“They said we were trans, transsexual, transgender women. They reimposed their academy from the North, while here we tried to survive (…) to feed ourselves, even if it was from the land. They presented theories about us to make our existence more hygienic (…) that is why I do not say trans women, I do not speak in surgical terms like a scalpel, because these codes do not attest to what happened to transvestites in these regions, from the Indians to this crap civilization. I recover the stones and the spit, I recover the ridicule (…) The Damned are transvestites and they don’t want, not even in their worst moments, to be called something else”. It is with this assertive and defiant note that Camila Sosa Villada opens the book the damneda novel-fable that has just been published by BCF.
Someone said that you had to be careful with people who were destroyed, because they knew they could survive, but in the damned we realize that some cannot and others only survive because they transform into something else. Camila Sosa Villada, now an actress and writer, lived as a transvestite prostitute for several years until her debut with a play (“Carnes Tolendes”). And this, which is her first novel, although supposedly partly autobiographical, has the agility to play with the limits of literary genres as she played for years with the rules of sexual genres, when she was a boy studying Communication and Theater in the University of Cordoba. , Argentina, and at night, she slipped on extremely high heels in Parque Sarmiento, where a statue of Dante is pontificated and the life of a group of women touched by the curse of having been born in a body that society does not recognize, for being both male and female.
It is therefore in these spaces where nothing is black or white, but where hybridity and metamorphosis are law, that this book is born, intense, moving, challenging but, above all, plural, because in these damn women we can recognize all the excluded . of the world, or, as the author says in the interview we did with her, those who are out of grace [divina]. And there are many. Being a hot topic, this could be one more novel written by someone who watches from the outside and uses the experience and pain of others to sell books. It is not the case. Here everything is raw and the pain is not drained, neither with complaints, nor with well-constructed sentences. He also shuns the pamphlet and prefers more tortuous territories where fable and magical realism are mixed with autobiography, reportage, and poetry. It is a book written from within the endless nights, in the midst of all violence, from the familiar, then the world in general, and even the transvestites on top of each other. There is only one safe place and that is the house of Tía Encarna, 178 years old, who one night took in an abandoned girl at the bottom of the park. Hence, “what life does not give, hell lends”; everyone there is a monster, if only because the world taught them to see themselves that way. But, for that very reason, they are incapable, they have learned that “it is easier to escape through tunnels than to jump over walls” and Camila Sosa Villada is herself incapable of rejecting the role of tragic heroine, preferring irony to commitment, to exploration. without fear the limits between reality and fiction in the interviews he grants.
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Source: Observadora
