This Is Not Miami, Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes, 2023, Text Publishing Company
Fernanda Melchor’s This Is Not Miami is indeed not what it seems. A collection in which a beauty-queen turned murderess, a UFO, a dozen Narcos and the Devil himself all make an appearance, it sounds like a classic example of whimsical Latin American fiction; impossible happenings, like a group of runaway immigrants hiding from the police by clinging to underwater concrete pillars for two hours, or a jaunt in a haunted house ending in a series of hair-raising exorcisms, at times lead the reader into believing they are following a work of magical realism. They are not. Although now renowned as author of novel Hurricane Season, Melchor’s career began as a journalist and non-fiction writer, and her first collection is based on testimony provided by real people from the Mexican port city of Veracruz. In the author’s note she insists, “The only fiction I’m willing to acknowledge in these texts is the fiction inherent in every construct of language.” In creating a collection of crónicas, Melchor has brought her readers into a world with the imaginative expansion of fiction and yet the spine-chilling reminder that all which occurs is sworn to be true.
“The city is a breeding ground for stories,” Melchor writes, and in no city is this truer, it seems, than in Veracruz. Our various protagonists are not after all fictional characters but are instead real people borrowed for a few pages at a time, presumably as long as their interviews with Melchor last or as long as it takes for their information to be shared; thus we come to see the city as a labyrinth of unrelated lives all too bizarre or horrifying to be believed. A young woman, beloved city-wide for her beauty, becomes a target of hatred and superstition when accused of murdering her toddler sons in a haze of drug addiction or madness. An exhausted dockland worker is shaken to his core when he comes across an illegal immigrant, on the run from the police and sworn on a mission of revenge spanning countries and generations. A supermarket cashier, an extra in a Mel Gibson movie, and a dozen others outpour to Melchor their own stories of terror or randomness but although they stand side-by-side within the pages of the book, they have of course never met. The result is a city not unlike the fictional Santa Teresa of Bolaño’s 2666, a seemingly endless web of suffering and strangeness. Unlike Santa Teresa, however, Veracruz really exists; in the last and most moving story of the collection, self-described as “sketches of life in the port city in 2011”, an anonymous young woman who sees a boy get beaten to death in a nightclub says, “You were crying. You were really scared and you couldn’t believe that the city where you were born was turning into one of those horrible places up on the border where there’s nowhere to go out because of the constant shootouts”.
This Is Not Miami is a truly unique accomplishment. Melchor includes some of her own memories in the collection, detailing the early days of her and her first husband’s romance, and references the interview and research process of gathering the stories. The collection is thus repeatedly brought back to earth, and although the reader does not always understand exactly what they are reading (part auto-biography, part fiction, part article?) we are aware we have never read anything like it. Furthermore, although we waste no time getting particularly intimate with any one of the protagonists, each story is as emotionally hard-hitting as the next—more so, when we remember with a sinking feeling they are all real people. It is worth keeping in mind that, arguably, it would have been easier for Melchor to construct either a purely journalistic or a purely fictional collection; she could have easily used the “relatos” gathered for “inspiration” for a work of fictional short stories, which would be unhindered by loyalty to facts and which she could embellish as she liked. Equally, she could have presented the stories in their original phrasing in the form of interview transcripts or as emotionless, factual retellings, giving the collection’s journalistic weight and objectivity. Instead, she has chosen to walk the thin line between the two; the result is a highly disciplined, bare-boned prose rooted resolutely in personal accounts yet singing with emotional sensitivity and poetry.
At the centre of it all is a keen awareness of storytelling itself, of its subjectivity and cruelty; in “Queen, Slave, Woman”, Melchor details the contradicting attitudes and accounts in the court case of Evangelina Tejera Bosada, the woman accused of murdering her sons in what some claim was a psychological breakdown caused by drugs and a traumatic upbringing. The same woman who is turned into a symbol of evil itself, reviled by the press and public and promptly turned into an old wives’ tale (“Eat your vegetables, or Evangelina will come and punish you”) was, only five years earlier, held up as a symbol of beauty and grace in Veracruz’s violent carnival. Both the adoration and the vehement hatred of Evangelina are seen to be blind with subjectivity; Melchor doesn’t explicitly take sides but the story ends with a sobering comment from the author, where she analyses the “contradictory yet complementary archetypes” of villain and heroine—products, she says, of a society which “professes to be an enclave of tropical sensualism but deep down is profoundly conservative, classist and misogynistic”.
This Is Not Miami, then, is anything but a tale of magical realism. It keeps a close eye on the more sensational attributes of the genre, seen within its own storytelling protagonists, while maintaining its feet on the ground at all times. In spite of being based on genuine accounts, the collection is wild, unbelievable, prompting you to laugh and cry in the space of a few startling and moving paragraphs, proving that—at least in the city of Veracruz, Mexico—sometimes the only thing harder to believe than fiction is the truth.
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Categories: Mexico, North America