A book to illuminate the night of feminicides

It is possible that some readers, upon reading the back cover text of this novel, might think: another book about femicides? And what is more: another narrator witness reflecting on the moral right to write about the subject? But it is enough to follow four news items to come across the evidence that the murders of women –and, specifically, those committed by the victims' husbands or romantic partners– never end. As if it were impossible to reprogram certain brains and extirpate the conviction that the woman they claim to love with madness is their property and cannot do anything they do not consider appropriate: wear certain clothes, talk to other men, go out to work every day... They seem like things from another world, or another era, but the arguments of past times or cultural otherness do not even need to be taken out of the closet. It does not matter the sociocultural level, the color of the skin, or the language of the assassins: the scourge is everywhere. And it must also be addressed from writing, which is capable of recounting great violence and enormous ambiguities.

Also because these types of events are still subject to a certain mistrust: are you sure they are not a little to blame, they? Do you mean they are not sacrificial victims? Nathacha Appanah (Maheburg, 1973), a multi-award-winning French journalist and writer, adopts a commendable attitude of defense and total solidarity with the victims. Furthermore, and with such a delicate subject, she does not fall into sensationalism or victimhood, but rather writes from the confidence in the superior power of life over death. The main merit of this book is the attitude with which it is written, the place from which it speaks: neither from above nor from below the victims, but at their side. If in any case the label of feminism in all its civic, liberating, and social struggle dimension is accurate, this is an authentically feminist book.

The echo of domestic violence

The Hard Night brilliantly interweaves three stories of women who were victims of violence at the hands of their partners, one of which is the author's own story, who, when she was very young, was on the verge of dying at the hands of the man with whom she lived. As she grew older, every time she hears about a case of domestic violence, she cannot help but feel it resonate, and it is by taking advantage of this echo that she decided to start working on what has ended up being this book, of deafening violence and beauty. It is a systematic, profound, and delicate scrutiny of the enigma that lives at the heart of conjugal violence: how are the knots created that entangle love and turn it into possession, threat, and finally violence with a fatal outcome? How many layers of an onion, how many very thin veils made of prejudice and ignorance must be lifted to arrive at some truth about the brutal fact that one fine day, or one bad night, the hands that had caressed a neck decide to strangle it?

Without making any concessions to cheap lyricism or easy condemnation, Nathacha Appanah chooses the middle path, the most difficult one, to recount two cold-blooded murders (and almost her own), brutal and without mercy. She gives names and surnames to the victims, traces their past lives, and interviews the parents and children of women who, above all, need someone to remember them not charred, not abandoned in a roadside ditch, but when they were happy, complete, when they gave themselves permission to be who they wanted to be. Once the tragedy was consummated, only the possibility remained of writing a fierce, meditated, more than valuable book, such as this one.