Karina Sosa urges us to create answers to a world that feels incomplete

The writer and editor Karina Sosa (Oaxaca, 1987) found in literature the most effective means of exploring the complexities of memory and identity.

In his most recent novel, Orphanhood, It alludes to an episode of social unrest that occurred in her place of origin, but at the same time to the story of a young woman who not only suffers the disruption of her environment, but of her life.

The plot is set in 2006, a symbolic year in Oaxaca, when a popular revolt broke out that went beyond the initial demands of the teachers of section 22 of the National Coordinator of Education Workers.

The struggle that began as a demand for better working conditions soon transformed into a broader movement, in which various figures in society joined forces in the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). The main goal: the dismissal of the then governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, and a series of changes in the state that, for a brief period, seemed possible.

I was able to observe each event closely because my father, Flavio Sosa, participated in the APPO. He was a social activist, a political prisoner and disappeared. However, this story is autofictional.explained Sosa in an interview with The Day.

Memory is like a house of mirrors in which each person reflects his or her own fear, desire and longing. Even though we all look at the same event, we do so from different perspectives. For this reason, memory is something personal and non-transferable.

A daughter discovers the rift in her family: her parents are separated and the house where she and her siblings grow up is filled with memories. In June 2006, the protagonist’s father leads a popular struggle to overthrow the government of Oaxaca and to obtain justice. While dealing with her father’s abandonment, the young woman tries to discover who she has been and who she is now as a woman.

Karina Sosa emphasized that her novel is not a pamphlet or a chronicle. Rather, it is an introspective journey of the character –who bears her own name– in search of her place in a constantly changing environment.

The influence of other writers is palpable in Orphanhood, published by Penguin Random House. Karina Sosa mentioned Elena Ferrante and her novel The lying life of adults as a trigger for its own story.

Like Ferrante, Sosa is interested in power relations and the emotional burden that parents impose on their children. In her work, the paternal figure is a source of conflict, as well as a catalyst for the self-definition of the protagonist, who struggles to free herself from the weight of expectations and family legacy.

The writing process was also painful for the young author, as her paternal grandmother passed away in 2021. However, the narrative, terrifying and intimate, was intertwined with the collective loss suffered by her community, producing a novel that evokes personal grief, as well as the impact of a traumatic historical moment that resonates in contemporary Mexico.

The title of the novel is not a coincidence either. It reflects the shared feeling of many Oaxacans who lived through those years of struggle and repression, where the absence of justice and abuse of authority were constant.

There were prisoners, missing people, dead people, and there will never be full reparation for the damage. There is still no punishment for those responsible for these atrocities.lamented Karina Sosa.

“Fiction and literature allow us not to pontificate on things, on the contrary, they only leave marks or glances on what happened. Orphanhood, I urge readers to look, to remember, and to construct our own responses in a world that often feels incomplete.”