still from my video for the International Latino Book Awards
Over the weekend, my whole family was locked inside as California blazed as an undeniable result of the climate crisis with unbreathable air. Which is how I was home and watching the online ceremony where my novel SIDE CHICK NATION won a prize. It was selected for first place in the International Latino Book Awards for a novel in English that is an adventure or drama. My book is both, and is the first novel published about Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. This is one of many categories of awards they present.
As a member of the Puerto Rican diaspora living on the West Coast, I watched in disconnected horror as the hurricane and its brutal aftermath began to unfold in September of 2017. Because the novel came out in June 2019, I had to write it quickly, but I also felt an intense responsibility that it had to be really good. After all, I was telling the story of one of the greatest tragedies that had happened to my people, this brutal disaster at the intersection of colonization and the climate crisis.
The only reason that I was able to be the first to publish was because I had originally been on deadline to write a different book for my publisher, Kensington Books. I asked and got permission from my editor in early 2018 to change topics and write about the hurricane. I visisted Puerto Rico for the first time in a decade in June 2018, and it broke my heart all over again.
The book is part of a series of feminist heist romance thrillers called Justice Hustlers, and I managed to keep true to this hyper specific sub-genre, even as I took on the hurricane politics. Because Kensington is one of the biggest independent commercial publishers in the US, they crank out paperback original page turners. I have intentionally developed this series of social justice novels that appeal to the masses. My editor, Esi Sogah, is fantastic and has been incredibly supportive, while her insightful criticism has made every single one of my books better. But she has been promoted to executive editor and has many, many books on her roster. Kensington’s economic position in the industry isn’t structured for literary fiction. Their editors don’t have the luxury to meander through their authors’ books, sentence by sentence, for weeks on end to find the deeper music of the language, to seek the deepest possible emotional impact of the characters’ journeys. So, in addition to my Kensington editor, I hired a novelist and freelance editor whose work I greatly admire. Susan DeFreitas is a Caribbean woman of color who would understand the politics as much as the literary craft. I would later invite her to join our crew here at the Daily Dose. I paid her going rate for feedback on such a long manuscript. It ended up being over a thousand dollars, and was worth every penny. Even though I had gotten an advance of six thousand dollars for the book, and my agent got 15% of that. I paid other consultants to vet different aspects of the book, including a Puerto Rican sensitivity reader who was also a hurricane survivor, Marianne Collazo, I had never felt so much pressure for a book before. This was the first novel about the hurricane, the event that had irreparably changed the Caribbean, that had shocked my people into full consciousness of the brutality of our colonial status and had made me a climate activist. I needed to be all in to make it the best book I possibly could.
Activists have responded well to the book. Before publication, I reached out to Naomi Klein on twitter, who had written one of the first non-fiction books about the hurricane, THE BATTLE FOR PARADISE: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists. I explained that I was attempting to put those same politics into a book for people who read sexy romance thrillers instead of non-fiction. She took time to read the book then gave me a great quote.
“Gripping feminist heist fiction about turning the tables on the disaster capitalists in the jaws of climate apocalypse? Improbably and thrillingly, Aya de Leon has pulled off exactly that with SIDE CHICK NATION. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Naomi Klein author of The Shock Doctrine
We got some good reviews, but nothing really took off with the book. It was submitted for several prizes, but wasn’t even a finalist. Until the International Latino Book Awards. Until I won this prize.
There are infinite variables that go into the calculus of book prizes and who wins and why. One of them is certainly the sense of political urgency of a book. There are lots of strikes against this book being taken seriously. It’s a romance, a heist, it has an urban fiction cover, but inside it’s a searing critique of empire and extractive capitalism. It is the popular fiction account of a frontline community of US citizens in the climate crisis. I assume that the judges for each of these contests actually read the book, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that none of the non-Latino prizes thought it was a contender. I am totally biased. These were my people dying. This is the best book I’ve ever written. This is the the spot of politics where I have decided to plant my flag. This intersection between the climate crisis and racism and sexism and capitalism and imperialism. I can’t think of anything more important to talk about.
I think Varshini Prakash explained it very succinctly in her interview with Anand Giridharadas for The Ink:
“We would have had a Green New Deal a decade ago if Black lives mattered, because of Hurricane Katrina. We would have seen the carnage that resulted from it as the greatest call to action. And the same thing is true with Hurricane Maria.”
Prakash is the co-founder and executive director of the Sunrise Movement, as well as co-editor of the new book Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can. I hope this non-fiction collection goes on to win prizes, but more than that, I hope it goes on to influence policy.
Which is really what I wanted for my book. To break through peoples’ numbness, to move people to action, to get people in the US to be accountable for our complicity as the colonial power in Puerto Rico. It’s not about the prizes, it’s about having our struggles taken seriously. The title, “side chick nation” is about the protagonist, an Afro-Latina who is pimped as a teen, and her journey to understand her own value. It’s also a metaphor for Puerto Rico’s colonial status as our nation’s own dirty secret. But maybe the judges didn’t get it. Or they just didn’t like my book. Thought it was boring or cheesy or too formulaic. So I’ll let you judge for yourself. Here’s the first chapter.
Thanks to the International Latino Book Awards for seeing the value of this work, but mostly for seeing this the value of my people and our Island and the importance of telling this story.
Side Chick Nation, a novel
Prologue
Water flooded the storage space as Dulce slept. It seeped through the metal slats in the pull-down door. It pooled on the concrete floor. It rose around the mattress where Dulce was sleeping. Although she was not exactly sleeping, more like in a stupor or a spell from the cocktail of rum and marijuana. It dulled her hearing, so she didn’t startle with the shrieking winds and battering rain, and thudding of broken branches against the building. It dulled the panic she would have felt—alone in a storage space where she was living illegally. In a hurricane. And nobody knew she was there.
Water seeped up, turning the mattress into a giant sponge. Soon her back was wet. The crisscross of her racerback tank top, the cotton shorts. The moisture soaked into the fabric, even above the surface of the water she lay in. Inch by inch, the line crept up her feet, her beautifully painted blue toenails, the sides of her arms and legs and torso. It saturated her hair, destroying the remains of the blowout she’d been trying to conserve. She had sweated out the roots, but the tips of her hair had stayed somewhat straight, even in the humidity. She’d kept it up in a ponytail over the last few days, so the ends didn’t erupt into tight curls from the sweat on her back and shoulders.
But now, the water rose just above the mattress, soaking her hair, and it bloomed into springing curls all around her head.
Still she slept.
It wasn’t until the water seeped into her ears that her body moved at all, beyond the rise and fall of her chest. Her shoulder flinched with the moisture tickling her ear canal, but it didn’t wake her. First one side, then the other, as her head was slightly tilted on the mattress. No pillow. But then both ears filled and the tickle was gone. Her body stilled again in sleep. The now full canals dulled the howls of the storm.
The flooding outside was anything but gentle, yet the water could only seep in through the slats in the metal door, and the crack at the bottom above the cement floor. So the water level rose slowly. It crept up gently along her neck, her jawline, her cheekbone. The water sidled up tenderly, like a lover.
Dulce slept, like a maiden awaiting a prince, awaiting a kiss.
Yet she slept on when the water first touched her lips. Only when it began to drip into her mouth did she truly stir. The water, pooling in the back of her throat and making it impossible to breathe properly now. The prince had come. The rescuer on his horse. The discoverer. The pimp.
She flashed back as the water choked her. She recalled his hands around her throat, the bruising press of fingers against skin and muscle and tendon and windpipe. As the floodwater of the hurricane trickled delicately into her throat, her body recalled the searing pain of constricted breath. The scrabbling panic of asphyxiation, her heart was hammering frantically, as if it needed to escape her body to survive. Then the half-blackout, feeling her body slump to the floor, wincing with the sharp press of his boot toe as he delivered a single kick to her hip.
Her hip was soaked now in the floodwater, the left hip. Her pelvis was tilted slightly, and her left side pointed down toward the sodden mattress. Her right side was slightly raised, the hipbone jutting above the waterline like a disappearing island of brown skin, as water pooled between the tops of her thighs.
Yet she could feel that the real threat was at her throat. Again.
Like that other time, her pimp had sent one of his thugs to kill her. The man had a knife at her throat, as a few dozen women and some of their kids looked on in horror. She had been standing outside the shelter on the icy Manhattan ground in only socks, numb with terror, unable to feel the freezing concrete beneath her feet. Again, the press at her throat. The knife threatening not only skin and muscle and tendon and windpipe, but now her carotid in jeopardy, as well.
More water trickled into her throat, and she coughed weakly, her gag reflex still kicking. And with the gagging, part of her brain began to register the fact that her life was in danger. Some fight or flight response activated her tongue, dragging it into action to spit some of the water out.
Her life was in danger. Her body struggled to wake, but couldn’t quite push through her half-sleeping stupor, in which the unbidden memory bloomed in her mind like a nightmare. The time she’d been fool enough to go back to her pimp. And he’d thrown her against a wall. Paint and plaster crashing into her back and shoulder like a drunk driver. When she staggered to her feet, he’d choked her. His thick fingers were more insistent than ever, despite her own hands, gripping his wrists, digging her fingernails into his skin, trying in vain to open the vise of his oppositional thumbs. Yet it was her own grip she could feel loosening as she began to lose consciousness.
That had been Dulce’s breaking point. The moment she decided to leave him for good. Or rather, she passed out fearing she might die, but deciding to live if she found she had a choice.
That same resolve woke her inside the storage unit.
She sputtered to life, coughing through a burning throat. In total darkness, completely soaked. Her body was sluggish and disoriented with the marijuana and the residuals of rum. She tried to lift her head, but her hair was unexpectedly weighed down with water.
Slowly, through the chemical fog, she rolled to her side. As if in slow motion, she dragged an arm beneath her, propping herself up on one elbow, her mouth fully above the water line.
She coughed hard and gagged, suddenly vomiting. Yet the retching made her a bit more lucid. Even in the total darkness, she was able to orient herself, to make sense of the bizarre combination of mattress and moisture, screaming winds and crashing thuds.
Storage space. Hurricane. Flooding. Fuck.
Brava Aya!
I’m so happy that you won this award! I love Side Chick Nation and was hoping it would get wide attention. I met you through Elizabeth Stark, bought the paperback and the audio of through librofm.com, and loved hearing you read it.
I have given you 5 star reviews on Amazon, Bookbub, Goodreads, and Barnes and Noble, and promoted the book to my Oakland neighbors, my friends on email, and in Prose and the Pandemic FB group, and will keep promoting it. I’m a memoirist who writes about dating in my 50s and identifying as a lesbian in my 20s to 40s, topics that are interesting, but not as urgent as yours. Thanks for what you write.
Here is my review:
Feminists fight back and win in Puerto Rico!
With everything going so badly right now, as they are here in California, wouldn’t you like to curl up with a book in which feminist women of color fight back against powerful men who are exploiting them, other women, and Puerto Rico….and win? And learn about the effects of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico in the process? You know you would, and this is the book to read, full of smart but poor women who start out being pimped or threatened by their men, then break away and face numerous obstacles, including the hurricane, before they make things right with the help of a bold and fearless feminist women’s health clinic in NYC. Aya De León, poet and creative writing teacher at UC Berkeley, has written another perfect novel—an exciting, satisfying read.
Thank you for all the effort you took to make this book so perfect. It shows!