‘Loca’ by Nelly Arcan, unabashed writing

In the echo of my deaths

there is still fear.

Do you know about fear?

I know of fear when I say my name.

It is fear

fear with black hat

hiding rats in my blood,

or fear with dead lips

drinking my desires

Yes. In the echo of my deaths

there is still fear.

Alejandra Pizarnik, The fear

“If we feel resentment towards those who commit suicide, it is because they always have the last word”

Rage. Pain. Sadness. A tangible trinity. Nelly Arcan (her real name was Isabelle Fortier) committed suicide on this day, September 24, 2009. Chronicle of a death foretold. Written and described as a farewell letter to unrequited love. Published in 2020 by Pepitas de Calabaza and translation by Natalia Fernández, Crazy (2004) is a realistic and cruel text about love and motherhood, sex and drugs. It continues in the wake of her first book, Bitch (2001)which became a sales phenomenon.

“It is often said that confession relieves. However, until now I have not felt relief writing this letter, perhaps because it is not really addressed to you»

And like writing, it doesn’t save. In this stark autofiction the author shows us her fears, her past as a prostitute and her inability to relate. It can be interpreted as a farewell, a catalog where her grandfather, a rabid Catholic, and her aunt, a reader of tarot cards in which she could never read a future in Nelly’s life, continually appear.

«For me, whores, like internet girls, were doomed to kill themselves with their own hands by virtue of spending their vital energy too quickly in their younger years»

In the relationship he has with a well-known journalist, narcissist and womanizer, he discovers a couple who are very similar to him and not at all. Her lives crossed by the Quebec night, in a frenzy that ends up damaging her. She wrapped in the tinsel of a sacrifice that dwarfs her, that pushes her to disappear. She discovers her pregnancy just as he leaves her. She makes a decision:

«Shortly after a pharmacy test confirmed my pregnancy and things changed for a while, the time of my death was questioned. It was the day after my abortion when my decision became irreversible again and when I began to write you this letter»

This open letter, literature of the self with a deep pessimistic charge, inseparable from the author’s life. That unresolved trauma where, moreover, writing does not contain a saving wand that dissolves our problems:

«let’s say that between my readers and I there was great complicity, I taught them that vomiting could be a way of writing and they made me understand that talent could stir your guts.

In my case, writing meant opening the gap, writing was betraying, it was writing what fails, the story of the scars, the fate of the world when it is destroyed. Writing was showing the reverse of people’s faces and that required being sadistic».

Arcan’s judgment in these pages…

“When my death comes, if you read this letter, you will see a prediction”

…they open the way to two poems by two other suicidal writers: Alejandra Pizarnik -who, casually or causally, took her own life on September 25, at the age of 36-, and Sylvia Plath, who did it a decade before the Argentine :

The cage

Outside there is sun.

It’s just a sun

but men look at him

and then they sing.

I don’t know about the sun.

I know the angel’s melody

and the hot sermon

of the last wind

I know how to scream until dawn

when death poses naked

in my shadow

I cry under my name.

I wave handkerchiefs at night

and ships thirsty for reality

they dance with me

I hide nails

to mock my sick dreams.

Outside there is sun.

I dress in ashes.

The Hanging Man

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid:

A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.

If he were I, he would do what I did.

June 27, 1960