I am currently taking a class in Latin American Fiction, and recently we read Bad Girls by Camilla Sosa Villada. It’s a translated autofiction about Camilla’s time as a transwoman and sexworker in Argentina. All works done in translation are difficult in communicating the nuances of words across a barrier of both language and culture. Bad Girls has the added complication of being an autofiction with prominent magical realism woven into the narrative. If you are unfamiliar with autofiction, I would not blame you. Until this book I had never even heard the term, much less read one. Autofiction is where parts of the story are autobiographical and others are completely made up. This could mean anything from parts of the story are wholly true and others are purely fictional. Or it could be fictional things happening to real people, or real events happening that the author experienced, but fictional people are experiencing them, and everything in between. Magical realism is more commonly known, but in a nutshell, it’s completely fantastical things occurring in a narrative that treats the fantastical the way a reporter treats the weather — sometimes it’s just a gloomy rainy day, and sometimes it’s just a fact of life that people on occasion turn into birds. You just have to get on with it.
Some very important additional context needed to discuss, let alone read, the novel revolves around a word purposefully left untranslated. Sosa Villada uses the word “travesti” to describe herself and other transwomen throughout the entire novel. Travesti is a derogatory word—a slur specifically for trans women— which carries with it an implication of sex work and general class vulnerability. The author insists upon it for the narrative because she believes that by using more medical language, it takes away the human elements of what she experienced, such as the love and support she found in other travestis and their shared pain. We used this word in class, and so I shall use it in this article to respect the author’s wishes.
Where the novel really shines is with the pacing of the plot, and how it purposefully confuses the timeline. The main plot of the novel spans approximately six to seven years, and begins and ends not with Camilla’s personal story, but the story of an older travesti, Encarna, and her adopted son. Camilla’s experiences unfold surrounding this woman and all the other travesti sex workers she was friends with. Interspersed with events that are happening in the “present” are retellings of the author’s experience growing up closeted, and how she became who she was, all her loves and losses and regrets. We learn about her while we learn about the lives and deaths of her travesti sisters. And every now and then we have a brief cut-away from future Camilla, adding comments or additional information about what was going on. It makes the story feel alive, like a stream of consciousness that arrives when you just let yourself think, or when you tell a friend a long story. This makes the pain Camilla and her loved ones undergo all the more tragic. When you read you can feel yourself mourn them, both their physical loss of life and the knowledge that they could have been more had the world allowed them to be.
I really enjoyed reading this book for class, and there are so many things I could discuss about it, but not without giving away massive spoilers to those who are interested in reading it. I highly recommend reading this book to anyone who is interested.
