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We Are Green and Trembling is a hallucinatory, innocent, fanciful and redemptive book. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara elects one saint but meets the reader through the minds of many. The novel is a reimagining of the life of Antonio de Erauso, a Basque nun who escaped a convent and travelled the New World. During this erratic, violent travail, Erauso lived mostly as a man and has since become known as one of the most important trans figures in hispanophone history. The work was originally published in Spanish as Las Niñas del Naranjel (The Girls from the Orange Grove, 2023) and follows the Argentine author’s International Booker-shortlisted The Adventures of China Iron (2019).
Translated into English by Robin Myers, the novel is made of two strands which converge then diverge. In one, we encounter Antonio with a pair of indigenous children he has rescued (kidnapped? adopted?) from captivity, hiding out in the forest with various animals like one big, interspecies family. Between conversations with the girls, Michī and Mitãkuña, Antonio writes missives — excerpted for us to read — to his aunt in Spain, recounting the vicissitudes that have brought him to this point.
The second strand dramatises the colonial outpost from which Antonio stole the children. This is a world of greed and instinctive violence, conveyed by Cabezón Cámara with awful lucidity. Mass suicides, executions and beatings occur while the hot air hangs with absurdities (“Who had authorized Fernández to immolate himself?”). Bodies are desecrated incessantly: hanged men “arching. Sketching a violent C to one side and the belly of a D to the other”; an exterminatory burning yields a “pink, waxy lagoon of white skeletons”.
There is a particular vein of contemporary Latin American literature that excels in conveying the body candidly but in a manner poetically true to how bodies feel. Cabezón Cámara stands out in this regard: like Spanish-language contemporaries Fernanda Melchor and Mariana Enriquez, she renders the body’s fungibility with an intuitive truth.
Perhaps one of the novel’s greatest successes is its portrayal of the near-psychedelic experience of colonial governance. In the sweating world of Phillip III’s American imperium, the “elegant imperial calligraphy” is a weighty force, under which people, objects and ideas seem to warp. Hypocrisy is met with hypocrisy; greed maddens; death surrounds everything except the deathless longing for home, or at least a barrel of Rioja. Every idol is mistaken for a god, while every deranged vision is a revelation.
During their sojourn in the jungle, a world-making exchange takes place between the indigenous girls and Antonio. How was the universe made? What happens after we die? What is a person? The characters relate the world as they understand it, their different perspectives emphasised by the way Myers’ English translation laces Guaraní, Spanish and Basque words through the text.
The book is densely symbolic, studded with a language of intense objects which, like coordinates, position Antonio’s journey: the chestnut is a totem of growth, change and his trans identity; the buzzard is death’s accomplice; oranges are a promise of the grace of God; the crest of empire is a token of insanity. Amid these symbols and between poles of covenant and providence, Antonio’s fate unfolds, propelled by his secret, which enforces an impossibility of attachment or stillness.
We Are Green and Trembling possesses the power of a mural; wide and painterly, with objects and images rising out of each other. Where it lacks forward motion of narrative it compensates in its meditative lyricism. It is odd for something so feverish to feel ultimately reflective. The depth of its spiritual engagement with the natural world recalls the work of the American nature writer Annie Dillard. Its aggressive linguistic invention evokes Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake. Cabezón Cámara’s historical fiction plays out like confession or revelation, a piece of real-unreal colonial apocrypha, glowing white hot, dancing like the heart of a pyre.
We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Robin Myers Harvill Secker £18.99, 208 pages/New Directions $17.95, 256 pages
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