No 5
Selva Almada
“And if not to get something out of it, why would you summon a ghost?
The most evident answer is that you summon them out of love.
In 2013, Selva Almada wrote “This girl was murdered”; in 2014 she published Dead Girls. The former is a brutal chronicle about the killing of Ángeles Rawson and the latter, a book about three unpunished femicides that took place in Argentina during the eighties: those of Andrea Danne, María Luisa Quevedo and Sarita Mundín. A work of non-fiction that intertwines these murders with other stories of misogyny and horror in a scrapbook of vacant lots, forsaken roads and homes that no longer offer refuge. A desolate wasteland that Selva chooses to navigate with divine empathy. At the sight of the wreckage, where rubberneckers might rejoice, she steps aside to look for actual pieces of life. Drawn by the sparkling details of the ordinary, she also focuses on the small things, the private moments — like pulling a funny face at the mirror before going out — and finds a way, amidst the abandonment, to make the girls bounce back with vitality.
In the face of the public scorn women are still held subject to, even after their murder — that last drop of social stigma that strives to find whatever might distribute the guilt to taste, and takes it out on clothes, dancing, pleasure or rebellious gestures — Almada writes about the things that made their hearts beat, what moved them, their hopes, the things they liked to talk about. To take an interest beyond the events of their killings and make a point of their humanity is a decision that may seem discreet but is ultimately subversive. One that gives them back something of the voice they were deprived from. It is an act of love.
