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Power from the Barrel of a Videocam |
The
obituary in The New York Times (Sunday, May 27, 2001) was topped
by an Associated Press photo of Alberto Korda in front of his
own most famous photo, "El Guerrillero Heroico." Korda,
who was 71 when the photographer snapped him last year, looks
up with the ironic smile of a man who is a little tired of the
joke, but willing to play along to help a younger colleague who
is not yet famous enough to have his, or her, name attached to
an AP photo.
Havana
is a small place, and those in its cultural elite know each other
quite familiarly. So it shouldn't have been a surprise when,
at a party in the house of another photographer in January 1998,
my compañera and I ran into Korda. He didn't look
well, and the big cigar he was smoking was clearly doing him
no good, but he was friendly and willing to answer our questions
about how he had first become acquainted with Fidel and Che
in 1959 he was assigned to cover a goofy golf game at the Havana
Country Club, where Fidel wanted photos to prove that revolutionaries
in combat fatigues could play better than then-President Eisenhower
in his knickerbockers and little cap.|
He had brought his videos from the forest of northern Brazil, near the Surinam border, where the remnants of once-larger pre-Columbian groups had fled Brazilian road-builders and prospectors to constitute a new tribe. Brazilian anthropologists had introduced the videocam, and the tribe decided that he, their traditional story-teller, should document their dances and rites. Now, by his images and (multiply-translated) words, he brought before an international audience in New York his critique of the urban culture his people insisted on rejecting. Other people from the "margins" of the America's urban cultures are using the new information technology in equally surprising ways. The Mayan rebels of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional inform the whole world of their positions and have even conducted an international poll on what their policies should be, through the internet. Rural communities in Colombia are recovering, or perhaps inventing, traditional stories through filmed or videotaped dramatizations, Native Canadians transmit local and international news, greetings and cultural programs, in all their native languages, via TV satellite, and so on. Christine Boyer* is quite right: the old categories of "center" and "periphery," "First World" and "Third World," and even the rapidly aging category of "postmodern" no longer help to explain anything. Saskia Sassen* has also made the point, though not in this intervention, that North America is becoming "Latinized" or even "Third- Worldized," as conditions of exploitation of cheap labor long familiar in Latin America are reproduced in the sweatshops of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and the border towns; at the same time, overseas investment in Latin America by North American, European and Asian firms creates pockets of relatively high-wage, high-technology industry that destabilizes the economies of surrounding areas, stimulating urban and international migration and further confusing the distinctions between Latin American and North American ways of life. *Other contributors to symposium |
As Tom Angotti* points out forcefully, the sharpest contradictions today are not between a neocolonial Latin America and a hegemonic North America, but between those with greater wealth, power and information access and those with less. What is new and potentially disruptive of the old patterns of exploitation is that wealth, power (e.g., political and military) and information access are not necessarily correlated. Information technology is becoming cheaper, more widely available, and more effective -- farther reaching and faster -- all the time. With only a little assistance from outside groups, such as the Brazilian anthropologists with a videocam or Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas and his familiarity with computers, or artists who hand out cheap cameras to slum children in Washington, DC, or Bogota, this technology reaches the hands of people who have a startlingly different sort of information to convey. The lack of a decent formal education in reading and writing is no serious obstacle for those working with sound and images; in fact, people without such formal education often grasp the potentialities of the new media faster than those with it. And the internet, which still consists mostly of written text (though this is changing), may turn out to be the most effective way to encourage people to overcome any deficits they have in literacy. Nor does depriving a favela or barrio of telephone lines create an insuperable obstacle to communications in the age of cellular telephony and other technologies still emerging. I do not believe that information equals power -- there are too many ignorant tyrants for us to believe that oversimplified equation -- but access to information, and to the ability to impart information, is a resource that can be used to gain power. The Zapatistas have used it to gain popular support throughout Mexico and the world, other "Indians" of the Americas use it to defend their communities and to prepare them to deal with the outside world, and everybody -- even those whose access to the new technology is limited to watching the programming on O Globo -- becomes aware of alternative ways of life and the existence of distant cities, destroying the ignorance and isolation which have always been the first line of defense of despotism. |
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Monthly Review, Volume
52, Number 4 (September 2000)
About to Burst Free
by Geoffrey Fox
http://monthlyreview.org/900fox.htm
James D. Cockcroft, Mexico's Hope: An Encounter with Politics and History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 320 pp., $18, paperback.At the outset of this closely argued history of Mexican capitalism, James Cockcroft asks, "How long will the majority of Mexicans put up with being exploited on both sides of the Mexican-U.S. border?"
His answer is, not much longer. The country is "in a state of semi-insurrection. The Mexican state is in full crisis. Large chunks of the nation are occupied by its security forces, which have direct ties with U.S. security forces. Mexico's economy is being held hostage by the United States and the foreign investment and banking communities. Lurking in the shadowy wings are powerful military forces, domestic and foreign. And still Mexicans hope" (372). The stunning defeat of the governing party in the elections of July 2000, unforeseeable when Cockcroft wrote these lines, nevertheless confirms his main contention: the old system, stable for so many decades, cannot endure unchanged.
Mexico's hope is that previously excluded groups will be able to demand and receive greater social justice. How the existing system came to be and why it is being challenged is the story of this book.
Cockcroft focuses on structural changes rather than the more dramatic, and more ephemeral, political events that are the stuff of conventional histories. Thus his chapter on the prehistory of Mexican capitalism barely mentions Hernán Cortés and the conquest of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán (modern Mexico City) in 1521. It concentrates instead on indigenous traditions of forced labor and enslavement and the ways in which the Spanish conquerors used them, along with their own institutions and military might, to subject the conquered people to superexploitation. This means forcing them to work for less than they and their families needed to reproduce their own labor power, so that they had to scratch nutrients from the soil to supplement starvation wages-a practice that has been revived today in Mexico's depressed rural areas (12). The colonial economy, based on pillage of existing resources rather than investment in new, and prevented by Spanish law from entering the most lucrative markets even for this booty, scarcely developed in the first 250 years. Only in the late eighteenth century, when Spain gave up its attempts to seal off its colonies completely from British, French, Dutch, and (after 1776) U.S. traders and pirates, did elements of modern capitalism emerge.
Cockcroft presents the 1770-1880 period as "a continuous economic process having three disruptive political moments:" the independence wars of 1810-1822, the U.S.-Mexican war of 1846-1848, and the 1854-1867 civil war and war against French intervention (43). Without sacrificing any of the drama of these events, Cockcroft's approach makes them intelligible by showing how they were caused by, and contributed to, more fundamental developments in Mexican capitalism.
One of these was the timorous rise of a criollo (native-born) commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, too weak to pursue independent policies but reliant instead on the state and more powerful foreign bourgeoisies to protect it. The truly wealthy landowners, or hacendados, meanwhile, were also becoming more bourgeois, as they discovered the greater bottom-line efficiency of "free" labor (which they could fire) over slaves or forced labor and became more savvy about marketing their agrarian products. Also in this period was an expansion of the "intermediate classes"-e.g., small tradesmen and merchants, intellectuals and professionals-between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In politics, then as now, they would side first with one, then with the other "major pole of a bipolar class contradiction, . . . almost always dividing among themselves" (51).
It was the ranks of the poorest and most numerous Mexicans, peasants and hired laborers, that fed the revolt against the Spanish Crown that broke out in 1810. Cockcroft interprets independence in 1822 as "a kind of counter-revolution sponsored by the criollo elites" to stem the popular revolt.
As Cockcroft points out, a similar fear of the masses, and of the Crown's inability or unwillingness to control them, drove criollo independence movements throughout the Spanish colonies in this period. However, the outcome in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, for example, was vastly different. There the counterrevolution failed; the black, Indian, and poor white fighters became increasingly more radical and eventually swept away the criollo elites and their values. Why Mexico was different is not explored in this book, but would be an important topic for a comparative history. It may help explain the glaring differences between the political cultures of these countries and that of Mexico, where a president with the anti-elitist, mocking and selfmocking style of a Chávez (Venezuela) or a Bucaram (former president of Ecuador) has been unimaginable-or at least it was until the folksy Vicente Fox Quesada's election last July.
In Mexico, the elites even established a short-lived monarchy, although its rule was very tenuous. And when, a generation later, the "Yankees" invaded in the Mexican-American War, the elites were more concerned with suppressing their own rebellious masses than with fighting the invaders, and clung to power even despite that massive defeat (66).
The modern state as a national entity constitutionally enshrined above the interests of traditional corporations or privileged oligarchies . . . and supposedly oriented towards the `public good' rather than toward any special-interest group (or class) was ideologically conceived and juridically consolidated . . .
during and shortly after the war against the French military occupation (1862-1867), writes Cockcroft (79). More specifically, he sees in Benito Juárez's "state-expropriation policy . . . against the Church and uncooperative bourgeois property holders . . . the forerunner of the strong state interventionism of President Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s."
This is a stretch. Strong state interventionism was all the rage in the 1930s, and if Cárdenas needed an example, he was probably looking to his contemporaries Getulio Vargas, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Juárez's namesake, Benito Mussolini, to name just a few. Not everything in a country's history needs to be explained by its prior history.
But back to the 1870s: the modern state, as governed by war hero Porfirio Díaz from 1876 to 1911, guaranteed sufficient stability to permit the growth of railroads and other industries, financed mainly by U.S. and other foreign capital. Along with these industries, the industrial proletariat was growing and organizing, mounting ever more threatening protests against the foreign interests and their criollo allies. Here Cockcroft highlights the organizing activities of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), a radical proletarian movement whose history he has earlier written in his classic monograph, Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1913. The militancy of miners, railroad, and other workers encouraged campesinos, dissatisfied sectors of the bourgeoisie, and the ever-wavering "intermediate classes" to join what began as a political movement against Díaz in 1910 and grew into the ten-year civil war known as the Mexican Revolution.
Sadly for groups like the PLM, the results were "a defeated peasantry; a crippled labor movement dependent on state favors; a wounded, divided, but victorious set of elites led by industrialists, hacendados, and enterprising entrepreneurs [sic] and regional caudillos; and a paper triumph, the 1917 Constitution, a very progressive document for its time" (82).
The point is important enough to repeat: "In terms of the key interests of peasants and workers, the Revolution did not succeed; nor was it aborted or `interrupted.' It was defeated." (108)
This is a harsh and polemical judgment, but if we take the key interests to be the aspirations of groups like the PLM and leaders such as Emiliano Zapata, it is undeniably valid, despite the rhetorical claims of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) to be continuing the Revolution. But, as Cockcroft adds, it was not a final defeat. The urban and rural proletariat "lost a battle, but the war continued, here peacefully, there violently, in the decades ahead."
A major reason for their defeat, in Cockcroft's view, was that in 1915 the peasants and workers split: the fifty-thousand- strong Casa del Obrero Mundial accepting inducements from General Alvaro Obregón to abandon its alliance with campesinos and help him defeat the armies of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Dividing working people's organizations has been a persistent strategy of the Mexican state ever since.
After Obregón (assassinated in 1928) came the stridently anticlerical General Plutarco Elías Calles, and after Calles, yet another general, Lázaro Cárdenas (president from 1934-1940), whom Calles hoped to control. Cárdenas' legacy is complex. He outmaneuvered Calles by creating his own base of support in worker and peasant federations and by so doing won the adoration of the masses. He also preserved Mexico's version of capitalism, and kept his mass organizations from becoming powerful enough to demand greater reforms by insisting, like Obregón before him, that the peasant and workers confederations remain separate. He created yet another federation for those most dangerous intellectual workers, the schoolteachers.
After Cárdenas, a series of more cautious and less imaginative (and in many cases, more corrupt) Mexican presidents continued to use these institutions to mete out privileges and wealth to a select few-including the hierarchies of the peasant and labor confederations-and to maintain themselves in power. Their fear and contempt toward those they were supposed to represent became painfully clear in 1968, when the army opened fire on a demonstration of students and other civilians in Tlatelolco Square in Mexico City. There have followed several other badly handled crises, including the 1985 earthquake and then, in the wake of the official enthusiasm for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its supposed benefits in the 1990s, the drastic devaluation of the currency which devastated the whole economy. In all of these, the top-heavy, self-absorbed institutions have failed to respond effectively to the demands of their own members and still less to other constituencies. In the neighborhoods and local branches of the organizations, their representatives are the political bosses, caciques whose main function is to keep the masses demobilized. But with the economic crisis, the caciques have fewer rewards to offer and must rely increasingly, and with decreasing effect, on repression to ward off challenges to their authority.
The challenges are coming from newly mobilized constituencies within the society and from outside. The main challengers internally include Indians-most dramatically, those in the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas, but also other groups throughout the country-and women. Rural Indians, dependent on wages as farmhands, have been repeasantized by superexploitation in Mexico's most recent and continuing economic crisis, and driven to protest this and other grievances. Women have repeatedly taken the lead in social protests, from the popular risings or tumultos of the colony, through the miners' strikes early in the twentieth century, to the mass mobilization of Purépecha indigenous women in defense of their environment in the early 1980s. Physical and economic abuses in the maquiladoras and other low-wage jobs and the increasing difficulties of defending their families in Mexico's present economic crisis are keeping them, and the Indians, "in the forefront of all Mexico's social movements for political and economic change" (382).
Other challenges come from the larger world beyond Mexico. These include information technology (which tends to accelerate mobilization of the most diverse groups, facilitates global coalitions of "indigenous" peoples or of environmentalists, and undermines attempts at official control of information); the internationalization of the Mexican population, with an increasingly large percentage living in the United States (and exposed to different ideas and economic expectations); NAFTA, and pressure from various U.S. groups (including trade unions) to improve environmental conditions, labor conditions, and security of the press.
Cockcroft believes that the two-centuries-old system, in which a strong central state balances the demands of competing elites at the expense of all other sectors, has broken down so completely that it cannot be put together again-at least, not in the same way and not with all the same elements. Whatever new system emerges will inevitably have broader participation from wider social sectors and will be forced to address their demands. This is why Mexico has grounds for hope, a hope which has now been deposited in President-elect Vicente Fox Quesada.
This social history is an impressive literary as well as scholarly work. James Cockcroft, author of many important books on Mexico and Latin America, has managed here to organize complex and seemingly unconnected events stretching over six centuries into an especially compelling narrative of the still unresolved struggle for control of the country's wealth and destiny.
GEOFFREY FOX is the author of Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics, and the Constructing of Identity. He lives in New York and can be reached at gefox@post.harvard.edu or http:// gefox.home.mindspring.com/kinesis.
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Languages Don't Bind People
By Geoffrey Fox - Newsday, Monday, December
18, 1995
OVER AND OVER, those who want to make English the United States' one official language have claimed that this is necessary to prevent the balkanization of America. Now that thousands of young Americans are about to become acquainted with the real Balkans, we may all finally learn the true lesson from that region. Intercommunal savagery like that occurring in Bosnia is not due to linguistic or other cultural differences, but to the ambitions of demagogues who exploit fears of those differences. Playing on intolerance will be the quickest way to balkanize America.
The prelude to the war in Yugoslavia began in 1987 when a Belgrade politician, Slobodan Milosevic, in order to gain a majority in the largest ethnic group and thus seize control of the ruling party, whipped up Serbs' anxieties about their failing economy by blaming the troubles on other ethnic groups. He soon was joined by other opportunistic politicians, who dredged up ancient enmities against the Croats and a mythical "Muslim fundamentalist" threat to keep everybody distracted from the Serb leaders' disastrous economic policies. The Croats under Franjo Tudjman responded in kind, holding even their pacific Serb neighbors responsible for the sins of Milosevic and company. Lately all this nationalistic pressure has driven some of the Muslims in Sarajevo - a city famous for its tolerance - to similar chauvinistic attacks.
Why did this work? There are many things that divide the warring groups in former Yugoslavia, besides ancient history and symbolism. One is religion, even though most of the so-called Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs were not especially observant before the war. But the most important difference is economic: Before the war, Croatia and the urbanized parts of Bosnia, especially around Sarajevo, enjoyed far higher standards of living than landlocked Serbia, partly because of their geographical advantages. Some Serbs took this as proof of unfair treatment and deeply resented the prosperity of their neighbors.
But curiously, one of the things that does not divide them is language. Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims all speak Serbo-Croatian, a single language, even though Serbs and Croats write it with different alphabets. Lately, the enmity among these groups has grown so intense that some Croats insist that they speak "Croatian" and some of the Muslims have taken to calling their language "Bosnian," but the fact is that these three peoples understand each other's radio broadcasts, shouts and insults perfectly well. This is probably one of the reasons the Balkan wars have been especially brutal. Their intimate knowledge of one another's language and thoughts makes it possible for the combatants to be cruel in especially effective ways: All that a torturer or a sniper needs to think is, "What would cause me the most pain?"
One thing the recent history of the Balkans shows, as well as that of the American Civil War, is that a common language has little power to hold people together when there are interested parties determined to divide them. In Yugoslavia, they do this by exaggerating religious differences and ancient history. In the United States, we do it by fixating on race. Where that doesn't work, as with Hispanics, the latest supposed threat to our well-being, who can be of an race, we use language.
The real threat of balkanization here comes from intolerance, like that demonstrated by those who want to make life harder for minorities, even to the extent of making it more difficult to publish information about our laws in their languages. The American but, alas, not at this moment the Balkan, way is to accept and thrive on differences and to encourage everyone to participate, with no official preferences for any ethnic or racial group.
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99.06.21 - Individual
intelligence & collective stupidity
A statue of the 14th-century King Dusan of Serbia lay on the ground in Prizren, Kosovo, Sunday after it was toppled by local Albanians. (Agence France Presse)
How could the Serbs have been so stupid?
How could NATO be so stupid?
How can we keep from being so stupid ourselves?
The collective stupidity of intelligent individuals is the great conundrum of our, the human, race. Serbs, not all Serbs certainly but a critical mass at critical moments, have allowed themselves to be bamboozled by a tiny clique of opportunist politicians to pursue a horribly self-destructive campaign that has ruined their economy, made refugees of great numbers of their people and now, finally, lost what their own myths proclaimed as their most sacred territory, symbol of their national aspirations.
The stupidity of NATO included alienating China, trying to outfox Russia (the agreement with Russia that ended the war said explicitly that the occupation would be under UN, not NATO, command), and ignoring the protests over the bombing campaign from its own members, especially Germany and Italy. Bombing markets, hospitals, TV stations and commuter trains in Serbia wasn't all that bright, either. Only the bombs were smart, not the people or policies that directed them. No matter what the insufferable, smirking Shea may think (if he thinks), we are not going to achieve a unipolar world led by the US and seconded by Britain, where compromise is unnecessary. Even the power of NATO will meet, and already has met, certain immovable objects.
As for the last question, well, we just have to remain alert, and skeptical.
Stephen Dusan
{doo'-shahn}
also known as Stephen Uros IV, b. 1308, d. Dec. 20, 1355, reigned (1331-55) as king of Serbia after deposing his father, Stephen Uros III (r. 1322-31). He brought Serbia to its height of power through his conquests. He seized part of western Macedonia from the Byzantine Empire in 1334 and in 1343 conquered Albania and more of Macedonia. Stephen had himself crowned emperor of the Serbs and Greeks in 1346. He captured (1348) Epirus and Thessaly and promulgated (1349, 1354) a law code. His empire collapsed, however, under his son and successor, Stephen Uros V (1355-71).
Adapted from Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. ©1998 Grolier Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
MERMAIDS AND OTHER FETISHES:
Images of Latin America*by Geoffrey Fox
Columbus' mermaids
On January 9, 1493, on his way back to Spain from his first trans-Atlantic voyage, Christopher Columbus noted in his journal that he had seen three mermaids which "rose high out of the sea. But they were not as lovely as they have been described, looking rather more like men in the face."
Nearly a century and a half later, in 1632 in the sea of Chiloé off the coast of Chile, according to a contemporary account, "many Spaniards and Indians saw a beast approaching the beach which, protruding from the water, showed by the front part of its head, the face and breasts of a woman, of pleasing appearance, with long, loose blond hair or mane; she carried a child in her arms. And when she dived they saw that she had a tail and back of a fish, covered with thick scales, like little shells."
They had probably frightened a dugong, and what Columbus had seen in the Caribbean and on an earlier voyage to Africa were probably manatees -- related varieties of large sea mammals, today called sirenians, that nurse their young at a pair of mammary glands on the chest.
There are no known varieties with "long, loose blond hair or mane" or a "pleasing" face of a woman.
Seeing and believing
"The world was so new that many things still lacked names, and to mention them, one had to point with a finger." (Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad)
The men of Chiloé, and Columbus before them, had two perceptual problems when confronted by something strange. First was to find a category by which they could apprehend it, and second to describe it so that others would understand: to name, and to explain. Columbus used the only word available -- sirenas, or mermaids -- even though, as he noted, they were not quite the way sirenas were supposed to be; thus, whatever his private reservations, "sirenas" they would be to whoever read his reports. The men of Chiloé, in contrast, were so excited by "the beast" that they gave it all the attributes that tradition said it was supposed to have.
The myth of Latin America operates in much the same way -- the vocabulary for naming and explaining associates it with a tradition that makes it hard to see what is really there.
Latins and mermaids
The term "Latin America" coined by a Chilean writer and sociologist, Francisco Bilbao, in about 1865 was popularized in the mid-nineteenth century by French propaganda. The new sciences of linguistics and evolutionary biology were being used to construct such supposed "races" as "Latins," "Slavs," "Teutons," et alii, in which national character was thought to be passed down along with language. For Napoleon III, "Latin America" implied a special connection between "Latin" France and those New World lands where the elites spoke Spanish or Portuguese. The people of England and the United States, in contrast, were said to be "Anglo-Saxons" -- an opposing "race," with a dissimilar soul and destiny.
Napoleon's ideology implicitly scorned the polyglot and multicolored masses in the Americas, and the masses returned the sentiment. In Mexico they routed his army of occupation and shot his satrap, Maximilian, at Querétaro in 1867. But eventually -- after the problem of Maximilian was taken care of -- urban elites in Spanish America came to accept the "Latin" label for their own reasons. It declared their unity against a common enemy more dangerous than France: "Latin" America was an assertion of identity against the hegemony of "Anglo" America. Also, it helped the light-skinned elites deny their other heritages, indigenous and African, of which they were ashamed. Even Porfirio Díaz, a Zapotec Indian who had fought against the French, became a "Latin" and Francophile during his long presidency of Mexico (1876-1911, with brief interruptions).
For the English and North Americans, however, the concept of "Latin" America served, and continues to serve, a different psychological function. It dumped all the diverse peoples south of the Río Bravo into a ready-made anti-Latin myth, going back at least as far as the Reformation -- the break from the Roman, or Latin, church -- and the long imperial conflict between England and Spain.
"Latins," as Englishmen saw them, were romantic (from "romance," a novel written in a "romance" language) and Roman Catholic, which meant they were superstitious, mysterious and irrational. Though craven, they could be provoked to extreme violence if the odds were in their favor; otherwise, they could be held in the most abject subjugation indefinitely. They were cruel (the Inquisition was a favorite element in images of Spain and Spanish America). They were oversexed, or -- more precisely -- underrepressed, which was why they had so many babies and why Anglos found them so seductive.
The imagined Latin was the sum of the delicious temptations that an Anglo was supposed to resist, beckoning as the Sirens had beckoned Odysseus to crash against the rocks.
Sightings of Latin America
"The truth is beyond reach; it's in all the lies, like God." (Tomás Eloy Martínez, La novela de Perón)
Those of us who write of Latin America for an English-language audience face the same challenge as Columbus in 1493: to name and explain something strange, in a vocabulary freighted with the falsely familiar. Because Latin America is strange to us, stranger than we think. This is not just because the history and traditions of our countries are different, or that their political assumptions may be startling or their economies much poorer. There is the more fundamental question of language, which is to say, the way people think.
At a first level of difficulty, some words or phrases in one language have no near equivalents in the other -- caudillo, for example, or gauchada, or, la puta que lo parió. Or, in the other direction, "call-girl," "whistleblower," "self-help."
More importantly, the clusters of associations around each word, the assonances and puns, the grammar itself (word order, the subjunctive mood, the gender of adjectives) suggest particular sequences of images. These then shape courtship rituals, ideological constructs, interpretations of disaster, or any other action or expression that develops from the free play of the imagination. A stream of consciousness or an inspired repartee will take a very different direction in, say, Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres, about prerevolutionary Havana nightlife, than could ever occur to an author writing in English.
Most writers avoid these difficulties by writing about the alien imagination rather than from within it, as DeFoe wrote about Friday. In English language novels set in Latin America, the most fully imagined characters are most commonly other English-speakers: the priest, the spy and the nun in Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise, the consul in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, and so on.
For those who do try to write from the alien viewpoint, the most common error is to assume that, at bottom, "they" are just like "us," because human nature is universal and immutable. The priest and the policeman in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, for example, are Mexican only in their props and setting. This view of the essential sameness of human beings, generally associated with a liberal political outlook, masks or ignores the true relations of power that shape personalities and make them capable of inflicting, resisting, submitting or enduring in particular ways. And of course, if we cannot see these relations of power, we cannot act consciously to change them.
A pair of novels on the recent (1976-1983) terroristic regime in Argentina will make the point. In Imagining Argentina, Lawrence Thornton imagined as a protagonist a liberal minded, middle class Argentine as nice as Mr. Rogers (like Mr. Rogers, he works with children) whose wife is suddenly "disappeared" by military goons. The story evokes our empathy precisely because the protagonist, Carlos Rueda, is so much like the probable reader, and because the Argentina that Thornton imagines is also familiar -- vaguely like small cities and farmland in the United States.
The bad guys, however, are completely opaque, their motives no clearer than those of the troll in "Billy Goat Gruff." Thornton's imagined place is not really Argentina at all, but the magical kingdom of fairy tales where spirit triumphs over fear by the appropriate gesture of an individual.
An Argentine novel, The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis by Humberto Constantini, gives a much more precise sense of what was happening to Argentines at the time. This is a comical, horrifying tale of an apolitical Buenos Aires bookkeeper whose low-level lust, nostalgia and a sense of decency cause him to fall into a trap set by the military torturers. An English reader can follow Francisco Sanctis' predicament quite well in the translation, but it would have been impossible to imagine if the author had not been able to think as his character thinks, in the peculiar dialect and logic of his corner of Buenos Aires.
From Thornton, we get the impression that the evil of a military regime in, say, Argentina is simply its kidnapping, torture and murder. Turkey, Chile, the Philippines or a totally invented country might have served his narrative purposes quite as well. The true insidiousness of the Argentine rightists' actions -- how they exploited and manipulated the assumptions of their Argentine victims, in a code of terror of many subtle gradations calculated to reproduce itself far beyond the direct victims and so to change the nature of discourse in the entire society -- is knowable only in a work, like Constantini's, that makes that code transparent.
In A Totally Free Man, John Krich imagines himself into the head of Fidel Castro, who is supposedly dictating his memoirs into a taperecorder. The book has several virtues, including being a witty and fairly thorough biography of its hero. Its central implausibility is that such a man would dictate such memoirs. Fidel is not Richard Nixon, obsessed with his personal crises and anxious to protect his reputation. Rather, as Krich (accurately, I think) portrays him, he is supremely confident of his place in history, and far more concerned about how he can act upon the world that what the world has done to him. For those reasons, we should not expect the real Fidel's memoirs any time soon. But if we accept the premise, Krich stretches his imagination and ours, to force us to look at grand historical events -- Moncada, the triumph of the revolution (but not the missile crisis or other, later events) -- from one possible Cuban point of view.
It is only when we can see the world through an alien consciousness that we can become aware of the specific structure of that consciousness, and it is only then that we can be made aware of the assumptions of our own consciousness. This is the imaginative projection that Max Weber called Verstehen and a folk saying calls "walking in another man's shoes," and it springs from one of our strongest impulses --the desire to know the strange.
Revenge of flowers
Mi venganza personal será el derecho
de tus hijos a la escuela y a las flores...
Cuando vos, aplicador de la tortura,
ya no podés levantar ni la mirada,
entregarte esta manos que maltrataste
sin lograr que abandonaran la ternura.My personal revenge will be your children's right to school, and to flowers ...
When you, applier of torture, / can no longer even lift your gaze, / to offer you these hands that you mistreated / without succeeding in removing their gentleness.Luis E. Mejía Godoy, "Mi venganza personal"
One morning in Masaya, Nicaragua, in October 1983, I gave a talk at a training school for Sandinista cadres. (My topic was U.S. trade unions.) Afterwards some of the compas, compañeros -- Edgardo, Reynaldo, Carlos Salinas and his compañera Aída -- drove me in a Ministry of Agriculture jeep to an outdoor restaurant by the lovely and tranquil Puerto de Aseses, an inlet of Lake Nicaragua. We sat at a table among green trees and mossy rocks, where I could watch the waters splashing over a black rock that looked like the back of a swimming hippopotomus. We ate that peculiarly ugly, sweet-fleshed fish without bones that lives only in Lake Nicaragua, and we drank Nicaraguan beer and I took Carlos and Aída's squirming four-month old daughter to give Carlos a break so he could eat. Her names, Yaosca Yala Nuh, come from the Sumo language of eastern Nicaragua, and mean "Mountain Flower" and "Star of the Morning." Wherever I go, it seems that at some point I find myself holding a little child, and every time I am startled by the trust and hunger for experience. She made herself comfortable in the strange arms and watched quietly as adult hands picked up salt, replaced a napkin, uncurled fingers to emphasize a point. The air was fresh and cool, and the water on the rocks made a soothing sound beneath the relaxed and whimsical conversation.
After lunch we drove into nearby Granada -- hot, hot Granada -- and stopped at an old, huge house, with a tile roof some five meters (more than 15 feet) above the floor, and we sat in those big rockers of white cane which are made in this old colonial city. From a radio in the background we could hear a rich, baritone, insistent voice, reciting biblical passages against wars and, by insinuation, against sandinismo, with the refrain, "This is the word of God." Edgardo said he had been baptized three times, by the Catholics, the Evangelicals and the socialists. Now he didn't know what to believe, he said. I answered too flippantly, I think, that he could be a socialist on Sunday mornings if he didn't feel like going to mass, and a Catholic when he didn't feel like doing guard duty for the militia.
Leila, the young compañera who lived in the house and was a friend of Aída and Carlos, brought us cold atol suave to drink and told us, because she had seen it, that right there where we had eaten lunch, on that dirt road by the edge of the lake at the entry to Puerto de Aseses, was where Somoza's National Guards left the destroyed cadavers of the young people who had fallen into their hands. I wanted to hold Yaosca Yala Nuh once more.
A dream of the heroic essay
Aquí, la verdad está clarísima. El pueblo está haciendo la revolución, que es hacer patria.
Notebook, 16.x.1983
Before I left Masaya, a newspaper column by Eduardo Galeano ("Pablo Neruda, la literatura y el compromiso") inspired these agitated reflections about the difficulties of writing about Nicaragua so that a North American could "feel what the revolution is, to... imagine... what it is to live it."
"Here" -- I wrote in Spanish -- "the truth is absolutely clear. The people is making the revolution, which is to create a country. Up there, everything looks different. I shall have to write an essay so strong, so hard, so clear, so beautiful and so alive that there will be no possibility of refuting it. The only way to combat it would be for the enemy to write his own, even more beautiful and alive -- in which case, at least, our universal literature would be enriched."
Such a heroic and absurd ambition! The people I met, and the stories of all they had gone through to "hacer patria," seemed to require some such heroic effort of me. But I had failed to realize something, something the Nicaraguans would help me understand. For that lesson, I would have to go to another place, another Sandinista cadre school, in the mountains of Matagalpa.
Fetishism of images
Although it was early afternoon, I was exhausted and trying to sleep on the thin mattress of a bunk. I dreamed that I was sleepy, so sleepy that I didn't dare climb a stair, broken and dangerous, that I normally would have climbed, because I was afraid of falling. A not-quite familiar phrase reached me from the next room, el fetichismo de la mercancía, in a nasal, high-pitched, country voice.
I had been too nervous to sleep much the previous night, and had stayed up with the young Sandinistas on watch. The school was in a small, ranch-style farm house, probably built in the '60s, and abandoned by the owner when the Sandinistas came to power. The land was now a cooperative, growing mainly coffee. The house, on a hill before a higher hill thick with corn stalks, would be an easy and attractive target to contras, who had recently attacked another co-op nearby. My Sandinista comrades had one AK47, one pistol, and one guitar.
El fetichismo de la mercancía was said again, this time by another country voice. Finally I got what they were saying: "the fetishism of commodities." It was a study group, reading volume I of Capital.
I knew something about these kids by now. They were all in their early twenties and they were all veterans of "the war," the popular insurrection against Somoza which had ended four years earlier. They were proud of their membership in the FSLN, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, and wanted to prove themselves worthy of it. A couple of them were farmers, one young woman was a mechanic, all of them had low-level, manual jobs in the countryside or in the town of Matagalpa. None had finished high school. I had a Ph.D. when I first tried to read Capital, and I'd found it rough going.
They talked about people they had all known, names that were familiar to them from Matagalpa. A landowner who had kept his permanent workers in debt peonage through a system they called "la rata" -- selling goods on credit, the landowner keeping the accounts, the workers, the fathers of some of these Sandinistas, getting deeper and deeper into debt. Seasonal workers, who had their own small plots of land but hired themselves out for the harvests. Peasants who dreamed of becoming rich with a good harvest, so they could hire others to do the work.
All these people had names, faces, particular histories, all were known to the members of the study group, all were from the area. These familiar figures were now making the text come alive. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the text was making them come alive in another dimension, a historical dimension that gave their lives a larger, longer-term meaning than any of them might have imagined.
When I read Capital, I had grappled with the fetishism of commodities and the history of feudalism and capitalism as abstractions about remote events. For these young Sandinistas it was at once urgent and easy to understand these relations, because they were deliberately working to transform them.
In fact, that was the important thing to know about the people whose voices reached me as I lay on that lumpy cot. They were transforming themselves by working to transform their world. To describe them in static terms, as people who were and would continue to be a certain way -- as "Latins," for example -- would be to fetishize our imagery.
To name, to explain, to change
My note to myself about writing the heroic essay was silly, but quite understandable. Most of us in our society, the urban and college-educated of the U.S., think of the production of literature as an isolated and heroic act, each individual before his or her word processor or pad of paper. If we think at all of the social conditions of literary production, we tend to think of superagents or giant publishers or mafias of book reviewers whose interests, of course, are not our own. The production itself is still, I repeat, considered an individual act.
In fact, to name and explain and thereby to change our relations to Latin America does not require a single essay, nor the work of a single inspired genius. The literature of revolution can only be a collective project, like the revolution.
And there is no danger that the enemy of the revolution will write anything more beautiful or alive, for then "the enemy" would be a revolutionary; the danger is rather that we may be so entranced by dead and static images that we do not see the changes before us.
Translating Latin America: Culture as Text. Translation Perspectives VI, 1991: 135-144; an earlier version of this essay appeared in Central Park 15, Spring 1989:177-183.
The image of the mermaid has been borrowed from the web site The History of Mermaids, where you will find more images and stories of mermaid sightings.
Las cosas buenas de Andalucía
Los cantaores de cante jondo cuando se estremecen
en orgásmico estruendo; Un melocotón maduro y sabroso, cuando viene regalado
por el frutero de Fiñana;
La cara de una anciana del mismo pueblo, cuando sus arrugas
se multiplican en generosa sonrisa
para instruirme como trepar a los techos de las casas,
es decir, a las ruinas de la alcazaba,
por una escalera que seguramente voy a encontrar por
otro de los intrincados callejones
llenos de gatos
en el inverosímil cerro de casas, cuevas, castillo
y árboles aluminiados de las antenas de televisores
en el medievo modernísimo de Fiñana;
La torre de Vélez Blanco,
cuando se oye el tintineo de una orquesta ovejuna
con coro de cantaores lanudos (barítonos todos);
El mar, cuando finalmente acepta mi cuerpo
que ha repulsado con oleada furiosa;
La Alhambra, cuando aparecen zahoríes con claveles;
Los poetas de Andarax enredados y
ahogándose en el efluvio de sus pequeños yos,
cuidados y protegidos del mundo vulgar
cual violetas africanas en casa de burguesa ociosa,
cuando se callan (pero no se quieren callar).G. E. Fox, España, agosto 1981 Top | Home
