Out of Earth, the award-winning debut novel by Brazilian novelist Sheyla Smanioto, translated from Portuguese into English by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis, and published by Boiler House Press, is about digging. The digging is simultaneously of dead bodies from the earth, dogs dug from the body which invariably means violence is going to flare up, or the birth of a child, or the birth of words that come to the surface and want out, for example a plea for forgiveness. As this intro implies, a lot is possible in Smanioto’s inventive portrait of four generations of rural low-class women wallowing in ignorance, poverty, and repression, just not that they creep free from their designated fate.
Language and passions, laid out in short lyrical bursts, are saturated with intense aggression. Talking is a kind of violence but so is silence. When Fátima’s daughter Scarlett pops up at her new home in São Paulo, aged twenty, we don’t know at first why Fátima isn’t happy. Her daughter’s ugliness is blamed, then her lack of words. For no apparent reason, the girl is suspected of wishing for her mother’s death. While nibbling a cheese biscuit, Fátima is secretly making her daughter out for a vulture. Gradually, it becomes clear why Scarlett couldn’t stay in the village anymore. She fled when her grandmother died, or was it her dog-killing father? Tonho professed to love Fátima passionately, but somehow when he was in a dog-kicking mood, he lost it and took it out on his wife. This continued when she was pregnant with Scarlett and somehow the mortal fear of the child being dragged into it must have transmuted into dislike of her daughter, at least later when she is grown. “A fearful creature, her daughter, a fearful creature lost in her navel and all this time alone Fátima wasn’t taking a beating on her own. This fear of what the childish flesh can remember, this fear there’s no way to bury it. Goddamn. So it goes with them.”
I haven’t checked the Portuguese original, but the English translation is highly interesting for choosing a phrasing that is a little alienating; expressions aren’t always idiomatic. For what is “childish flesh”? Does this denote the body with child or the innocent flesh that cannot ever get used to violence practiced on it? Or another connotation could be that we are talking about (once) young bodies that have experienced beatings since childhood. Another instance is the sentence “So it goes with them.” The fear is walking with them, but also maybe evaporates. That doesn’t make much sense, until we consider that fear is not really there, unless we are reminded of it; in that instant, fear needs us and/or we need the fear.
Almost everything in the microcosmos of this novel is caught up in a cycle of violence and misogyny. That makes it unpleasant reading. It’s not much fun to be exposed to a passage with a violent rape, however poetic or virtuosic it’s written. Neither did I personally have much fun when Grandma Penha looks back on how her heavy menstruations were dealt with: she was hung upside down “like a banana palm … dripping blood.” Even celebrations center around the wielding of knives, or the death of a chicken in the pot, which segues into an even bloodier vignette describing Grandma Penha’s miscarriage. There’s nothing in the events that could provide some relief, except maybe the outrageous sex scene with a “madman,” and some touching reminiscences about a mother who died before her time. I scratched my head why I kept on reading, though not like a curious teenager waiting breathlessly for the next gory episode, but… well, why actually?
Because of the way it’s written, which is one of a kind. There are no passages where we are explained anything, nor is the language wordy or showing off. There are lots of repetitions, but creative ones, tilting a theme in a surprising new way, creating a sort of singsong dreamlike trance, setting the music for more sadistic violence, like an unending inherited curse that all the characters in the book carry. “History aches for pain, our bodies understand […].” This story is as much universal as it seems distant. I had to think of ancient myths, although influences of magical realism are obvious, as the author has stated herself in an interview. Most magical of all is when characters die over and over again, like in melancholic drawn-out dying scenes that you see in old movies.
We don’t learn too much about the characters. They are all dark-eyed, with strong thighs and stomachs that can hold and unleash snapping dogs. They are some kind of primal creatures who have always roamed the earth (or just Brazil). Tonho has a thing for pubic hair. The characters are all tragic wretches, subsistence farmers. They mull around in a cardboard fictional village, before some of them reach São Paulo. We don’t get any details about the socio-economic or political realities of the settings. Not that these are terribly varied. We mostly see the inside of the house or outside where excavators are breaking up the ground, looking for a murder victim.
Darkness and immobility are very well used too, as well as a low line of vision, as if the author is providing us with claustrophobic footage. That rape scene takes place with Tonho unable to see. Around that murk, “[…] forgetting is a crime without a corpse.” Living characters can take the place of murdered ones, simply take their clothes, flee, and start a new life. Not that there’s anything new under the scorching sun. Three-quarters in the book, when Fátima announces her plan to leave the village, things get stuck. “Time: a train powered by dead bodies.” Naturally, it’s frustrating that the characters have so little agency. What little initiative they possess is torpedoed, by the author, let’s be clear. When the characters move to the city, even without a man or cruel grandmother to rule over their lives, who can they blame for their ongoing woes? “History is another body that belongs to us, one that time can’t destroy, or not so much. Time is what doesn’t pass when you’re hurting. And hurt is when none of this matters.” God (some characters are devout and die with prayer books on their laps) brings no comfort either. “God’s the one with the ideas, people just live through them.”
The only less successful trope in the novel is when a woman, whether alive or dead, turns into a gorilla. Two of the women in the story went to the circus to see the gorilla woman and this creature performs with expected outrage. But unlike the dogs and the circling vultures that wait for Grandma Penha to flop, the gorilla lacks a distinctive personality. There is some likeness with dying women becoming gorillas or their bodies growing into trees. Not sure what Smanioto was trying to do here.
JACQUELINE SCHAALJE has published poetry and short fiction, most recently in The Comstock Review, The Friday Poem, and Pembroke Magazine. She’s the winner of the Florida Review Editor’s Prize 2022, and was a finalist in a few competitions, among which Live Canon’s and Alpine Fellowship. She participated in the Fall 2022 W2W mentoring program of AWP. She is a translation editor at MAYDAY, and reviews books for Painted, spoken, too. She earned her MA in English from the University of Amsterdam.
SHEYLA SMANIOTO was born in 1990 into a working-class family in Diadema, São Paulo state, which was then the most violent town in Brazil. In 2017 she was selected by Forbes magazine as one of the people under 30 making a difference in Brazil. With her two published novels, Desesterro (2015, appearing here in English as Out of Earth) and Meu corpo ainda quente (2020), she won the SESC, Biblioteca Nacional and Jabutí prizes, as well as being shortlisted for the São Paulo literature prize. She has twice received grants from Itaú Cultural fund to assist her writing.
LAURA GARMESON is a writer and translator from Portuguese and French. Her work has been published in the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, Asymptote Journal and The Economist, among other publications.
SOPHIE LEWIS is a translator and an editor. Working from Portuguese and French, she has translated numerous authors and she co-founded the Shadow Heroes translation workshops enterprise – shadowheroes.org. Sophie’s translations have been shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff and Republic of Consciousness prizes, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize.
