Memory is the most treacherous affection there is, says Camila Sosa Villada in one of the texts that compose The Betrayal of My Tongue. Memories always flow in disorder and leave us fragile and vulnerable to feelings we rarely can control. Is it possible to resist our memory? she wonders, and then, as a condition of survival, she clings to betrayal to reflect on language and its relationship with eroticism and the past.
This series of writings respects chaos, plays with the sharpness of imagining oneself in another place and inhabiting another language. Fiction and non-fiction are assaulted by a language that is inherited and betrayed. With prose as sharp as it is poetic, Sosa Villada once again cultivates the art of writing what is left unsaid. Sometimes the hardest coexistence of all is with oneself.
In her novel Thesis of a Domestication, recently adapted to film with her starring role, the protagonist, a celebrated trans actress, struggles with the ambivalence that her family and her comfortable life provoke in her.
In the new book The Betrayal of My Tongue, these conflicting feelings fall on the author herself and the craft of writing. “I write myself,” Sosa Villada declares. “It is my right to write myself and not know.” Her way of thinking about writing recognizes no boundary between artist and work: by writing, the author creates herself. However, the conclusion of the phrase, “and not know,” a right she claims along with the right to write, makes clear that creation does not grant her many certainties. The images she chooses throughout The Betrayal of My Tongue to evoke the process are violent: writing is a “crime,” it means betraying “one’s intimacy, the intimacy of one’s family, of one’s loves, of the secrets that demand silence, of the human justice of silence.” For her, writing is both a necessity and a burden.
The Betrayal of My Tongue resists categorization: it combines several literary genres without deciding on any. It is a kind of continuation of her first two books: the poetry collection Sandro’s Bride and the essay The Useless Journey. It shares with The Useless Journey the focus on Sosa Villada’s childhood and the place writing occupies in her life; however, the new book addresses those themes differently. It is much less concrete: the prose is autobiographical but washed of the references and proper names that in The Useless Journey anchored the narrative in a specific time and place. That gives the author the possibility to steer the narrative toward the supernatural: suddenly, on a very hot day, two witches “collapsed from their brooms mid-flight.” A girl who may or may not be young Camila, Sosa Villada begins writing in third person, and her mother care for them while they recover, and the childhood memories being narrated turn into a fairy tale.
The imposition of categories, “the adult demand to name us,” does not respond to her needs as an author and trans woman but to those of “teachers, priests, relatives”: the ones who enforce social mandates. She rejects with sarcasm readers who pity her. “I do not feel pity for them,” she writes. “I wish I could be lodged like a thorn that gets infected, under the skin of their memory.” She insists on her particularity, even if it makes her prickly, even with herself. That applies as well to The Betrayal of My Tongue: Sosa Villada avoids boxing it into a literary genre because that would limit its expressive possibilities. “Say who I am?” she protests. “Say that I am nothing. Or a river. Or a spell that was conjured in my cradle.”
In the first paragraph of the book, the author talks about ellipsis as a tool, a way to open space for a “tacit writing, something that keeps sounding even without instruments.” She sets out to learn “the art of writing what is not said.” She fulfills this latter purpose in its most obvious sense with the intimacies she shares throughout the book: she tells the things that are not said, like her uncomfortable and exciting participation in the erotic life of her parents.
However, the ellipses also allow seemingly contradictory statements to coexist.
As she recognizes in The Useless Journey, she is “always wanting to rebel even against favorable winds.” She opens the book announcing that she has started grammar classes, to “know what I have in my hands”; later, she expresses hatred for “the rigid grammar, crowned with gold and precious stones” owned by men, and the desire to “kill the writer who copied a language.” She makes a list denouncing all the objects, experiences, and sensations that have become commodities under capitalism, and closes it by recognizing that she too sells herself, for “the empty pleasure of the revenge of a poor woman.” She states, “I am incapable of writing tenderness,” and three pages later describes with heart-wrenching tenderness the agony of the mare that carried her through the woods as a child. The structure of this brief book, with its jumps between sections, allows each of her assertions to stand without giving the last word to any.
The Betrayal of My Tongue is a strange, slippery book that writhes in the hands like an eel. It offers a series of vivid impressions that do not connect; one closes the book feeling as if waking from a dream that leaves few memories but a palpable atmosphere. Perhaps its ellipses, the silences between fragments, are the truces that occasionally occur even in the most conflicted coexistences.
Camila Sosa Villada (born January 28, 1982, Córdoba, Argentina) is a writer, actress, and screenwriter. She studied Social Communication and Theater at the National University of Córdoba. In 2009, she premiered her first show, Carnes Tolendas, a stage portrait of a travesti. She is the author of the essay The Useless Journey (2018), the novels The Bad Ones (2020) and Thesis of a Domestication (2019–2023), and the short story collection I’m a Fool for Loving You (2022). The Bad Ones won the international Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize 2020, the Finestres Narrative Prize 2020, and the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro 2021. Her works have been translated into over twenty languages. In 2023, she starred in the film adaptation of Thesis of a Domestication alongside Alfonso Herrera.
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