Policarpa: Apocalypse Sur Amerikkka - Paperback

Policarpa: Apocalypse: Sur Amerikka is a fever dream, near-future fairy tale set in a collapsing La Gran Colombia, where an inexplicable golden plague carried by the bodies of young women has become a weapon in a war between a deranged king and the revolution rising up against him. Told in fractured, mist-edged memory from a jail cell where its heroine awaits a firing squad, the play follows Policarpa, an indigenous girl of nineteen with magical gifts and a paralyzed twin brother she refuses to abandon. Plucked from the tunnels beneath Bogotá by Ingrid Bolivar, the dark, messianic "queen of the slums" who runs a sewing shop as a front for her apocalyptic designs, Policarpa is groomed to become the prophesied Salvadora: the virgin sacrifice whose plague will end the world. She can command magic cloth and is set to work on sewing a gown for General Valentía, the country's ruthless war hero-turned presidential candidate. But Policarpa falls in love with Valentía, and that love fractures the prophecy. Caught between Ingrid's gospel of merciful annihilation and her own stubborn insistence that a brutal world is still worth its arepas, its music, and its love, Policarpa moves from instrument of destruction into its strange, glittering savior.

The play braids myth, telenovela, and political horror: Muisca cosmology (Bachué, Chía, the snake swallowing the moon), Catholic martyrdom, fairy-tale logic, and contemporary atrocity all collapsing into one another. Its ensemble of women: the mother (Paciencia), the seductress-assassin (Realidad), the warrior (Valentía), the false prophet (Ingrid), orbits Policarpa as facets of a single argument about women as the blood, the victims, and the avengers of history. Darkly funny, and unsentimental it ends in salt and butterflies: three women turned to weeping statues, and a heroine who refuses both princesshood and martyrdom to claim only herself "ni pura, ni inocente. Solo La Pola."