Reclaiming rage and the female body in “Reservoir Bitches”
By hola | Published | No Comments
When thinking about female rage, what comes to mind? A quick search on TikTok will lead to compilations of women committing murder, letting out primal screams or wiping tears off their blank faces, makeup perfectly smudged. Publishers have begun to categorize female rage as its own literary genre, appealing to female audiences as a cathartic exploration of our own repressed anger and desires. Though female rage is a buzzword today due to social media, the phrase, since its inception, has represented women who reclaim their autonomy and identity by tapping into suppressed emotions while navigating the injustices around them.
In Dahlia de la Cerda’s “Reservoir Bitches,” translated to English by Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches, those emotions are never masked to begin with. The collection’s 13 short stories present, as the synopsis so aptly describes, Mexican women who “prod the bitch that is Life and become her.” “These women hail from every part of Mexico’s socioeconomic classes yet all are restrained by the same systemic flaws. In spite of such limitations, their rage demands resistance.”
Characters range from a cartel boss’s daughter who seeks revenge for the murder of her best friend, a desperate girl who scours the internet for feasible abortion options, a politician’s wife who manufactures an indigenous identity to raise voter support for her husband, and a transgender woman who is attacked by a group of men in the dead of night. Unlike most stories of female rage, which gradually build a character’s resentment for the world around them over time, de la Cerda’s characters are already far beyond the point of no return when readers meet them, having survived a lifetime of Mexico’s everlasting governing patriarchy.
“I came across the story of a father who, in search of justice for his murdered daughter, went to a town hall with the mayor and personally handed him the case file, asking him to support the investigation,” recounts the narrator of “La Huesera.” “The politician said yes. Hours later, Don Chema found the file in a trash can.”
In the same story, police investigators refuse to classify the rape, torture and strangulation of the narrator’s best friend as femicide because they merely considered it the result of a robbery that “got out of hand.” When those who were given power in order to help you instead stand to the side with their hands over their eyes and ears, what else can you do but use that rage for protest?
The women of “Reservoir Bitches” own their bodies and emotions like badges of honor. They wear whatever makes them feel empowered, even if it means receiving degrading names like “naca,” signifying trashy or lower class, and the leering eyes of others. They delight in having the money to afford cosmetic surgeries. They don’t wait for marriage to have sex and it isn’t always great. They never forget those who have wronged them.
For these women, being confident is its own form of protest. It’s also a necessity when, despite their wealth and social standing, they are all still viewed as no more than tools to the men who stake claim to their lives. These characters are not framed by their limitations or the labels society assigns them, but instead by the actions they take to overcome such hurdles viewed as norms.
In “Sequins,” a transgender woman named Julia runs away from her abusive mother and turns to sex work to survive and also uses the money for cosmetic surgeries to become the beauty she’s always dreamed of. Julia’s body is her pride. When she is murdered, the lines between life and death blur. She finds her corpse dumped on top of a pile of trash. As she recounts the brutal nature of her own murder, Julia focuses on her tortured body and the transphobic headlines that news outlets would make to mock it.
The murdered 15-year-old robber in “God Forgives Us” later becomes a narrator in “God Didn’t Come Through” to share her own story. We learn she turned to crime to support her starving family. While bitter resentment and shame about their situation are what push her, she also has, notably, no remorse, taking up criminal activity with eerie enthusiasm. In a casual yet humorously dark tone that permeates each of de la Cerda’s stories, the robber explains, “You compare what a burglar makes with what you do busting ass and, real talk, mijo, you get the itch to rattle the cage, grab the bitch by the scruff, roll the dice.”
Other stories weave together as well. Named after each respective narrator, “Yuliana,” “Constanza,” “La China” and “Regina” recount different threads surrounding the story of Regina’s murder, though it was declared a suicide to save her family’s political reputation and protect the killer: her abusive cartel boyfriend. The anger over Regina’s murder carries over from character to character, building suspense as pieces of information come to light and we learn how Yuliana finally exacts her revenge.
The standalone stories are just as powerful. “The Smile” and “La Huesera,” each recount the horrors of femicide victims and the scars that haunt both their spirits and loved ones. Arguably the most impactful in the entire collection, however, is “La Huesera,” which takes a unique format compared to the other stories and is the last of the 13. The story is actually a goodbye letter addressed to the narrator’s best friend, who went missing and was found brutally murdered months later. De la Cerda’s blunt yet chilling prose quickly makes it clear this murdered girl and grieving friend are stand-ins for the thousands of Mexican women who are killed or forever missing without any justice. The narrator condemns the police just as much as whoever murdered her friend for their constant failure to protect women against violence and conduct thorough investigations.
“Mexico is a monster that devours women. Mexico is a desert of pulverized bone,” writes the narrator. “Mexico is a graveyard full of pink crosses. Mexico is a country that hates women.”
Instead of ending on this bleak rage and grief, or perhaps because of it, the narrator chooses to write down every possible memory of her friend she can think of to keep her alive through the story. This act is defiance against the erasure of Mexican women, a reclaiming of the soul when the body has been taken. Though devastating, it’s also the perfect ending to a collection that offers nothing but a middle finger to those who threaten women’s bodies and identities.
– Written by Michelle Benitez
– Copy edited by Findlay Drabant, Channing Matha and Valerie Izquierdo
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