“Whatever a person has been is imprinted on his skin, in his smell, on his face. If you’ve lived a filthy, evil life, it’s stamped on you. It never comes off.”

Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia’s 2026 International Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, On Earth As It Is Beneath, was first published in 2017 in Portuguese as Assim na terra como embaixo da terra. It has been translated by Padma Viswanathan.

Crime and punishment

At less than 100 pages, On Earth is a work of realist horror unlike any other. Maia uses shocking images of violence, decay, and abandonment, which, despite their surreal, exaggerated descriptions, are perhaps the closest to reality in a penal colony.

The reader enters the world on what seems to be an especially rough day. It doesn’t take long to realise that every day is equally bad.

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The prison warden – brutal, greedy – is mad with power. The decrepit colony (which is in talks of being shut down) is his hunting ground and the few inmates, his prey. The stench in the prison grounds that Maia describes – of sweat, rotting carcasses, injured men – lifts from the pages and clogs the reader’s senses. So thick that the reader feels sullied by it. The food supplies are low and the summer is brutal, with no hand coming to help, the prisoners turn into animals, relying on their primal instincts to survive and serve the warden, the alpha of the pack.

The colony seems to be haunted by the ghosts of the land it was built on. It used to be a plantation and enslaved workers were brutalised and killed. Burying the past has been impossible – all attempts to start afresh have been met with sickness, disappearances, and natural calamities. The monstrous past will not stay buried. Each time the earth is dug, the shovel knocks against human carcasses and remains. A former Portuguese colony, the 300-year-long colonial brutalities have poisoned the country’s soil and soul.

The price of human life

Bronco Gil, an inmate, learns to gut wild boars as a young boy. Melquíades grows up in the shadow of his policeman father, just as violent and hypocritical. The colony is a male harem of sorts, completely devoid of any feminine presence. There are no conjugal visits, nor do they speak of their families. It is as though the men are entirely solitary creatures, born of nothing, loved by nothing, dying for nothing. There is no brotherhood, no rebels, nor heroes. Both the cruel warden and the prisoners are isolated by their individual performance of violence. However, it is a woman’s gaze that judges their actions – telling the story as it is. The masculine hell is only clearly visible to the one who doesn’t occupy it.

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And yet there is so much that needs to be tended to – peeling the vegetables, cooking lunch, burying the sick dog, polishing boots. The daily rhythm of life is in perfect sync with the unreal occurrences. Translator Viswanathan’s greatest achievement is recreating the tactility of the damp summer and the inmates sweating hard at work. Their strength and intelligence are only good enough for performing subhuman tasks. The body, therefore, may only be seen as a lump of flesh which is to be discarded when it can no longer be of use. Much like those buried under the earth they’re standing on, their lives too are stripped of any meaning or intrinsic value.

These penal colonies might be hard to come by now but their philosophy lives on – especially in the modern life’s credo of use-and-throw. And once the hierarchy of human life is determined, any excuse is acceptable for the subjugation and killing of those valued cheaply.

Also read:

On Earth As It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia, translated from the Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan, Charco Press.