company, Mr. Tinsworthy, shows at the New York City office. The chairman is there to congratulate Mr. Hart. After the recent changes implemented in the New York offices, productivity has increased historically. From being revenge driven, Mr. Hart turns to praise receiving. Finally, since the chairman is so impressed by the work of Mr. Hart, he promotes him to be the head of operations at the company’s offices in Brazil. The boss is gone now and forever. The women are free, the changes stay, but the happy ending happens thanks to the will of the “big-male-boss.” One can argue that the film betrays its plea for liberation and women-empowerment by giving the chairman, at the end of the day, the absolute power to get rid of Mr. Hart, women agency is reduced. At the same time, it would be too simplistic to say that women agency, in the film is reduced by the presence and actions of the chairman of the company. And more importantly, the lesson of the film, if there is one, anyway, is that liberation comes from dreaming together and working together, that changes are achievable, and that even if hierarchies are difficult to fight back, it is the productive work of those oppressed that both presupposes and exceeds any form of exploitation: just as the company was productive when Mr. Hart was oppressed and the company was more productive when he was not around, the only constant was the labour of the workers. If productivity depends on the happiness of workers, why then would companies bet on hierarchies and bosses?

Lullaby: Caring for Life and Happiness

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We know from the very outset of Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby (2016) the conclusion of the story it tells: this is the tale of a nanny who murders the two children who are in her charge. The book is therefore in part an investigation into how such a tragic event could come to pass. How does a woman described as “this perfect nanny” (202; also the US title of the English translation) come so dramatically to turn from being the embodiment of care to being the agent of destruction and violence against two young innocents? But the book is equally–and perhaps even more–powerful as an exploration of the ambiguous and ambivalent relationship between employer and employee in domestic service. The murder that caps this story merely plays out the worst fear of a relatively common condition, when well-meaning middle-class parents invite an unknown quantity into the heart of their familial arrangements.

The parents here, Paul and Myriam, are generous and full of good intentions. He is a music producer, and she is a lawyer. She is more interesting than he is, or at least the book is more interested in her, perhaps because she is the mother, traditionally expected to find fulfilment and satisfaction in nurturing her off-spring. Indeed, at first that is her intention: initially she gives up her high-powered job to commit to full-time motherhood but to her “secret shame” (8) she cannot stand the restrictions on her life that this entails. When she runs into her old boss, Pascal, and he hints that the firm would take her back, she becomes a child herself: “She had wanted to hang on to Pascal’s leg, to beg him to take her with him, to give her a chance” (11). This is an early sign of a theme that runs through the book: that everyone needs mothering, but there are just not enough mothers to go around. When Pascal does agree to take her on again, she and Paul decide to hire someone to mother their children, but who will also end up largely mothering them, too.

But the decision to take on paid help is fraught with guilt and uneasiness. Paul comes from a left-wing family–“His parents had raised him to detest money and power” (106); his mother is full of “stories about her youth, her past political commitments, her revolutionary comrades” and once “believed that a revolution led by both sexes would give birth to a very different world, where her grandchildren would grow up. A world where there would be time to live” (115). Myriam’s work as a lawyer focuses on legal aid cases, defending those who cannot afford to pay for representation, “sleazy dealers, halfwits, an exhibitionist, talentless robbers, alcoholics arrested at the wheel” (29). She even finds herself defending men accused of hate crimes or domestic abuse. This despite (or because of?) the fact that she herself, it is implied but not directly stated, is of North African origin. So she is alert to the endemic racism of the agency where she first looks for help, where initially the agent assumes that Myriam is looking to be a nanny, rather than to hire one.

Ironically, perhaps, though most nannies are women of color (later in the book we are given a glimpse to the way they “swarm” with their local charges in the park, murmuring “snatches of Baoule, Dyula, Arabic and Hindi, sweet nothings whispered in Filipino or Russian” [178]), Myriam is set against hiring a North African:

She fears that a tacit complicity and familiarity would grow between her and the nanny. That the woman would start speaking to her in Arabic. Telling Myriam her life story and, soon, asking her all sorts of favours in the name of their shared language and religion. She has always been wary of what she calls immigrant solidarity. (16)

From the outset it is important, in other words, for Myriam to be able to maintain her distance, to establish clear boundaries, to avoid thinking (or letting the nanny think) that she has much in common with the person they hire. She and Paul therefore end up picking one of the few white women on the market, a forty-year-old named Louise. But for all the assertions of distance, one of the first things we hear Paul saying to her is “Make yourself at home” (21). The ambiguous overlap between workplace and home is already built in. 

If anything, Louise starts off with a better sense of the contradictions and struggle inherent in her situation. Shown around Paul and Myriam’s home, “she observes each room with the self-assurance of a general standing before a territory he is about to conquer” (22). And it is not long before the “apartment is completely under her powder, like an enemy begging for forgiveness” (24). This is because she soon establishes her indispensability, as a “miracle worker” (22) who brings order to the chaos, and swiftly breaks down any initial resistance from the children, baby Adam and primary-school-age Mila. Louise can play games and tell stories; she can cook and clean and sew. It is not long before she is not so much commanding general as not-so-secret agent: “she has embedded herself so deeply in their lives that it now seems impossible to remove her” (159). A fellow nanny visiting the apartment one day, when Myriam and Paul are away, sees that they have on display a photo of Louise holding the children. “You’re part of the family,” she tells her (121). By this time, it seems that this has become Louise’s fantasy, too.

Myriam and Paul encourage this fatal confusion, because they do not want either to see themselves as employers or Louise as employee. So they invite her to be guest as well as cook for a dinner party with their friends. Here also we see similar denials of power relations when Myriam introduces Louise to “Pascal, my boss” only for him to reply “‘Your boss? Oh, give me a break! We work together. We’re colleagues” (51, 52). It seems to suite everybody to blur the hierarchies that divide them. Yet at the dinner Louise still feels “nervous as a foreigner, an exile who doesn’t understand the language being spoken around her” (52). It is easier for those who hold the upper hand to deny that fact that for those who are supposedly included within a relationship that goes beyond labour to feel that they truly belong. But at the dinner, fortified by the flowing wine, Paul goes a step further: “This year, we’re going to give ourselves a treat and take our nanny writh us on holiday! You have to enjoy life, right?” (54). To whom is he speaking? Who has to enjoy life here? Is this the nanny’s holiday, too?

The irony is that for many jobs, the requirements for being a good worker involve denying that you are indeed a worker. By refusing to recognize your exploitation by others, you also become willing to exploit yourself, going beyond your contractual duties, working late, thinking about work in your leisure hours, confusing work with life. It is after all precisely their investment in their careers, and their identification with their jobs, that has led Myriam and Paul to turn domestic care into paid labour. But they want and expect from their nanny a similar self-sacrifice, which indeed she provides, going above and beyond expectations at every turn. Myriam and Paul want Louise to care for their children in the double sense of not only performing a service for pay (something a hired baby-sitter begrudgingly does one weekend when Louise is ill), but also being emotionally attached, even perhaps loving them. But not too much, of course, because one day this service will no longer be required. When Adam and Mila no longer need her, Louise’s contract will be terminated.

This is the anxiety that starts to grip Louise: that she will become (literally and figuratively) redundant. She therefore hatches a plan, to encourage Paul and Myriam to have another child: “Her obsession with the child spins endlessly in her mind. She thinks of nothing else. This baby, which she will love madly, is the solution to all her problems. [. . .] It will protect Louise’s place in her kingdom.” The problem, however, is that Louise’s don’t see the need for a new child: after all, they have two already. The children they have block the arrival of the one who is to come, and in more ways than one: 

She feels sure that Paul and Myriam don’t have enough time to themselves. That Mila and Adam are an obstacle to the baby’s arrival. It’s the children’s fault if their parents are never alone together. Paul and Myriam are exhausted by their tantrums; Adam wakes up too often in the night, cutting short their lovemaking. If the children weren’t constantly under their feet––whining, demanding cuddles–Paul and Myriam would be able to forge ahead and make a child for Louise. Her desire for that baby is fanatical, violent, blindly possessive. She wants it in a way she has rarely wanted anything: so badly it hurts, to the point where she is capable of choking, burning, destroying anything that comes between her and the satisfaction of her desire. (183)

For a desperate woman, perhaps touched with madness (and we also get something of Louise’s context and backstory, to which her employers are almost entirely oblivious), all this is no doubt reason enough for the dramatic act of violence that has unfolded as the novel opens (and with which it ends). She kills the children because they can never be enough, because one day they will grow up and pass her on the street without recognizing her; she will become no more than the faintest of memories, like the “ghost” to which she is several times already compared (110, 155). She kills the children for the sake of new life, of continued life, and because “Someone has to die. Someone has to die for us to be happy” (193), although she never realizes that, whatever Myriam and Paul say (“Louise will be so happy” [55], they convince themselves as they invite her to work through their holiday), her happiness is the very least important factor in the labour contract that fleetingly binds her to this bourgeois existence.

The Days of Abandonment: Writing a New Story

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Olga is a writer, a mother of two young children, living in Turin. Her husband, Mario, has just announced that he is leaving her. So begins Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002). What follows is an exploration of her response to her new situation, which veers from grief to anger, tragedy to something like comedy. Along the way, there is a fair amount of overlap with Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, which covers much the same territory. What distinguishes Ferrante is, first, the materiality of the world she describes, whose very thinginess at times seems to conspire against the novel’s protagonist. Second, the fact that Ferrante’s heroine has children (where Ernaux’s does not) changes almost everything. This is as much the portrait of a mother as it is of a wife. After all, as Olga discovers, the maternal bond has to endure even as the marital relationship breaks down.

At first, Mario offers little in the way of explanation. But soon enough it becomes clear (and despite his initial denials) that he has in fact taken up with another woman. To add insult to injury, it turns out that his new girlfriend, Carla, is significantly younger, the daughter of a woman who had once been the couple’s friend when the two of them had first moved to Turin. Indeed, at the time the young girl’s apparent infatuation with Mario already caused ructions within their marriage, and now Olga concludes that far from cutting off contact with Carla then, 

For almost five years he had secretly enjoyed that body, had cultivated that passion, had transformed it into love, had slept patiently with me abandoning himself to the memory of her, had waited until she became of age, more than of age, to tell me that he was taking her definitively, that he was leaving me. (70)

Olga realizes all of this only when, by mere accident, she comes across Mario and Carla out on the street. Any previous sympathy she may have had for her husband now vanishes. A woman enraged, she attacks him physically, shoving his face against a shop window. “Hold the commas, hold the periods,” she says to herself. “It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world” (70). She wants to drag him with her to this unpunctuated experience in which the narratives providing sense and meaning to everyday life suddenly no longer hold. And yet, of course, in their own ways each of the two of them is playing out their part in one of the oldest stories in the book: the cheating husband; the betrayed wife.

There is then a double challenge here. Ferrante’s challenge is to tell this well-worn tale in a new way. And this then echoes or is echoed in Olga’s challenge to reconstruct her sense of self, and perhaps particularly her sense of self as a woman, without falling into familiar traps and stereotypes.

For Olga is now haunted by a story from her childhood, a story that at the time she perhaps did not understand but which now gains new meaning, of “a dark figure of my Neapolitan childhood,” a woman whose husband had abandoned her with her children and becomes the subject of cautionary gossip in the neighbourhood:

My mother talked about it with her workers [. . .] while I played under the table [. . .], repeating to myself what I heard, words between sorrow and warning, when you don’t know how to keep a man you lose everything, female stories of the end of love, what happens when, overflowing with love, you are no longer loved, are left with nothing. The woman lost everything, even her name (perhaps it was Emilia), for everyone she became the “poverella,” that poor woman, when we spoke of her that was what we called her. The poverella was crying, the poverella was screaming, the poverella was suffering, torn to pieces by the absence of the sweaty red-haired man, and his perfidious green eyes. (15–16)

How to avoid becoming the poverella, who lost her name and her individuality, transformed into an archetype? And how, now for Ferrante, to avoid simply writing another poverella’s tale?

Of course, one way to avoid the same old story is to give the scorned woman voice, and this is fundamental to Ferrante’s novel. We may perhaps intuit or (from Olga’s point of view) fear what others may be saying, but here we still rigorously close to Olga’s own perspective, even if it may leave us in the dark about other aspects of the story. We know little to nothing substantial about Carla, for instance: she becomes simply the girlish seducer, childlike in her presumed infatuation. Her perspective will have to be left for others to tell. Olga by this point has no desire to be “fair,” and neither does Ferrante.

And perhaps another way to reiterate the same old tragedy of the helpless victim is to veer into comedy. At times I did wonder if this was intentional, but to me much in the novel approached a dark slapstick humor, especially as Olga comes to be betrayed not only by Mario, but by the physical world around her. Her telephone is broken, for instance. She has to replace the locks to her apartment, and even getting in and out becomes a struggle. Everyday, habitual acts become a mystery:

Maybe I was too tired to maintain the usual order of the world. I shouldn’t have gone out. What had I done? Had I put the coffeepot on the stove? Had I put in the coffee, filled it with water? Had I screwed it tight so that it wouldn’t explode? And the milk for the child? Were they actions that I had completed or had I only suggested to myself that I complete them? (95–96)

There is also a sex scene, in which Olga tries to seduce her downstairs neighbour, a musician she hardly knows, that is also surely funny in its spectacular failure as the musician comes too soon (here the object that betrays her is his penis). Dragging herself up the stairs afterwards, “Crouching in a corner, beside the banister, I saw the poverella of so long ago, who said to me in a weary but very serious tone: “I am clean I am true I play with my cards on the table” (87). But who is that phantom from the past to give Olga her advice?

The novel is entitled Days of Abandonment, though in fact it covers several months: it starts on “one April afternoon” (9) and continues until at least August, because we are told that “the hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment” is “Saturday August 4th” (88). Indeed, almost a third of the entire book (pages 88 to 151) is devoted to this single day, which proves to be a catalogue of disasters that range from a sick kid to a dead dog (possibly poisoned, she imagines), fights with her children (one of whom stabs her with a paper cutter), and Olga accidentally locking them all into the apartment. To cap it all, by the end her indignity is witnessed by her downstairs neighbour, who has come up with “a rose, a single long-stemmed rose, a ridiculous rose offered with a ridiculous gesture by a man not at his ease” (148). Again, it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

No wonder the children periodically add to Olga’s woes by suggesting they might be better off with their father. But she perseveres and by the end, when Mario asks her to take them more often because “Carla is exhausted, she has exams to take, she can’t take care of them, you’re they’re mother” (185), this is truly the last straw for Olga, the point at which she realizes “He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print made by a hand on the wall” (186). And it is about the same time that she also senses that she has somehow broken from the paths set for her by the stories she has read (Anna Karenina) or been told: “I had even buried somewhere the abandoned wife of my Neapolitan childhood, my heart no longer beat in her chest, the veins were broken. The poverella had become again an old photograph, the petrified past, without blood” (184). The present does not always have to repeat the past. 

She can even return to the site of her earlier embarrassment and clumsiness, looking for someone who “knew how to make meaning stronger, to invent a feeling of fullness and joy” (188). The book ends with the acknowledgement that this is a fiction, but at least it is a new one, and she is prepared to pretend to believe it. She is writing herself into a new story.

The Story of My Teeth: Sometimes a Name is Just a Name

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There really is, in the city of Ecatepec, part of Greater Mexico City and not too far from the Basilica of our Lady of Guadelupe, a street called Disneylandia. Its cross-streets include California, Washington, New Orleans, Massachussets [sic], New York, Cabo Kennedy, and Arlington, collectively making a strange little subdivision that recreates an imaginary map of the United States, which mixes states with cities and counties, and which combines allusions to technology and the Space Race (Cape Kennedy), the Pentagon (Arlington), and mass entertainment. If this were all you knew of the United States, perhaps it would be enough? (Or perhaps it would once have been: surely today we would substitute Silicon Valley for Cabo Kennedy.) A little knowledge may be dangerous, but it is also the kernel around which we can elaborate an entire imaginary of the world. After all, is not that the way that Disneyland itself works, as a factory that produces fantasy out of caricatured snippets from the real world and its history?

I say that there really is a street called Disneylandia, because after reading Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth (2013), I felt I had to check. In the book, this is where the narrator, Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, has his home: “I purchased two plots,” he tells us, “side by side, in the lovely Calle Disneylandia” (24), and here he builds a mansion and a warehouse side by side, with the warehouse to store his collection of, among other things, teeth. But Sánchez Sánchez, also known as Highway, is in this novel quite the fabulist. Moreover, this being a novel, we cannot necessarily expect all the placenames and names it contains to have real world referents. Yet the book seems to claim the truth of this particular reference in that, in a chapter devoted to images, it includes a map that shows the street’s location. 

On the facing page to the map, however, is a photograph with the caption “Highway’s House.” The photo appears to show a suburban house (built right up to the road) that has been built in the image of the Disneyland castle, with half a dozen or more spires and turrets, yet on an ordinary street complete with lamppost, sidewalk, and a couple of pedestrians passing by. The photo’s author, we are told, is Valeria Luiselli. But Highway is a fictional character, surely? In which case, whose house is this? And where was the photograph taken. Google Street View shows no such building on Calle Disneylandia. (In an interview elsewhere, Luiselli tells us that it is in Oaxaca.) The images that purport to validate the story told in the novel are not necessarily to be trusted. Hence I felt I had to check whether or not the street itself exists. It does, but perhaps as no more than one of those snippets of the real around which stories are told.

In some ways, this is common practice. No story, no matter how fantastic, conjures up a world out of nothing. When a novel refers to (say) chairs or tables, or even places such New York or Manchester, for the most part we assume, unless told otherwise, that the meaning of “chair” or “table,” or the geography of “New York” and “Manchester,” are more or less the same in the fictional world as they are in the everyday world. Likewise with the names of historical figures: when a novel references (for instance) “Margaret Thatcher” or “the Pope,” we take it that these are the same figures, with the same characteristics, as those with which we are already familiar from history books or radio and TV etc. But this is not true, or not consistently so, of Luiselli’s novel.

Especially when it comes to proper names, Luiselli repurposes signifiers, snippets of the real, often to put them to radically new use. For instance, Highway’s first job is working for a newspaper-stand owner by the name of Rubén Darío (8). Yet Rubén Darío is also the name of perhaps the most famous of Latin American modernista poets. What is the connection, if any, between that Darío and this one? To add to the confusion, Darío the poet’s most famous book was Azul, and Darío the newsagent’s wife is called Azul. Azul is said to having an affair with a “Mr. Unamuno,” described as “a pigeon-chested old codger who had a program on public radio” (9). Are we here to think of the Spanish writer, Miguel de Unamuno? If so, in what way is that Unamuno like this one? What point, if any, is being made by this correspondence?

Once alert to this system of references that are not quite references, we see or suspect them everywhere. Some are quite obscure. The man who teaches Highway the “art of auctioneering,” for instance, goes by a variety of names, but his Western name is Carlos Yushimoto. Can this be the same Carlos Yushimoto (whatever the “same” would mean) as the Japanese-Peruvian short story writer? The translator’s chapter, entitled “The Chronologic” (because yes, here the translator has her own chapter) would seem to imply as much. Other allusions are more cryptic: is the “Mr. Cortázar” who bequeaths to Highway’s family a “green velvet armchair” the same Julio Cortázar who, in his short story “The Continuity of Parks” describes a man reading in an “armchair covered in green velvet” who (strangely enough) ends up menaced by a character from the book he is reading? “Reader, beware!” it seems that we are being told. But beware of what? Of missing these references, or of catching them, and so of being caught off guard and possibly misled by a web of apparently arbitrary intertextuality? Does it help to know that Alan Pauls (here, a friend of Highway’s) is the name of an Argentine writer, that Emiliano Monge (here, an altar boy) is a Mexican short-story writer, or that Alvaro Enrigue (here, a bus driver) was Luiselli’s husband? And of course what Valeria Luiselli herself (or at least, her name) doing here, incarnated in the person of a “mediocre high school student” (129) taking elocution lessons?

The more famous and easily recognizable names are often Mexicanized. Hence we have Highway’s uncle Marcelo Sánchez-Proust, presumably some relation to the French novelist Marcel Proust, as well as another uncle, Miguel Sánchez Foucault, who invokes the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, not to mention Highway’s cousin, Juan Pablo Sánchez Sartre. Is this then an indication that, throughout, Luiselli’s aim is a Mexicanization of a broader set of literary and cultural references, inserted almost at random (it would seem) in the story she is telling.

One way to understand all this would be to say that these names add value. After all, that is Highway’s own approach, in auctioning off his collection of teeth: to attach a name (and therefore a story) to each item, to give it provenance, history, and worth, even if in the end what is being sold off is just another chunk of enamel. These stories–these stories of his teeth, the teeth he seeks to pawn off on others–drive the price up. They are patter, and perhaps like all patter they do not bear too much examination, but in the moment they dignify and fuel the act of selling.But is this not also then a critique of this mode of valorization, of name-dropping and discursive validation. The Story of My Teeth, we are told, is a novel co-written by factory workers. I am not sure they would have cared much for these allusions, except in so much as they constitute a set of jokes for which the butt is whoever thinks that references and allusions ensure legitimacy and interest. In the end, teeth are just teeth. And a name, infinitely transferable, makes nobody special. You can call a street “Disneyland” all you want, but it is still just a way to get from A to B, a place to put a home.

Symphony in White: Dancing over the Abyss

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There is a repeated image in Adriana Lisboa’s Symphony in White (2001) of a butterfly floating about a “forbidden quarry”: 

Once upon a time there was a butterfly that ripped the fresh mountain air and danced above a forbidden quarry where gray lizards warmed themselves in the sun. In the routine path of its flight, the butterfly could see, to one side, an abandoned farm and a house with plants growing on the roof. To the other side, a farm with animals in the pasture that looked like toys and a river that was a long golden thread. (161)

In several of the iterations of this image, we are told that this “multicolored butterfly open[s] its wings and hurl[s] itself into the abyss. It could fly” (175). It is as though this were a picture of frivolity in the face of danger, of a creature that is slight and nimble enough to dance in the face of a gravity (or gravitas) that might cause other creatures to tumble to a tragic end. It conveys a sense of innocence but also ignorance as to the dangers that lurk below: this is “a butterfly that flutters over a forbidden quarry and sees everything but imagines nothing” (162). And indeed this book ultimately aims to take us beyond the idyllic rural landscape of neat fields and toylike animals of provincial Brazil in which it is set, to plunge us into the violence that structures and disrupts that landscape, a violence of which the “damned multicolored butterfly” (91) will remain forever unaware.

The Brazilian dictatorship (which lasted from 1964 to 1985) is the backdrop for this multigenerational novel. At one point we are told, for instance, that “throughout Brazil things were happening on the sly and at that very moment there were torturers engaged in the task of making political prisoners confess (to anything) or go mad” (166). But the violence at the heart of this novel is more intimate, more clearly gendered, and the focus is less on society as a whole than on the fate of a family whose secrets are only revealed late on in the book.

The narration darts back and forth in time, from what appears to be an idyllic childhood to what could be a disillusioned middle age that in fact offers a fresh start. It is never too late, the book suggests, to seek a happiness without illusions. But getting there requires making one’s peace with a tragic interim, the abyss around which the novel’s plot turns.

It is not as though Clarice and Maria Inês, the sisters whose story this novel tells, are not given hints from the start that beneath the rural tranquility in which they grow up there is not a dark undertow. Stories circulate among their little group of childhood friends about the abandoned farm visible from the forbidden quarry: “they say the owner went crazy because he caught his wife with another man. He went to the kitchen, got a big knife. They say he was drunk. Maybe he was crazy. He got the knife and he killed his wife!” (6). Tall tales told by young kids, perhaps, but there is a sense that the landscape is haunted: in the farm’s ruined buildings, “among the streaked and peeling walls, ghosts howled” (93).

The latent threat becomes all too real when, as if out of nowhere (but in fact out of everywhere), their friend, Lina, is raped and murdered. This sudden trauma provokes some victim-blaming whispers (“Maybe she brought it on herself. Didn’t you notice how she dressed?” [54]), but is soon declared off limits to discussion: Clarice and Maria Inês’s parents “declared Lina’s death forbidden” (54). It coincides, in any case, with Clarice’s somewhat sudden removal to Rio de Janeiro, the big city where she is to go to school and perhaps to put her interrupted childhood behind her.

Time passes. Both sisters marry. Clarice, after a dalliance in the big city with a painter named Tomás, returns to the countryside and weds the son of a neighbouring landowner, Ilton Xavier, with whom she has had an epistolary courtship while she was away. The marriage does not last, however: she realizes that she is merely fulfilling expectations and so, in something like a crisis, she gives everything up for a while, leading a nomadic experience in boarding houses and surviving on the generosity of friends. Eventually she finds her way back to the countryside.

At first, Maria Inês likewise follows convention, marrying her second cousin (and childhood friend), João Miguel, with whom she moves to Rio, effectively changing places with her sister. They have a daughter, Eduarda, but their marriage too grows stale, albeit in the bourgeois comfort and sophistication of servants, entertaining, and frequent European travel. Maria Inês puts up with all this until, in the middle of one of her Christmas parties, she is told that her husband may be having an affair with yet another cousin’s ex-wife. Yet it is also suggested that he is equally or perhaps more interested in his tennis instructor or in a handsome young man in Venice. Perhaps it is the notion that her rival is female rather than male that makes Maria Inês decide then to return, after an absence of ten years, home to the farm, in what we take to be a break from married life that is almost as dramatic as Clarice’s, many years earlier. Unexpectedly, teenage Eduarda declares that she is coming, too.

And so the stage is set for the story that frames all this history: Maria Inês’s trip back to the countryside, which entails a reckoning with the past and perhaps the possibility of a path towards a different future. This will also involve, almost as in the last act of a Shakespeare play, a whole series of revelations, of re-encounters and delayed recognitions. And the climax of the plot takes place at the once-forbidden quarry, where the latent violence that undergirds the entire novel makes its appearance once more, albeit this time redemptively, settling accounts and allowing the butterflies who dance around the abyss to float free.

Bad Girls: Creatures in Travesti Heaven

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The girls whose lives are portrayed in Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls (2019) may be seen as “bad” by outsiders looking on, but this book is written from their perspective and although it admits that at times “We had no idea how to be good or bad” (145), overwhelmingly it shows that they have a code of ethics and empathy that puts the rest of society to shame.

The “girls” in question are travestis, which a preliminary “Author’s Note” seeks to differentiate from trans women, although that is the term that would be the closest equivalent in English. But in Latin America, the word travesti, originally a slur, conjures up an image of marginality and precarity, inflected through class as much as sexuality and gender, and often linked with street sex work. In some ways it shares some of the semantic territory as the British term, “rent boy,” but with the addition of an association with performative femininity. As the “Author’s Note” puts it:

Far below, where the secret rivers of the world flow, appeared a word that stank of death, shit, semen, prostitution, the night, the cold, bribery, blood and jail, of misery and neglect. A word sharp as a knife, grime-encrusted and wounding. A word that spoke not just of the creatures we were and are but also of our poverty, of the acts that made us legendary, of the courage with which we headed out to live among families and communities. We didn’t want to look like women, we didn’t want to hide our struggles in any way, we didn’t feel trapped in the wrong bodies, we didn’t know what we were doing. But in the street, they christened us with that old, buried word, highlighting our beauty, which was like a home. (x–xi)

The novel is dedicated to tracing that beauty–and kindness, and love–even in the abject conditions in which travestis find themselves, which to some extent they also embrace. Specifically, it focuses on a loose group that haunt and ply their trade in a park in the provincial Argentine city of Córdoba. They come to life at night, and give life to the place even at the expense of their own poverty and suffering: “Every night, the travestis drag themselves out of a hell that no one would ever think to write about, to bring spring back to the world” (1). Early on in the book, this notion that the travestis can conjure and nurture new life from such unpropitious circumstances is literalized when one of them, Auntie Encarna, finds “a three-month-old boy abandoned in the Park” (4) and proceeds (informally and illicitly) to adopt him. One strand of the narrative then proceeds to follow the fate of this unlikely pair: the child and his new mother, whose breasts may be formed by backstreet injections of aircraft oil, whose “maternal instincts were theatrical but took control of her character so thoroughly that they felt authentic” (11). All the other travestis regard Encarna as their substitute mother, who welcomes them into her high-walled pink house, “the queerest boardinghouse in the world” (5). Why not also take in this baby who has known no other mother?

Not that Sosa Villada is prone to romanticization. This is not particularly the tale of whores with hearts of gold. They hardly have the space or time for sentimentality. As much as the travestis are in constant danger from their clients–any trick may go wrong at any point–from the police, or simply from the scorn of would-be “respectable” society, they also fight and squabble among themselves, sometimes viciously. Indeed, at times the worst violence is that inflicted on each other, or themselves, whether it be out of bouts of competitiveness or displaced anger that would be better directed at institutions that they feel unable to change.

In fact, it is striking that as much as the book stresses the humanity of these outcasts who are often treated as mere objects for quick and guilty sexual satisfaction (though they also make themselves “into an object, into valuable flesh, to live the only life that was available in that town” [105] and even “embrace[ their] role as slave, as an object” [111]), it is drawn too to their animality. They are described as a “pack,” “a small pack wandering the margins of the world” (54). They have “animal wisdom” (85) or sleep “sweating like animals” (96). More mysteriously still, one of them locks herself in her room once a month as she turns into a “she-wolf,” while another, originally Maria the Mute, starts to grow feathers on her chest, and by the end of the story has entirely transmuted into Maria the Bird, flying down into the narrator’s purse: “I let her settle in there” (191). As the adopted boy grows up, he takes to “whittling figures of all the animals we’d been: bird women, she-wolves, sad women, brave women, a whole mythology carved in figurines the boy created in his isolation” (181). We are all basically beasts, the novel seems to suggest, and women are one animal among others in a world in which the line between species is blurry and can be crossed, whether by accident, thanks to forces beyond our control, or through effort and determination. 

So perhaps the point is that the fellow feeling and support that the travestis (admittedly, intermittently) show each other comes from their recognition of our common status as creatures governed as much by instinct and desire, hunger and the most basic of needs for shelter and, ultimately, love. It is also notable that among the many pen portraits of clients and (less often) boyfriends, one of the most sympathetic is a zookeeper: “My zoo guard gave me tenderness, brought me hot coffee on cold winter nights, and several times dropped me off at home in his car, saying goodbye with a kiss on the mouth” (134). He takes her on midnight jaunts through the zoo, closed to the public, where they have sex among the cages, as she “rub[s] up against him like a horny dog.” “If it was up to me,” the guard tells her, “I’d open up the cages and let it all go to hell” (134). Everyone and everything deserves its freedom. The travestis perhaps lead the way in showing the life that can be lived on the wild side, beyond the cages that most of us do not even realize that we are inhabiting.

Power and its injustices, however, are all too obvious to a travesti. Hence their anger and resentment has a broad range, and is sometimes indiscriminate: “We were forever ready to burn the whole place down: our parents, friends and enemies, the middle classes with their comforts and routines, the posh kids who all looked the same, the patrician cocksuckers who scorned us so” (97). But often they feel powerless to do anything–or to be precise, too exhausted; a travesti ages quickly, we are told, “at an accelerated rate, the way dogs [and] wolves [. . .] do: seven years for every human one” (82). Yet they are also aware that, for all their exclusion and marginality, they are also central to the political and social economy that excludes them. Their clients are students, workers, politicians, supposedly happily married husbands, who may deny their own desire but cannot resist it. “Such is the power of travestis, we attract the gazes of the world. No one can escape the allure of a man dressed as a woman, the faggots who go too far, the degenerates everyone stares at” (149).

Yet they are both confined and cling to the shadows, seeking out invisibility and “transparency” as much as they also revel in their power to “dazzle” (121). Their stories go untold, or told only as cautionary tales by homophobic parents who predict sad ends to their non-conforming children. But for Sosa Villada, they are “there to be written about. To be immortalized” (96). And though their stories may not end well–this is a book haunted by death, which comes to its characters in many different ways, from sickness to suicide to murder–Bad Girls perhaps provides a glimpse of the beauty of “travesti heaven,” where they can “finally be compensated for [their] broken heart[s]” (28).

Ru: Glimmering through Fragments

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Kim Thúy’s Ru (2009) is a lyrical evocation of growing up amid displacement, exile, and migration. It proceeds via a series of very short sections or vignettes, many of which are no more than a dozen lines long, and few of which are more than a page. As each section starts a new page (and so there is abundant white space beneath many of them) and as, in this English translation at least, the text is only left-justified and so the lines are ragged on the right, at first glance upon opening the book it could seem to be a book of poetry.

Moreover, though it is presented as “a novel” on the front cover, it is as much as anything else memoir or meditation, even to some extent a collection of short stories–some humorous, some tragic–that collectively constitute the story of Vietnamese migration and adaptation to Canada.

The narrator’s name is Nguyen An Tinh. On my keyboard, I cannot reproduce the diacritics, which differ only by a single (under the i) from her mother’s name, Nguyen An Tinh. This already suggests how translation (and these are names twice translated: from Vietnamese to French, and now to English) flattens out difference and creates composite subjects. Similarly, there is also an uncertain difference and distance between narrator and author (whose name is, of course, Kim Thúy), whose stories overlap but presumably also differ in ways that can never be fully clear to the reader, least of all to a reader in English.

This is, moreover, a book that is continually in translation, in the various sense of that term. As well as the linguistic translation (usually implicit, but sometimes explicit, between Vietnamese and French; and characteristically invisible between French and English), there are the geographical translations between East Asia and North America, the cultural translations involved in that displacement (and its attendant memories), as well as the drastic change in status between a relatively privileged life in South Vietnam, the trauma of the refugee experience on a flimsy boat or in a Malaysian refugee camp, and the struggles of resettlement in Canada.

As such the book both questions and depends upon the notion that something survives translation. (And each page’s visual resemblance to poetry perhaps reminds us of the quip that it is poetry that is lost in translation.) At one point, the narrator directly addresses this issue:

Just recently in Montreal, I saw a Vietnamese grandmother ask her one-year-old grandson: “Thuang Bà dê dâu?” I can’t translate that phrase, which contains just four words, two of them verbs, to love and to carry. Literally, it means, “Love grandmother carry where?” The child touched his head with his hand. I had completely forgotten that gesture, which I’d performed a thousand times when I was small. I’d forgotten that love comes from the head and not the heart. Of the entire body, only the head matters. Merely touching the head of a Vietnamese person insults not just him but his entire family tree. That is why a shy Vietnamese eight-year-old turned into a raging tiger when his Quebecois teammate rubbed the top of his head to congratulate him for catching his first football.

If a mark of affection can sometimes be taken for an insult, perhaps the gesture of love is not universal: it too must be translated from one language to another, must be learned. In the case of Vietnamese, it is possible to classify, to quantify the meaning of love through specific words: to love by taste (thích); to love without being in love (thuong); to love passionately (yêu); to love ecstatically (mê); to love blindly (mù quáng); to love gratefully (tình nghia). It’s impossible quite simply to love, to love without one’s head. (96)

It’s worth repeating that my keyboard cannot do the Vietnamese orthography justice. But this passage again also suggests that the problem here is not just with (verbal) language, but also with bodily gestures that may seem to be innate or even natural. A well-meaning pat on the head on a Canadian sports field turns a Vietnamese kid into a “raging tiger.” Even love requires translation, or is perhaps untranslatable. Perhaps the narrator’s Vietnamese love, the love withing and surrounding her Vietnamese family, does not translate, and instead has to be invented anew, for her Canadian family and relations.

There is much that is left out of the narrator’s story–surely there is much left out of anyone’s story, but here the structure of brief vignettes, stopping and starting, and the white space surrounding them, makes those narrative absences all the clearer, such that we are not even sure if we are really dealing with narrative at all. One figure, for instance, who is almost entirely omitted is the narrator’s “‘white’ husband” (79), with the quotation marks around “white” adding a further layer of uncertainty, though we can assume he is not Vietnamese. After all, the only other time he is mentioned, it is for a sartorial faux pas when he wears a “red T-shirt with a yellow star,” in other words mimicking the national flag of (Socialist, postwar) Vietnam “in the streets of Montreal.” What is presumably intended as a gesture of affiliation is (again) taken as an insult, such that the narrator’s “parents had him take it off and replaced it with an ill-fitting shirt of my father’s” (95). Taking off the national flag and replacing it with the Vietnamese father’s shirt, does the husband now become more Vietnamese or more (inconspicuously) white? This cross-cultural relationship, between husband and wife, husband and in-laws, remains unexplored, off limits.

As for the love between mothers and children, that also takes on new aspects via displacement. Whereas the narrator has been given a name that is virtually indistinguishable from that of her mother’s, such that she is her “extension,” her “sequel,” whose task is to “continue her story” (2), she has given her own children names that are resolutely French: Pascal and Henri, names of French philosophers and kings. Moreover, Henri, at least, is probably never going to continue his mother’s (the narrator’s) story:

He is one of those children who don’t hear us, don’t speak to us, even though they’re neither deaf nor mute. [. . .] Probably he’ll never call me maman lovingly [. . .]. He won’t know that, thanks to him, every spark of joy has become a blessing and that I will keep waging war against autism, even if I know already that it’s invincible. (7)

This is a book about the obstacles to expression and translation, whether they be the untranslatability of emotion or language, or autism, or the vengeance and re-education camps of the Communist victors in the aftermath of war. But it is also a book about the struggles against those obstacles, and about the “moment[s] of complicity, of communion” (132) that can emerge through the glimpse of a scar, at a family reunion, or in the ritual whereby Henri “curl[s] up in Pascal’s arms, hiding behind him in front of strangers” (50). We “recognize our old selves,” but presumably also others, “only through fragments, through scars, through glimmers of light” (139). In this fragmented prose, it is perhaps the gaps between the vignettes as much as the stories they contain that allow such glimmers to shine through, sparks of joy amid suffering.