Tierra de Brujas: When it doesn't rain do the blue veins dry up??

Every book can be summarized in 6 paragraphs….

• Viajesalpasado Editorial. Edition 2015
• Author: Maria Ferreira
• Book for interested in: Africa, Kenya, social chronicles, ritual beliefs, poverty and inequality.
• What will? A very young María Ferreira relates with masterful rawness her experience in a hospital in a village in northern Kenya, Makuyu, a town full of whores and drug addicts. A sublime language, with powerful images, of a shocking story about being very alive in the face of death.

Paragraph 1

My promised land is called Makuyu, which in Swahili means Sycamore, because it is a village that has grown around one of those trees. Maybe it sounds like a bucolic place. It is not. It is a town of whores and drug addicts. There is a small lake full of vomit and urine where condoms float and survive, miraculously, some amphibians. At night men burst on the roads and dogs wander, starving, rummaging through the trash. I have never been as young as in Makuyu. I have never been so alive. He 20 years and loved that land of witches

What you have just read is the end of the first paragraph of the book. direct prose, clara, of Cambalacs' house, which is maintained throughout the work.

Paragraph 2

Ndung'u picked up the dead baby. His huge hands covered the child like a cradle. The baby seemed asleep, at peace. The look of pain had completely disappeared from his face.. I was glad he was dead, and I found that joy repulsive and complicated.. I saw Ndung'u open the refrigerator door, He put aside the beers that I had bought a while before and left the child's body in there..

There are good travel writers or social chronicles, with a good pen, whose texts lack the power of a good story. Form is important in literature and so is substance.. You have to have something powerful to narrate. And Ferreira has it, in first person, and tells it how he has lived it.

Paragraph 3

At the end, We got up and the mother touched my breasts and hips while she laughed and talked..

-He says you look like a sick cow, that your bones are marked, Patrick translated for me. I felt disgust, a disgust that lasted until I got sick with typhus and spent a whole week expelling everything I had swallowed that day. And then I became strong and understood, finally, I didn't have the slightest idea where I was, how things worked, I understood that I had to get out of myself to begin to understand. At that moment loneliness began.

The author falls ill after going to eat at a co-worker's house. Come, because he has no choice, so as not to offend and seem like a prissy foreigner, a dish of chicken with rice in which there are ants. The water they offer you is brown. Because he lives in a brown world, where people eat food in which insects float. Then he understands that in that world he must survive, conform, and understands that she will do it alone.

Paragraph 4

When we arrived at Ndung'u's house we filled our bellies with warm milk. We sucked like calves, without fear of getting sick. And then we saw a beautiful sunset, and the mosquitoes that bit us and it didn't matter anymore because we were animals and we weren't afraid of death..

Tierra de Brujas is a journey through the human condition capable of adapting to everything to survive a hostile environment. Living in a space like Makuyu is exactly that paragraph that Ferreira narrates, lose the fear of death, which actually means losing the fear of life too.

Paragraph 5

I don't know how to change a tire and I sit in the ditch. And the Maasai comes back and sits next to me: it is night: I have never seen sunsets as ugly as those in Kenya, that's why this country fascinates me: because it does not agree with the idea of ??northern beauty. It is a country of survivors, of workers, of people bursting, of immigrants. It is a country that kills, but while you die you are distracted by being free. Some call that depravity.

There are many Kenyas, as there are many visions of its evenings. Ferreira explains her suya, his love for a land that, says, it entertains you while it kills you. There is an age, a time, and a place where that is longed for. Without understanding that, one leaves there without understanding anything.

Paragraph 6

Some kids came to play with my hair and said my veins were blue.. I told them that theirs were too.. They said no and laughed. They showed me their black skin. They ran through my blue veins like the river that irrigated those lands. -You have rivers in your body, said a girl. When it doesn't rain do you dry out?

How can you not enjoy a book that ends like this??