Colombian Girl Quotes

You listen to me and you listen good, girl. I am a dark, twisted, and very fucked up man. Do you know what a sadist is? I don’t give her time to answer. “I enjoy inflicting pain on women. Now granted, I have access to women that enjoy that side of my dark psyche but you, little girl, are treading on very dangerous ground. You are awakening a monster. If you feed that monster, there will be no possibility of caging the beast.

On an impulse he cannot explain, he buys himself a one-way ticket - and the evening of that very same day finds him wandering the streets of the old colonial quarter of the Colombian town. Girls in love with boys on scooters, screeching birds, tropical flowers on winding vines, saudade, and solitude, One Hundred Years of it; and then, as the tropical dusk darkens the corners of the Plaza de la Adana, he sees a woman, her fingers toying with a necklace of lapis lazuli, and they stand still as the world eddies about them.

When your mouth overloads your ass, put on your big girl panties and apologize! ©2017 Suzanne Steele

Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a novel inspired by personal experience. Kidnapping was a reality for many Colombians until 2005 when the practice really began to decline. If they had not been kidnapped themselves, every Colombian knew someone who had experienced it: a friend, a family member, someone at work. There was once a girl like Petrona who worked as a live-in maid in my childhood house in Bogotá. Like Petrona she was forced into aiding in a kidnapping attempt against my sister and me, and like Petrona in the face of this impossible choice, she did not comply. I have thought of her throughout the years, along with all the women I have met who are stuck in hopeless situations in Colombia.

I wish I knew how my parents remembered their younger selves, or that I had even an inkling of what they thought of their place in the world, back when their lives were confined by the small towns of their Colombian childhoods. I would give anything to spend an hour with my father when he was a rascal of nine, or with my mother when she was a spirited girl of eleven, both unable to suspect the extraordinary lives that awaited them. And so, in the back of my mind is the preoccupation that perhaps I didn't know them well enough, and certainly regret that I didn't ask them more about the fine print of their lives, their most private thoughts, their greatest hopes and fears. It's possible that they felt the same about us, for who can fully know their own children?

La Tata’s eyes conjuring a memorized motherly anger, the same anger brought on her by her sick mother, by the vecinas, by her patronizing sisters, an anger spilling out of every single mother, a rehearsed womanly conviction, a learned frown, hands arched on hips, pursed lips, eyes vaguely shut vibrating to the rhythm of the vocal cords—the posture of every Colombian mother, a hologram passed on through generations to land on the next girl’s body in a Now you are gonna tell me ahora mismito where carajos are you getting all that money y ay Myriam del Socorro Juan that you lie to me. Y agárrate muela picá que lo que viene es candela. Myriam