Ojeda’s voice is unique and bold. As one of the most renowned writers in Latin American literature right now, she puts her talent to work, in both poetry and prose, to speak honestly about troubling topics of global urgency such as violence and misogyny. She addresses the palpable effects of the excesses of the neoliberal status quo on people's characters, mental health, and sexuality exemplifying the fine line between pleasure and brutality. Horror and agonizing psychological labyrinths are threaded through her narrative allowing her to explore complex characters as believable and relatable as they are unthinkable.
Jawbone’s main protagonists are a group of privileged and rebellious teenage girls and their literature teacher, a young but old-maidish woman with a fragile mental state. The story is set in humid, tropical Guayaquil, Ecuador, the author’s birthplace. The teenagers spend their days between their private, all-girls catholic school—where they are notorious for their defiant behavior—and secretive get-togethers at an abandoned building they’ve turned into their lair, where they explore their imaginations, physical and mental limits, and the doubts and terrors of their impending adulthood. All the while, their teacher Clara struggles incessantly with incapacitating anxiety and flashbacks of abuse, trying to maintain her composure in front of her students at school, and ruminating on her troubling relationship with her dead mother, whose clothes she wears and gestures she mimics.
Most of the focus remains on the group’s leaders and best friends, Annelise and Fernanda, as well as on Clara, as their lives and thoughts increasingly intertwine, painstakingly revealing what lies behind the opening scene of the book. We learn that Fernanda has been kidnapped by Miss Clara and is struggling to figure out the whys and hows as she wakes up “with the uglier side of her 1966-Twiggy-face” pressed against the table to which she’s tied. The story unfolds gradually along time leaps and sophisticated psychological elaborations that take place inside the characters’ heads. Action and settings switch back and forth between school and home, social interactions and private memories. The reader jumps from the girls’ secret meeting spot bordered by mangrove swamps to Clara’s mental battles and conversations with her dead mother; from Fernanda’s therapy sessions to Annelise’s commanding manifestos on the cult to a rhinestone-encrusted, Dior-scented, drag-queen god; then back to the kidnapping site from the beginning, and so on.
These comings and goings make the reading experience quite intense, edgy, and fast-paced. It’s an exhausting high dose of adrenaline, painful but alluring, almost masochistic, and definitely satisfying. Walking along the slender ledge where terror meets excitement and disgust meets compassion, Jawbone exposes what lies behind the undecipherable boldness and awkwardness of teenage girls. Though not just any teenager, but the type whose privileged upbringing obscures and shelters them from any adult concerns, delaying maturity, and providing the idleness and material resources that enable the obsessions of their choosing. Whether these are horror stories, the changing adolescent female body, creepypastas, or intimacy and sex, they jump head on into their rabbit holes disregarding any consequences. This group of girls from Ecuador’s high society, isolated in their social bubble and oblivious to the surrounding inequality that fuels their privilege and entitlement, is the surprisingly fecund terrain from where Ojeda explores the intricacies of the female adolescent mind. But the reader should not be fooled: this is not a story about the excesses of some rich, spoiled girls. Through them, Ojeda exposes the cracks at the core of their allegedly shielded environments and the failures of neoliberal buoyancy where the decadence the girls revel in allows patriarchal violence, exploitation, unaccountability, neglect, and guilt to reign free.
Ojeda puts female adolescence under a magnifying glass, depicting it with uncanny precision and, for me as a female reader, with almost painful, memory-triggering accuracy. Illusorily a free spirit, the fickle teenage heart is easy prey for commanding and seductive personalities. There is nothing more alluring to a teenager than someone she can use as a mirror, a shadow-self that is perhaps more self-assured, more daring, and who appears to have it all figured out. Such is the friendship between Fernanda and Annelise. The two are bound by an unbalanced and fragile power dynamic, swaying between symbiosis and predation. And for Annelise—a manipulative, obscure figure prone to intense fixations—it becomes paramount to recruit a friend that enables her to push her obsessions even further; someone bold and confident, but malleable enough to be influenced at convenience. Given the depth and intensity of their shared secrets and intimacy, the loyal friend also poses a danger, and the threat of betrayal is always looming.
Like most teenage girls, Annelise and Fernanda’s gang are vulnerable to wild desires but, unlike many, they’re mostly free to act on them without restraint, thus disrupting the myth of the innocence of youth. Muggy Guayaquil, with its exuberant vegetation and untamed fauna, is a fitting stage for the release of savage instincts as the girls paradoxically make horror their safe haven. School, city, and home, in contrast, are the places of restraint and control, which require them to carefully negotiate a policed freedom compromised by patriarchal expectations. These paradoxical and toxic social dynamics have a different impact on their less privileged and socially awkward teacher, Clara: they make her easy prey for her abusive and entitled students. But Clara is not innocent either. She brings to the table some of the toxicity that permeates her daily life, oozing from the traumatic relationship with her late mother, and deploys her own brand of perversity to fight back. Ojeda constructs complex characters, each and every one broken in some way, each woman’s wounds and demons constantly revealed and weaponized by others. Everyone in this novel is both a victim and a victimizer.
Stuck in a love-hate triangle, Annelise, Fernanda, and Clara challenge together and antagonistically the bonds of motherhood from the perspective of daughters. At the same time, they fall into the trap of enacting fraught mother-like behaviors themselves, mostly between each other. The lack of maternal attention from their own mothers translates into strange contradictions as the girls oscillate between feeling unburdened and free, yet also rejected, unloved, and uncared for. The three women exemplify three ways of being a daughter. But not just any daughter. Specifically, daughters who have been failed various times and in various forms by their mothers and respond by transgressing that very role. More than exploring being “a bad daughter”, Jawbone questions the meanings of the filial bond: Is there any indebtedness to it whatsoever and, even, can this role be reversed by taking over the mother and literally becoming her? In Clara’s words, “unbirth ourselves. . . . Obliterating your mother so you can exist above her.” Relieved from the duties of being a good child, the daughters in Jawbone are free to test how to weaponize that kinship.
Ojeda repeatedly employs the monster as a metaphor through which she explores her characters’ fractured psyches. Drawing from Book XVII of the 1970 seminar by Jacques Lacan, for whom the mother is “a huge crocodile in whose jaws you are,” as well as from the allegory of the color white as the site of the void and potential chaos—hence equated to adolescence—Ojeda turns the story into a sort of psychological thriller that borders on horror. In many ways, she tells the story of what happens when metaphors become literal. She does not shy away from abjection or gruesomeness when needs be, and the story sometimes becomes terrifying. As a storyteller, Ojeda takes many risks, for she is not afraid to cause discomfort in her readers, but this is not gratuitous torture. She tells her readers, as Clara tells Fernanda, “I don’t want you to cry out of terror, I want you to cry out of empathy.”
Ever-present excess defines the Jawbone universe, where characters never fail to blow things out of proportion: desires, fixations, fears, fictions, and even inner solitude. The author dives so deep into her characters that inhabiting their intimacy in such an intense way feels like an intrusion. She puts the reader in the compromising position of uncomfortable witness and voyeur, marauding around what lies at the innermost corner of these women’s selves. As they go through different traumas resulting from their conflicting self-images, their mutating and uncontrollable minds and bodies, and sexual awakenings and predations—the reader is there to watch them test the limits of sanity, pain, pleasure, and freedom, while grappling with the very loaded “girls like you” accusation. “Girls like you should beware of parties . . . Girls like you need to learn to pace yourselves,” instructs the homophobic and racist theology teacher. “The world is full of bad people who want to do terrible things to pretty little girls like you,” warns the distant and controlling mother. “Something has to be done with sick little girls like you,” condemns the disturbed and resentful Clara. Weaponized to police, to control, to terrify, objectify, idolize, demonize, adulate, threaten, dismiss, or dehumanize, the expression “girls like you” proves to really mean every girl. Ultimately, it reveals how impossible it is to be a girl, that there are no ways to be a girl at all.
In a book about girlhood and womanhood, embracing radical femininity sounds empowering. And in Jawbone, it can be. There certainly are moments of female empowerment attained through a defiance of norms that is inherent to adolescent rebelliousness. But Jawbone offers a layered exploration of patriarchal dynamics. Most of the book is made up of moments of horrors, wounds, and fissures inside the characters that can be traced to the oppression, impossible expectations, policing, and stasis imposed on women in our societies, where misogyny and patriarchal violence are so deeply ingrained. Mónica Ojeda has repeatedly denounced and addressed this crisis and characterizes it masterfully as it presents itself in the Latin American context.
As captured by Ojeda, the characters’ social atmosphere uncovers the patriarchal tactics of raising “young ladies” for marriage and to serve as sexually desirable bodies, while at the same time imposing on them restraint and decorum, censoring and denying any form of self-ownership. A plunge into the girls’ minds unveils the layers of obscurity imposed on their already confused and repressed awakening sexualities. Catastrophe is imminent, as money within easy reach, free time, and scant if hardly any parental supervision or even love act as catalysts for disaster. Money can, in fact, buy many things, like unlimited access to the internet, immunity from punishment for misdeeds at school, a big empty house with absent parents who are traveling, or Dad’s revolver collection to play with. Moreover, the patriarchal expectation of being the perfect family woman or not end up as a spinster, makes Clara in particular even more vulnerable to the girls’ whims. Her already fragile mental state is constantly preyed on, and the insurmountable difference between her and the entitled, cruel, rich girls becomes even more obvious.
Yet, within them all persists a relentless will to survive in a man’s world. Often, the girls find refuge and defense in the most extreme and aggressive forms of femininity whose strength is invoked through its most animalistic, painful, and terrifying attributes. The radical force of motherhood haunts every woman in the story—as it does in reality—as a possibility and a desire, but also as a curse and weapon, a source equally of power and destruction: “A mother could take a life as furiously as she’d made it.” The narration becomes extremely familiar yet disturbingly uncanny, unrecognizable, or, rather, one fights constantly not to recognize what is happening on the page at all. As Ojeda says herself, through Annelise, “Words open inhospitable and investable doors in our heads, and when those doors are opened, there’s no turning back.” This is the kind of book that is hard to read out loud: it makes the speaker immediately vulnerable.
And yet, the book demands to be read out loud to savor and understand better the polyphony and rhythmic dissonances Ojeda constructs. Language style, tone, and speed are key. Reading Ojeda requires listening to the distinctive voices of each character in one’s head; it is listening to the whispers, to the haughtiness and panic, to the screams and the moans. Sarah Booker has accomplished the feat of recreating this sensation in English, providing her readers the same sense of familiarity and immersion that Ojeda creates in Mandíbula. It gives me the inkling that Booker must have read the novel out loud.
I had this realization during a gathering where Booker read a fragment of both Ojeda’s and her own work, one after the other. As a translator, Booker makes a masterful move, shifting the tone at certain moments very subtly. Reading Ojeda, as a Latin American woman from Mexico, it immediately dawned on me that, regardless of how Ecuadorian the local sound of the conversations might be, what the group of girls is enacting (in Spanish) is a very particular performative aspect of embodying the rebellious teenager. Namely: being paradoxically absurd and subversive with the meanings of the words spoken, while speaking them with uncanny solemnity, especially when enunciating one’s own teenage worldview—as when Annelise theatrically insists on the existence of the White God she has invented. While the girls hold many ceremonies and rituals, the precision and the surgical correctness of the language they employ seems to be what, from their perspective as teenagers, legitimizes the discourse. And that is the thing: as an adult, one can dismiss and ridicule what gets named scornfully as “teenage behavior”. But the truth is that one is never more serious about certain ideas, some pacts are never more sacred, and some passions are never so intense and heartfelt as when one is a teenager. To solemnize such beliefs, pacts, and passions with a meticulous, formal language makes perfect sense . . . . In Spanish.
In English, the ideas, the pacts and passions, all of the madness, are legitimized through transgressions against language itself. While in Spanish the irreverence of teenage insanity is expressed through confounding solemnity, in English the subversion is conveyed through words as Booker puts the scandalous and dirty to work. When Booker read both versions out loud, I understood how she had heard them inside her head, and each made perfect sense in its own tone. Two worlds, as two languages will always be, in parallel positions to each other, in perfect synchronicity, but each in its own distinctive lane, keeping just the right distance from one another. It is very hard to tell how conscious this shift is though, and there lies its brilliance. It is subtle, nuanced, and natural. Booker’s Jawbone succeeds in creating the experience of foreign familiarity that Ojeda throws onto the reader’s lap in Mandíbula.
Besides her thorough attention to the sonorous, Booker attends to the visual as well through careful formatting. She is wisely aware of the power dynamics at work when translating into a more hegemonic language, as when in the Spanish, for instance, the italicized English is used as a class marker with aspirational undertones. She is careful not to exoticize the setting for the reader while not domesticating when words get too culturally specific, like when she leaves words such as jueputa, locooo, bacán, or guapa untranslated (and unitalicized), bearing in mind that Ojeda doesn’t make concessions to her Spanish readers either.
Booker is a seasoned translator and scholar, having worked on many of Cristina Rivera Garza’s texts, among other prominent Latin American writers. In this unhinged work of fiction, saturated with pop-culture references, psychological rabbit holes, and Ecuadorian, female, teenage slang, she seems to have used all of her previous background to reinvent herself and produce this new, clear voice that moves with ease and wit through Mónica Ojeda’s world—a teenage baroqueness filled with excess. The most pedestrian words are threaded into a very sophisticated language that produces a specific worldview, the one Ojeda deploys in its distinctive iterations mainly through Clara, Fernanda, and Annelise.
While the reader is thrust from one character’s inner self to the other, it becomes clear that much of the language is overwhelmingly female slang, impossible to be spoken by teenage boys, or adult women. It does make one wonder about the male reading experience. I am not saying that this is a book exclusively for female readers; rather, I am saying that, as a female reader myself, this book feels like an exploration of all of the most intimate and horrific things that the marvel of being a woman entails. It is about falling in love with the horror of being and feeling like a woman, if that makes sense. In Jawbone, it does.
