Spanish / Argentina
Siempre nos estamos yendo
(Always on the move)
Sukaczer, Verónica
(text)
Buenos Aires: Nube de tinta, [2021]. – 239 p.
ISBN 978-987-1997-50-3
Flight | Displacement | Forced displacement | Homelessness
Reading age: 13+
White Ravens issue: 2022
Sixteen-year-old Zinnia is on the road with her younger sister Jaz. Travelling alone, displaced from their home and without a clear destination, they take refuge in an apparently deserted house. Inside they encounter an old woman, and later the thirteen-year-old Isa joins them. In this provisional, fragile, and endangered place, Zinnia talks about her childhood, which came to an abrupt end when a wall suddenly stood between the larger world and her own, immediate world. People became separated from one another, forced again and again to pick up and leave a place, to find a new one, only to be forced to move on again. Written in the first-person perspective, this novel impactfully describes – without referencing specific places or historical events – what it means to be without a home, and the figures’ feelings of powerlessness, their inability to surmount the wall, and never to finally arrive. This is a bitter, timeless book, with believable characters, which deals with ubiquitous humanitarian disasters. [JW]