'We Saw Houses Sink': Yol Segura's Non-Binary Novel Criticizing Progress

Water can bring bisexual mermaids to earth, at least that's what Chappell Roan's pop sings in 'Casual' (2023), but it can also throw up non-binary aquatic utopias , like those imagined by Yol Segura , who, between Sailor Moon 'dildos' and a contaminated dam in Mexico, writes her debutnovel : We Saw Houses Sink .

"When do utopias slip through our fingers? It's because I miss the idea of the future, not the idea of progress ," says Segura , 35, who was "dragging out memories" from his youth rooted in the 1990s, a time when pop music and the idea of "progress" reigned supreme.

The second resulted in projects such as the Zimapán Dam, built in the Mexican state of Querétaro by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the then ruling political group.

In reality, he explains, "progress" translated into sewage and flooding of communities , like the one where Irene—the protagonist's voice—grew up, with the goal of supplying electricity to Mexico City.

With the intention of breaking with "the promise of a modernity" -that never arrives- and the "should be" -that manipulates the body-, Segura, who identifies as a "non-binary lesbian person" , explores, through the inclusive language of the 'x' and the literature of the "non-person", the possibility of "decomposing the concept of humanity" through the almost "magical" idea of water.

Because for utopia not to slip through our fingers, we have to think about it , and Yol intertwines it with that phrase by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940): "Perhaps revolutions are the way in which humanity, traveling on that train, pulls the emergency brake."

"For me, that would be utopia: the moment we stop and say, 'That's not the way it was, we're going to go off the rails.' That idea that we're heading into the void, but we can still slow down ," he reflects.

And, he emphasizes, "stopping" goes against what we understand as "progress," which benefits only a few people. "If we give up on that, we can build something else, the likes of which I still can't see, and, I suppose, that no one, or not at all," he points out.

Although, he clarifies, there are spaces that force us to go more "slowly and contemplate," such as literature , that art that stops people's lives to write "500 or more pages about something."

That "something" can also be an 'x' that freezes the reader's gaze , because a word says 'we' instead of 'us'.

"I have this feeling that the 'x' always makes you uncomfortable , like it forces you to stop and say: 'Ash, again.' And I think that I enjoy that discomfort - which is becoming less and less - because for me it has to do with showing that there is something that is not right in the system," he says.

So, he explains, this "little pause"—which reads almost like "a mistake"—is linked to continuing to insist on "recognizing the identities that are not being named and erased."

In this sense, he believes that the "most conventional literary tradition" has denied certain bodies and idealized a type of perfection, when the reality is that "100% of bodies" fall far short of that ideal.

However, she admits that, in the last 20 years, with the "emergence of women and dissidents" on the literary scene, there is an increasing diversity of voices.

People no longer write in “solitude,” she says, but rather through networks, like when she attended a workshop in 2018 by Argentine author Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, where she read a “very tadpole-like” version of 'Vimos casas hundirse' (We Saw Houses Sink), now published by Planeta.