No Room of One’s Own
Reviews
By Mila Jaroniec
They speak directly to you—“fam,” “sister,” “queen,” “amigui.” They drink—pulque, Tecate, tequila. They dance—cumbia, perreo, reggaeton. They don’t need your understanding, but they offer everything for it, laying hearts and secrets bare like gifts at the feet of Santa Muerte. Conjuring empathy through understanding. They make what in retrospect could be called bad decisions. They tell you their stories, all of them, the ones most people don’t like to tell—especially those. And your heart breaks for them, because you know that if you were in their place, you’d make those same decisions too. Your heart breaks in thirteen different ways.
Dahlia de la Cerda’s English-language debut Reservoir Bitches (Feminist Press, 2024), with a titular nod to Quentin Tarantino’s debut film Reservoir Dogs, is cutthroat and stocked with ample crime, but that’s about where the similarities end. In an Artforum review of the Tarantino film, Manohla Dargis writes: “[Tarantino’s] point isn’t the heist but the players: the film is an anatomy less of a crime than of men choosing lives of violence.” If Reservoir Dogs is about men choosing lives of violence, Reservoir Bitches is about the other side of that choice—about the women whose lives are shaped, shattered, and driven by it.
The thirteen stories in Reservoir Bitches—thirteen for bad luck; thirteen for sin and rebellion; thirteen for Death in the tarot—are less stories than they are intimations, less structured narratives than streaming confessionals, pressed into your ear, your soul, your hand. Nothing is filtered, nothing contrived. Each is told in the first person, some are linked together, some not, all taking place in the same network of women—that is, in the same state of emergency. The effect is polyphonic and devastatingly resonant, as much a credit to Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches’s masterful translation as to de la Cerda’s fierce storytelling. It’s hard to translate literature without losing some elements of sound, and even harder to translate literature built entirely on sound—slang, syntax, cadence, soul. Cleary and Sanches’s seamless transmission from the Spanish to English arrives in a voice so distinct and immediate it’s like being gripped by the throat.
The book opens with “Parsley and Coca-Cola,” in which you keep the narrator company through an at-home abortion. It’s grim but lighthearted, funny and youthfully bleak, but as you soon come to realize, this story is as gentle as they come.
In “Yuliana,” the eponymous heiress to her father’s drug empire tells the story of her best friend Regina’s murder at the hands of the narco boyfriend she so desperately wanted, and Yuliana’s subsequent road to revenge. When Yuliana officially becomes her father’s successor, she hires her new bodyguard, La China, a trained assassin with a vendetta against abusive men, to carry out the hit. The narrator of “God Didn’t Come Through,” an adolescent girl who resorts to theft to feed her starving little brothers, is the menacing hoodlum with a machete who gets shot trying to rob the home of three elderly seamstresses and their sick mother in “God Forgive Us,” setting off the pervasive motif of God turning a blind eye to injustice: “I put my life in the devil’s hands because God doesn’t come through on this kinda thing.”
Prayers go unanswered, pleas ignored. The only instance of a divine response comes in “The Rose of Sharon,” in which the speaker prays for the death of her abusive alcoholic husband and actually sees her prayers answered when he dies choking on his own vomit. The problem is, now she owes God. She starts hearing demonic voices in her head, one of them saying God is angry with her and demands a blood sacrifice: “Do you remember the story of Abraham and Isaac?” She does. In an attempt to absolve herself, she stabs her own son to death as an offering.
Some stories come from beyond the grave. In “Regina,” Yuliana’s murdered friend tells her side post-mortem. In “Sequins,” the soul of a trans sex worker meditates on her own mutilated body laid to rest on a trash heap before walking off into the night with the souls of her murdered sisters. In “The Smile,” a seventeen-year-old Black runaway is brutalized by a group of men and left for dead in the desert before coming back for revenge as Death herself.
The final story, “La Huesera,” is written as a meditative, wrenching confessional to a murdered friend—the speaker let her friend leave the party on her own, and you can imagine what happened. The letter, choked at first like the mandated therapy assignment it is, pries her heart open nonetheless, closing with a harrowing poetic litany of Google search results for body of woman found, spiraling with heartbreaking violence. It’s the other side of Roberto Bolaño’s sobering achievement in 2666, which features the brutal recount of hundreds of cases of femicide in Santa Teresa, a fictionalized Ciudad Juárez. As Jonathan Lethem writes in a New York Times review of 2666, “Bolaño’s genius is for weaving a blunt recitation of life’s facts—his novels at times evoke biographies, case studies, police or government files—with digressive outbursts of lyricism,” and the same can be said for Dahlia de la Cerda.
The victim was beaten to death in her own home by her husband, whom she had reported twenty times. Twenty. Reporting abuse is your best defense.
Killed in your own home.
Women killed for walking the streets at night. Women killed for being whores.
In your own home. Nowhere is safe.
Nowhere.
Being a woman means living in a state of emergency . . .
Shot to death in her room.
There is no room of one’s own when men think our bodies belong to them.
Buried under her bathroom floor.
There is no room of one’s own.
This isn’t a fictionalized world the speakers inhabit. It’s the world men have built with the choices they made, in all their horror and violence. The world in which existing while female is a principal fault, where they tell us we’re pretty while wanting us dead.
Every two hours and twenty-five minutes, a woman in Mexico is strangled, raped, dismembered, burned alive, mutilated, beaten to a pulp, and left with bruises and broken bones. A woman’s body, another woman. Some woman, a nameless woman. A lifeless body was found. But none of them was yours.
The reservoir dogs may have drafted the outline, but the Reservoir Bitches get the last word. Embodied or not, human or not quite, they’re alive. That’s their resistance. So alive they walk right off the page. So alive you could invite them to your party. So alive you can hear their voices for real. And if you listen hard enough, to the sound under the silence, you might.
Mila Jaroniec is the author of two novels, including Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover (Split Lip Press). Her work has appeared in Playgirl, Playboy, Joyland, Ninth Letter, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, PANK, Hobart, The Millions, NYLON and Teen Vogue, among others. She earned her MFA from The New School and teaches writing at Catapult.
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