2023-09-27 08:40:00
In a masterful noir novel, the Brazilian Patrícia Melo recounts feminicides by interweaving them with nightmares and fever in the heart of the mourning jungle.
Just a year ago, Amir was the most charming of men, courteous, elegant, cultured. The narrator, a brilliant lawyer from São Paulo, had fallen into the trap, in love like a child blinded by this handsome guy. But tonight, the same man is screaming in his face. Taken “with a possessive and unjustified fury”, he slaps her while calling her a slut. The young woman does not waste time, does not listen to his excuses, follows her instinct and goes as far as possible to attend the trial of three murderers of an indigenous woman in the State of Acre. “Many don’t just slap. What they prefer is to kill,” she concludes.
Minimum convictions
Those We Kill by Patricia Melo is a terrible journey into the land of victims, an investigation into the dominators who seduce, exhaust and then annihilate women by calling them “dirty whores”, “big bitches” or “sluts”. Starting from a particular case, the narrator broadens her subject by dissecting the processes of domination, the minimal condemnations of boys from good families smiling in silver photo frames, the death of a young native who was in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Or “who had been looking for it”, screams the vox populi.
Scary testimonies and magical realism
But Patrícia Melo is not content with lining up feminicide cases, following a trial in a small state at the other end of Brazil, and reporting comments that make you want to vomit. She composes a literary and social work, woven with startling testimonies, magical realism, nightmares and fever in the heart of the mourning jungle. Those We Kill is a masterful novel that does not seek the reader’s tears but rather his anger.
Patrícia Melo, Those we kill, translated from Portuguese (Brazil) by Elodie Dupau, Editions Buchet-Chastel, 300 pp., €22.50.
#kill #investigation #dominators #Libération