Areas of subalternity in Sara Mesa’s work

This article centres on one of the driving forces that runs throughout the work of author Sara Mesa: specifically, areas of subalternity, that is, subjects or spaces which either belong to the margins of what is considered normative or those which prove difficult to ‘hear’. Thus, Mesa’s literature works with territories that are in conflict for dominant and normative understandings of the social, hence her focus on characters in their childhood, her reflection on the effects generated by places of discipline (schools, psychiatric hospitals, orphanages), or her denunciation of narratives that render subjects in social exclusion and poverty invisible. In this sense, this article proposes a first approach to what can be considered the conscious exploration of certain areas of subalternity (subjects and/or spaces) through narrative tools. To do so, two paradigmatic examples have been selected: the story about a woman living in poverty told in Silencio administrativo (‘Administrative silence’) (2019), and the fictional story about a teenage girl who suffers harassment and a man undergoing psychiatric treatment in Cara de pan (‘Among the hedges’) (2018).