From Savagery – Alejandra Banca

[Restless Books; 2024]

Tr. from the Spanish by Katie Brown

On September 8, 2024, Edmundo Gonzalez, Venezuela’s opposition candidate and the rightful winner of the country’s presidential election, arrived in Madrid after fleeing Venezuela under threat of arrest, blackmail, and intimidation. His forced exile makes him the latest in a long line of political dissidents targeted by the Maduro regime. While Gonzalez’s case has been widely recognized by activists as a symbolic final blow to democracy in Venezuela, his journey into exile reflects a familiar reality for many Venezuelan migrants today. Since the mid-2010s, nearly eight million people have been displaced from Venezuela due to shortages of essential resources and soaring crime rates. It is a staggering number, and one which will inevitably continue to grow as political instability in the country rages on. 

From Savagery, the debut work of fiction by Alejandra Banca, beautifully translated by Katie Brown, humanizes these statistics and gives a voice to a new generation of Venezuelan migrants creating life abroad. In her twelve interconnected stories, Banca primarily follows a group of twenty-somethings who have recently arrived in Barcelona. Many of her characters are waiting for their asylum papers to come through and they work grueling, precarious jobs to pay their bills and send the little money remaining home to their families in Venezuela. 

An early story in the collection, “Bum-Ba-Da-Dáh-Da Da-Da-Dáh-Da” follows the recurring character of María Eugenia as she works a shift on her bicycle dropping off orders for a food delivery app. The title comes from the noise the app makes as another order comes through, “the sound of money, of hunger.” María Eugenia is new in Barcelona and because she doesn’t have the right to work, pays off an acquaintance who has a social security number to use his account on the app. The reader accompanies her throughout her work shift as she scales the steep hills of Barcelona, struggling with severe period cramps and an overflowing menstrual cup, told through Banca’s gruesome and blunt prose. She withholds nothing in her description of the blood pooling on María Eugenia’s bicycle seat, and the character’s mental math as she calculates how many orders she will need to complete before she can stop and change out of her stained clothing. 

Other characters in the collection face similarly bleak employment prospects. Cheo, a friend of María Eugenia, also works as a delivery rider and navigates his own painful and bloody condition—a terrible case of hemorrhoids for which he cannot afford the treatment surgery. Nacho, another member of the friend group, installs home-security systems in luxurious suburban communities, a job equally if not more dangerous than biking through the city at night. (To cut costs, Nacho’s boss insists they forgo safety practices, leading him to be electrocuted.) He also faces virulent racism and abuse by the clients, who follow him around their homes, convinced that an immigrant like himself must be prone to stealing. 

In her foregrounding of the harsh labor conditions of undocumented immigrants, Banca does not victimize her characters, nor does she give into painting them as easy tropes. The story “Freelance Whore” follows Nataly, a vivacious sex worker who dreams of registering as (and receiving the benefits of) a freelance worker. Nataly doesn’t understand why her profession, which isn’t illegal in Spain, shouldn’t be given the same government benefits of other jobs. “I work too, and more than most people. I break my back every night. Where’s my pension for providing pleasure?” Nataly points out. “Freelance Whore” reaches an inflection point when Nataly goes on a date with a Russian man. The reader has a sense that something very bad is going to happen to Nataly as her date leads her down unlit streets toward an empty apartment and proceeds to open a duffel bag filled with drugs. Yet instead of a disturbing ending, Banca surprises the reader by providing one filled with joy. Nataly proceeds to have incredible sex, and ostensibly forms a relationship with her date, finding gratification in the body she has been turning a profit from. “I ain’t just a body,” Banca writes, “I ain’t just meat. No. I’m a human being, I feel, I smell, I touch, I lick, I suck. I can take pleasure. I’m alive!”

At other times, the worst does seem to happen to Banca’s characters. In “Lasme” the recurring character of Nanda strikes up a friendship with her younger, strikingly beautiful coworker named Lasme, an immigrant herself from the Ivory Coast. The two work together at a beauty product shop in downtown Barcelona where they are expected to flirt with and entice potential customers. During a night out with customers—wealthy tourists from the UAE—Nanda witnesses Lasme being violently sexually assaulted. In fear and shock, Nanda flees the tourists’ Airbnb and runs through the city disoriented and searching for help. She meets a group of immigrant delivery riders who help to calm her and call the police. Nanda clocks a Venezuelan accent on one of the riders and feels a sense of comfort and kinship. The act of identifying other Venezuelans by their accents is a powerful experience that Banca weaves throughout the narrative. 

In her “Translator’s Note,” Brown touches upon the essential and multi-faceted use of language in Banca’s collection, stating: “As Venezuelans negotiate what it means to form diasporas for the first time, language stands out as something shared, something familiar in the face of change and uncertainty.” This is present not only in Venezuelan characters staying attuned to the sound of their compatriot’s accents in Spain, but in the surprising and colorful polyphonic quality present in the stories themselves. Language is quite literally shared as Banca swings the point of view wildly among her narrators, to the point where the reader cannot always be sure who is relaying the story or speaking. However, this decision is not confusing in a disorienting way that removes the reader from the collection. Instead, the polyphony of voices gives the effect of the characters sharing well-worn stories in their circles, interjecting themselves into a collective narrative 

Banca also pays special attention to the language of other immigrant groups in Barcelona. From a Pakistani neighbor to a Moroccan boss to Argentinian sex workers, Banca situates the young generation of Venezuelan migrants within those of global migration trends. In the original version Desde la salvajada, Banca includes several different types of Spanish, as her characters speak in dialect from Venezuela, slang from Spain, and unique inflections from their mother tongues (in the case of Spanish not being their native language). In her translation, Brown illustrates this by using several types of English dialects from the US and the UK. In doing so, the collection serves to make visible the diverse communities which shape the city of Barcelona, and form a network of solidarity across these groups.

These immigrants are starkly contrasted with the Barcelona locals. Locals—more often than not, clients and customers of the characters—either disregard the Venezuelan migrants or are overtly xenophobic toward them. “What’s with all you Venezuelans? Jesus, you’re a plague!” says one Spainard jokingly. Then there are the lingual tensions between the two groups. Certain Catalan characters insist on only speaking Catalan to the recently-arrived migrants, despite also speaking Spanish. (Brown leaves these phrases untranslated.) Of course, there are exceptions, with some locals that show curiosity, compassion, and the desire to mix both Catalan and Venezuelan Spanish. Yet in the end, From Savagery illustrates how it is the other foreigners in Barcelona who ultimately show up for the Venezuelans, bonded by the immense pain of leaving their homes behind. Banca writes of this complexity: “Being a migrant means feeding yourself on loss, on what could have been, the infinite possible nuances of that history which will forever remain hidden but present”

Venezuela is ever-present for the characters as they navigate migration. In several moving scenes, the reader bears witness to the subtle ways in which the characters’ old lives in Caracas blend into their new realities in Spain and vice-versa. Cheo notes the “brutal” similarities between the city layout of Barcelona and that of Caracas as he rides his delivery bike. Nanda, sitting in a Spanish McDonald’s in a downpour, has the sensation that she could be back at the McDonald’s at the Chacaíto metro station where she and her friends would hang out during university. Occasionally the reader is allowed glimpses into life back in Venezuela, through the characters’ memories and in the stories “Dirt Poor” and “Damp.” Yet what remains behind, referenced as just “the crisis,” is always disintegration, poverty, and the rotten smell of death.

In spite of the devastating and horrifying reality back home, or perhaps because of this, Banca’s characters burn in their determination to imagine a better future. They all harbor dreams: Nanda wants to become a writer, Nataly would like to pay taxes, and Cheo hopes to earn enough money to bring his long-term girlfriend to Barcelona. However, they are all united by the overpowering dream of one day being able to go back home. Bances writes:

We don’t fully understand that feeling-trace born from the savagery that lives within us and that watched us grow, the savagery that allows us to be, to act, and to take a bite out of the day-to-day, and also to get a little chewed up ourselves; but we venerate it, we respect it, because only one desire pounds above all others: to return one day.

As Brown suggests in her Translator’s Note, the title From Savagery doesn’t exactly reference the conditions in Venezuela, but rather the force inside the characters that drives them to keep going each day. 

In the last and titular story in the collection, “From Savagery,” Banca’s characters in Barcelona finally converge at a party to celebrate María Eugenía’s one-year anniversary of migrating to Spain. She has come a long way, having learned how to navigate an unfamiliar city on her bicycle, and mastering the food-delivery app. She has ridden through severe menstrual pain, dodged sexual harassment, and befriended the city’s local sex workers. María Eugenía has carved out a life for herself, one filled with possibility and hope. The story opens with María Eugenía doing a few orders before her party that evening. She admires the city around her in a new light: “She catches the last glimmers of sun on the buildings, the golden hour. In that light, everything seems special, like on the point of defining a decisive moment, an epiphany.”

For once, everything seems to go right for her. María Eugenía makes a whopping thirty euros in tips, a large amount to send home to her family. As she rides around her new not-so-new city, excited text messages from her friends about that evening ding from her phone in her pocket. Later, she approaches the party and hears her friends inside: “They left the door half-open and from the elevator she hears the music and the laughter. When she enters, the shouts of welcome embrace her: her new family is waiting for her.” 

The collection ends with this beautiful image of María Eugenía and her friends, both new and old, drinking and singing Venezuelan songs. Despite their innumerous challenges and crippling homesickness, Banca is not interested in painting the migrant life as one of pure struggle. Her characters, though living on the margins, are young, ambitious, and resilient. They do not just want to survive in their new home. They want to live. 

Rose Bialer is an emerging writer and translator based in Barcelona. She holds an MPhil in Comparative Literature from Trinity College Dublin.