Describing Gerii Pleitez as a razor-sharp wordsmith is an understatement. The rawness of her prose, her insight into contemporary Australian society and the failures and disappointments of the human condition leave no truth unturned.
A self-described punk, 'postfeminist' author, Gerii (short for Geraldine) is confident what she denounces in her debut fiction novel, 'On the Sunday, She Created God' is both "brutal and beautiful".
The daughter of a Salvadoran couple who fled their war-torn country in the 1980s, Gerii grew up in Cabramatta, one of western Sydney's multi-ethnic suburbs, formerly marginalised for its high prevalence of gang violence and drug abuse.
Gerii describes the peripheral suburbs where she lived as the type of neighbourhoods where store signs were written in languages other than English, and where people defecated 'condoms filled with heroin in their backyards'.
Source: Claudianna Blanco
She self-identifies as a member of the generation of 'translator children', the cornerstone of immigrant families where English was a second language.
"First-generation, translator children, who'd bridge the language barrier between the living and the nearly dead. Between those who were raised here and for those who left everything behind," Gerii writes in her book.
She was one of those children who took “exotic lunches” to school and helped their parents navigate Australian culture, interpreting the rules of a country that was alien to them.
"Translator children are a generation of young people who grew up with two languages and exist in a part of society. There is not much talk about this experience," Gerii tells SBS Spanish.
For Gerii, a visceral writer, growing up as a child of migrants made her feel like she was living between two worlds, in a cultural and social limbo.
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Her parents, like many migrant couples who lost everything in war, worked tirelessly to ensure their daughter received a proper education.
“We are a generation of Salvadoran kids, but we are not from there, we are from here but we are not from here either. We exist in an external place, we don't look like Australians but we don't talk like people in El Salvador either."
But instead of idling in limbo, Gerii takes action by offering a critical look at society. She speaks about the migrant experience knowingly, fiercely describing the abyss created by the lack of belonging.
“We are not Australian, but we are Australian ... I can clearly see a social class structure and how the world operates. That also happens in countries like the United States where [Hispanic children] go to college, but our parents are people who clean houses and work hard,” she says.
But Gerii's book not only painstakingly dismembers the unspoken truths that underlie in the Australian social class structure, she also denounces violence against women, especially women of colour.
"I think that women's stories are the most important thing right now. There isn't much for us for brown women, Asian women or those from other countries ... and I want to talk about these women who are marginalised."
That is why in her book, a fictional work which highlights experiences and stories that resemble her own and the people she knows, Gerii's anti-heroin, Wren, describes her father's anger that translates into brutal blows against her mother and the dog.
"My father worked to satisfy that consistent stack of bills on top of the fridge. My mother worked to calm that rage under my father's skin. She'd fail and it was often her, not me who would have the open palm to her face or the broken nose bleeding into a fistful of toilet paper", she writes.
Wren describes the silence, violence and tacit pacts of couples to tolerate it.
"My parents understood allegiance as much as they understood violence. That was the only thing I consistently knew of people. It was the interminable ability to absorb pain and come out intending to express love. Pain and love, they were the two faces of a coin," the book reads.
Abortion is another theme that is implicit in the book. Gerii believes that the stigma and criminalisation of abortion is something we need to discuss openly as a society, but mostly from a feminist perspective.
Abortion is both illegal in New South Wales and in El Salvador, a country where women who end their pregnancies are imprisoned, even if the pregnancy was the product of violent rape.
Gerii believes some of these hurtful stories remain untold given the Australian publishing world is mostly dominated by white males.
"The instant you realise you're female and no matter what power you wield, you will always come second, is the moment you truly become a woman. How much you give away will hardly matter. Less will never equate more", she writes.
For this reason, Gerii founded her own independent publishing house, Kara Sevda Press, not only to enter the Australian publishing world, but to help others, especially women of colour, do so as well.
"We are own Gods and we can control our own stories. Women can control their own narratives, now more than ever," she tells SBS Spanish when asked about the meaning behind the title of her book.
Gerii's next step is to publish a magazine called "Women of colour'. Although it may sound like it caters to a certain demographic, she hopes the publication helps balance the scale and open new possibilities for female self-expression.
