Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny, translated from the Spanish by JD Pluecker, Deep Vellum, 2023
There’s trash in there, said the man who was cleaning our shower drain. He pulled out a rope of hair—in our household of mostly women, it collects. I thought of the specific word he used to describe our hair, that of a tangle of broken, dead, fallen hair: trash. No one in my circle, also mostly people with uteruses, has ever referred to hair as “trash.” To us, hair is hair, and we grieve its damaged pieces. It seems peculiar and disheartening that our being women (as a social construct) and people with uteruses (as an overlapping, but not coextensive, biological reality), have always been intimately associated to and related with trash. Our relationship with trash is indicative of our whole body and mind’s vicissitudes. In Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s recent novel, Trash, the fact that her three narrators all identify as women demonstrates a radical intention, revealing how certain sexual identities and wants are constructed as “bad” in order to maintain the patriarchal and ableist social order, where particular bodies and desires are rendered incapable of performing normative moral order, and are therefore unacceptable in society. When we reframe it that way, “trash” is not necessarily just the waste we can no longer consume or make use of; its entanglements prove to be far more complex, much deeper than that. The identities we align with, the politics we embody, the bodyminds we are, our presence unwanted and disturbing to the ruler’s home—when they stir up a stench which discomforts cisheterosexual (mostly) male desires, we become trash to their senses.
In this stunning debut novel, we encounter biopolitical debilities — such as hormones for transitions, the toxins from medication, blood from menstruation — through which Zéleny wades to render the limitations of our social and biopolitical mobility. Trash, set in a municipal garbage dump, starts by familiarising us with its cycle of narrators, taking turns like a roundtable with each part written in distinct voices, pulling us into the lucid experiential timelines of each narrator’s embodied memory.
The first narrator is an unnamed girl who later christens herself ‘Alicia’. Her first scenes are long dialogue-like chapters, as though she is answering a question. They depict her living conditions as a child, discreetly situating us in the past and ultimately fooling us into thinking she may still be a child. Perhaps this choice was deliberate; perhaps Zéleny intends the reader to perceive Alicia as someone who could never grow up healthily, an adult in a child’s body, a battered, toughened soul in a quivering body on the verge of tears (whether these tears are of sorrow, resentment, or anger). We glimpse the assigned vulnerability of a child’s body, especially that of a girl, which derives from a deep dependence on the decisions of adults. The self-destructive choices of Alicia’s adoptive mother, who cleans gringos’ houses for a living, are enabled by the cruel, unfair treatment of domestic workers by their employers. Failing to fulfill the employers’ expectations, such as a commitment unequal to the reward, and being accused of stealing despite having been in service for a long time, her mother loses one job after another. Without a job, she regards Alicia as a burden and desires to discard her, despite having taken her in as her own. This acquaints us with the novel’s first depiction of what is deemed “trash” in this capitalist world: workers occupying so-called “unskilled” jobs are considered disposable, and treated as such by their employers (it is no coincidence that said workers are disproportionately women). Consequently, Alicia’s mother views her child as disposable; in the eyes of a hopeless parent, a child has no monetary value, and so is worthless in such a dark time. Such a precarious life can only make the body of a child more brittle, as we can hear from Alicia’s tone:
Her lessons showed me how to live with nothing. They made me who I am.
Because of her, I am who I am.
And because of her, that old-ass bitch, I am where I am.
The second narrator is Griselda, who produces her top priority at the time as her introductory line: “The second phase of our research has been approved.” Griselda is a researcher on “setting-based behaviour” — an ethnographic spotlighting of violences which are thought to be a consequence of an ingrained, sustained space, in this case, the trash dump — and she also operates as a doctor or medic for the local community. Her dedication as a researcher and doctor in these marginal spaces is reflected in the way her bodymind is slowly altered by the conditions of the trash dump. Stench has become a second skin, unwashable. Stories of multiple facets—how happiness, struggle, illness, sufficiency are all attached—are as difficult to break down as multilayered plastic. Griselda is forced to reckon with all aspects of her life as and amidst trash, both philosophically and through her consumption: “[S]orting the trash, recycling the trash, living from and for the trash.” This includes how she processes and arranges for her tía’s gradual descent into dementia. Her tía’s past is reenacted in delirious episodes, tearing apart the once composed, intelligent, unflappable woman Griselda once knew; an anchor for Griselda and her twin when their parents passed away. Behind the woman Griselda thought she knew is a young, ambitious girl who had been traumatised by carrying a baby to term and abandoning it.
We come to be defined by the space we inhabit and the education we receive … [such as] the kids living around or inside the trash dump in Juárez, but more broadly it applies to everything. And that’s what I’m most interested in studying. Who is the person who makes a life out of our leftovers? And, more specifically, what makes us who we are?
The third narrator, Reyna Grande, is a trans woman and the matriarch of a union of sex workers; she is entrusted with their territory, a collection of corners, and distributes them to whoever needs work. Holding the belief that “if we’re all putas, why the hell should we be segregated?”, her union is different from other unions which cater to specific identities. In Reyna’s union, everyone fits in. All are welcome no matter the background, the identity, the body, including what is between their legs. Throughout her chapters, the recipients of her advice and stories change, the children she tries to care for end up slipping from her fingers, not quite reciprocating the trust she has shown them. With her memories of the many putas who left her for their own reasons, Reyna is sentenced to a maternal loneliness, confusion and self-sacrifice — a similarity as much as it is a contrast to the surrogate motherings of Alicia’s adoptive mother and Griselda’s tía.
Trash paints a tragic picture of how much we are dependent on social sanction to enable our actions, permit our bodies and allow us to inhabit certain spaces. Social constructions of who and what is acceptable limits our visions so that our futures appear constricted in a narrow alleyway of very few options. Zéleny’s narrative is whole and cinematic, yet fragmented across time and space, inhabiting different bodies, projecting different voices, as kaleidoscopically pieced-together as an assortment of any finds you’d dig out of a trash can. We are presented with the multiplicities women are so often conscripted to embody: Alicia, a wary, terrified child’s mind in an adult’s body who psychically rejects her physical transformation into an adult woman; Griselda, a caretaker for her tía and a medic-cum-field researcher at the dump, ironically making data out of the bodies she encounters and treats; Reyna, a maternal figure, a leader, a bodyguard, and a firm dreamer for herself.
For each narrator, the bodies of other women provide immediate and intimate counterpoints to their own experiences: Alicia’s multiple “mom”s, individual women who raised her in turn each time she was abandoned by the last one; Griselda’s aunt, an intellectual, hardworking woman whose mind is deteriorating with dementia; Reyna’s numerous, ever-rotating wards who take refuge with her union and are trying to collect money to continue their transitions and save their lives. These familial figures agitate the narrators’ sense of their roles, boundaries and relations, which they constructed to protect themselves, prompting them to reconcile with the “dirtier” aspects of their families, and themselves, which they had been uncomfortable with. Alicia must reconcile herself to the fragility of her mother and the unwanted changes to her body. Griselda must make amends with never being able to completely understand her tía’s past, nor help her tía’s already fragmented mind to assuage her guilt and fear. Reyna releases her binding oath to be an all-encompassing guardian to her puta wards, and instead prioritises her needs and love first.
As time unspools further, the foolish actions of men trigger the eruption of these women’s lives at a dangerous speed; the reader begins to think that everything had come together for them, only for things to unravel just as quickly. We see that the thick cords of our lives are thin threads we need to bind to our fingers, so as not to lose the one filament which makes us ourselves. Our routine is ‘setting-based behaviour’, yes, but ultimately we have agency over what shapes us: At the end of the novel, each narrator is thrust into the urgency of choice. Will they let setting enclose their selves? Or will they shatter setting and stitch together a life they’ve always sought? By setting, I refer not only to the material environment, but also the violences, regrets, and unresolved pasts which shroud their shadows.
JD Pluecker’s translation cuts straight into the truth nestling on the bone of the issue, making use of the skill they’ve gained through their previous work translating similarly no-nonsense queer, justice and non-normative poetics. The vulnerability of such bareness and urgent pacing, paired with rare convolutedness, does not engage with any of the beatific aesthetics much literature romanticises these types of tragedies with. It plunges readers deep into the heart of the novel: Trash. Sinking in stench and sitting with utter discomfort of the “dirty”, “erotic” politics prewritten into the characters’—women’s—lives.
There is no opting for beauty. Choice is a myth, and purpose is, more often than not, privileged. Things which life relegated us to were not completely planned by us; mobility, provision, shelter, all the finer stuff of love. The political fields such as policy making and urban planning all desire that attention be shifted away from “life”, but we can only ponder what “life” is as it starts becoming muddled in said politics. Is it absolute employability, is it freedom from capital chains, is it the ability to live a healthy uncontaminated life, is it the ability to breathe in a body that is your own? In Trash, “life had no desire to disappear, but then it just does. Eventually it does.” But can we really assume there is no life in the trash wastelands, where things deemed purposeless or replaceable are thrown away in truckfuls? When we trace life to its ends, at the final destination of the rotten, aged, and wrinkled, even there, new, boring, meaningless organisms tussle and germinate anew. Life is meticulous and thorough, a course or trajectory tacked with strings, a biopolitical debility.
It was simpler for them to understand the barrios that squatters built than these settlements that no one planned to build and that arose, simply arose, out of the earth. Or out of the trash.
Fairuza Hanun, also known as silkcuttofu, is a queer, neurodivergent-disabled, Indonesian Muslim on a mission to practise the queer-disabled ethics of care and ecology. Their work has also been published and forthcoming in multiple journals, including Asymptote Journal’s blog, GENCONTROLZ Magazine’s All That Jazz, PR&TA Journal, Perhappened Magazine, and more. They survive by working as a creative writing teacher and arts publicist, with a penchant for reviewing books.
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