Roza, Tumba, Quema or Slash and Burn: Review
This review contains spoilers
When this book was proposed for the June discussion, the first thing I did was look up who the author was. Unfortunately for me, I have to admit that I am quite an amateur when it comes to reading and I have not read much in my life. To my surprise, I discovered that Claudia Hernández was a Salvadoran writer, which made me very happy because the only writer I knew from the small Central American country was Roque Dalton. Moreover, I have had great interest in the geopolitics of this region.
Shortly after starting the book, I found myself with many questions and reflections. Once I finished the novel, I wanted to understand the author’s narrative style better, and I decided to read El verbo J as well. I wanted to find out whether the narrative techniques that appear in Roza, tumba, quema were exclusive to this novel or if they were part of the author´s literary style. After reading both books, I dare to say that Claudia Hernandez has a very distinctive style and a peculiar ability to narrate violence without falling into sensationalism.
Roza, tumba, quema is a novel with great literary value that describes a spiral of violence. Violence with an unclear starting point and which perpetuates itself from generation to generation. Throughout the novel, there are various forms of violence that run through the lives of a female lineage. The passive characters are usually women, while the active characters are different people who hold power over them: fathers, brothers, husbands, priests, civil servants, soldiers, guerrilla fighters, organisations and institutions. And all of this happens under the complicit gaze of a community that watches and judges.
The story follows a nameless woman from childhood to old age. The novel begins with a childhood marked by extreme poverty, domestic violence and institutional abandonment. From a very young age she had to take care of her siblings and assume responsibilities that did not belong to her. She also carried a deep maternal wound because she felt abandoned by her mother.
As the story progresses, as readers, we witness war, forced recruitment of minors, motherhood, the loss of her first daughter, widowhood, discrimination, migration and her own ageing. The desperate search and wishes of recovery of her first daughter becomes one of the central threads of the novel. We also discover the circumstances behind the mother and daughter separation and how the girl was given for adoption to a French family without the mother's consent, which will remain as an open and bleeding wound throughout the entire book.
One of the things that caught my attention the most was the title: Roza, tumba, quema, or Slash and Burn in English, refers to a traditional agricultural practice that consists of clearing a piece of land, cutting down the vegetation and burning it, so that the ashes can be used as fertiliser. However, when this practice is repeated continuously, it eventually makes the soil become infertile. This technique as a title is a metaphor for violence and consequences. Over generations, the protagonist’s family is subjected to new forms of abuse, exploitation and discrimination. By the end of the novel, the characters are still standing, but they also show clear signs of exhaustion.
Regarding the narrative elements, one particular aspect is that all the characters are nameless, and the places where the story takes place are never clearly identified either. This technique encourages the reader to pay close attention to the story not to miss the plot and the main storyline, but it also achieves something very powerful: it universalises the topics. The author is not only telling the story of one family, possibly Salvadoran, but a story that could be repeated in many different places and historical periods. By removing names and specific geographical references, the focus turns towards human relationships, the human condition, structures of power and mechanisms of violence (universal themes).
The narration also does not follow a completely linear timeline. The story mixes present and past. Memories pop up naturally while the protagonist reflects on her life. In addition, the author uses long sentences, subordinate syntax and a prose style which is similar in oral storytelling. Many times, I felt as if I was listening to real testimonies rather than reading a novel. This creates a strong emotional impact on the readers.
Characters are never presented from a degrading position of victimhood. The author narrates deeply painful experiences with a naturalness, which makes them even more powerful.
The novel is narrated in third person singular. Additionally, the narrator sometimes appears to be an omniscient narrator, already revealing the destiny of the protagonist or of the end of certain situations. Regarding the verb tenses, it is quite peculiar that the author frequently uses the present, simple future and conditional forms. This creates the feeling that many events were predetermined and unavoidable.
In relation to the dialogue style, the author uses the free indirect style or what is sometimes called interior monologue, which blends with the characters' thoughts and reflections. This novel does not have direct dialogue; Instead, indirect dialogue and personal reflections dominate the narrative. These elements make the story feel intimate and close despite being told in the third person.
When it comes to the characters, women are the main characters, but there is an indirect character that deserves to be analysed: the community, which plays a fundamental role during the story. Although it is not an individual character, it acts as a constant presence that watches, monitors, and sets the moral standards to judge and punish. The community criticises women who study, women who migrate, women who receive social benefits, and women who live without a husband. One clear example is when the third daughter returns home from university with a different hairstyle, and the neighbours question the mother for allowing her to study. A second example is when the protagonist becomes a widow and a man starts harassing both her and her daughters, yet nobody reports him. A third example is when the protagonist's mother is entitled to receive food assistance after her husband's death, but the community spreads rumours and misogynistic criticism about her, eventually pushing her to give up that support. Violence appears not only through direct actions, but also through collective silence and passivity.
Men occupy a secondary place in the narrative, but their decisions and actions have very direct consequences on the lives of women. They are men who abandon, recruit, control, restrict or exercise economic and sexual violence against women (usually from the own family). A very clear example is the husband of the protagonist's second daughter, who demands that she quits university, prohibits her from working and forces her into economic dependency. Through these stories, the novel shows how multiple forms of violence take place within spaces that are generally considered safe, such as marriage and family life, and how these forms of violence are not only tolerated but often reinforced by society and community itself.
Regarding the themes, the novel offers a reflection on education and structural inequality. Although the protagonist, and later her daughters, gain access to school and university education, education itself appears heavily conditioned by severe material limitations. From childhood we observe an environment where professions, forms of labour, poverty and ignorance seem to be inherited from one generation to the next.
The expected destiny for men is to work the land, raise livestock, perform low-paid labour, or migrate. The expected destiny for women is marriage, domestic work and motherhood. In this sense, the novel suggests that the most vulnerable social classes must pay an enormous price in order to access basic rights and achieve that elusive dream called social mobility.
This reflection reaches its peak through the story of the third daughter, who manages to enter university. Although she passes the admission exams, she has personal circumstances of disadvantage compared to other students. The novel demonstrates that having access to an opportunity does not necessarily mean being able to benefit from it under equal conditions. Lack of resources, economic pressure and accumulated educational disadvantages make her progress significantly harder. This novel offers a very interesting critique of the myth of meritocracy: efforts are not enough to overcome structural poverty.
In addition, women from rural communities, racialised women, and women suffering the borderline of extreme poverty, are forced into exploitative domestic labour in order to cover their basis needs (shelter, food, some money for their families, etc.); which enforces the structural conditions of poverty and further perpetuates them. These women are also exposed to harassment and sexual abuse within these working environments, which is aligned with one of the novel's central arguments: women are exposed to different forms of violence across different spaces, whether at home, in the street, at school, university, work, in shelters, and beyond. It seems there are no safe spaces for women.
Following the analysis of the main themes, there is also institutional and bureaucratic violence exercised by a state that abandons its citizens, for instance, before the war the family used to live in very extreme poor conditions in forgotten territories. During the war, the state commits war crimes against the civilian population, including rape and extrajudicial executions carried out by the army forces. A clear example is shown at the beginning of the novel, when the aunt flees with her children, the protagonist and her siblings after the army takes control of the rural area where they live. After the war, the state continues perpetuating conditions of inequality through different means. The novel also portrays obstetric violence when the protagonist loses a pregnancy and receives deeply dehumanising treatment at the hospital.
One of the most brutal aspects of the novel is the adoption of the daughter who eventually ends up living in Paris. This story encourages the reader to reflect on human trafficking, global inequalities and the power relationships between the Global North and the Global South, between developed countries and countries affected by poverty or conflict. In this sense, colonialism is presented as a form of violence.
One particularly powerful scene occurs near the end of the novel, when it is revealed that the daughter was sold to a French family with the consent of the priest, the nuns and the baby girl's father, also that the money paid for the adoption (transaction) was used to continue funding the guerrilla movement. The French adoptive parents confessed that a hostile country with a war or with an internal civil war is ideal for adoptions because it creates a decrease in financial expenditure and bureaucracy. The novel shows how different institutions participated and remained silent about deeply questionable practices.
War transforms the most vulnerable people into commodities and stock. The bodies of women and children become tools to satisfy other’s needs. The adopted children who grow up far away from their culture and who experience racialisation often grow up with a sense of emptiness and the feeling that something important is missing from their identity. The adoptive siblings of the first daughter in Paris are a good example of this reality. Therefore, children grow up with a narrative questioning their biological parents, what passes the moral responsibility from perpetrators to the victims.
Connected to this theme, one of the most striking images in the novel is the cemetery of foetuses belonging to female guerrilla fighters that the protagonist discovers near the end of the book. For me, this place represents all the pregnancies and maternities interrupted by war, as well as the violence carried out on women's bodies during one of the most vulnerable periods of their lives. It also connects directly with the grief that the protagonist carries for decades over the daughter who was taken away from her.
The suggestion of burying an object that symbolically represents the absent daughters struck me as a profoundly human image. It speaks about the need to accept certain losses in order to continue living.
Another central theme is motherhood. The novel is deeply shaped by the relationships between mothers, daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters. Although many of these relationships are complex and marked by conflict, they also become the main spaces of support, resilience and resistance. I was particularly impressed by the evolution of the relationship between the protagonist and her mother. Even though the protagonist suffers violence during her childhood, and later in her adult life had lack of support from her mother; the protagonist never develops resentment feelings towards her mother. On the contrary, by the end of the novel their relationship is marked by mutual understanding, support, companionship and shared vulnerability.
Regarding mother-daughter relationships, the novel focuses above all on loyalty and on the sacrifices that the protagonist makes in order to provide a better life for her daughters. One of the most moving moments takes place near the end of the novel, when the grandmother, the protagonist and the second daughter sit down and talk. It is a deeply sincere and tender conversation in which all three women recognise each other's fragility. The protagonist comes to understand her mother's vulnerability, while her second daughter begins to see the vulnerability of both her mother and grandmother. In many ways, this scene represents a generational transition of the duty of care. The daughter starts to realise that the time has come for her to begin taking care of her mother and grandmother.
This conversation becomes even more meaningful when we remember an earlier episode in which the protagonist is about to be kidnapped by a group of men who intend to abuse her. At that moment her mother appears and, despite being a harsh woman who had previously inflicted violence against her own daughter, she faces the aggressors and manages to drive them away. What is most striking is that all of this happens under the gaze of the community, who watch without supporting her. Once again, the novel contrasts collective silence with the instinctive protection that exists between mothers and daughters.
The protagonist's reflection during this episode is one of the most powerful and interesting conclusions from the book. She believes that a mother can always sense when her children are in danger, regardless of the distance. She says that when a daughter desperately calls for her mother in her thoughts, the mother can hear that call no matter how far away she is. I found this a deeply tender and powerful image of maternal bonds. It is especially significant because, despite all the violence she has suffered, the protagonist never stops trying to protect her daughters and build for them a better life than the one she had herself.
I was also deeply moved by the way the novel portrays support networks between women. Throughout her life, the protagonist receives help from friends, relatives and neighbours. Likewise, her daughters eventually support one another. One example is when the youngest daughter says her childcare money can be used by the third daughter to support her with her university studies. These relationships function as a form of resistance against an environment marked by poverty, discrimination, lack of opportunities, and violence.
The story of the youngest daughter represents the continuity of inequality. Ironically, she ends up migrating to Paris in order to work and support both her own future and her family. In one way, the daughters inherit the poverty and material limitations that shaped the protagonist's life. In other ways, migration emerges as a survival strategy. This reality connects the novel with the experiences of millions of migrant families around the world today; a never ending story.
Linked to the youngest daughter are her paternal grandparents, who openly discriminate and hate the mother of their granddaughter, due to her being poor and racialised. They (particularly the grandmother) celebrate the father's abandonment and criticise the fact that their granddaughter does not attend university like her other two sisters (but they do not support her economically, ironically!). Through these interactions, the novel also explores class prejudice, racism and the way social hierarchies are reproduced within families themselves.
At the end of the novel, we see how the youngest daughter returns home only to face a new form of aggression, this time through legal means: the possible expropriation of the family home for the construction of a road. It is significant that after surviving war, displacement, poverty, migration and multiple forms of violence, the family once again are confronted by a new threat: economic development, infrastructure projects or market forces. The youngest daughter even places her own body in the way to prevent the expropriation from taking place. Through this final episode, the novel confirms one of its central ideas: violence and inequality do not disappear, they simply transform themselves. The actors change, the language changes, but the most vulnerable people continue carrying and suffering the consequences.
This novel leaves an impactful image of the spiral of violence, very linked to the idea of the title of the book: Roza, tumba, quema is a practice that progressively exhausts the land when it is repeated over and over again. In the same way, the family of women of this novel experiences successive waves of violence arriving from different instigators, causes, and across different historical periods. Generation after generation, the characters continue resisting, but they also carry the signs of accumulated exhaustion. Just as the soil becomes sterilised through constant exploitation, the lives of these characters are shaped by a persistent violence that never completely disappears, but simply adopts new forms.
Finally, all I can say is that Roza, tumba, quema is a challenging, dense, timeless, universal and profoundly human reading that forces the reader to reflect on the many forms violence can take and on the social structures that allow perpetuation. Due to its literary value, its narrative mastery, and its level of difficulty, I would highly recommend reading it. For all these reasons, I would give it a score of 8 out of 10.
