Amidst the humidity of a Cartagena night, I lay awake beneath the lethargic chug of an overworked air conditioner, excited to visit my family’s home city for the first time. I tried to imagine the families that had once lived in that colonial-style home in Centro Historico, now carefully preserved as an Airbnb; perhaps the Spanish merchants from the 19th century and their descendants, families who showed off their European heritage like a divine right to rule, had pressed their cheeks against the cool stone walls in a desperate attempt to fight off the heat that their ancestry had not prepared their bodies for.
Marvel Moreno’s December Breeze, originally titled En Diciembre Llegaban Las Brisas, unravels the lives of these descendants, these self-appointed nobles, who lived on the Colombian coast in a way that is as raw and unflinching as it is thoughtful and layered. Set during the 1950s-60s in Barranquilla, Colombia, the story is a third-person narrative told from Lina’s point of view and split into three parts, one dedicated to each of her friends: Dora, Catalina, and Beatriz. While the story is popularly noted for the way it unveils the violence inflicted by men, it is also revelatory in exposing how some of the worst violence that is inflicted on women happens because of the ones who stand back and allow it, often times as a way of purposely punishing their female relatives for their supposed transgressions, transgressions which society has conditioned women to fear: Dora for committing the ultimate sin of being beautiful, Catalina for the sin of being born to a fraudulent heiress, and Beatriz for the sin of fervent chastity.
Whatever path the three women take, they are set upon it because of a punishment, be it for the sins of their mothers that must be borne by the daughters, or their own sins of breaking from the control that their mothers’ trauma enforced on them. Through Lina, we trace the scars that lead from trauma to oppression and back again, following the strands of historical violence that wraps around each girl’s neck like a noose, and catapults them into the arms of their abusers. Lina bears witness to all of this, the only one who rejects impassivity, and the only one to have not experienced it, despite being so surrounded.
The stream of consciousness narrative takes up entire pages and often consists of a single sentence, interrupted only by commas and semicolons. Though the sentences may be long, the narrative is precise, with every detail specifically chosen to give as clear of view of the girls, their mothers, their grandmothers, and their world as possible. It is Lina’s all-encompassing recollection of the experiences each of the three women have with men, Colombian society, and most importantly, the other women of the city.
If you research this book, then you’ll note the word ‘obsessive’ often comes up when describing the narrative. Truly, Lina obsesses over the past, as if recounting it with enough thoroughness, leaving no leaf uncounted on an ancestral tree, will help her make sense of the world she lived in, perhaps even change it. And yet Lina’s own inner world is rarely mentioned. The only way the reader can learn about her is through the other characters, and the choices she makes regarding them. Her consistent attempts to help her friends, even when she doesn’t fully condone their actions, paints an image of a fiercely loyal woman who is not as bowled over by the control of her family as her friends are, and can afford to fight for them even when she knows she’ll lose.
Yet here, once again, we are confronted with a challenge to female unity in this era. Lina is the only one among her friends who bears witness to male violence but does not experience it. We see from her recounting of conversations with these friends years after the events that this might be an underlying point of contention for them:
…she, Lina, poorly expressing her chronic indignation at the absurdities of the world, and Catalina listening quietly, with the condescendence of someone hearing an echo of a delusion, until she finally checked her watch, tired, and by way of a farewell said to her: “There’s something hopelessly naïve about you, Lina.”
It is a comment that takes you aback. Do the other women not consider Lina a real woman because she hasn’t suffered the same violence that they have? Perhaps this is what unified the experience of women at that time in Colombia: violence. And one cannot be a part of that world if one can only bear witness rather than suffer it.
Despite writing during the Latin Boom, Marvel Moreno has spent years being criminally overlooked, even though her work shares notable aspects that characterised many of the great writers of the time. Moreno suffered from a lack of publicity for the same reasons that her characters suffered a lack of freedom: she was a woman in a society where female intellectualism was swept under the rug as easily as domestic violence was ignored by averted eyes and nonexistent urgency. As writers, it is our duty to engage with our craft and let it lead us as far as it can; if we are interested in the voices of female writers, then we must find them in all corners of the world.
December Breeze is a novel that I hold close to my heart, and Moreno’s work inspires me beyond the personal, being a descendant of a Colombian coastal family myself. To craft a sentence that fills a paragraph, which fills a page, and still grips you, without losing its own thread, is a feat that few writers can boast of achieving. Her writing is clever, detailed, and infinitely human. This is a book that resists broad generalisation through the act of specificity: to leave no stone unturned, no moment, no thought, no breath of a woman left unnoticed, is to create a history that is entirely about, and for, women.
Tatianna Kalb, Co-Editor-in-Chief
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