In Carmen Naranjo’s And We Sold the Rain, I find there to be an interesting connection between the use of the third-person plural (particularly in the title), and the removal of the country’s natural resources. Throughout the work, the ineptitude and greed of the higher ups is constantly satirized and ridiculed, even from the first line; “This is a royal fuck-up”(page 1). The country is plundered for all its worth, and countless mechanisms and cycles are catastrophically damaged. In these descriptions, the work singles out both foreign and domestic culprits, though undeniably it is the multinational influence that is portrayed as the true evil, whereas the local corruption simply allows or permits for such evil.  What is most interesting, however, is to see how the work uses “we”. Other than the title, there is only one occasion where the third-person plural is used by the voice of the essay and not in citation; the moment where this “we” laments what the country had once been.

This causes me to question the title of the work, why the use of “we”, and who exactly is “we”? Though it may seem obvious that “we” refers to the writer and their country, in the work itself, “we” only comes into play from the perspective of the working class, and is otherwise merely recalling what a higher-up or a newspaper was saying, and their use of “we” comes across as dishonest and detached due to their obviously privileged position. Why then, is it used in the title? It seems to me like this reflects that, despite all the protests and complaints the author has for the country’s public officials, they still recognize them as part of the same group. It might seem like this is inevitable, but in my personal experience, many radically-minded Canadians tend not to refer to Canada as a “we”, especially when discussing the government itself or our international presence. It is certainly possible to avoid using “we” for one’s own people, so I find the use of it in the title (and almost exclusively there) quite interesting.