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Abjection of the female body in Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes
María E. López
Tijuana scholar Sayak Valencia argues that being born a woman and poor in contemporary Mexico condemns girls to live in a precarious circle of violence.
1 Sayak Valencia, Capitalismo Gore (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Editorial Melusina, 2010). Similarly, the writer Fernanda Melchor believes that being a woman in contemporary Mexico carries the stigma of being ‘weak and stupid’ – ‘something like being born with a disability’.
2 Spanish original: ‘que era algo así como nacer con una discapacidad’; Luis Román Nieto, ‘Escribes como hombre/toda escritura es femenina. Entrevista a Fernanda Melchor’, La Palabra y El Hombre, 45 (2018), 6–11; https://lapalabrayelhombre.uv.mx/index.php/palabrahombre/article/view/2624 [accessed 18 January 2021]. Both Sayak and Melchor address the precarious situation for the poor, the working class and migrants in the frame of ‘necropolitics’.
The concept of necropolitics was first proposed by the Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe to explain how the lack of governmental action in violent spaces leads to the emergence of private forces that exert control over the deaths (not the lives) of the inhabitants.
3 Achille Mbembe, Necropolítica (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Editorial Melusina, 2011), p. 20. Mbembe argues that necropolitics develops when the State hands over power to private forces, due to either incapacity or being immersed in corrupt dynamics. The right to kill is no longer an exclusive prerogative of the State. In this regard, both the State and private forces act as necropowers that compete to gain control over the territory and the people.
This chapter addresses the representation of Veracruz
4 See Ricardo Cartas, ‘Temporada de huracanes es un cuento de hadas de la modernidad’, Radio BUAP, 28 August 2017; http://ricardocartas.com/2017/08/temporada-de-huracanes-es-un-cuento-de-hadas-de-la-modernidad/ [accessed 28 January 2021]. as a necropolitical scenario for poor women, girls and sexual minorities in Fernanda Melchor’s novel
Temporada de huracanes (2017).
5 Fernanda Melchor, Temporada de huracanes (Mexico City: Penguin Random House, 2017). Melchor was born in 1982 in the Port of Veracruz. At present, she is widely recognised as one of Mexico’s most promising and prominent writers.
Temporada de huracanes sold more than 37,000 digital and printed copies in Mexico, and Random House had to reprint the book 11 times to continue supplying bookstores with it. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages, and the translations multiplied the success of the book internationally: in Germany, Melchor won the International Prize for Literature in 2019; in the US, the novel was one of five finalists for the prestigious International Man Booker Prize in 2020. She is also the author of
Aquí no es Miami (2013),
6 Fernanda Melchor, Aquí no es Miami (Mexico City: Editorial Almadía, 2013). Falsa liebre (2013)
7 Fernanda Melchor, Falsa liebre (Mexico City: Editorial Almadía, 2013). and
Páradais (2021).
8 Fernanda Melchor, Páradais (Mexico City: Penguin Random House, 2021).Melchor experiments with form. She avoids fixed phrases and hackneyed characters and stands out for a handling of language ‘that escapes tape recorders and cameras, which is entangled in the voices and the gestures of the tribe’.
9 Spanish original: ‘que se escapa a las grabadoras y a las cámaras, el que se halla enmarañado en las voces y en los gestos de la tribu’; Aquí no es Miami, p. 12. The tribe for Melchor are her people: the people of the Port of Veracruz and the surrounding areas – ‘this imaginary world that I grew up in and that I have invented’.
10 Spanish original: ‘este imaginario con el que crecí y que me he inventado’; Luis J. L. Chigo, ‘Analizar la raíz de la violencia sexual forzosamente implica analizar la sexualidad masculina’, Maremoto, 9 November 2020; https://monicamaristain.com/analizar-la-raiz-de-la-violencia-sexual-forzosamente-implica-analizar-la-sexualidad-masculina-fernanda-melchor/ [accessed 28 January 2021]. In fact, the plot was inspired by a real event: the murder of a sorcerer in Veracruz by his young lover and his handicapped stepfather.
11 Cartas, ‘Temporada de huracanes es un cuento de hadas de la modernidad’. A friend saw everything but did not participate and was released from custody. According to the journalistic note, the lover killed the sorcerer because the sorcerer wanted the man to return to him. However, the young man was already married, so the young lover killed the sorcerer.
The novel is structured in chapters, each of them being a sole paragraph. The episodic structure has no chronological order and centres on the lives of different characters. The text intertwines the characters’ voices and thoughts with the gossiping in the village and the fast narrative of the omniscient narrator. This starts with the discovery of the rotten corpse of Bruja Chica (Young Witch) near La Matosa, a fictional town inspired by Veracruz, and ends with the impressions of the undertaker, el Abuelo (the Grandpa), while he is placing her body and others in a mass grave. Bruja Chica is presented and addressed as a woman, and her death is therefore viewed as a femicide. However, by revealing the male biological sex of the character midway through the novel, this crime becomes a violent act of homophobia. In this study, I refer to the murder of Bruja Chica as a case of femicide, although I will also address some specificities of this murder as a trans homicide.
Luismi, Brando and Munra are detained and interrogated about the assassination. They are known in town for spending hours hanging around doing drugs and drinking alcohol. The thoughts of the protagonists, the gossiping and the omniscient narrator reveal the complex lives of the characters in an area full of secrets and marked by latent violence. First, we learn of Bruja Chica’s childhood and of her mother, Bruja Vieja (Old Witch), as well as the legend of the hidden treasure in their home. We also learn of Yesenia, Luismi’s cousin, one of the perpetrators of the crime, and of Yesenia’s grandmother, a deeply misogynistic woman who mistreated her. Norma, Luismi’s 12-year-old girlfriend, is one of the central characters of the novel. Norma suffers domestic violence and is pregnant by her stepfather. Luismi and his own stepfather, Munra, take her to hospital so that she does not bleed to death due to an abortion caused by a medicinal drug prepared by Bruja Chica at the request of Chabela, Luismi’s mother. Chabela prostitutes herself and disappears after becoming a sexual partner of Barrabás, one of the leading drug dealers and human traffickers in the area. Luismi, who is homosexual, carries out the murder of Bruja Chica, encouraged by Brando, a drug addict and a sexually disturbed young man who wants the money allegedly hidden in Bruja Chica’s home to leave town and his mother, a woman who takes refuge in religion to cope with the abandonment of Brando’s father.
I suggest two ways of reading the chaotic lives of the characters in the context of the structural poverty and violence in Mexico:
(1) Temporada de huracanes reports the dynamics of violence resulting from the activity by organised crime and corrupt authorities in contemporary Mexico. In this regard, Melchor presents drug traffickers and corrupt police officials as necropowers operating with the aim of making profit, with dramatic consequences for people. This novel shows how the structural violence, poverty and lack of prospects in the area increase the social marginalisation. For many, emigration is the only way out; for most, the lack of money makes this option unaffordable, so they take refuge in alcohol, drugs and compulsive sexual relations.
(2) Temporada de huracanes also explains the dynamics of violence against women, girls and sexual minorities as entrenched in a socio-legal space that leaves the majority of the investigations into violence against women and sexual minorities abandoned and the perpetrators free. The novel illustrates that the violence against women and girls in the area has a different level of complexity to the violence associated with organised crime because it is embedded in a specific process for gaining control over women’s bodies. This violence occurs at the hands of violent males (‘sujetos endriagos’, using Sayak’s term) who treat women, girls and sexual minorities as (sexual) commodities. In Temporada de huracanes, violent males can be the corrupt police, the owners of the factories speculating with workers, the representatives of organised crime (like Barrabás) and the ordinary male civilians who do not necessarily partake in organised crime but have developed necropolitical practices for controlling women’s bodies and sexuality. Such is the case with Luismi, Munra, Brando, Norma’s stepfather and others. In the novel, violence against women and sexual minorities is also perpetrated by mothers, grandmothers and female neighbours.
In this regard, the novel highlights that homosexuality continues to be a taboo subject in Mexican society because, as in so many other countries in the region, homosexuals do not fit into the dominant gender and sexuality epistemologies. We will see how in the novel, homosexual practices are considered incomprehensible acts even by homosexuals, because they show the faults of individuals. In this way, homosexual encounters occur in the dirty, messy and dark underground of Bruja Chica’s basement or in the engineer’s car.
This chapter is divided into three parts. I first present the high rates of gender and sexual violence in contemporary Mexico, particularly in Veracruz, the place that inspired this novel. This section also provides an account of how gender and sexual violence in the necropolitical regime is part of the process for gaining control over women’s bodies in particular. Then I address the dimension of violence in Temporada de huracanes. To this end, I present La Matosa as a necropolitical location that is governed by obscurantism and lust. Finally, I address the representation of gender and sexual violence through the stories of various characters in the novel.