Delivering The Delivery (La Encomienda): Dislocation, Self-Erasure, and the Quiet Violence of Migration
by Katarzyna Stępień
Lung tissue by Wetselaar-Whittaker, J, 1950/1990, Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, Dutch Collections for Europe, Netherlands.
The Delivery (La Encomienda)
Margarita García Robayo. Anagrama, 2022. 192 pages. $22.95.
Across my two and a half years (and counting!) of PhD research, I encountered many books that I wanted to work with, and settling for the final seven wasn’t an easy task. One of them is Margarita García Robayo’s The Delivery (La Encomienda). An enchanting, magical tale of a woman living “five thousand three hundred kilometres” (1) away from home is a sharp, quietly perturbing (sometimes uncanny) exploration of dislocation understood in terms of geography, emotions, and existence. Honest to her style, so well-known from her previous novels, García Robayo writes with economical precision that hits the spot perfectly where it’s meant to. Despite the suggested simplicity of a story of a woman alone in a new city and the loneliness she experiences, the book remains complex and unnerving, gradually revealing its own positionality as a meticulous study of alienation, longing, and disequilibrium. The book’s strength lies partly in its atmosphere, which envelops the reader. The unnamed city (most likely Buenos Aires) with its cold and unwelcoming streets, the ephemeral apartment building where she lives, and the constant reminder of the body’s physicality as a tool and a burden. A machine that needs to be taken care of, to be fed and clothed, in order to receive the highly wanted acceptance. The author uses the title and the physical package not only as a scene setting, but also as a metaphor for the main character’s drifting sense of security within her own body, as well as her own home. The constant state of motion is paired with a Sisyphus-like infinite story of never arriving at the finish line.
La Encomienda by Margarita García Robayo.
Anagrama, 2022.
The protagonist is far from idealized in the book. She’s flawed, often passive, as if waiting for the world to take care of her, yet very suspicious of everyone’s intentions, and difficult to read or understand. Rather than embarking on a clear path of growth or redemption, García Robayo presents her as a product of her surroundings, as a person reduced to the survival mode in which any personal traits are muted for the sake of self-preservation. The supporting characters come and go seemingly unfazed and somehow immune to the protagonist’s influence. They are metaphorically representing the perpetually formed and re-formed identity of the protagonist herself. As she reflects, “To hurt someone, you need cruelty—that is, genuine interest. It’s easy not to hurt; usually all you have to do is abstain” (31). This admission reveals more than a passing observation. Rather, it points toward the emotional logic that rules her inner world. The numbness she inhabits is not simply a response to circumstance, but gradually it becomes an integral part of her personality, a kind of self-defence mechanism that bloomed from detachment and self-preservation. Her reflections on love are of distinctly similar ambivalence, sounding less like declarations of her feelings and more like confessions of anxiety, as if love were a terrain too fragile to navigate without risking further dislocation. Within this emotional framework, the people she encounters are not portrayed as fully relevant but rather as provisional figures, brief pauses on a longer route of survival. She registers them more as interruptions than companions, their significance measured by the degree to which they intrude on her beloved/hated solitude. In this way, her relationships map out a landscape of distance rather than connection, reinforcing the novel’s broader meditation on alienation and the uneasy labor of simply enduring.
While chatting to her boss, she reflects on herself: “In other words, I knew myself well, and as a result, I didn’t love myself enough to waste time defending myself: ‘People who have a lot of self-love just haven’t looked at themselves closely enough’” (49–50). The quote encapsulates her excruciatingly painful self-assessment, revealing a worldview shaped by cynicism, emotional fatigue, and honesty. Her admission that she doesn’t love herself enough to defend herself suggests a belief that knowing oneself means revealing all the flaws, failures, and insufficiencies. In this, self-love becomes almost synonymous with delusion reserved for the gullible ones, who have never dared to examine themselves too closely. It also reinforces the novel’s involvement with the concept of invisibility and disappearance. Her refusal to “waste time defending” herself signals a defeat and a withdrawal from the slightest possibility of recognition. She doesn’t expect to be seen, heard, understood, or even acknowledged. She’s resigned enough to even stop noticing herself as someone worth defending. What is emphasized here is a subtle but very powerful image of self-erasure, in which her emotional detachment becomes both a shield and a punishment inflicted upon herself. The idea that self-examination would stop self-love speaks almost of a broader concept of cultural tension. In times where self-confidence, self-promotion, self-care, and well-being are promoted, her stand can be interpreted as a rebellion against the imploded reality of affirming and rewarding oneself. Yet, it is not an act of power, but rather one of defeat. It carries a bitter sense of weariness and resignation. The protagonist’s clarity about her inner self is not empowering but rather reinforces her belief that she is unworthy of affection. In this aspect, this particular quote becomes a reflection of the novel’s emotional landscape. It exposes the damaging (and often unpredictable) effects of alienation she experiences after migration. It also illustrates how the internalization of emotional, existential, and geographical displacement can blur the line between self-love and self-worth. Her self-awareness doesn’t ground her, but rather isolates her even further, reinforcing the feeling of life lived on the margins and suspended in between two worlds, where connection and understanding feel undeserved.
García Robayo’s prose is spare, often coldly piercing, directly to the matter at stake, naming the feelings that the world left behind unnamed. Her protagonist wonders, “Love and sadness, when they’re that intense, must feel the same, in the lungs” (93), which emphasizes how visceral and physical emotions, especially strong emotions, can be. Moreover, in that analogy, love and sadness are both felt as a weight or a burden, mirroring the protagonist’s larger sense of being overwhelmed by the circumstances of her loneliness and longing. In poetic clarity, the statement speaks of the universal, yet unspoken, truth: the body cannot tell the difference between happiness and grief. Both start in the chest, altering the breathing patterns and can often feel suffocating. By using a calm, unsentimental tone, the author makes the palpable tension even more suffocating, strengthening the feeling of imprisonment within one’s own space—here seen either as a body or an apartment. Her prose’s fundamentals are built on implications, rather than explications, bringing the silence and subtextual meaning into play when analyzing the work as a whole. This restraint might initially feel uncomfortable for the reader, but it is precisely this that gives the story its intimate understanding of the protagonist. La Encomienda can be seen as a compact and realistic version of a contemporary urban life for the young, who are economically and socially displaced and in a limbo-like state of waiting. The need to belong remains unfulfilled and is replaced with a feeling of resistance and endurance.
The Delivery by Margarita García Robayo,
translated by Megan McDowell.
Charco Press, 2022.
She reflects:
There are many days when my desire is for the wind to carry me off like dust. To disappear. That's what I've been doing, anyway. Distancing myself, dissolving. The very few times I've run into people from my past—from my childhood, my adolescence, from my city—I could see the surprise in their eyes, hear it in their tone of voice, as if they were looking at a ghost: ‘You disappeared,’ they say, though it's obvious I didn't, that I'm right here, trapped in the same package as always. The expression on their faces is never pleasant, as if knowing I was far away had given them the certainty that I was OK, but now, seeing me again, they can't help but think that something went wrong. A return, almost always, is a failure. (141)
This limbo state of an immigrant is only too well-known to anyone who has ever left their home country. The feeling of belonging will never be the same, and by deciding to immigrate, we all signed an unspoken agreement that our identity will never be the same. The quote embodies her most intimate thoughts of erasure, self-alienation, and the painful reality and ambiguity of migration. The first sentence, along with her desire for “the wind to carry me off like dust,” is not necessarily a reflection of suicidal thoughts but rather a longing for disappearance. The dust that she mentions is weightless, directionless, pointless, and somehow also easily forgotten—a life that she already feels she’s living. The “distancing myself, dissolving” is her reflection of the slow process of self-erasure, in which she drifts between her lives, her homes, her countries, living without her roots or community, taking on jobs that will make her feel even more invisible. The dissolving is not only her personal reflection but a consequence of migrant precariousness. The self-erasure didn’t come by intention but rather by an unfortunate circumstance. The moment she comes back or meets people from her past, she feels like a ghost, emphasizing the migration as an absence, which is illusional and shattered by proximity. Despite being “trapped in the same package as always,” she is no longer recognizable—somehow physically present, yet socially erased, which reflects the core paradox she struggles with. Visible enough to be a nuisance, yet invisible enough to be forgotten. The fact that the return is coded as a defeat is probably one of the most common and yet unspoken aspects of migration. To return wouldn’t be to finish one chapter and embrace another, but rather the promise of a better life waiting ahead, which was false; someone’s life was not a complete transformation (bildungsroman-like) but rather a collapse.
The power of La Encomienda lies in its masterfully crafted mood, observational details, and the hidden emotional truths constantly lurking behind an ostensibly ordinary and mundane reality. It is important to mention that La Encomienda is not only about migration, but it is also a divagation on shame, invisibility, and the unsettling sense that one’s life is unfinished, unanchored, and increasingly translucent. García Robayo captures the psychic texture of this state with piercing clarity, portraying how dislocation is not merely geographical but also existential. Intertwined in the narrative is another fear, one far more universal, namely the anxiety of missing out on something essential. Contemporary culture feeds this feeling relentlessly, telling us that our lives ought to be bigger, louder, funnier, more productive, and that we should be overflowing with purpose and perpetual excitement all the time. The familiar slogan of “you only live once” becomes less a reminder of an opportunity to live your life to the fullest but rather a threat, a mandate to optimize every moment. Within this climate of constant expectation, the protagonist’s existence appears lonely and insufficient, as if she were failing at the task of living her life. La Encomienda quietly deconstructs these pressures, revealing how they created the protagonist’s estrangement and provoked her fears of disappearance. In doing so, the novel offers a sharp, unsettling image of what it means to inhabit a life that constantly feels deficient and suspended between two worlds. Readers who appreciate minimalist, psychologically enlivened fiction will undoubtedly find this book a compelling companion for a reflective evening.
Katarzyna Stępień is a PhD student in Hispanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin (IE) and a Trinity Long Room Hub Early Career Researcher, with a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University College London (UK), and a bachelor’s degree in English Studies from the Nicolaus Copernicus University (PL). Throughout her studies, she established the Student Feminist Society, organized various lectures and conferences, was a recipient of a Provost’s scholarship (PhD) and a Dean’s scholarship for the best students (BA), and won a Vice-Dean for Student Affairs award for students who excel in their activities in university life and have been recognized as a valuable element for the student community. She has had numerous publications in both academic and non-academic journals and has actively participated in conferences where she presented the results of her research. Currently, she teaches Spanish language, as well as Hispanic and Latin American culture, literature, and cinema at TCD and UCD.
