By Natalie Taylor
Brenda Lozano is a Mexican fiction writer, essayist, and editor with three books to her credit. Her novel, “Loop” (Cuaderno Ideal, in Spanish) won a PEN award, and she is recognized as one of today’s best young Mexican writers. On February 14, 2023, Brenda was the keynote speaker at the International Writers’ Conference of San Miguel de Allende.
In her fictional works, Brenda covers a range of social issues. “All or Nothing,” touches on myriad themes—from love, to anxiety, to familial relations. In “Witches,” the issues are gender and culture; and “Loop,” addresses self-reliance and survival. In her talk at the Writers’ Conference, Brenda chose three themes, as the Penelope-like protagonist of her novel, “Loop,” she wove them skillfully into a cohesive narrative.
Her talk dealt with the connections between fiction, reality, and genre, and how these three feed into each other, and blur the distinctions among them. To illustrate this relationship, she spoke of a real incident—a Mexican mother who stalked her daughter’s killer, eventually killing the culprit. It is a story of courage, but more than that, it speaks of an ancient theme: a woman’s vengeance. This is the theme addressed by Euripides in his play “Medea,” where the eponymous protagonist takes revenge on her husband in a horrendously brutal manner. Relating the real story of the mother who avenged her daughter’s death, Brenda connected the reality to some of the genres that touch on this issue. Two horror movies, “Carrie” and “The Exorcist,” relate the story of young women brought to the brink by society, who take revenge on those who have wronged them. “Carrie,” based on Stephen King’s novel, is about a teenager abused by both her mother, and her classmates. When she becomes aware of her own supernatural powers, she discharges her rage in a terrifying killing spree. Carrie personifies the horror of an angry woman’s unleashed power. The same theme is taken up by Regan, the adolescent protagonist of another horror movie—“The Exorcist.” She is a girl-woman possessed, in this case by the devil, and the cure for her monstrosity is an intervention by a male; a Catholic priest who will perform the exorcism to bring her back to “normal.” Regan reacts violently to the men who attack her, in effect taking revenge on those who attempt to manipulate her body and her mind.
Brenda shows the connection between the real events of the mother who exacts revenge on her daughter’s killer, and the fictional horror stories of Carrie and Regan, cleverly intersecting the themes of genre, reality, and fiction. The avenging women are quite different from a female character like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who is a victim, yet suffers without inflicting revenge on those who have wronged her. Alice is the polar opposite of Medea, Carrie, Regan, and the avenging Mexican mother, who are not afraid to let loose their inner female demons.
