Image from the film 'La llorona' (2019).
This is the web version of Letras Americanas, the newsletter of EL PAÍS America that
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Dear reader, my name is Emiliano Monge, I am a writer and contributor to the opinion section of EL PAÍS.
After several years writing about politics and culture, a few weeks ago the idea of this space, dedicated to the books that are being written and published in Latin America, came to fruition.
American letters,
this is how this meeting point has been baptized, in which I will try to travel, together with you, as many spatial and temporal territories as possible of our literatures and literary traditions, without forgetting that books challenge us and they change from reason, but also from emotions.
Always under the pretext of some novelty, but also as a result of some recovery, award or recognition, festival, controversy or discovery, this space will seek to become a compass for those who wish to move around the enormous map of American letters.
let's give it
A few days ago I finished
Sometimes I Wake Up Trembling,
the novel with which the writer from Hidalgo, Ximena Santaolalla, won the last Achar Award for First Novel and with which she is inserted, all of a sudden, into that very Latin American tradition that is that of the literature of the political violence.
Apparent dictatorships and democracies, torturers and tortured, dark and missing cellars, secret births and stolen babies: from
Operación masacre,
by Walsh, to
Nocturno de Chile
or
Amuleto,
by Bolaño, from
Roza tomb burning
by Claudia Hernández to
Smoke,
by Gabriela Alemán , the literature of political violence, whether from fiction or non-fiction, dialogues with one of the conflicts that marks us as a region and has left painful and uncomfortable books.
Like any tradition, of course, that of our literature of political violence is a subset of a larger set, that of the literature of violence.
A subset also made up of other smaller subsets, which can sometimes be a book —the work of the poet Zurita, for example, occupies its own circle, just like that of the narrator Libertad Demitrópolous— and other times be composed of the the work of several authors: the boom, that generation that some continue to see as the peak instead of as the period—left several novels about dictators, all of which fit in the same circle.
Sometimes I wake up trembling,
in this sense, it shares a circle with novels by Horacio Castellanos Moya, as well as with
The Human Material,
by Rodrigo Rey Rosa and
The House of Other People's Pain,
of Julián Herbert, that is to say, it is inserted in the circle that could be called “of genocides”, which uses documentary records and that crystallized from the work of Rosario Castellanos, although before, in the 19th century, it had been written about the treatment inhumane that were reserved for the native populations, slaves brought from Africa or Asian migrants.
And it is that Santaolalla's novel deals with the dictatorship of Ríos Montt in Guatemala, the annihilation of more than one hundred thousand indigenous people in the Petén and the formation of the kaibiles, soldiers trained in the United States to dehumanize their victims, while at the same time they dehumanized themselves during torture and murder.
cross borders
Santaolalla's novel, however, does not stay in Guatemala: through two of the kaibiles who star in it, he delves into the Mexico of military corruption, human trafficking and the systemic murder of Central American migrants.
This is why
Sometimes I wake up trembling
also shares a subset with
The Migrants Who Don't Matter,
by Óscar Martínez, Antígona González, by Sara Uribe,
Signs that will precede the end of the world,
by Yuri Herrera, and
The Central American Book of the Dead,
by Balam. Rodrigo.
A theme, however, is not enough to belong to the groups and subgroups of a tradition, much less in a region as vast and rich as that of our letters: it is necessary to be as aware of the form as of the substance.
That is why, while reading Santaolalla's book, I thought and I also dare to affirm that it fits into the subsets mentioned:
Sometimes I wake up trembling
—whose title is not misleading: after reading it, I woke up besieged by brutal images— is a feat of resources technical and language work.
And I am not just referring to the fact that, like most of the authors I have mentioned here, he uses journalistic sources or that he dares to put the borders between fiction and non-fiction in tension, I am referring, above all, to the fact that he invents his own language (one for each of your narrators, too).
And I am also referring to the fact that, while breaking narrative time and time again, Santaolalla builds a unique architecture, an architecture that leaves wide corridors and very long corridors for the reader to fill with his presence.
coordinates
Sometimes I Wake Shaking
was published by Random House Literature.
Horacio Castellanos Moya's work was originally published by Tusquets, although it is being republished by Random House Literature.
The case of
El material humano
is similar: originally published by Anagrama, today it is found in Alfaguara.
The House of Other People's Pain
was published by Random House Literature.
Roza tumba quema
is found in editions of Sexto Piso and Laurel, while
Antígona González
has various editions, as well as
Migrants who don't matter.
The Central American Book of the Dead
was published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica y
Signs that will precede the end of the world
by Peripheral.
Anyone who wants to know more or approach the Ríos Montt dictatorship from another place can look for the film
La llorona
,
as well as the documentaries that make up the
Saga de la Resistencia.
You can also listen to the podcast
The Warning
.
It only remains to say goodbye and remind you that in two weeks Letras Americanas returns, a newsletter that you can receive in your email if you subscribe here.
