Romance de la negra rubiaEnglish: Negra, lit. a black woman; but in the popular parlance of Argentina, it is used to refer to a woman of humble origins; it can also be used as a term of endearment.English: Rubia, lit. a blonde woman. is a 2014 novella by Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, published by Eterna Cadencia. It follows the story of a poet who sets herself on fire to avoid being evicted from a building by the police, an act that makes her famous and allows her to help her community and then launch an international tour as a performance artist.
Through parody and irony, the novella explores themes such as power relations, political demagoguery, and traditional ideas of romantic love. It also addresses popular religiosity as a transgressive force in society and the value given to sacrifices and the dead as a bargaining chip to obtain favors or benefits from groups in power.
According to Cabezón Cámara, the book is part of a sort of "dark trilogy" along with her two previous works: La Virgen Cabeza (2009) and Le viste la cara a Dios (2011). The idea of referring to her work as a "dark trilogy" was suggested by the author herself and then picked up in various interviews and reviews.
Plot Gabi is a poet in a commune of artists who live in a building as okupas (squatters). When the police try to evict them, she decides to set fire to herself as a form of resistance, an event that is captured by television cameras. Gabi manages to survive the burns and becomes a popular heroine. At first, she is used as a symbol by political groups, but she later learns to use her power with the media to obtain benefits for her community.
She soon launches an international tour as a performance artist, in which her disfigured body is the main attraction. She arrives at the Venice Biennale, where she meets Elena, a Swiss millionaire who buys the installation in which Gabi was traveling and who begins a love affair with her. Some time later, Elena dies due to an illness and leaves Gabi the skin of her face so that she can transplant it onto hers. Thanks to the power she has gained, Gabi manages to gift her former housemates with houses of their own and she is later elected governor of Buenos Aires Province. Once her term ends, she decides to retire and lead a quiet life in the city of Tigre, where she writes this story and lives with two European men in a polyamorous relationship.
Main characters Gabi: she is the protagonist of the story and the negra rubia of the title. According to Montes, the character embodies the social construct of a powerful, lower-class woman who gives her life for her people, not unlike Eva Perón, a negra rubia just like her. Montes adds that comparisons can also be drawn between the narrator and the stories surrounding Argentine political leader Milagro Sala and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the former president of Argentina. In this sense, being negra implies having working-class origins, while becoming rubia is to gain political power. Gabi is a poet who sets herself alight to avoid being evicted from a building she had arrived at because there were people there offering whiskey and cocaine. Due to the severity of the burns, she spends a year in the hospital. Upon her release, she becomes a leader in her community and starts to gain favors for herself in negotiations with the authorities. Gabi is constantly observing the events that surround her from a cynical point of view with which she identifies the hypocrisy of the people with whom she interacts, although, at the same time, she gets carried away by circumstances with a passive attitude, summed up by the phrase da igual, nada tiene sentidoEnglish: It's all the same, nothing makes sense. Among the characters to whom she is compared in the novel due to either her physical appearance or the power she achieves are: Darth Vader, Eva Perón, and Marina Abramović. In an interview, Cabezón Cámara described Gabi's character as follows:
Elena: she is an art collector, originally from Switzerland, who buys the art installation in which Gabi was participating and who becomes her lover. When she dies of cancer, she leaves part of her fortune to Gabi along with her face, so she can have it transplanted onto her own face. Gabi falls in love with her por alta, por rubia, por musculosa, por llevar la ropa de lino con eleganciaEnglish: Because she is tall, blonde, brawny, and she wears linen clothes with elegance and describes her as a woman who is ligera y fuerte.English: Light but strong
Composition
The original idea for the book was born in February 2002, when Cabezón Cámara read a press article published in Argentine newspaper Clarín in the context of the December 2001 riots in Argentina. The article included a photograph of a man who had set himself on fire. The man's name was Rubén Arias and he was a 31-year-old newspaper delivery man, a resident of Neuquén, who had threatened to set himself alight if the police tried to evict him from the subsidized housing in which he lived. The police had dismissed his threat, and so Arias set fire to himself and caused everyone around him to flee, a moment that was captured in the photograph.
Arias remained hospitalized for about 15 days before dying. This incident sparked clashes between the police and the remaining people who were evicted, but days later the local authorities decided to provide them with housing on the condition that couples living together had to get married. This piqued Cabezón Cámara's curiosity and made her think that Arias's death had served as a sort of sacrifice that had been accepted by the authorities in Neuquén to provide those evicted with houses, in the style of the Greek gods.
This idea was one of the two that Cabezón Cámara later submitted to Diana Bellessi, who suggested that she first work on the one that would become La Virgen Cabeza, published in 2009 by Eterna Cadencia. Years later, Cabezón Cámara took up again the idea for Romance de la negra rubia and wrote a first version of the novella, narrated in the third person, which she ended up discarding as she considered that the prose she used was too rough and violent. The second version of the manuscript was the one that eventually became the final version of the book.
The novella is written in the first person and is made up of brief chapters of no more than three pages each. It also has an epilogue and a coda.
Central themes The social role of sacrifice One of the central themes of the book is the social role of sacrifice as a record of the struggle in favor of communities, although it also criticizes the negative impact it has had throughout history and its exploitation by political actors. At the beginning, Gabi's sacrificio fundanteEnglish: Foundational sacrifice serves as the primordial act that creates her community's shared identity and provides them with a sense of belonging. The sense of nosotrosEnglish: Us that they had managed until then becomes a nuestroEnglish: Ours in relation to the community ownership of the building in which they live. This social movement created around the figure of Gabi also allows her to gain political power and thus pressure the judge who had previously evicted them into providing them all with the title deeds of the building.
However, Gabi observes with skepticism the meaning of her own sacrifice and realizes that it has been appropriated by groups in power as a way to increase their political capital. She specifically calls out the Justicialist Party as one of the sectors attempting to take advantage of her condition of being medio muertaEnglish: Half-dead in a similar manner as had been done with the victims of forced disappearance during the military dictatorship in Argentina, whose memory is identified by Gabi as one of the foundations of the political power of Peronism:
Moreover, Cabezón Cámara analyzes Gabi's situation and makes a historical overview in which she identifies the symbolic power of sacrifices to bring benefits to the community to which the sacrificed party belongs. Among the examples she mentions are the sacrifice of Iphigenia at the hands of her father Agamemnon to secure the blessing from the gods, the birth of agriculture after Cain killed Abel, and even the Holocaust which, among its immediate effects, led to the creation of Israel. In short, the author identifies a sort of general law in which the dead have been used throughout history as a bargaining chip to obtain benefits for their respective communities. And even more than that, Cabezón Cámara claims that the people who have been tortured the most they themselves later victimize others under the pretext of the exchange value in the number of dead they have accumulated. As some examples, she mentions the abuses perpetrated by the Israel Defense Forces in Palestine and the crucifixion of Jesus, which centuries later would wreak havoc through the evangelism that took place during the Spanish colonization of the Americas. The author asks herself the question ¿Llama la herencia del mártir al martirio de los otros?English: Does the martyr's legacy call for the martyrdom of others? regarding this point.
The novella also points out that these foundational sacrifices have served to normalize pernicious aspects of present-day societies. In the case of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Agamemnon's victory legitimizes the gender violence she is subjected to, and grants men a symbolic right over the lives of their wives and daughters. The fact that Iphigenia was burned alive does not go unnoticed in Cabezón Cámara's writing, as she makes a reference to it in the case of Gabi herself and in the case of the women murdered in Argentina by burning.
Popular religiosity Religion is another major theme in the book, especially the concept of popular sainthood. Throughout the novella, Gabi takes on the role of martyr, and her self-immolation is repeatedly described using religious terms, such as mito del origenEnglish: Origin myth and sacrificio fundante.English: Foundational sacrifice The second chapter, which is precisely titled Cómo me hice santa,English: How I became a saint narrates the exact moment in which Gabi's sacrifice becomes the symbol of struggle for her community. The fact that all of the building's inhabitants manage to be given housing after the sacrifice is later considered a miracle, while Gabi's screams at the police telling them they would never enter the building are interpreted as a prophecy that is fulfilled when they are killed due to their own criminal actions.
The establishment of Gabi as a popular saint allows her to turn into an opposing force to political power by positioning herself, first, as a defender of the community of bohemian artists, and later, of the dispossessed classes that take part in the squatter movement, even if that was never her original goal. This concept of a transgressive popular religiosity is a recurring theme in Cabezón Cámara's narrative, also present in her previous works: La Virgen Cabeza (2009) and Le viste la cara a Dios (2011).