On The Sunday, She Created God by Gerii Pleitez
“It felt good to be leaving the city. Maybe I’d miss the blue-water, the blue collars, the white paper sails on the harbour, and the white collars beating their desires into the pavement nine to five. The beauty of this city was always so protected by affluence, and it meant that this place was always foaming with energy because people needed the hustle in order to possess a slice of it; it was always a demanding place.”
On the Sunday, She Created God (2019) is the debut novella from author Gerii Pleitez, who’s also the founder of the indie press, Kara Sevda Press, under which this powerful punch of a book is published. This is the first book Kara Sevda Press published, with an ongoing aim to support women of colour and First Nations artists and writers across Australia.
Described as a "punk, post-feminist punch in the face", we follow Wren, a disillusioned woman with plans to escape the burden of the city with her friend, Babe, following a drug-fuelled New Years Eve party.
After running into an old flame, Teddy, at the party, the trio reminisce about their wild, younger days. Wren and Teddy have not seen each other for a decade and she is confronted to learn he is now married, with a child, and owns a shop selling “baked goods and repurposed old crap.”
We learn that Babe and Teddy had a brief fling, and through Wren’s ruminations on this it becomes obvious she is still harboring feelings for Teddy:
“What we desire and what we fear is often the same thing. The fear of failing or losing something before you ever admitted to wanting it at all in the first place left people like Teddy crystallised in a time I’d never experience again. He would never be mine. Sometimes it felt like some of us were just drone bees who had never touched the grace of pollen, only the chaos of the hive.”
Babe and Wren have been planning their road trip for some time, and caught in the moment, Wren inadvertently invites Teddy along. A few days later, they set off across the NSW South Coast on a trip that will have devastating and long-reaching consequences for all three.
In just shy of one hundred pages, Pleitez takes her readers on an incredible roller-coaster of experience. It’s hard to write more about the plot without giving away the key experiences that help to instigate the rapid growth Wren goes through. Pleitez’s prose is hard-hitting, yet imbued with a poetic quality:
“My parents understood allegiance as much as they understood violence. That was the only thing I consistently knew of people. It was the interminable ability to absorb pain and come out intending to express love. Pain and love, they were the two faces of a coin.”
Wren is a flawed and raw character, whose rage at the constructs she feels herself confined by is palpable throughout the first two thirds of the book. She rages against the elitcism of creative careers, the corporate rabbit hole, and the competitive sell-out culture too many pursue in order to ‘live’:
“The days are counted and scrated into these computer programs like tallies on filthy prison walls, generations of misery taught, misery endured for a weekly wage; a sick competition of which snake may purge on its own tail fastest and be back by popular demand; which fool will be the last to laugh his spittle into cold air… Fuck having to get back into ad land just to be around some version of ideas generation.”
Pleitez injects some narrative based on her own El Salvadorian roots to develop Wren further, and provide context to her unique and demanding perspectives of the world she observes around her:
“First generation, translator children, who’d bridge the language barrier between the living and the nearly dead. Between those who were raised here and for those who left everything behind. The kids with the exotic lunchboxes were my friends. We weren’t represented much.”
At the heart of this novel is a story that many people will feel a connection to; that deep desire to uncover who we are, to grab the life we’re given, and to try and feel all it’s urgency without compromise.
It’s difficult to develop and portray a character who experiences a transformation in such a short novella, without it being too constructed or forced, but Pleitez pulls it off. Gritty prose, combined with startling clear and often profound thoughts are what makes this an incredible, uncensored debut.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
