Tag Archives: revolution

Week 12: My Tender Matador

I remember being told last week that we had made it to the end of the “linguistically difficult” texts. After reading this, I’m not sure about that. I’m certainly not complaining, though: my favourite part of this book was the way it was written, however hard it may be to follow along with the dialogue at times. There were several points at which I wished I could check the Spanish original for comparison, since even in translation the language is complex and full of subtle details. In the conversation video, Juan Poblete refers to the style as “popular baroque” in how it integrates “high” and “low” language, but this is hardly a binary opposition of two discrete modes; rather, it’s written on a strange continuum of poetic, conversational, romantic, political, confessional, comedic, and pornographic, each of which is coloured with heavy irony. As any literary critic would point out, it really brings out the artificiality of all language and social performance while simultaneously revealing the absence of any essential core hiding beneath these performances.

Though attention isn’t drawn to it in the same way as in Lispector or Menchú, I found the voice of the narrator played an interesting role throughout this book. Due to the lack of quotation marks or line breaks during dialogue, it can be hard to tell where the characters’ voices end and the narrator’s begins, but there were points where the narrator seemed to take a partisan position in the story’s conflicts. For instance, the topic everyone seems to stumble over when discussing this book: the Queen on the Corner’s gender identity. Going by her description throughout the majority of the story, it’s hard to imagine her as anything but a transgender woman, however anachronistic the term may be. The way she is portrayed, both through her own voice and the narrator’s, is so overwhelmingly feminine that it can be extremely jarring when other characters address her as “mister” or with “he/him” pronouns (which she always takes in stride, showing far less discomfort than I felt). Yet, there is an interesting exception near the beginning, where she is briefly referred to with masculine pronouns in the narrator’s voice for what I believe is the only time in the book (“All he needs is his Prince Charming, whispered the old ladies standing on the sidewalk across the street, watching him through an open window as he flitted about like a hummingbird”). If it weren’t for this one slip, it would be far easier to interpret the narrator as objective, but here it is revealed that the narrator is as susceptible to social perceptions (such as those of the old ladies) as any other character. As such, the Queen’s femininity becomes not a hidden yet inherent aspect of her identity confirmed by the objective voice of the narrator but an interested, asserted, even revolutionary position, understanding of which is reserved to an exclusive in-group including her, her loca friends, the narrator (for most of the book), and, towards the end, Carlos (there’s an interesting parallel here: as the Queen builds revolutionary consciousness through her association with Carlos, he too is introduced into her own world of revolutionary sexual politics). And, for a brief moment, this revolutionary assertion is successful, as Pinochet is “fooled” into perceiving her as a woman, again paralleling the momentary revolutionary assertion by the Patriotic Front that later takes place on the very same road.

Did others notice points at which the narrator intervened in the story in an active, interested way?

Week 10: I, Rigoberta Menchú

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I can’t say that I enjoyed reading I, Rigoberta Menchú. This was easily the most difficult read of the class so far and the only book that was a struggle to finish. However, “enjoyability” was hardly its intent, and I can’t imagine Menchú was considering literary interest while telling these stories to Elizabeth Burgess. If anything, the greatest strength of this book is how direct it is, minimally concerned with the norms and restrictions of broader literary practices. Of course, this isn’t to say that it’s completely unmediated, as is evident in her adoption of the Spanish language and references to untellable indigenous secrets. However, for the sake of movements to decolonize literature, it’s hard to imagine a more decolonial text than one by an illiterate indigenous revolutionary from the global south.

Given this distance from “literature” as I’m used to thinking about it, I really can’t evaluate this on the same terms that I’ve approached other books in this class. The most I can say is that it is a clearly a historically, anthropologically, and politically valuable text. Of course, we could get into debates over how all literature is all of these, but this clearly addressed these themes far more explicitly than even the most historical, anthropological, and political works of fiction we’ve discussed. And, insofar as it managed to spread awareness about the Guatemalan civil war, mobilize international aid, and document indigenous life in late twentieth-century Guatemala, it seems to have been quite successful in these departments.

However, as far as my own immediate reactions go, I, Rigoberta Menchú really didn’t move me as much as it seems to move others, though I wish that it did. The descriptions of exploitation, torture, and colonial injustices were certainly harrowing, and the accounts of indigenous traditions occasionally appealed to my anthropological interests, but, for the most part, I don’t feel like I actually gained all that much from reading this book. In some respects, it reminded me of how I felt while reading Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America, another book that I respect more than enjoy: it was extremely effective at convincing me of something that I already believed. If I had read this book 5 years ago, it probably would have had a significantly stronger effect on me, yet, having read a fair amount of leftist and anthropological literature since then, it didn’t tell me much that really shocked me. Global capitalism has had disastrous effects on the third world and minority populations, with Latin America having been particularly hard struck; ideologies of racism and imperialism can destroy any semblance of morality in governing bodies and lead to horrific cruelties; collective organization of the exploited classes is the most effective tool for resistance to these economic, political, and ideological forces of oppression. I suppose the most interesting thing about this book was hearing all these familiar ideas from someone so far removed from the academic writers that I’m used to hearing them from, put into practice in such a concrete historical context. But, considering the sheer amount of controversy surrounding this text (and how obviously ideologically motivated many of its critics are) I would prefer to abstain from participation in broader discussion over a testimonial that I personally just didn’t find all that exciting, however much I may respect it.

Do others feel that this book changed their mind on any major points, or did it just reinforce or augment existing beliefs?

Week 6: The Kingdom of This World

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I broke the rules a bit this week and ended up reading both Pedro Páramo and The Kingdom of This World since they were both on my reading list anyways. I enjoyed both, but I’m writing about the latter since I read it more recently so it’s fresher in my head. Though I don’t want to spend too much time comparing the two, I do have to comment that I find it surprising that, between the two books, Pedro Páramo is the one most often regarded as the precursor to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both in style and content, Carpentier seems far closer to García Márquez; he shares the same neutral, matter-of-fact tone and the blending of history with myth, while Rulfo’s writing is more intimate and dramatic with a focus on characters rather than historical events.

Otherwise, The Kingdom of this World was not what I expected it to be. Having read about the Haitian Revolution in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, I expected any fictionalized account to focus on the dramatic shifting of political alliances and the violent warfare that took place across the island. As it was, the novel almost jumped over the actual revolution – it depicted the first stirrings of revolution in Voodoo rituals, then skipped straight to the rule of Henri Christophe after independence had already been achieved. Toussaint L’Ouverture, easily the most famous figure in the revolution, was mentioned only once in passing, as was Jean-Jacques Dessalines; on the other hand, names like Dutty Boukman and Henri Christophe were as important in Carpentier’s fictional narrative as they were James’s historical one.

There’s a way in which this is an accurate representation of the way one experiences history through their own personal memories. I think we’ve all had moments when we found out that some major event that everybody else seemed to know about somehow just passed us by, only discovering it after it has already become enshrined as part of history. Other historical events can dominate our lives as much as they do a history textbook. However, even when we are aware as historical events take place contemporaneous to us, there’s still a kind of alienation between our own experience and history as such, that grand narrative stretching back to the origins of human storytelling. Perhaps we can intellectually accept that we are part of the same temporal sequence that included such historic events such as the Haitian Revolution, but those semi-mythical moments never really exist in the same way our daily affairs do.

Yet, as Carpentier would suggest, we do not all participate in the same history, but only a limited number of many histories. It’s somewhat like Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, but the paths don’t only fork; they twist over and under each other, some reaching outwards and others turning back on themselves. It’s not just that Macandal either died or survived, or even both; each story only has significance insofar as it is remembered, transmitted, and acted upon. If one version of the story is “true,” that is because, from our position, that is the story that has been transmitted to us and appears most relevant, but alternative stories are still exercising their own subterraneous influence under and against it.

How do others feel about the way you experience history in your own lives? Do you ever feel as if you are really taking part in history or is it always something distant and inaccessible?

Week 3: Cartucho

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When I first read excerpts from Cartucho for SPAN 280 in 2021, I was surprised at how difficult to read I found it. Not in the typical sense that it is difficult to understand, but in that it is hard to find anything constant to latch on to. Even having read the full book, this impression remains. The chapters are short and disjointed and characters are barely introduced before their often-gruesome deaths are narrated. Though some names do return in later sections, it is a struggle to recall who was who – afterwards, all that remains in my head are a handful of names disconnected from their stories. I suppose this is an accurate approximation of the disorienting experience of being in the midst of a warzone.

There were only three characters who recurred frequently enough to stick out to me from this blur of names and faces. The first is, obviously, the narrator, and the second is her mother. The third is Pancho Villa, whose appearances throughout the book link its disjointed narrative to the history of the revolution as it has traditionally been told. Perhaps he stood out to me only because I already knew of his significance; I wonder how different my experience reading would have been if I were not aware of his historical role. As far as I can recall, he never directly interacts with the narrator, yet he is omnipresent through his interactions with surrounding characters. Because of this, it’s hard to discern how much of his description is genuine and how much is mythological, especially given the differences there are between his depiction in the original edition and the 1940 edition as his reputation changed (according to Ryan Long in the interview video). At times he is described as brutal, as when he murders Pablo Siañez over an argument in “The Two Pablos,” while at others he is merciful and sentimental, as when he spares the concheños in “General Villa’s Tears.” Then there is the interesting case of “Nacha Ceniceros,” where two conflicting stories are given and one is denounced as propaganda to slander the revolution.

Despite this connection to grand historical narratives through the figure of Villa, the story is otherwise radically different from these narratives in another: the character’s motivations. The explicitly economic, political, or ideological motives that revolutions are traditionally attributed to are almost entirely absent. I’m sure much of this is simply on account of the young narrator’s disregard for such complex topics, but her account nevertheless reveals the degree to which interpersonal connections can shape historical forces. Many characters, including the narrator herself, seem to drawn to Villa’s side because of his charisma or kinship ties rather than a conscious weighing of conflicting ideological positions or economic incentives. Of course, such forces were working in the background, but they were only one part of a much larger picture.

What do others think of the role of Villa throughout this story? How much do you think his depiction is mythological and how much is personal?