Pink Slime, Fernanda Trías, translated by Heather Cleary, 2023, Scribe Publications
Latin Americans may have sensed the apocalypse—and it is generating nightmares.
It was a nightmare—in which an explosion similar to an atom bomb created a red, expansive wave that covered everything—that yielded the award-winning novel Pink Slime.
The book by Fernanda Trías, which earned the author the Uruguayan National Literature Prize and the Bartolomé Hidalgo and the Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Fiction prizes, was conceived in 2000 from the same recurrent dream.
The work obeys a tendency in which Latin American science fiction writers have looked inward and not outward to the cosmos for their inspiration.
Nerds in the region have always been avid sci-fi readers but its writers are not well known for creating future universes and alternative lives, preferring social themes and politics.
It is true that translated stories by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham, Arthur C Clark and Frank Herbert have been printed and re-printed in various formats, including comic-books, over generations.
We can recall Venezuelan José Balza and Argentine Adolfo Bioy Casares, but when it comes to literature on future universes and alternative lives, Latin American writers are not well known.
However, this work by Trías suggests that may be changing: as we step into a new era, the feeling of the coming apocalypse is deepening and generating different, often terrifying, narratives in the region.
Trías has a predilection for science fiction because this genre allows total freedom of expression, and in the case of Pink Slime (Mugre Rosa in Spanish) the intended exploration does not involve a trip to the cosmos, but an intimate gaze into our planet.
The writer’s need to express her despair before the inevitable reality of climate change became a story about a man-made pandemic that eerily and prophetically described—almost to the last detail, including the face masks—the infamous Covid pandemic of 2020.
The manuscript started in 2017 when Trías was granted a residency by the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (MIAS) Casa de Velázquez and the completed manuscript was handed over to the publisher in 2019. For Trías, it was a shock seeing that the novel was beginning to match the reality a year later.
But fragments of the author’s dream diaries from 2000 were an important part of the construction of this oneiric tale.
Set in a small port village in an unidentified place in Latin America, the water has been contaminated with toxic algae and red winds corrode human flesh. The landscape is crumbling, eerily empty; chaos reigns and food shortages are the norm. This tale then starts with a bite …
The dilemma faced by the main character is wanting to leave everything behind but being stuck in a flat with a voracious child, victim of a Prader–Willi type “syndrome”.
The kid does not understand what is going on and cannot speak well but demands to be fed constantly, while on TV a “wonder food” is peddled by bureaucrats as the epitome of progress.
Slowly but surely, as the pandemic advances, all human connection is eroded. As in 2020, the picture is bleak. Trías’s writing style captures the tempo of this unfolding disaster and the slowly engulfing course of the malady.
And as in the Covid pandemic, the protagonist has plenty of time to reflect on her own life, divorce, role in society, class, appreciation for nature, the collective past, role reversals, solitude and identity, claustrophobia, social restrictions and the all-expanding limits of environmental damage.
The main character engages in a journey which connect all these instances to find that at the end of the tunnel there is a human being.
It is a terrifying story in which the fragility of human existence in a threatening world is employed to explore what it is that makes us human in the first place.
For Trías, the Earth becomes a body, the infected red skies and red rivers of Mugre Rosa are the blood, and its inhabitants become the pink slime itself.
The environment, capitalism and sickness cannot be separated because our own sick, and at times violent, connection to the “other”—be it animal, plant or human—affects everything.
In real and figurative terms humanity’s ultimate link is the flow of blood and when this haemorrhages it is in desperate need of healing, but the choices facing us point to only love and solidarity above money or profit.
The author plays with mirroring the body as a recipient of sickness, but the illness itself is not of the body and is shared by her ex-husband, child and even a caged bird.
Ironically, as global society obsesses with campaigns for health, healthy eating and Instagram-ready, hyper-athletic physiques, we reject bodies that do not fit the desired stereotypes and are morbidly fixated with fat shaming and disability.
Even now, in the 21st century we are afraid to look in the eye a beggar who is missing a limb and consider a sick or old body as repulsive, fearful that poverty or disability may infect us, and in the social media age more than ever, prize the perfect youthful body.
Trías reminds us, however, that mankind is a single species and that, at the end of the day, if we keep denying the damage caused by a tiny minority our fate is assured.
The author has also published La Azotea (The Roof) and Ciudad Invencible (Invincible City) as part of You won’t dream of flowers (No Soñaras con Flores, 2020).
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Categories: South America, Uruguay