Her Story Must Be Told
Reviews
By Ariel Ramchandani
When Patrícia Melo’s The Simple Art of Killing a Woman opens, someone is filming the narrator from a window across the street while she stands outside at a New Year’s Eve party. “It must be a drag being so beautiful,” says a drunk stranger who notices the camera. In this powerful book about femicide and violence against women, first written in 2019 and now translated beautifully into English by Sophie Lewis, the Brazilian author evokes the ideas of recordkeeping and agency. Again and again, the women in the novel must fight to reclaim the record and do some accounting of their own.
The unnamed narrator’s boyfriend shows up at the party incensed, accusing her of being with other men. This boyfriend, a lawyer who reads Wittgenstein and does yoga, slaps her in the face. The narrator sees the slap for what it is: the opening salvo of domestic abuse. It awakens something in her. “Lots of people who are regularly beaten up die at the first slap—psychologically. And yet, my slap seemed to be creating a kind of reverse effect: it seemed to be raising a piece of me that had been forgotten, something stifled inside me.”
When the narrator was a child, her mother was killed by her father. It has defined her, even though she has never known the details. Now she wants to know what happened to her mother, to go through her grandmother’s materials and accounts. “All the sleepers inside me were waking, and they were hungry,” she says. “Never mess with someone who’s carrying a corpse along inside them.”
In her professional life, the narrator is also a collector of information. A lawyer, she is conducting research for her boss, who is writing a book about the thousands of unsolved femicides in Brazil. Perpetrators are rarely and slowly brought to justice, and cases involving black, Indigenous, or poor women languish. To avoid her boyfriend, Amir, the narrator asks to go as far away from her home in São Paulo as possible. She goes to Acre, a liminal place on the Brazil-Peru border. (Melo has drawn on extensive research on the femicide epidemic in Brazil for this book. When she wrote it, Acre had the highest rate of femicide in Brazil.) She arrives in the city of Cruzeiro do Sul, with Amir close behind.
In court, and in her life, the narrator encounters enough dead women to fill a stadium. The book is a litany of horrible images—almost every page seeps with violence. Chapters begin with short records of killings, spare and poetic in form: “Killed by Her Husband / Elaine Figueiredo Lacerda, / sixty-one, / was gunned down / on her own doorstep / on a Sunday evening.” Within the confines of the chapters, the narrator tells story after story: of a woman who had her face slashed from ear to ear, of a woman who was shot in the vagina, of a woman who told her mother she met a prince, when in fact she met her killer. The narrator looks at the “before” images, of women smiling and happy, and imagines she has a knack for sensing approaching death, “detecting the signal no one picks up, because no one pays attention, like those car alarms no one hears any longer, they’re such a regular part of the soundscape.” She is fascinated not by psychopaths, but by all the ordinary men who learn to hate before they learn to kill. She becomes obsessed with searching online for the phrase “killed by.” It becomes a way to leave and find her own life at once. These stories are so sharp and visceral that her own pain at what her father did to her mother pales in comparison.
Among other things, Melo is a writer of detective thrillers. (In this particular case, she was tasked by her editors to write a book with a female protagonist.) In Acre, the narrator steps into a courtroom drama when she attends the trial seeking justice for an Indigenous teenager named Txupira. Txupira was killed by three young scions of Acre and found floating in a creek, her nipples removed, splinters of glass in her uterus. From this crime springs others. At her hotel, the narrator overhears jurors meeting with the defense counsel. The local newspaper publishes evidence of the meeting and then a journalist is killed.
Txupira’s community, the Kuratawa, has lost their land, which has been subdivided by a highway and destroyed. As one character, the prosecutor seeking justice for Txupira, puts it: “Indian lands, virgin forest, white man arriving and fucking it up, that old routine we know so well. Except that here, this was only yesterday, in the twentieth century.” In Acre, the land was turned into rubber plantations. The workers came without spouses, and were accustomed to stealing Indigenous women. In court, the defense team is reluctant to deploy a common strategy and tarnish Txupira’s name: “For them, the indigenous people are animals. The Indians are animals. And animals are the environment.”
Outside of the courtroom, the narrator visits the Ch’aska community and takes part in a series of ayahuasca rituals. In her hallucinations, detailed in stand-alone chapters, she appears at a lake surrounded by animals, where she sees women who have died and fighters from every creed. Icamiabas, Amazon warriors, naked, some with their left breast removed—they decide how to punish men. They eat their hearts and drill their skulls. With each successive trip, the narrator grows in power and reaches further into her own past. As the dead women flit around her, the story of what happened to her mother begins to unfold.
The eco-thriller, the courtroom drama, the clinical accounts of death, and the fables from the forest crystallize into a form of hysterical, hallucinatory realism. The desolation of bodies is the desolation of the earth, rendered in equally poetic terms. The courtroom drama follows satisfying conventions, but it is constrained by the hard truths of this world. The voiceless descriptions of violence bleed into the descriptions of violence against the female characters in the story. At one point the narrator imagines her own murder. As the death toll rises, the mind-bending chapters start to feel just as real as the narrator’s reality. Anger, voices of the dead—Melo seems to ask: what could be more real than that?
Melo grapples with that essential question: how to turn systemic horror from the sound of a car alarm no one hears into a piercing scream. Though at times, and only for a moment or two, the characters are mouthpieces for ideas, overall Melo has tried something radical here. She combines feverishly poetic language and the searching intelligence of the narrator with a near-endless accounting of horror. “When a woman dies,” Melo writes, “her story must be told and retold a thousand times.” Reading, I could not turn away.
Ariel Ramchandani is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has been published in Mother Jones, The Atlantic, The Atavist, The Guardian, The Economist’s 1843, and other publications. She is the co-host and writer of the podcast No Place Like Home.
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