For novelist Cris Judar, connection and bodies are charged with conventions and societal norms, and arsenic such, connection and bodies incorporate wrong them the imaginable for societal upheaval and change. They are sites of repression, erasure, and enclosure, but besides spaces for liberation, creativity, and dissident expression.
Language constructs and reinforces our governmental infrastructures, but fabrication has the capableness to estrange america from language, to ideate caller experiences of embodiment, grow horizons of expectation, and unfastened possibilities for ways of being, of moving done the world. Fiction besides has the quality to amusement however connection snaps nether the value of violence, however trauma ruptures the precise meaning of words.
These intertwined thematic threads—language and the body, societal and governmental repression, and lines of formation towards liberation—coalesce successful Cris Judar’s fiction. A non-binary writer from São Paulo, they are portion of a procreation of writers connected the beforehand lines of critiquing and challenging the authorities of sex and sexuality successful modern Brazil, wherever overmuch arsenic successful the United States today, trans rights, queer identities, feminism, arsenic good arsenic the connection we usage to talk astir sex basal astatine the forefront of governmental struggle.
By including these voices, Judar explores the intimate corners of Brazilian history, and they besides constituent to the gendered dimensions of authorities violence.
Judar, who has published astir fractional a twelve works of fabrication including award-winning books Roteiros para uma vida curta and Oito bash Sete, approaches these governmental topics done genre-defying prose that hovers astir the borders of poetry, playing astatine the limits of the vocabularies and grammars utilized to specify bodies, desire, and femininity.
The queer poetics Judar advances are rooted successful Brazilian politics, past and present. That specificity is particularly evident successful They Marched Under the Sun, wherever abuses of the Brazilian authorities fold into intimate narratives. The publication is structured astir the voices of 2 young women successful São Paulo, Ana and Joan, each connected the cusp of their eighteenth birthday, each experimenting with their consciousness of self, with their limits and possibilities.
But their voices are not alone. To the contrary, their interlocked communicative arcs are perpetually interrupted by traces of acold broader societal trauma. In letters that look passim the novel, women imprisoned nether the Brazilian subject dictatorship (1964-1985) who experienced gendered unit and extrajudicial imprisonment astatine the hands of the authorities besides grasp astatine caller vocabularies, reimagining what it means to inhabit their bodies, to acquisition tendency successful the aftermath of torture. In the lawsuit of a missive from the quality Julia F. Dantos, these caller vocabularies are literal: “Legs = flamingos. Buttocks = fluffy clouds. Eyes = ovum yolks, unbeaten. Lips = highways, starring maine towards desirable destinations. Neck = a sunset overlook. My assemblage = a satellite, poised for discovery.”
By including these voices, Judar explores the intimate corners of Brazilian history, and they besides constituent to the gendered dimensions of authorities violence. Brazil’s rightwing, Cold War dictatorship hunted down citizens perceived arsenic communists oregon leftists, deeming them enemies of the state, but similar galore different authoritarian regimes, it besides upheld strict norms astir sex and accepted household values. LGBTQ communities were persecuted, feminism repressed, and discourses astir sexuality that did not conform to blimpish Christian ideals censored. The unit and torture that took spot successful detention centers were besides gendered, arsenic women suffered abuses antithetic from those to which men were subjected.
Through intimate reflections connected the body, Judar’s caller unpacks however dictatorships are forces that enforce straightjacketed ideas of morality, and however present-day societal norms transportation the value of our past governmental systems, arsenic good arsenic the legacies of those who managed to unrecorded successful its crevices, asserting a nonconformist existence.
Indeed, the societal traumas of They Marched Under the Sun are not lone echoes of a past regime. The caller besides alludes to modern examples of unit successful the country’s current, antiauthoritarian system, gesturing to the ways successful which brutality persists successful Brazil arsenic authorities and firm powerfulness proceed to perpetrate unit with adjacent impunity. In “October” (the novel’s chapters are labeled by month, not by number), Ana looks into her reflection successful a reflector and is confronted by a dependable cataloguing the deluge of unit successful Brazil from the past decade: “river dams ruptured” refers to the Brumadinho dam catastrophe successful Minas Gerais, erstwhile method failures astatine a adjacent mining installation caused a monolithic mudslide, burying hundreds of excavation workers, animals, and residents of the adjacent municipality alive.
None of the examples successful this catalogue are easy translated oregon transposed into different connection and societal context; they are utterly circumstantial to Brazil.
“One 100 and eleven rounds fired; 5 boys dead” alludes to the constabulary sidesplitting of 5 teenagers successful a mediocre vicinity of Rio de Janeiro successful which officers fired 111 bullets astatine their targets successful a gross excess of brute force.
“Dandara, the travesti” references a lawsuit of the convulsive hatred crimes that travestis successful Brazil endure connected a regular basis. The word travesti—which I near untranslated fixed its specificity to Latin America—describes a idiosyncratic who was assigned antheral astatine birth, holds a pistillate sex identity, and lives successful a discourse of societal and economical precarity and exclusion owed to that identity, which has enactment enactment connected the streets arsenic its main notation (currently, the word has acquired beardown governmental associations and has besides been adopted by trans radical successful antithetic contexts). Dandara dos Santos was tortured and beaten to decease by a radical of 12 people, who yet tossed her assemblage successful a wheelbarrow, changeable her, and posted a video of the transgression connected societal media.
“The thirteen bullets that took Marielle” speaks to the 2018 governmental assassination of Marielle Franco, a Black, socialist, lesbian metropolis councilperson successful Rio de Janeio and vocal professional of constabulary brutality who was killed aft giving a speech, starring to nationwide outrage and protests.
“A regular constabulary hunt implicit Luana Barbosa’s butch body” describes the sidesplitting of a Black, cheery woman, a parent from the periphery of São Paulo, who died astatine the hands of the constabulary arsenic a effect of blunt unit trauma, aft asserting her close to person a assemblage hunt carried retired by a pistillate constabulary officer.
None of the examples successful this catalogue are easy translated oregon transposed into different connection and societal context; they are utterly circumstantial to Brazil, and Judar’s prime to see them is an enactment of denunciation grounded successful a peculiar past and governmental context, 1 that engulfs their characters. At the aforesaid time, determination are wide resonances betwixt this novel’s governmental outcry and demands to admit repression against queer and trans communities, against workers, radical of color, and different marginalized groups acold beyond Brazil.
Indeed, contempt its specificity, They Marched Under the Sun has had an unusually planetary trajectory since its archetypal work successful Brazil successful 2021. Unlike astir authors, for whom translation into English is simply a steppingstone towards work successful different languages, particularly those successful the Global South, They Marched Under the Sun was translated into Egyptian Arabic and Italian—and different stories successful Judar’s oeuvre into Indonesian, Italian, German, Danish, and Spanish—prior to my embarking connected this English translation.
Judar’s prose whitethorn beryllium resistant to translation successful the mode it reasserts its contextual rootedness, but the governmental issues and themes of the caller are nevertheless broadly relevant, compelling to audiences crossed wide swaths of the world. And the urgency of Judar’s meditations connected authoritarianism, impunity, societal repression, and avenues for liberation successful the United States successful 2026 is truthful wide arsenic to beryllium self-evident.
But another, arsenic important crushed arsenic to wherefore we should work Judar successful English translation lies successful language. In 1990, French feminist theorist Helène Cixous wrote a bid of essays connected Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector successful which she articulated the value of speechmaking novels primitively written successful overseas languages. If portion of feminism involves transgression wrong language—or what Cixous describes arsenic an effort astatine becoming “transgrammatical”—then looking astatine what kinds of experimentation instrumentality spot successful different countries and languages is indispensable to breaking bounds successful immoderate parent tongue. She writes, from the French context, “it is bully to enactment connected overseas texts—Clarice Lispector’s, James Joyce’s and others’—because they displace our narration to grammar. In everything we do, we are questioning femininity. We enactment connected texts arsenic quests, that is, a questioning of femininity, connected traces that are perceptible.”
Traces of femininity look passim They Marched Under the Sun, sometimes successful ways that are champion near untranslated—such arsenic successful the lawsuit of travesti—and successful others, that weave their mode done caller images redefining tendency successful English: “To emotion is to capable 1 lung with suffering and the different with stones. A belly afloat of otters, a limb of lamas, rump similar a handbasket of golden that could acceptable a calf oregon full quality child.”
It is apt to prosecute They Marched Under the Sun arsenic though it were a quest, due to the fact that the thought of questioning femininity, of questioning the ties betwixt connection and bodies, is cardinal to Judar’s agenda. This is the precise quest that Ana and Joan themselves embark connected astatine the outset of the narrative. It is the quest that is meditated connected successful fables and fantastical stories that look passim the book, specified arsenic the anecdote astir a assemblage of radical determined to alteration themselves into cats: “they lifted their tailbones towards the satellite portion lapping pick from good chinaware; they meowed successful a chorus of tones and practiced their purrs, which weren’t each that convincing; they frequented polemical lectures connected the taxable of The Art of Becoming a Feline-Human-Citizen, oregon How to Live Well arsenic a Soul Separated from the Body.”
Ana, Joan, and adjacent the assemblage of feline radical fostering this feline culture—all of these fictional characters question to clasp an estranged narration to their bodies, to the Portuguese language, to socially imposed conventions of being. Reading with Judar successful English is an accidental to question and transgress, to ideate worlds and words of anticipation person to home.
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From They Marched Under the Sun. Used with the support of Fonograf Editions. Copyright © 2026 by Cris Judar, instauration by Lara Norgaard
English (US) ·