Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since fleeing a dead-end life as a nun, he's become Antonio and undertaken monumental adventures: he has been a mule driver, shopkeeper, soldier, cabin boy, and conquistador; he has wielded his sword and slashed with his dagger. Now, caring for two Guarani girls he rescued from enslavement, and hounded by the army he deserted, this protean protagonist contemplates one more metamorphosis, which just might save the new world from extinction...
Based on the life of Antonio de Erauso, a real figure of the Spanish conquest, We Are Green and Trembling is a queer baroque satire and a historical novel that blends elements of the picaresque with surreal storytelling. Its rich and wildly imaginative language forms a searing criticism of conquest and colonialism, religious tyranny, and the treatment of women and indigenous people. It is a masterful subversion of Latin American history with a trans character at its center, finding in the rainforest a magical, surreal space where transformation is not only possible but necessary.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"A hallucinatory, innocent, fanciful and redemptive book. Cabezon Camara's historical fiction plays out like confession or revelation, a piece of real-unreal colonial apocrypha, glowing white hot, dancing like the heart of a pyre." -- Isaac Zamet - Financial Times "Haunting, powerful new historical fiction." -- Alida Becker - The New York Times "Sensuous and searing-a queer anticolonial picaresque." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A bold and compassionate reimagining of an extraordinary queer life." -- Financial Times "Cabezon Camara's third novel published in English, fluidly translated by Myers, is a polyphonic interpretation of the incomparable adventures of an enigmatic, seventeenth-century conquistador-esque figure whose chosen moniker was Antonio de Erauso-a seamless, fever-dreamy expose of inhumane colonialism, religiosity, and genocide, revealing the extreme resilience necessary to claim selfhood outside expected, mandated norms." -- Terry Hong - Booklist (starred review) "Argentine writer and founder of the feminist movement Ni una menos Gabriela Cabezon Camara turns Argentine history on its head with a trans main character and transformation at its core-this remarkable novel is powerful, sensual and imaginative.
" -- Karla Strand - Ms. Magazine "Gabriela Cabezon Camara's writing is singular in the Spanish language: an intrepid pulse that shakes and disarms us in the face of the wordless power, both formidable and innocent, of the jungle and the creatures it portrays." -- Fernanda Melchor "She writes with the astuteness of an experienced researcher and the vivid rhythms of a poet. The worlds of her books are revealed to us through a playful, erotic, festive sense of curiosity, one that always leads us to good harbor." -- Cristina Rivera Garza "If there's any writer strong enough to start a revolution, it's Gabriela Cabezon Camara. And I'll be right there beside her." -- Gabriela Wiener "So sharp, so urgent, so brave. Gabriela Cabezon Camara is one of the most authentic voices writing in Spanish today, and among her many talents is one that's especially hard to find: not only does she challenge and incite us, not only does she confront the darkness, but she also gives us in return the subversive courage to think of ourselves as more human, more alive, and more luminous than ever." -- Samanta Schweblin "Cabezon Camara's entrancing poetry reminds us how magical and frankly unpleasant it is to live through history." -- The New York Times "At times a swashbuckling tale of conquest laced with magical realism and surrealism, We Are Green and Trembling is historical fiction in name only... a searing critique of modernity's colonial echoes: a resurgence of far-right ideology, cultural erasure, and gender-based oppression. Through its exploration of identity, history, and resistance, Cabezon Camara dismantles dominant narratives and power structures. In doing so, she constructs a story that is not only inclusive but also redemptive-anchored in the richness of language, the beauty of the natural world, and the power of storytelling to reclaim what history tries to erase." -- Chicago Review of Books "Cabezon Camara returns to her readers with all the strength and talent we expect from her, but she also arrives with something new, a tenderness that hadn't appeared before. We Are Green and Trembling, a most interesting translation for this title, anticipates an interspecies relationality that is at the same time futuristic and ancestral. Its luminous prose pulses several times to moments of absolute radiance. This work, a historical fiction that is also intimate, deviant, and populated by other presences, confirms some things we already knew and functions as a piece of futurology: the fires that will burn in the past, all fires, continue to burn." -- Laura Pensa - World Literature Today "We Are Green and Trembling is beautifully translated by Robin Myers to echo the feeling of a panoply of voices and speakers in this polyphonic New World. ... While Cabezon Camara portrays in vivid detail the violence inherent in the colonial project, she keeps her hero mostly away from it, his murders only recollections, his attitude to his Indigenous wards patient, before he eventually melts into the jungle-presented as a space for possibility and transformation, but also one where the past is wiped clean, unaccounted for and blank." -- Alejandra Oliva - Americas Quarterly "This is already a disobedient literary classic." -- Maria Moreno, jury of the Premio Medife FILBA "Gabriela Cabezon Camara is a writer of both epic scope and intimate precision. In Las ninas del naranjel, she scathingly renders the ravages of Spanish colonialism in the Americas while also capturing, say, the infinite and infinitesimal connections among living creatures in the jungle; the ever-shifting ebb and flow of individual memory; and the fragile tenderness shared by improbable companions. Her historical imagination is both unsparing and endlessly playful, her prose rich and teeming with life, her ethics --her way of looking at the natural world, at the relationships among species, at human atrocities and bonds-- a source of genuine solace and inspiration to me. I think she's one of the most electrifying writers working today." -- Robin Myers "It presents the complexity of the colonial and gender discourse and its capacity to combine and have coexist different traditions, cultures and languages. An audacious re-reading of a controversial historical figure and its risk-taking, poetic and animal-like prose." -- jury of the Premio CIutat de Barcelona "The novel blows up the well-known story that is written from the experience of the virile by incorporating a voice that pays attention to the sensuality and hostility of the landscape, the ambitions and fears of the characters, as well as the corruption of the bodies that Cabezon Camara describes directly and masterfully without prejudice. She explores a fabulous cadence in the combination of Spanish with Guarani and the theological baroque of the 17th century, to create a unique language with a particular rhythm. This novel embraces the bastardism that gives rise to America, destroys anthropocentrism and returns to nature its eroticism without the colonizing exoticism. Here is a living being that breathes, spills and rots to give new life, giving us back the certainty that we are also that: something alive that belongs to something bigger." -- Ana Garcia Bergua, Diana Sanchez and Emiliano Monge, jury of the Premio Sor Juana "In We Are Green and Trembling, Gabriela Cabezon Camara finds beauty within the rot of conquest and delves into the contradictions of human nature, challenging the ways in which religion configures us as people and as territories. But she goes further. This is the truth of her literature: she presents us with the possibility of telling our stories through the caverns and silences that have enabled humanity's ongoing existence. Neither angels nor demons, but worldly creatures. No heroes, no gods---just human beings whose organic narration of their own lives serves to question the very conception of the world." -- Brenda Navarro "Cabezon's novel is able to bring back extraordinary vitality to dialogue. A luminous novel in crushingly dark times: let's celebrate the paradox." -- Maria Sonia Cristoff "A ceaseless wash of verve and convictions.... This new release focuses on Hemphill's exquisite verse, allowing us to admire him as a stylist while also providing a reminder of why he found it necessary to bring these lingual gifts to bear on politics. Unabashedly erotic and relentless in its solicitude." -- Daniel Felsenthal - The Nation
The Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezon Camara (b. 1968) has worked at varied jobs, from selling car insurance in the street to cultural journalism. She is the author of the novels Slum Virgin, Romance of the Blonde Brunette, and The Adventures of China Iron, which was shortlisted for the International Booker and Medicis prizes. She is an environmental activist and a co-founder of the feminist movement Ni una menos. Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and translator. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, she has been longlisted twice for the National Translation Award in poetry and won the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders / Academy of American Poets). Her work has appeared in Granta, The Baffler, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
Autor*in
Übersetzung
New Directions
