La fosa abierta
Brigitte Vasallo

NONFICTION | 2026 | 195 pages

In this book, Brigitte Vasallo challenges two silences: that of family history, imposed by gender violence, and that of political history, imposed by the dictatorship and the Transition. A memory without monuments that begins in her family's place of origin, the Sierra de Chandrexa de Queixa, and expands to the margins of official history. Its focus is the dismantling of the pre-capitalist countryside in southern Europe with the arrival of the so-called economic miracles of the 1950s, and the identity of the mutant descendants of that diaspora, orphaned of meaning.

In order to reclaim the elusive history of her mother and her time, Vasallo contacts Gilles Charmat, the child she raised in Paris as a domestic worker. The letters she writes to him, and his silence, articulate the common thread of The Open Grave and embody the difficulty of subaltern subjects in accessing their own history, always guarded by the dominant classes.

The author seeks a language that unites two worlds: that of oral tradition and that of written literature, that of individual memory and the possibility of collective storytelling. The txarnega identity, queer in itself and reappropriated, is the prism through which the analysis is articulated, ultimately creating a space of its own enunciation. From this position of subalternity that cannot speak, Vasallo constructs a literary artifact that not only recovers a silenced history but also names what was buried to confront hegemonic narratives about progress, gender, and history.

RIGHTS: spanish ANAGRAMA

BY BRIGITTE VASALLO:

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