I recall Limpia (2023), by Alia Trabucco Zerán, with fascination. That novel traced the misadventures of a domestic worker, poor and confined within her own thoughts, moving between the private and public dimensions of a person, of family and domesticity. This crossing is precisely one of the analytical keys of the author’s latest work: The Others, published by Lumen in March of this year.
The Others
takes us on a journey through the most debated issues of our time. Gender identity, feminism, migration, poverty, exclusion, the genocide in Gaza, among others. These problems, arranged in three main parts (“But I Am Here”; “Detonating Silence”; “The Wakefulness of Language”), lead the author to the heart of the matter: the rise of totalitarianisms as a historical mark of the beginning of this century.
The convergence of what seem like isolated subjects in this international phenomenon is apt, because despite the diversity of the issues addressed, this work rests on three pillars: language, freedom, and justice. At the intersection of these pillars lies the interpretation of current events. The capacity of language to define and constitute us, and its articulation as discourse structure the dialogues of public debate and, therefore, the way we interpret reality. The language can become a constricting element, the most powerful tool of totalitarianisms, but it can also be a liberating agent, the channel for discourses of freedom. Between them lies justice, whose role in the fight against inequalities and as a guarantor of a common order becomes blurred.
The reflections of Alia Trabucco on these topics take many forms. Although the work is organized into clear blocks, from the outset it offers a fragmented, disorderly, and scattered discourse that gives rise to images, whether photographic or artistic. The presence of imagery proves to be a decisive success. It aligns with another key facet of her work: memory. Memory has in The Others a dual dimension: individual and collective. Trabucco Zerán remembers her grandparents, who were migrants, and the experiences of exclusion they were forced to endure. She recalls her childhood, her literary trajectory, and other episodes that enrich the narration. Yet she also engages in a rehearsal of collective memory. The appearance of works such as the celebrated La lengua del Tercer Reich by Victor Klemperer takes the reader back to the darkest moments of the twentieth century and the force of their discourses. This work is also a exercise of collective memory, with the aim of interpreting the present properly and offering alternatives for the future.
One might be tempted to claim that we are not facing a conventional essay, that it is a narrative essay or even a memoir. But what happens with this work—and one of its greatest attractions in today’s publishing landscape—is that it explores one of the defining traits of the essay as a contemporary genre: its entrenched individuality.
Unlike treatises and other didactic forms, contemporary essay, with its celebrated progenitor in Montaigne and other writings, moves away from its predecessors by giving room to the individual, to the self. The presence of the self awakens the unfinished nature of this discourse, it does not arrive at a definite conclusion, but rather at a personal stance. The inclusion of personal experience, the narrative quality of the text, or the fragmentary discourse all exploit the individual edge of the contemporary essay. However, the individual presence is not the center of the narration but, precisely, otherness, which has also been termed subalternity.
Alia Trabucco navigates between individuality and collectivity, between the freedoms one possesses and the duties we share as a society. The role of the one in the whole. This pendular movement between the public and the private marks the rhythms of the work, in its form and its content, becoming a singular and transcendent exercise in contemporary essayism.
The Others is also a bold positioning exercise by its author, who recounts the constraints she faced in daring to define herself publicly. Her narrative (La resta, Limpia) and also her essay (Los homicidios) reveal a trajectory marked by a critical engagement with visible reality. Her works propel a shift of the margins toward the center of discourse, turning what had traditionally been relegated to a secondary position into the primary object of reflection. In this way, experiences, voices, and historically excluded subjectivities gain centrality, challenging cultural hierarchies and the criteria of legitimacy on which dominant thought has been built. The marginal ceases to be a peripheral reality and becomes the starting point from which to interpret and question the established order. In Alia Trabucco Zerán’s works, today’s problems acquire a double dimension—personal and historical—becoming a response to the great modern debates. Thus, the author again turns the individual into the collective and the present into an echo of History itself.
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Author: Alia Trabucco Zerán. Title: The Others. Publisher: Lumen. Retailer: Todos tus libros.