Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada, translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude, Other Press, 2022
The night belongs to the marginalized, the outcast, the exile. It is here, amidst the shadows, that Camila Sosa Villada unveils the world of the travestis of the small Argentinian city of Córdoba. The daily tragedies encoded on the bodies of her companions are the backbone of her novel Bad Girls, but so too are moments—brief as a stab—brimming with beauty in which life on the margins does not seem impossible after all.
The English translation of the Spanish original, undertaken by Kit Maude, begins with a semantic manifesto by the author on the reappropriation of the word “travesti,” a Spanish slur used in the nineties to describe people who were assigned male at birth but develop a feminine gender identity. Sosa Villada, who herself identifies that way, rejects the idea of sanitizing her existence and that of her companions with other categories such as “trans women” or “transsexuals.” On the contrary: “I reclaim the stonings and spittings, I reclaim the scorn,” she declares emphatically. To identify herself in other terms would mean to erase her life and all the baggage of living in a society capable of using violence to reassure cisheteronormativity.
Bad Girls is an autofictional story, and the author serves as our narrator, recounting the time in her twenties during which she had to do sex work to survive. The novel begins one cold night with a caravan of travestis looking for customers in Sarmiento Park when an extraordinary incident occurs: Auntie Encarna—their 178-year-old leader—saves an abandoned child from a certain death in a ditch, “like a veterinary midwife shoving her hands into a mare to pull out a foal.” The child’s symbolic birthing has a visceral impact, as are most of the author’s descriptions in the novel. Her style can be described as what the Spanish author Ramón del Valle-Inclán called esperpento (roughly equivalent to “grotesque”), which is a literary technique used to examine the systematic deformation of reality by accentuating its most atrocious attributes. Sosa Villada’s prose constantly takes us to the limits and highlights the crudest details: “To thank her, he showed the dead snake that dangled from his knees,” is how she describes an elderly man seducing a prostitute. “She reached out for it and weighed it up like an artisanal salami at a country fair.”
After saving the child, Auntie Encarna decides to keep him despite opposition of the group. It is a transgression to the most conservative values engrained in Latin American (and indeed, most Occidental) societies: the rupture of the traditional family as the chosen family of travestis become the caretakers for Twinkle in Her Eye and endure the hatred of a neighborhood willing to terrorize a loving collective to defend their idea of how society should be organized.
The central maternal figure in the novel, Auntie Encarna, is the embodiment of the impossible: an old travesti. By hyperbolizing her age—a common trope in magical realism—Sosa Villada presents her as a counter-narrative to the reality that most travestis have to endure: dying young. (Their average life expectancy in Argentina is around 35 years—40 years below average.) In that sense, Auntie Encarna is a monument to the time and bodies lost to and brutalized by power. The scars on the skin of the 178-year-old sex worker are a map of the ways in which society seeks to discipline those believed to be mad. “If anyone wants to examine our homeland,” the narrator says at one point, “the homeland for which we have sworn to die countless times in school playgrounds, the homeland that has taken the lives of young men and women with its wars, the homeland that has buried people in concentration camps, if anyone really wants to investigate all that shit, they’d only have to take a look at Auntie Encarna’s body.”
Sosa Villada’s narrator explores her inability to be what she calls a “good prostitute”: she can’t work daily and is selective with her clients. “But deep down, in the basement of this story, there was nothing for me. Just my body, which I sold so I could live as a woman,” she explains bluntly. The price she has to pay to be herself is high: poverty, violence, and marginalization. The other element fundamental to her character is the paternal figure, which she revisits constantly in flashbacks, as a reminder of everything she deems wrong with masculinity; she compares her father with a “ferocious animal, the ghost that haunted me, my nightmare: it was all too awful to be a man. I didn’t want to be a man in this world.”
The travestis of the Sarmiento Park are forced to live a contradictory existence. On the one hand, they need ferocity to resist the onslaught against them from broader society. Death is always behind them; they are constantly attacked and have to endure many beatings on top of those their parents “had already given us, trying to change us back.” On the other hand, they build a strong community around Auntie Encarna, who provides a sense of dignity, a space to be vulnerable, and a network of support. This kind of organization may be termed “feral tenderness”—a term derived from “radical tenderness,” coined by a collective of dissident artists called Pocha Nostra. As Sosa Villada describes it,
The author uses touches of magical realism to allegorize several realities of the travesti community. Maria, a young mute travesti, slowly transforms into a bird, becoming a symbol for the need for freedom and the chance to speak up from the ominous exile most travestis face. Her slow transformation is a direct reaction to the impossibility of being part of the world. In contrast, Natali, who is condemned to transform into a she-wolf every full moon, represents the need for savagery as a defense mechanism. “We were forever ready to burn the whole place down,” says Sosa Villada about her group, “our parents, friends and enemies, the middle classes with their comforts and routines.” Natali’s premature death makes it seem though she has aged at an accelerated rate “the way dogs, wolves, and travestis do: seven years for every human year.”
Class tensions are another important element of the novel, as it describes the lives of impoverished sex workers. The Crows, as Sosa Villada’s friends call them, are two privileged travestis that joined the group periodically: “Wherever we went, they would follow us with all the impunity of their class, trotting elegantly along in a false show of shyness.” The Crows serve as a reminder of the moral hypocrisy of the elites that expel working-class travestis from social life and condemn them to second-class citizenship. “It wasn’t just the fact that they hadn’t come out of the closet, it was that it was easier for them that way,” Sosa Villada says of The Crows. “We’d never had the chance to hide in the closet in the first place.” Many of the travestis’ clients similarly keep up moral appearances during the day—even attacking travestis—while at night unleashing all their desires concealed in guilt. The division of the self Sosa Villada depicts here is exemplary of how masculinity, heteronormativity and the gender norms that structure societies are fictions used to justify hatred towards the Other.
The only element that may have been lost in translation is the travesti slang, which they originally developed in jail so guards wouldn’t understand them. Some words coined by travestis, like “chongo,” which describes virile men who like to sleep with travesties, have been kept in the English text. But these words are not commented on or put in context clear enough that their definition might be guessed, which may be a problem for English readers unfamiliar with these expressions. But Sosa Villada is defiant about such choices: “Language is mine,” she says, reflecting on love amongst the marginalized. “I’m going to wreck it, to make it sick, to confuse it, unsettle it, tear it apart and bring it back to life as often as seems necessary.”
Bad Girls isn’t an optimistic perspective on travestis’ life but a mirror of the grotesque that we—as mere spectators—are forced to see and feel. The group of women is slowly dissolved as a wave of killings sends them into a deeper exile, robbing them of their only safe space and making communication harder. “When we lost the Park,” says Camila, “we lost a support network that came just from being there all together.” Sosa Villada uses the tools of their oppressors to create an epic for her characters, turning her sisters into goddesses and her dead into heroes who bravely fight a war in which their bodies are the battlefield; her words save their stories from oblivion. This book is a weapon made to destroy and force rethinking until a new, inclusive dawn is possible: “a red piece of heaven, so that might fly.”
Rubén López is a Guatemalan writer and proofreader. He is an editor-at-large for Asymptote.
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