Pola Oloixarac on Botany, Sex, Vigilance: “Dark Constellations” [Free Choice-Week]

Posted on November 12, 2026 by dleoar

THIS WEEK I have replaced Carmen Villada’s novel Bad Girls with Pola Oloixarac’s techno-punk sci-fi novel Dark Constellations (2015). This is the third novel by Oloixarac I have read preceded by Mona (2019) [An international Peruvian student publishes her first novel with immense success and completes a PhD program at Ivy League wherein she receives a literary short list for Norway’s most important literary prize. Mona arrives high, bruised, dissociated at event only for a mythological Leviathan to ignite the Ragnarok] and her non-fictional novel Bad Hombre (2024) [weaponary of cancel culture to serve the oligarchy who benefit from higher power within different desired points on an intersectional level]. With Dark Constellations, I notice Oloixarac’s literary penchant for erudite prose, jargon-language, sex, literary inter-text, occult practices and academic settings.

Dark Constellations is divided into three parts. At a mere 200 pages with botanical pictures, this novel fools you with its rich exploration on sex descriptions devoid of salacious description, erudite and jargon-prose. I will say this is no easy read, that given the novel’s nature my first reading shallowly describes its surface. There is more to it, one reading is not sufficient for a reader. A convoluted novel.

The first part is set in 1882. On the final day of 1882, a voyage arrives at sea in Famara (Canary Islands). Amongst crew is 16-year-old botanist Nikklas Bruun. Here Bruun researches Crissia pallida, a substance mysteriously said to induce hallucinogenic states eliminating barriers between species and mind to mind. Moreover, Nikklas Bruun catapults into fame as in his writing his accounts for his sexual initiation in a fertility ritual wherein female members of the local tribe induce Bruun in a trance and mate with him.

“The commentators have estimated that there were approximately twenty-three girls, as well as a handful of adults with shell-hard skin, that took part in these ceremonies on this island, where trees can live for several thousand years (Dracaena draco, vegetal dragons whose dry skeletons branch into cartilaginous crests, and which contain a dark lymph famed for its regenerative qualities). The members of the expedition believed they were suddenly part of an astonishing fertility ritual; as the orgies begin, the descriptions lose their habitual precision. In a timid but denotative style marked by periods of discomfort, the young Niklas Bruun describes the women advancing individually or “in groups of two or three,” throwing themselves with a tranquil ferocity onto the explorers’ genital geysers, twisting down over the tips of their organs.” (8)

The book contains images, botanic language, essay-like narration and a plentiful of material of feminist readings, the role women have in the narrative.

The second part follows Cassio Liberman Brandão da Silva.

The narrative opens with Sonia, a brilliant Argentine student with good grades invited by her faculty to do ethnographic research on Brazilian territory. While there, Sonia attempt to assimilate her reality: the new environment, the observance of the local Indigenous tribe . Constant observation allows Sonia to reveal her biases and emotional world. Eventually Sonia begins an affair  with a bourgeoisie Brazilian engineer (João Fernando Brandão da Silva), abandons her research, moves to Brazil as she births Cassio. João Fernando works abroad (New York in aerial-nautical engineering) while Sonia raises Cassio in Brazilian upper-life. One day, Sonia decides to return Buenos Aires, taking Cassio with her. Reconnects with her father, together they raise Cassio, sending him to elite schooling. Cassio, precocious with social awareness practices justice. Precocious with knowledge and skill too, Cassio starts hacking international programs, in so far as hacking pentagon programs. Charges against him are dropped in exchange for information on the insecurities of the hacked programs.

“By the time Cassio was fourteen, he had written a program that exploited a vulnerability at the National Bank, and had impassively, even disdainfully, confronted several nation states and their laws. He’d hijacked computers at the Pentagon, and taken control of various local networks in Argentina and Brazil. The university’s engineering department and the newspaper Clarín had the most powerful servers, so he made them his slaves, having come to the realization that the illnesses of living systems created perfect opportunities to penetrate them.” (26) 

It is important to note that Oloixarac works with a medium-large ensemble of characters; some return, some mention once or twice; narration temporalities fluctuate throughout the novel.

As Cassio grows up, he ostracizes himself from society, loneliness himself, drowns on the sorrows of his appearance, dwells on the solitude a geek suffers. Cassio fails to establish any romantic or sexual experience, allowing Oloixarac to add scenes of masturbation with metaphors devoid of any pleasantry. (Also important to note that most sexual scenes in this novel while highly descriptive, evoke an image of non-sensuality).

“In pornographic films, the climax of each individual scene consists of the money shot; eventually the scenes converge in the narrative climax of the orgy, the cephalopods built of human flesh. A series of monstrous transformations ensued, and attention shifted from hole to hole, creating groups of beings that were progressively more complex, whereby a single surface covered unseen interior spaces. Double and triple penetration of the female was a common theme, multiple aggregations into tense muscular cumulous clouds. Cassio sometimes shot the magma of his being into the nearest Coke can, gathering these remains of himself. The human cephalopods confirmed a deep intuition: that everything could be penetrated, opened, rebuilt in the purest of terms—terms native to a machine whose form was still foreign to him, but that he, advancing obsessively step by step through his environment, would eventually come to know and control. 

The little predator had been born within him. This wasn’t the first time he’d felt it move.” (27)

Cassio attempts a connection with Melina, fellow geek and Theatre actress. Cassio suffers disappointment when he discovers  Melina is interested in sexual desires for an other. 

“Melina emitted a series of strange sounds, and then her voice faded away. He asked if she was asleep. She didn’t answer.

Cassio’s mouth was now numb—she had apparently applied some spermicidal lubricant. Cassio raised his eyes to her incandescent Mac, still sending its rays of light across the bed. A few days before, he’d installed the latest operating system and a few little programs to help her avoid leaving traces on the internet. He hadn’t yet checked to see if they were running properly. 

Her Facebook page was open. There were several messages from Marto, one of the actors from the musical. The little arrows of her messages curved toward his—she’d answered every one. The odds of a musical comedy actor being heterosexual were extremely low, but to judge from Marto’s photos—that bulge—and the content of his messages, it seemed indisputable that he was. Cassio made a few calculations, ones that even someone without his privileged mathematical cranial hemisphere could have managed. The data were clear: what he’d eaten was a muffin full of Marto’s genetic leftovers from, technically, just a few hours ago, a thought Cassio found thoroughly unpleasant.” (94-95). 

Seeking solace at a bar from this scene, Cassio is recruited by a former acquitance of his rogue hacking days: Max Lambart.

Part III — This part picks up on Cassio yet introduces new perspective Piera (2024).

Piera is a biologist. A peripheral figure. She is working with Max and Cassio for Estromatoliton. Cassio is the lead researcher. This is a tech-start up in Argentina, financed by the Ministry of Genetics, secretly mass surveillance program. The project is titled the Lat Am Unification Project: devices named Bionose are secretly placed throughout geographical location. These devices sniff, extract DNA material from citizens, sending it to a biobank. Estromatoliton’s job is create a algorithm capable of processing and interpreting large amounts of genetic data. Thereby, all citizens’ location, as well as life trajectories are logged. The interactions between citizens is at risk of exposure. This mining of user data is profiting.

Piera becomes a love interest for Cassio. They both try Crissia pallid (discovered by Nikklas Bruun) and as they both plan to sabotage the start-up, the story fluctuates back to the Nikklas Bruun who is revealed to have joined a worshiping cult towards a giant tall, life-sized rat who is a “man was a rat six feet tall, who said, in perfect and derisive human speech:“ (88). They engage in a ritual of hybrid-pollination between women and orchids.

Cassio and Piera infect the Bionose with a hybrid-virus, they do so with Cassio’s own DNA, thereby creating a living, technological virus-entity.

Like I said, there is a lot going on in this novel. The novel comments on stromatolites, having multiple layers. Perhaps, this can be said about Dark Constellations instead: multi-layered.

Oloixarac’s style forces active reading, dealing with erudite knowledge, jargon-language, percolation of essay-length narration and literary atmosphere.

Did I enjoy? Not particularly. I am not accustomed to this type of genre. I really enjoyed her other novels nonetheless, and would be excited to read Savage Theories. Oloixarac’s literary ambition is unmatched. ♦

 

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Bad Girls

Posted on November 12, 2026 by Sofia

This was a tough read, but a good read. I can’t lie, I felt completely overwhelmed by amount of violence and cruelty that the travestis experienced. At first, I also thought this book would be written in the first person plural, however, I believe it’s on a page six that we first encounter Camila’s “I”, and in the chapters that follow she is clearly the narrator.

Still, I found the use of “we” particularly interesting. In the author’s note, Sosa Villada explains that she uses the word travestis because other terminology “doesn’t respect our experience as travestis in these regions” and because “they wouldn’t want to go by any other name” (xi). The power of names and naming has come up in some of our other readings, such as A Girl Returned where the main character is just “l’arminuta,” and The Days of Abandonment with the “pouverella” character. In this book though, naming is a clear act reclamation of identity, a way of being able to define yourself, a way of baptized into the group (like little Twinkle in Her Eye).

Another thing that really woke me up when reading the introduction:

“Once again Northern academia was being thrust upon us while down here we were busy surviving, living, fucking, and eating, even if all there was on our plates was dirt” (no numeral just the first page).

I found this particularly striking. I sometimes wonder whether, in all our philosophical discussions about what is women’s writing, should we read women’s writing, we are losing sight of the writing itself: the stories, the experiences, and the women behind them. This book reminded me once again that there are lives being lived beyond the theoretical and abstract framework we want to understand them in. After reading the author’s biography, I immediately thought, wow I want to read about her life. And I did.

As I mentioned, this book was really reaally sad at times. But to describe it simply as sad would ignore the bits of beauty and the bits of hope. As Angie reminds us, being a travesti is also a celebration. At one point, reflecting on Angie’s death, Camila writes, “we forgot the most important thing: that being a travesti is a celebration. The most beautiful of us all was no longer there to remind us” (130).

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I can’t even write anymore. Despite the violence, the abuse, the deaths, the Camila tries to focus on beauty too, superficial or otherwise. Perhaps that is why this book was so difficult for me to read, even though I didn’t want to stop. Perhaps it really doesn’t matter what I write in this blog, or what I say in discussion. Sometimes, even though this is a literature class where we analyze literature, it’s good to just sit with a book and listen.

Sofia

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Why the kids and not the parents?

Posted on November 10, 2026 by Amada Libertad

This book, by far, has been my favorite read for this class.

Do you blame the nanny? I don’t.

Leila Slimani does an amazing job in crafting a narrative that fits everyone’s biases. Through Slimani’s story, to blame or not to blame the nanny is a byproduct of the reader’s own biases. What do you notice, what details strike you the most, how far your analysis of class, race, and gender dynamics can overcome the gory aspects of what happened?

Louise

Overview

We can agree that Louise was not just a nanny, she was a cleaner, a cook, interior designer, planner, teacher, and entertainer. However, she was just still paid for being a nanny, aka take care of the children. Some people could argue that no one asked her to be all of those things, that it was actually on her and her strange obsession with taking over the lives of the Masses.

Only a few times did the Masses, especially Paul, worry about “the nanny’s long hours” because he doesn’t want “her to accuse us of exploiting her one day” (p. 54). Myriam said she will fix the problem. She confronts Louise but ends up “thrilled” that Louise takes it upon herself, it is her fault. This is followed by small apologies once in a while, cheap gifts, and used clothes.

Did she have OCD?

Imagine being secluded in a strangers apartment, taking care of two children, surrounded by dirt and messyness. Imagine forcing yourself to not clean, to not organize because you are not being paid to do it. Nevertheless you are still forced to come to that space everyday. Dishes pilling up, dust, dirty clothes, the smell of trash. Would you be able to spend your entire day without taking care of the mess of a stranger without being paid for it?

Maybe, we could argue that she did not have to go that far. But, what if you were scared to not find another job? How can you prove to your employers that you are the right choice? How can you prove you are irreplaceable to secure your job that has no protections?

Maybe, we could argue that she just wanted the life of the Masses, to live a fantasy of what life could be, of motherhood, homemaking, and domesticity. For this specific point I want to argue that this is the capitalist fantasy that fits Louises’ background, a fantasy that is hard to question because it’s not 100% chosen. Instead, to an extent, it is imposed by the circumstances, by her past, her background, money, lack of proper stable housing, etc.

Contradictions and Rebellion

Throughout the book we see a weird fight between the desire and hate for this chosen/imposed fantasy. Moments of lucidity become more common as Louise becomes a “more accepted” part of the family. Like glitches in the matrix, Louise becomes more open and vulnerable to the truths she hides, the humanity in her. In the Masses’ trip to Greece, Louise is able to taste a bit of those privileges she once should have deserved just because of the color of her skin. For instance, autonomy weirdly becomes natural the moment she pushes Mila at the beach. She is annoyed, but she no longer performs, she reacts like the real parents of the child: irritation, boundaries, and selfishness.

When they go for dinner, the three of them, for the first time, Louise almost gets the courage to “tell them something — doesn’t matter what, something about her — but she doesn’t dare” (p.76) Why is she so scared? When was the last time you felt that scared to talk about yourself to someone? Is it just the fear of being unprofessional?

The more this lucidity is noticed in Louise, the more annoyed the Masses get, the more worried they are that they are giving too much to Louise. Resentful. The worry is no longer that she is doing too much, it is that they, instead might be giving her too much. The amount of work becomes normal, their gestures of appreciation, of caution, have become excessive.

Are this really gestures of appreciation? Why is increasing her paycheck not an option? They can afford a trip, an expensive watch, impulsive shopping, hosting friends at their home, but not increase Louise paycheck? Why, weirdly, it feels like they are being so nice to Louise. Did you get deceived? The Masses are giving Louise what rich people think can replace money. Social and cultural capital are the main currency. They are giving her a taste of their life, a peek into their privacy, a spot that can only be taken by people of the same class. Pity is not empathy.

Beyond class dynamics

However, we should not see Louise only as a victim either. She also is a privileged person in comparison to other people in the book. Here is where the complexity of the book and the blame becomes tricky.

“No illegal immigrants, agreed?”

She is chosen, she is different. She is not like the other nannies. Racism and Xenophobia.

Louise knows that she is special and she loves it. She knows she has an advantage, that the fantasy she chose fits her and attracts others.

She doesn’t need to pay or fake marriage for her papers, like Wafa did.

Her isolation, to an extent, is chosen. The people that are naturally around her do not fit the fantasy she belongs to.

She is respected by the friends of the Masses, she is respected in the streets, by her landlord, no one questions her capacity to do her job. She is respected by the masses, she is feared, to an extent by Myriam.

However, as we advance through the book we can see that her whiteness and her femininity are not enough to escape the misfortunes and judgements that being poor brings.

Here is where the understanding or at least a message that I think Slimani is trying to convey is that maybe these features, these privileges, are what makes Louise so dangerous in comparison to the other nannies. For Louise it is easier to accept and embrace the fantasy, but at the same time it is easier for her to understand that the fantasy is not real, that she deserves a different fantasy or that, if nothing else, she has more of a chance to force that fantasy into reality.

The unquestioned historical privileges that she embodies as a French woman, blind her from her own reality.

For Myriam a similar opposite process happens too, her historically unquestioned imposed disadvantages blind her from her own actions, from her desires to perform and achieve a different kind of fantasy.

A society of disconnection, where sorority is a threat to your own capitalist endeavors.

This is just a very superficial aim to understand some of the dynamics the Slimani carefully crafts in her book. There is so much to say about Myriam, Paul, and the kids, but this will make the blog into a paper.

To conclude, I will say: I do not think we can only blame Louise for what happened. Do you?

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The Pink House

Posted on November 9, 2026 by ava

I sat with this one for a little while. When I started reading, I sighed, knowing that this would be a sad one like many we have read. No happy endings probably. I was both right and wrong. I was overwhelmed by the sadness of the realities the travestis faced and by how painful it is to read about the cruel treatment society inflicted on people who deserved to live “normal lives” free from violence and injustice for simply embracing who they are just like anyone else.  I was wrong to think there was no happy ending because their partial survival was a happy ending. The stories that got carried forward by novelists like Camila Sosa Villada is the happy ending. The stories of injustice, the harsh realities.

I do think I read with the intention of finding common threads between the novels we read and one theme we keep returning to is motherhood. In this novel though that theme stood out in a unique way through the travestis’ desire to experience motherhood especially motherhood through Auntie Encarna and Twinkle in Her Eye and their admiration for the women who took shelter in the pink house and gave birth to their children. Also, I think for them Auntie Encarna (178 years old?) brought a sense of safety to their chaos which they all were, in a sense, after and she was able to provide a form of maternal love for them.

On motherhood, Camila writes:

“Nothing was as beautiful as her. How could we deny our love for her, or for our blood mothers, the monsters who had driven us crazy. The woman standing there, who bore the hatred of the world on her shoulders, was far worthier of our love even if she could be a bitch and a despot, a desperate, lonely woman capable of anything” (p. 69).

I still am not sure what women’s writing is. Do we even need an answer? Is it important to have an answer? Maybe because of the reparations aspect of things for women’s writing? This novel was written by a trans woman. Does that make it women’s writing, queer writing, or both? Is there a certain checklist for a novel to be considered women’s writing then?

I think a similarity with the last novel we read, That Hair, is the search for identity and belonging which I thought about as I read this novel.

One thing this novel did well was to show the clear divide between the experience of womanhood and the luxury of having one’s womanhood recognized by society. The travestis desire recognition as such and acceptance into the very society that rejects them. The freedom to live and be recognized as who they are is what they most yearn for and yet that very desire exposes them to violence, bringing sorrow to many and death to some. The relationship between the men (the Johns and the fathers), portrayed as brutish individuals, and the travestis is one to examine for sure. The concept of family was another one. The travestis were a family, and Auntie Encarna was their mom figure, who divided her love between “the orphans.” This reminds me of how beautiful some of the prose was and I enjoyed reading it very much. It was charged with pain, but nevertheless beautiful.

One thing I was confused about was the character of Maria the Mute who then transformed into Maria the Bird (???). I didn’t make the connection but I think she must symbolize something? I also don’t know if I enjoyed the overly fictional side of the novel (like the transformation into the bird) but oh well.

I particularly liked this one passage on page 185, where Camila talks about Auntie Mara as the record keeper, a part of the country’s history, in a way exposing the hypocrisy of society:

“Auntie Mara was a part of our country’s history, the happy, pornographic story of a country where bold men worked the land and the grandchildren of immigrants populated it, all of whom, the foreigners, the Blacks, the Indians, and the mestizos, to a man, would have been burned at the stake for sleeping with a travesti. Auntie Mara had kept a record of all those who had once, twice, or more, out of desperation, curiosity, or secret yearning, given themselves to a travesti body. She had a full chronicle of those occasions and expected them all to come back to her travesti pagoda with the confidence of someone who knows that for certain people it’s easier to die than change.”

As always, looking forward to our discussion this Friday!

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10 Camila Sosa Villada “Bad Girls”

Posted on November 8, 2026 by dnabi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th-Tgdkqmgw  (Donna Summer 1981 Bad Girls)

Back to the South American street life stories which I love, away from boring middle class European stories, these women are living life honestly and openly. This is another autofiction and so not focused on beautiful prose or weaving multi-layered storylines or character development, just a simple message, that trans women prostitutes are feminists too.

Camila tells us that she expects a shitty life in which her desires are forever repressed (107), but this is also true of most people, they sell their dreams for a shitty job in a corporation that eats away at their autonomy and agency. Sarmiento Park is next to the most important financial district in South America, and beside the university, traditionally the 2 major client groups for prostitutes after politicians. While the corporate family men are being as hypocritical as the prostitutes, living a lie, their values gone, their forbidden desires fulfilled enabling the economy to function (55, 108, 119). Everyone thinks it is someone else’s father or husband, but just in case no families talk about prostitution. Angie’s boyfriend builds houses for other people, the same way that Angie sleeps with other men (125). At least the prostitutes have autonomy and agency, free from romantic love, liberated from capitalism, family, and social security (11).

The part I loved was the focus on community as family. They have a safe refuge, Auntie Encarna’s pink house, to centre their lives. They live near the park, a large green space with a zoo and theme park but at night taken over by the prostitutes (1) so it’s close to home. The girls are different but family, as Camila “didn’t belong to” her birth family (62). They even adopt a baby as a family, a baby who looked at them as normal people, like they had never been appreciated before (8), further developing the bonds between them. Two girls (Laura and Nadina) graduate to move away and raise a family like happens in a birth family (36).

Sadly, over time things change for the worse. “The park was ruined when they flooded it with light, bringing new life to the night, athletes, families, art schools, police station” (156). Auntie Encarna had become fearful of the girls, the girls had no gathering spot, so couldn’t reach each other and “the bond grew weak” (157). As with all families, members started dying, the city streets are no longer theirs (188), life is so bad that Auntie Encarna kills herself and her baby – women killing children is becoming a theme of our class’s books – but at the funeral the girls shared memories of their happy family life (192). On to a next chapter, trans prostitutes live the same as all women, reinventing themselves to survive.

Do you agree that trans street prostitutes are the same as women and men who prostitute themselves for money at soul-less corporate jobs ?

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Hair means everything

Posted on November 6, 2026 by qtoca

The story was written in a way that felt different from the previous books we’ve read. It carried the same narration style as Ru where we go between exposition about the character’s family, then back to herself and how she felt about her own identity and hair (mostly taking place in salons). I will say, it was hard to get into; maybe it’s because I felt disconnected from her history and didn’t understand the cultural history that fueled the animosity of race in the region she was from.

I know, however, that there is tension in who she is because of her hair, its texture, shape, and difficulty in taming. Her hair has become a key identifier of who she is and how people perceive her and even comes back as a theme at the end of the story (her hair being a person in itself). Within her own family, she is expected to conform to stereotypes of what is deemed pretty in Angola and raises an internalised expectation of how she should maintain herself. Scenes where the hairdresser straightens her hair and uses products with pictures of models not even looking like her felt like a way to erase traces of their background; to assimilate. It made me uncomfy.

I don’t know many people in my personal life who actually spoke to me about these exact struggles (with Richmond being a town filled mostly with straight asian hair,) however, I’ve experienced within my own family disappointment when it came to just the slightest bit of wave in their hair. My mom specifically grew up with wavy hair and complimented me profusely growing up, saying how happy she is that I didn’t get her texture. During celebrations, straightening her hair is the first thing she does: the first step to becoming formal and beautiful.

Funnily, I with pin straight hair would curl it when I needed to look beautiful. This made me realize that sometimes we chase things that we don’t have and it can drive us crazy. Of course, this feeling is not to the same extent as the author experienced, especially since her involvement with hair often came with racial remarks, but it made me think how crucial hair is to women in general too. I wouldn’t dare to imagine going bald, and this itself made me think how important my hair is to who I am and how confident I feel about my beauty. A bad hairday, haircut, is enough for me to want to isolate… to think that I’m forever ruined until it grows back… I wonder if men ever feel the same.

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That Hair by Almeida: Identity & Belonging

Posted on November 5, 2026 by Sydney Hyndman

One thing that stood out to me while reading That Hair was how Mila attaches meaning to something ordinary, like her hair. Her hair becomes closely connected to her identity, her family, and her experience of growing up between two cultures. With her parents being a Black Angolan mother and a white Portuguese father, Mila is constantly navigating different parts of her background. Her hair seems to represent this experience, connecting her to her Angolan roots while also making her feel different from the Portuguese society she grows up in. 


I also found the title interesting. To me, the title “That Hair” almost makes Mila’s hair sound like something that other people point out because it is “different”. It made me think about the idea of being viewed as the "other". As she grows up in Portugal, where European beauty standards are present, her hair becomes a visible reminder of her difference. At the same time, her hair connects her to her family and ancestry, especially her mother and grandmother. Additionally, the memories of her grandmother illustrate how identity is passed down through family, even when someone does not fully understand their connection to their roots. Her memories of Angola are also interesting because she is trying to understand a place that is part of her identity, even though much of her connection to it comes through family stories. In this way, learning about her ancestry also becomes a way of learning about parts of herself. 


I think the novel's writing style reflects this experience of coming from different backgrounds. Rather than telling the story in a straightforward, structured timeline, Almeida moves between memories, family experiences, and different moments in Mila's life. I guess this makes sense because identity is not something we develop all at once. Rather, it is shaped by our life experiences and the places we come from. Ultimately, I think Mila's relationship with her hair reflects the complicated experience of belonging to more than one culture. Her hair is effectively a reminder of both where she comes from and how she sees herself.


My question for the class: Do you have a personal feature that you feel connects you to your ancestral roots? How does it connect you, and does it form an important part of your identity? Do other people recognize it often?


My image today is what I imagine Mila’s hair looks like. I wish I had this curl pattern.
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That Hair: was this supposed to be a novel…

Posted on November 5, 2026 by kcauchon

Wow. What a disappointment. I must admit, this was the book I was most excited for when we went through them at the beginning of the semester. So maybe I was setting myself up for disappointment. What I had anticipated from this book was perhaps how her hair and biracial identity affected her life. What I found instead was disconnected personal thoughts interspersed with some recollections of her times in hair salons.

I found that most of the time, this book read more like an essay than a novel. It seemed she was trying to convince herself of something and I still don’t really know what that is. Given the last sentence of the book, I assume she was trying to discover who she was. (I’m only about 90% sure Mila and the author are the same person). This whole book was a retrospective journey of self discovery and in the end, she doesn’t really come to any conclusions. Reading this book felt like having access to one’s inner thoughts without any of the necessary context. I think the author wrote this book for herself, and I hope that she got something out of it because I did not. It read as though she just started writing and didn’t stop, like these were truly just her raw thoughts with minimal editing. Which is definitely worth something, but it seems to mean more to her (and potentially her future grandchildren, for whom she also wrote the book) than any random reader. If my grandmother had written something like this I would definitely be interested in reading because it’d be like reading the journal of a loved one. But since I have no connection to this author, there is a distance that I felt while reading this which kept me from truly understanding it.

I also really struggled with the prose. I do think it could be a translation issue, since I know Portuguese writing has longer, more complex sentence structure than English, so I am not accustomed to this style of writing. I remember being particularly baffled at this sentence:

“This image captures the supremacist in me, the tormentor’s essence that ruins my days, as much as there’s nothing or no one to attack me or who has attacked me except myself; the supremacist implicit in the reticent, wounded timidity of so many headfuls of wiry hair that I encounter around Lisbon, a timidity much more justified than mine because, all things considered, all forms of timidity were in my case always a natural privilege and not a reaction to circumstance”(98)

First of all, I really can’t get past this being one sentence. But mainly, I really struggle to understand what the author is trying to get across when the prose is written in this way. I don’t quite know how to describe it, hopefully we will discuss the writing style in class. I remember having similar issues with the writing in Symphony in White, so perhaps me and Portuguese writing in translation simply don’t mix. I wish I could read Portuguese and maybe be able to better understand these books.

Overall, I sadly did not enjoy this book. However I am very intrigued to hear what everyone else has to say and hopefully gain some insight into what this book has to offer. My question to the class is: when was the moment you decided you either liked or disliked this book? For me I don’t really know if there was an exact moment but it was definitely within chapter 1 where I realized this book was not going to be for me.

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Says Mila

Posted on November 5, 2026 by ava

“Our being, like a cage full of birds, is filled with moans of captivity.”

-Forough Farrokhzad, The House is Black

This book was one of those I realized I shouldn’t have judged by its cover. I had no idea what I was going to read. Beyond whether I enjoyed the book or not, I think it exceeded my expectations and did what a book is supposed to do: make me reflect. It shared some themes with the other novels we have read so far, but what stood out was the writing style. As always I left way too many sticky tabs on the pages (more than I probably should have). Beyond motherhood, and even the subject of womanhood, I think what the book did well was weaving together stories of identity, belonging, and societal norms that we abide by or that consume us without us realizing (and at some point we revisit them), and that become too deeply engraved in us, especially as women. I do have a criticism though. It was doing too much at once. On this point, what I realized as I read these books is that I go into them to find their strengths and weaknesses. I think that is an issue I have identified with this style of reading, because maybe they aren’t meant to be overanalyzed to the extent that I sometimes do.

I really liked how she talked about representation and belonging. The stories her hair carries. Her hair seems to tell a story about her that she herself has yet to fully understand. I think it does a great job of telling a story that explores belonging and identity.

and near the end, she writes, “I’ve lived a novel, without realizing that what I write now is the leftover scraps of that book.”

This quote (and the book in general) also made me think about private and public stories, and the history of nations and people, in the sense that we must consider that they are more interconnected than one may think. That part of history is individual experiences. One thing to dwell on is the interconnectivity between the words history and story. In French, histoire translates to story. How do we perceive private vs. public history? This topic fascinates me more than I can express in this blog post. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

On page 97, she writes, commenting on the photo where the white girls are in the background, and she is talking about her experience and her internalization of racism through the process of assimilation(?), writing it as “it is the portrait of a self-persecution and the daily struggle to achieve indifference… I see now that I am the persecuted and the persecutor, the disfigured, disfigured myself.”

Belonging is something that I keep coming across and it both fascinates and puzzles me. What does it mean to belong? Do we need to belong? Is that what completes us? Why do we sometimes search for it so desperately?

One thing I experienced reading the book was not understanding what the author was trying to convey… Chapter 8 was one of those instances. I felt like there is something underneath the text that needs more digging, but I had not reached it, so maybe we’ll get to explore that in class as we passionately discuss the book. Looking forward to it!

Once again… after I write my blog, I learn/understand much more than when I read the book itself, and then it all starts to grow on me.

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That Hair : “a diversionary crown”

Posted on November 5, 2026 by parden

I enjoyed reading That Hair by Pereira de Almeida. While it was by no means a quick and easy read, the way the prose was set up (kind of rambly? is that a word? definitely reflective) meant that it was a smooth read. It didn’t feel like it was longer than it needed to be, which I think I struggled with in some of the previous texts (feeling like they could have been edited down into more concise stories).

I also appreciated the translator’s note at the beginning of the text. I know I keep harping on about translations and translators in my blog posts, but I thought the reflection on Portugal, Angola, and the legacies of colonialism on either side was super interesting as a way to start to understand some of the perspective/translation (word, syntax, flow vs meaning, etc.) choices within the novel. He notes some of his personal experiences, including conversations with people he’s met, and I’m interested in how we think this context might bleed through in his approach to the work.

Something that stood out to me from this text, after thinking about some of our previous class discussions on the limits of memory (what memories/stories are ours to claim? Our grandparents’? Our childrens’? what memories/stories are ours to tell?) was the narrator’s early reflexion on what she called the “overlap between who I am and the narrative of my origins” (26). I found this to be an interesting perspective to help set up her later reflections on both sides of her family tree. She reflects on this story of self, claiming: “my country of origin is my grandmother’s hair”, and talks about other family members as “heirs to my grandmother’s hair” (26).

And then, to fit with our themes on writing, I wanted to reflect briefly on the narrator’s interaction with the act. While she deliberates a few times on the subject, I wanted to pull two key moments:

  1. “Such a conclusion shows me that this is my hair only by chance. Who we become in writing is as different from who we are as a water stain is different from a key” (133).

This conclusion follows a reflection on how a person finds themselves only by chance, that the search for their narrative of origins isn’t enough to actually find it. I thought it was interesting, as we’re discussing what makes women’s writing, who is a woman writer, etc., etc., this idea of the presentation of self. Who we become in writing (the parts of us we put into our narratives? the characters based on their authors? or the author’s own becoming, outside of the text?) is as different from who we are (here, the author)…

2. “Writing is similar to taking a brush to a head of hair perched atop a Styrofoam bust. And if the hair is the person and I the tiara, if it is 1 who am mere decoration, if it was myself I locked up in the display case in the hopes of watching our cinema from a private box, who then is Mila? (148).

So true. Who then is Mila? What a way to end the text. I’m going to steal this question for my question of the week, if what I’m writing even makes sense: If the hair is the person (changeable, moldable, but ultimately growing and existing as itself?) and the person is the tiara (accessory, the decoration, the potential that rests on the uncontrollable [hair]) then what does that even mean for us as characters in our own stories (displays in our own museums??).

 

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