FERNANDA MELCHOR
In Fernanda Melchor’s novel Hurricane Season, it is not a tropical storm that devastates the town of La Matosa but rather the ever-faster downward spiral of poverty and violence – man-made catastrophes that become like natural forces to the inhabitants. The velocity of Melchor’s narrative gift is the current carrying her book’s rage and despair like detritus in a storm-swollen river, the voices of a whole village swept along in an unstoppable tale.
Interview by Claudia SteinbergPortrait by Lizbeth Hernandez
Claudia Steinberg Hurricane Season is a novel, but you originally conceived it as a work of non-fiction in the tradition of Truman Capote. You’ve said that you quickly realised that interviewing people about their crimes would not only endanger you, but also would not get you any closer to their reality. How did you examine their world?
Fernanda Melchor I have lived my whole life in Veracruz, in the surrounding areas of the city and the port. Driving through Mexico as a child I was intrigued by those truck stops and tiny villages that flew by the car windows. When I read a bizarre newspaper story of a murdered witch in one of those roadside communities, I wanted to understand what a witch could mean in the 21st century and what we mean by crimes of passion, as the journalists called it. I knew it would be almost impossible to spend so much time with the two people accused of the murder as Capote did; it is very difficult for a journalist to enter a Mexican prison. So I had to explore within the realm of fiction, filling the gaps with my knowledge of human nature. As a teen, I read fictional first-person accounts of murder like Perfume because I wanted to understand my own intense emotions. There was a lot of psychological and physical violence between my parents and by the time I turned 11 the catcalls in the streets started, causing me a lot of anguish about leaving the house. From the newspapers, I knew how easily a woman gets killed in Mexico – without any consequences for the murderer.
CS One of your characters, when confronted with his violence, says it was not he but the devil.
FM Brandon is so terrified of his homoerotic desires that he calls them devilish. Other characters blame the victim: “She made me do it.” Some women justify violence against women, because, “A man only goes there if she allows it.” Much of Hurricane Season is about making homophobic or shamanistic discourses visible with the intent to shock.
CS You’ve created a maelstrom of vicious and vile talk to express a collective subconscious. How did you master this spoken language?
FM I’m indebted to the strong oral tradition of my homeland. The form of poetry most practiced in Veracruz is La Decima, which is always improvised, like rapping. Being able to tell a good story or a joke is highly valued. Growing up, I heard amazing oradores, and our folk stories are a great mix of the Catholic religion and Afro-Caribbean and indigenous beliefs. I began Hurricane Season by imagining a group of women talking about the murderer and the victim – and then I could see these women and listen to what they had to say about their town, La Matosa, and the crime. I wanted the book to have that shape, formed by these gossiping women always contradicting each other’s testimony, so you can’t put it down.
CS The women speak with the same foul-mouthed opulence as the guys, reflecting an internalised self-loathing, but also a mutual wealth of contempt for the opposite sex. Their verbal power makes them seem strong: the victim has at least learned to be just as inventive in the art of the insult.
FM In Veracruz, our many vulgar terms can also be endearing, depending on the context. I wanted to reflect on all these discourses about women being the worst, but men also being stupid slobs. That’s how misogyny works – by making women believe in it, too. I became the stepmother of a little girl, raising her almost by myself for six years, and I became a feminist because of her: I wanted her to grow up differently from me, without internalising all the rivalry and envy between women, without the self-defeating thinking.
CS Your book also reveals the tragedy of misogyny for men – there is such sadness in the negation of their feelings – and one becomes aware of how important women are in their lives. But because of poverty and exploitation, mothers are not available to their children, and daughters are pushed into the role of being mothers themselves at age 12 by taking care of their little siblings.
FM Motherhood is very important in this novel, compliant motherhood, but also the total fear and revulsion motherhood produces in women. We are number one in teen pregnancies worldwide. There wouldn’t be any machismo if mothers weren’t subjected to these great expectations that can rarely, if ever be fulfilled. Men are also idolised into impossible roles.
CS The scarcity of tenderness, perhaps to the point of being forbidden, especially among men, runs like a dull ache through the book, and even that tiny moment when Brandon realises his love for Luismi ends in a murderous rage.
FM That bleakness was hard to take, especially the part about Norma; she is completely innocent, just a child. It was so difficult to find her little voice because her head is filled with things her mother had told her about men and women. She’s sweet and desperate, and helpless. I had to abandon her in the hospital, leaving the reader to worry about her. But in my heart, I know Norma will be able to bear everything because she’s had such a difficult childhood. I had to go to therapy after Hurricane Season.
CS The hospital is at least a healing place. Most shocking about her secret relationship with her stepfather is how he systematically prepares her for sex and makes her complicit by exploiting her longing for physical closeness. The reader also understands implicitly what he is telling himself: that she asked for it.
FM I couldn’t just demonise all the male characters, so I came to think about Norma and her stepfather’s grooming her as a confusion of languages. She wanted tenderness, but to him it was sexual; he thinks she wants that, believing that she speaks the same language while she’s only asking for the love her mother cannot give her. In the end, Norma’s choice not to be a mother at 13 is the very heart of the novel.
CS And so enters the witch, a good witch in the sense that she helps women by giving them abortive potions. She is a complex persona, a mythical construct of her own making and through rumours among the townspeople. Upon her death, all the assumptions about her power and her wealth are sadly revealed as projections. What did you learn about the real witch and how did you turn her into that strange figure?
FM The real witch was a man, a sorcerer, and his killers were local men or boys. The sorcerer was supposedly trying to bewitch one of the boys. Amazingly, the reporters, the police and the authorities took these rumours as fact and used them as the justification of the murder – this is the stuff of magical realism! I turned the sorcerer into a witch because I was more attracted to a female figure, and I borrowed from stories about witches to create this character. Learning about indigenous witches in Mexico who could transform themselves into animals and simultaneously change sex, I had this epiphany to create a non-gender-conforming witch – playing with ambiguity, she is always behind a veil, she might be beautiful or ugly. To the women of the town, she is one of them. I wanted to keep her mystery, so she never gets to talk.
CS As a non-binary character, she is a great catalyst for bringing out the suppressed homosexuality that is channelled into these intense emotions. You also tap into rich Mexican beliefs and superstitions. Were you ever worried that they would create an image of Mexico as a backward place steeped in irrationality?
FM I never thought anybody outside Mexico would be interested in the novel or able to understand it. However, I had wonderful readers abroad, and in Germany, it received two awards – what does Berlin, the capital of woke, have to do with my book? But then I thought of Germany’s horrible history of violence, and that there are stories like this everywhere. Hurricane Season was also inspired by Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner because of their ambience and environments. Laura Albert aka JT Leroy impressed me with her stories about the sexual abuse of young children. So did Harmony Korine’s film Gummo, and Larry Clark’s Kids. Violence is not exclusive to Mexican culture, and the sexual grooming of young girls and boys happens everywhere as well. La Matosa is also a metaphor for my childhood and those Mexican youths who cannot see a future for themselves; the grown-ups have left nothing for them.
CS La Matosa has been co-opted by the oil industry and people there live such hellish lives that they assume even more fateful, grander forces must be at work than something as mundane as naked greed. That’s how superstitions are born.
FM Many people in Veracruz live off the oil industry, but it is responsible for so many ecocides. Veracruz also has the only nuclear plant in all of Mexico; construction began in the 1960s but the plant only became functional in the 1990s with 1960s technology just as other countries were thinking about dismantling their nuclear industries. So I grew up certain that someday everything would be wiped away in a blast. In Mexico, we have submitted to authoritarianism while mistrusting the government; in Hurricane Season you can see that nobody protects the people, not the state, not the schools, not the hospitals, not the workplace. Everyone is fending for themselves. The narcos are yet another branch of mega-capitalism, but they feel like a force of nature, just like the rain or the hurricanes – inevitable.
CS You mentioned how devastated you were after completing the novel, but you’ve also said that you began the book in a pessimistic moment.
FM I was stuck in an agonising relationship, but I just couldn’t leave my stepdaughter behind. I was torn between love and guilt and needed to address a lot of things in my past and in my inner self – but I wouldn’t, so things were boiling inside of me that needed release. And 2015 was a very difficult year in Mexico; Enrique Peña Nieto was still president and the 43 students from Ayotzinapa disappeared. There was a lot of narco-related violence and many femicides. I got in touch with activists and groups of artists that were addressing these problems. In Veracruz, the worst years of violence had taken place in 2011 and 2012. But in 2015, we were beginning to find all these mass graves with thousands of dismembered bodies, while the government claimed that the murder victims were involved in organised crime. It was spreading brazen lies about innocent people, mothers and children. In Veracruz, I got in touch with groups of mothers, sisters and wives of missing people who had begun searching for the bodies themselves. I was surrounded by death, and I think of Hurricane Season itself as a mass grave, like a hole in the ground. It begins with the discovery of a corpse, and it ends with a gravedigger who provides the most gentle, final goodbye that I could think of, given the circumstances of the witch’s death – just a tiny flicker of hope. I’m more optimistic now, but then I just felt as lost as the characters of my novel. ◉