Empty Houses (Casas vacías) begins with a catastrophe: the sudden disappearance of a child in a park. Through this lens, Brenda Navarro depicts the lives of two women entangled in the aftermath of loss. Yet, the story of the book’s publication is as dramatic as the narrative itself. When Spanish publishers initially rejected Navarro’s debut novel, citing its “excessive bitterness,” she refused to be silenced. In an act of digital defiance, she released the novel online for free. This haunting “confessional” triggered an unprecedented wave of acclaim, eventually compelling the prestigious publisher Sexto Piso to grant it a formal release—a turning point that established Navarro as one of the most vital voices in contemporary Latin American literature.
A writer and sociologist, Navarro does not seek to create heroes. She explores how motherhood can simultaneously be a source of profound love and a wellspring of madness and cruelty. To her, the “house” is a metaphor for the female body—a territory invaded, vacated, and stripped of its sanctuary by structural violence. Following its debut on the bookshelves of Tehran in early 2026, translated by Miaad Banki, the novel finds a new, haunting resonance. For Banki, translating Navarro was an exercise in “controlled suffocation,” seeking to recreate a “verbal hemorrhage” within a linguistic context where formal syntax often demands structural stability. In this exclusive dialogue, they discuss the politics of motherhood, the syntax of anxiety, and the shared wounds that bridge Mexico and Iran.
1. The Demystification of Motherhood
Miaad Banki: In Empty Houses, motherhood does not appear as a sacred instinct, but almost as a social imposition or, at the other extreme, as a fierce desire that triggers atrocity. While translating your work, I felt I was translating a cultural “taboo”: the voice of a mother who dares to confess her regret. Do you believe that literature is the only safe space where women can admit the “failure” of the maternal ideal without being judged as monsters?
Brenda Navarro: I firmly believe that within public spaces, we women have had uncomfortable conversations about what motherhood means while living in societies that insist on complicating our lives simply because we have the capacity to reproduce. So yes, in our homes, our rooms, our kitchens, etc., we do talk about it and question many things. However, in public spaces, it is much harder for us to be allowed full freedom of expression. We have not yet reached the point where this right is recognized without judgment. In this sense, I believe literature is the ideal place to create fiction that allows us to speak about any topic, including motherhoods that are not considered a failure of women, but of the patriarchal systems that only seek to keep economic and political power in the hands of men—because there is nothing more political than being a mother. I think of Mexico and how the mothers of the disappeared are the ones constantly questioning power.
2. The Intransferable Solitude of Pain
M.B.: The novel is built on two monologues that run parallel but never intersect. It is as if both women were locked in their own suffering, without the possibility of touching the other. Does this structure suggest that pain is an absolutely solitary and intransferable experience? Or is the reader the only “bridge” capable of connecting these two solitudes?
B.N.: Both assessments are correct. It is important that they cannot be aware of each other, because if their universes merged, then we would be talking about two women with similar pains who could look each other in the face and not feel so alone. Both women suffer oppression and violence, but also an enormous solitude. When you decide to be a mother, it is as if you are placed in a position where you can no longer be an individual, only the bridge so that the children you created can have a life above yours. But it is also true that readers must be the only ones capable of witnessing this pain and these circumstances, because the most important thing is to feel the helplessness they have in the face of the sordid indifference of society. They have been left alone. The reader is the only possible companion, and yet, they cannot speak to them; that is where the solitude they feel can settle within the reader.
3. The Body as an Empty House
M.B.: The title Empty Houses evokes physical spaces, but during the translation, the “house” revealed itself to me more as a metaphor for the female body: an invaded territory, sometimes by a fetus, sometimes by absence, sometimes by the violence of men. How did you work on this symbiosis between domestic architecture and female biology? Is a woman’s body the true “house” that never quite belongs to her?
B.N.: Yes, the metaphor works that way; we are emptied bodies after bringing our children into the world, and that void never goes away. Later, it turns out that we women are the ones confined to our houses to ensure those babies live and grow to become cheap labor for the economic system. They leave us with empty houses that they make us guard and sustain for the benefit of society. I have always imagined that homes are a kind of incubator that we also have to pay for because our bodies do not belong to us; in a way, they belong to those large corporations that suck the life out of us and enslave us for a few coins.
4. The Syntax of Anxiety
M.B.: Your prose has a dizzying, suffocating rhythm, almost without pauses for breath. Furthermore, the absence of dialogue dashes dissolves the boundary between what the characters think and what they say. In rendering it into Persian, I tried to maintain this “verbal hemorrhage” and this fusion of voices. Was the decision to eliminate graphic marks a strategy to mimic the mental chaos of the characters? How do you ensure the reader does not get lost in that flow, but rather drowns with them?
B.N.: Yes, graphic marks get in my way. We don’t have any kind of marks when we are speaking; orality has other types of rules that have more to do with rhythm and the musicality of words than with a marked grammar within the physical space of the book. For me, the rhythm of the novel is part of the aesthetic bet, the play with language, and how language, for me, has the same capacity as music to generate emotions. So, that dizzying rhythm of the second voice, and in turn, that way the first voice expresses itself, has to do with the manifestation of pain and trauma as they might if they were talking to someone else. A kind of confession before God: “I have done this and I am being held accountable.” When you have truths like the ones they tell, the feeling of suffocation is exactly what I want the reader to feel most. They need to feel what the characters feel in order to understand.
5. A Mirror Between Mexico and Iran
M.B.: Despite the geographical distance, women in Iran and Mexico share similar wounds: systemic violence, patriarchal pressure, and collective grief. Now that Empty Houses is reaching bookshelves in Iran, what would you like to say to that Iranian reader who, thousands of miles away, will find their own reflection in the pain of these Mexican women?
B.N.: I am very honored that Iranian women and men can read my novel. I am very intrigued to know what kind of debates or conversations it provokes in them. It is a real shame that we share so many common pains, because it is difficult to live a life that cannot be full due to decisions that are not in our hands. However, I also know that in Iran there are women and men who sustain all that is beautiful in life—which is a lot. Literature, but also other artistic disciplines, are things that despite everything continue to nourish our humanity and generate networks of people who, at least while reading the book, can feel accompanied. Everything beautiful carries something monstrous within it, but that is the danger of being alive; it is a risk we take, and we do it well. Thank you for taking the risk of living and for believing in art.
Translated by Miaad Banki
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