Writing from the Edge

An older woman who spent her eighteenth year in Auschwitz. A younger one who used her nineteenth to organize against the war in Vietnam in New York. An economics student who despite his radical convictions works for the Mexican stock exchange. Mexico 1968. A year, a student movement, a friendship and a massacre which changes all their lives forever. This is the stuff of Itzel, a two volume novel from Sarah Xerar Murphy, the woman who lived it.

In the first volume Itzel: A Tlatelolco Awakening, published in the fall of 2019, Itzel herself is the focus as she blooms into her own agency, bravery, even heroism, possibilities she thought beaten out of her by the horror of the camps. The second volume, Itzel II: A Three Knives Tale just published in spring 2020, concentrates on Nauta, the narrator, to bring her face to face with her own violence and capacity for both betrayal and commitment in a series of harrowing scenes.

In the first we move into the time of the Tlatelolco massacre, in the second into that of the Halconazo, also called El Masacre de Corpus, the demonstration of June 10th, 1971, re-enacted in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which—though bloody—through the response of public and press corps, successfully called the government to account. This volume is dedicated to Armando Salgado, the photographer whose images changed Mexican history. The first is dedicated to artists Guadalupe Otero and Jorge Antonio Perezvega, with whom the author shared art making in 1968.

From the working docks of fifties Dumbo to the concentration camps of Nazi Europe, the late-night meetings organizing the US antiwar movement of the sixties to the false bottom vans carrying Central Americans to Canadian Sanctuary in the eighties, Itzel takes us on a whirlwind ride through our continental heritage even as its narrator, Nauta, never an innocent abroad but once a knife-wielding Brooklyn tomboy, contemplates her own coming of age. The bi-racial, bilingual and multicultural background of award-winning author Sarah Xerar Murphy, a long-term resident of all three of North America’s largest countries, makes hers the perfect voice for a story of such breathtaking scope.

 .....maybe there will be a moment there I still could have laughed. Joined him. But it’s the thought of the blade that will do it. I will be mesmerized. As if I am back there. Looking at it. Seeing the one steel sharp glint that will spring me into action. And even the meaning of that scene will shift. The memory of what I’d done. What I’d wanted to do.

It was my fight, I’ll whisper: His bronca was with me. I had to take care of it. It was my job. Mine. To determine the outcome. And yes, you’re right, I do have experience. I did know what I was doing. And the blade isn’t in my corset. Or in the bra I don’t wear. Where the Brooklyn street whores carry their razor blades. It’s here. In my pocket. It’s how I’ve lived.

     I will not be chattel, I’ll go on: I will not be chattel, repeating it between clenched teeth. Though it will likely not have been so elegant, I’m not sure I even know that word chattel in Spanish, it is among the properties of automatic translation that you sometimes clean up and polish the words you’re working with in your mind before you even know you’ve done it, so it will probably be more like: No soy la puta propiedad de nadie. I’m nobody’s fucking property. Or its equivalent. Because I am pretty sure I’ll use that word puta, though maybe that’s the intervening years translating themselves too, puta is probably the most common adjectival expletive in the Spanish speaking world, just not necessarily first choice in Mexico. But I like it: neither puta nor propiedad. Neither whore nor property. It still makes great sense to me ...