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Saturday, September third, 2011
One of the most arresting passages in Feeding on Dreams -- and one which incidentally made me think of Saramago's All the Names -- is this distinction between official, archival memory in the First World and in Latin America:
Languages are built on shared silences, assumptions never spelled out in dictionaries, what we omit, fail to explain, because we're often unaware that an explanation might be required to clarify what we mean. One day, Dorothée, a student at the University of Amsterdam who had been translating an article of mine about Chile's Disappeared for a local paper, came with a question. "There," she said, jabbing her finger at a paragraph. "Hay una contradicción." I could find nothing wrong with the offending phrase, no contradiction. It claimed that dictators want to sweep people from the minds of humanity, store them in an archive in order to forget them. "That's the word that doesn't work," Dorothée insisted, pointing to the Spanish word archivar, meaning to classify a document in an archive. For her, when you officially put something away, you're consigning it to memory, making it retrievable. If the State, el Estado, wanted to obliterate opponents, as in Chile with the Desaparecidos, she said, then it would obviously take them out of the archives. As a Dutch citizen, she expected public servants to preserve an agreed-upon past, which existed as irrefutably as the dams that kept the sea at bay. Whereas for most Latin Americans anything filed in a public archive is secreted by an adversarial and shadowy State that you should never trust, anything filed away is on the incessant verge of oblivion.
Memory is important throughout this book, shading into and conflicting with nostalgia, being lost and refound and disputed and defended; in one of the diary entries from Dorfman's 1990 return to Chile which make up the core of the book, a MAPU comrade of his is telling about a reunion dinner with his Pinochetista parents —
...His mother noticed that he was dragging his left foot slightly as he shuffled towards the living room. "What happened to you, hijo?" she asked. "Did you hurt yourself?" "You know perfectly well why I'm limping, Mamá. I was tortured, that's why. I'll never walk normally again, you know that." Tortured? His mother looked at the other members of the family as if to excuse the wayward child and his pranks. Of course the boy hadn't been tortured, hasta cuándo was he going to engage in that sort of political propaganda, let's not dwell on such unpleasant topics...
posted evening of September third, 2011: 1 response
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Tuesday, May 29th, 2012
"Very well," had said the considerable personage to whom Charles Gould on his way out through San Francisco had lucidly exposed his point of view. "Let us suppose that the mining affairs of Sulaco are taken in hand. There would be in it: first, the house of Holroyd, which is all right; then, Mr. Charles Gould, a citizen of Costaguana, who is also all right; and, lastly, the Government of the Republic. So far this resembles the first start of the Atacama nitrate fields, where there was a financing house, a gentleman of the name of Edwards, and -- a Government; or rather, two Governments -- two South American Governments. And you know what came of it. War came of it; devastating and prolonged war came of it, Mr. Gould."
Somehow I had gotten in mind from The Secret History of Costaguana, that Nostromo held specific allegoric reference to the building of the Panama Canal. That does not seem to be quite right... Certainly the story of the Canal is a relevant line of thought for approaching this book; and the Atacama, too -- nitrate was of huge importance when Conrad was writing this.
posted evening of May 29th, 2012: Respond
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Thursday, May 16th, 2013
Hernán Rivera Letelier grew up in the mining towns of Humberstone and Algorta, in Chile's Norte Grande, at the tail end of the nitrate-mining era: a major stage in Chile's history and in the history of the industrialized world. He tells Ariel Dorfman (as related in Dorfman's Desert Memories, 2004) that his earliest memories are of "eavesdropping on [the] adult conversations" of the miners who ate their meals in the Letelier home; his mother padded the family budget by selling home-cooked meals to the bachelor miners. The stories he was listening to were of the last remnants of the nitrate industry, already moribund by the time of his childhood; he listened well, and has built a successful career as one of Chile's most popular novelists (although mostly overlooked, until recently, outside of Chile) telling the stories of the pampa salitrera, the mining camps built in the Atacama desert at the end of the 19th Century by British and German firms and operated until the middle of the 20th Century, and of the people who lived and worked there.
Rivera Letelier's 13 novels to date span the length of the nitrate-mining era and the breadth of the Atacama desert -- from the 1907 massacre of striking workers retold and reconstructed in Our Lady of the Dark Flowers (2002), to the 1942 mining camp strike in Providencia in the (surreal) Art of Resurrection (2010), to the later dusty remnants of Coya Sur in The Fantasist (2006), on the verge of becoming a ghost town -- somewhat reminiscent in all of Faulkner's treatment of Mississippi. (or John Ford's, of the Old West?) The Art of Resurrection won the prestigious Premio Alfaguara and has happily brought his work some well-deserved recognition. It is the story of a week in the life of Domingo Zárate Vega ("better known to all as the Christ of Elqui," sort of a Chilean Rasputin who wandered the country in the mid-20th Century preaching his gospel) -- in which he searches for, finds, and loses his own Magdalene.
 My translation of a portion of Chapter 4 of the book will be up soon at The Unmuzzled Ox, under the title "Christ in the Desert".
posted evening of May 16th, 2013: 1 response
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