Following the Wounded Women in Isabela

This article examines some elements in the crafting of my novel, Isabela (2024), particularly its novelistic formation, and its take on the emblematic figure of the wounded woman in war. I demonstrate what non-conventional stylistic and conceptual decisions give the story its syncretic mode of thought, as its trail shifts from city to barrio, one category of fiction to another, and one wounded woman to the next. I also argue that all these movements and turns are necessary in the novel’s project of representation, as it envisions to narrativize the ongoing historical moment that is the people’s struggle for liberation as the novel’s singular arc, and as it follows the diverging and thorny course of the rebolusyonarya’s heart, wherever she’s headed.