The drama of migration through the eyes of a child

In 1999 he left his small town in El Salvador, where he lived with his grandparents, and began a 5,000-kilometer, nine-week journey that would take him clandestinely to the United States.

He passed on a precarious boat from Guatemala to Mexico.

He crossed the suffocating Sonoran Desert on foot to enter Arizona.

He traveled with strangers, in the hands of

coyotes

and

polleros

, from here to there in all types of transport, pretending not to be who he was, avoiding encounters with soldiers, imitating accents, accepting the meaning of a word that until then had never been used. had identified, but with whom he would identify for a long time:

migrant

.

Some fellow travelers died or disappeared along the way.

He survive.

At the end, his parents were waiting for him, who had fled to California years before the bloody civil war in their country.

Javier Zamora was only nine years old.

More information

Immigration: Hybrid literature makes its way

The adventures of Zamora (La Herradura, El Salvador, 33 years old) are narrated in the first person in

Solito

(Random House), an autobiographical novel that has had a great impact in the United States (partly, curiously, because it was recommended in the reading by Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of former President Bush).

“There is a lot of talk about migrant children, but always from the point of view of an adult.

It's easier to listen to what a child says... I think that's part of the success of this book,” says Zamora, in a video conference from Tucson, Arizona.

Tucson was precisely the city he arrived at 25 years ago after his journey through the desert.

Now, after all this time, she has returned to settle down.

During the pandemic he tried to write this story from a small apartment in New York, but it didn't work out, the big city didn't seem to be with him.

So he moved to Tucson with his partner, initially for two weeks.

“Now we have been there for four years.

At first I was afraid of it because this place had only made me suffer, but day after day we make good memories, it's like writing over the trauma,” he explains.

The writer of Salvadoran origin Javier Zamora. Gerardp del Valle (Penguin Rando

Something that catches Solito

's attention

is that that child does not relate the trip from drama, but, rather, from amazement.

He is amazed by the places he discovers, the people who accompany him, the adventures he goes through, he is curious, there is humor: he is a child.

It is not just a migratory journey, it is a journey of formation, a journey, like all of them, of knowledge.

“I think it's a defense mechanism, because I knew something dramatic was happening, but my brain didn't focus on that, but on nature, music, food, different things,” Zamora says.

The narration, furthermore, is exhaustive, in high narrative definition, without much room for ellipsis.

The author wanted to get the trauma out of his mind in this way.

“He thought the more details he put outside of me, the better the healing would be,” he adds.

The text, translated by José García Escobar (because it was written in English), is full of typical expressions from El Salvador, Guatemala and different parts of Mexico, and the choice of the translator was complicated: there were not many people like García Escobar, a Guatemalan, who knew the different Central American languages ​​and who also, as a journalist, had covered the phenomenon of migration.

Coyotes, who lead people on this tortuous path, have a great role in the book.

If they are often portrayed in fiction as unscrupulous evil people, here, better or worse, they enjoy a certain humanity, and are even part of the communities, like Don Dago.

“This Don Dago helped many people escape the country,” says Zamora, “but then the cartels were not involved in the economics of migration.

That changed at the beginning of the century, now I can tell you that coyotes like the ones in the book no longer exist, because they have to listen to those above.

And those at the top are drug traffickers.”

Migration from oneself

The journey is incardinated in the history of literature from its very origins, in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh or in

The Odyssey

.

Migration is, perhaps, the journey of greatest emotional depth, the one in which some risk their lives to, often against their desire, leave their origins and their loved ones in search of a safer and better life.

On many occasions they receive rejection from those who inhabit their destiny.

For this reason, in times of the so-called “migration crisis” (every crisis, we know, is an opportunity), first-person stories abound.

In

The Moon is in Douala and My Destiny in Knowledge

(Plaza y Janés, 2023), the young Cameroonian Sani Ladan narrates his journey to achieve an education that he could not obtain in his country: his dream was to be a journalist, so during a year he saved secretly from his parents to start his trip.

Not only the Boko Haram terrorists or the human trafficking mafias will interfere in his objective, but also the harshness of the European immigration systems.

He managed to enter Spain through El Tarajal, in Ceuta.

Luis Miguel, 28, pulls a suitcase with wheels as he crosses the Chilean-Bolivian plateau in Colchane, a city on the border with Chile, 3,650 meters above sea level, in July 2022. Nicolò Filippo Rosso

A similar, although different, path was experienced by the Ghanaian Ousman Umar, as he relates in

Viaje al País de los Blancos

(Plaza y Janés, 2019), who set out when he was only nine years old, like Javier Zamora, and took five years to arrive by boat to Canary Islands: in the middle, a hell of mafias, a long

impasse

of straitness and survival in Libya, crossing a Sahara converted into a cemetery on a journey without a compass and under the sun in which only two out of 40 survived.

Other testimonies are those of the Guinean Ibrahim Bah,

Three days in the sand

(La Imprenta, 2021) or the Senegalese Mamadou Día,

3052. Chasing a dream

(Punto Rojo, 2013).

Both Ladan and Umar (both were on the verge of dying and both suffered the experience of the Foreigner Internment Centers) are success stories: they managed to integrate into Spain, pursue university degrees, have a voice to tell their story.

That of Zamora, already integrated into the United States, is also a success story.

He began when, as an emerging poet, he received scholarships from prestigious universities such as Harvard or Stanford.

Trauma was what led him to write.

During his first years as a migrant he did not want to accept that pain.

With the arrival of adolescence, the past began to emerge.

One of the first attempts to deal with it, through literature, was poetry, as seen in

Unaccompained

(Cooper Canyon Press, 2017), without translating into Spanish, and very focused on the desert experience.

“That's the book you write when you haven't gone to therapy,” says the author, “It 's

just

what came out when I started writing while going to therapy and with the support of a partner.”

Zamora got his start in verse when his language teacher told him about Pablo Neruda and he read

20 love songs and a song of despair

.

“Neruda had written it very young, the age I was around, and it was one of the best-known books of poetry.

Plus, he reminded me a lot of my homeland,” she says.

Thus the Chilean poet, as in so many other cases, was the first to inoculate the virus of verses, a virus that other migrant poets later maintained.

In the book there is a quote from Charles Simic, who died just a year ago: “If he was born in Serbia and had won the Pulitzer, he could be a reference for me,” says Zamora.

A reference that would be joined by June Jordan or Salvadoran poets such as Roque Dalton or Claribel Alegría.

Another migrant with Pulitzer, this time in narrative, is Junot Díaz, who was awarded for

The Brief Marvelous Life of Oscar Wao

(Random House Literature, 2008), a book that narrated the experience of migration, in this case Dominican and already settled. in New Jersey, with fresh, mixed-race prose full of humor.

Zamora lived experiences as extreme as those of the aforementioned Mediterranean migrants: his 20-hour boat experience between Guatemala and Mexico is shocking, a journey in which shipwrecks are not uncommon and which led the secret travelers to suffer serious attacks of seasickness. and constant vomiting, suffering deep uncertainty about the immediate future and surrounded by the constant rumble of engines and an unbearable smell of gasoline.

Not to mention the uncertain journey through the desert, with the continuous threat of La Migra (the border police) that is seen almost as a mythological monster from which we must escape.

However, the author assures that the worst experience of that trip was none of those, but something more emotional: separating from some of the people who accompanied him.

“Saying goodbye to Chino, Patricia, Carla… Remembering it always makes me cry,” says Zamora.

“It meant losing the only three people who understand everything I have suffered.

Two of them were adults.

I would like to ask how they remember it as adults, I can imagine how terrifying it must have been.”

Other views

The treatment of migration is not always done in first person.

Song for Europe

(Lapislátzuli) by Paolo Rumiz, recently translated into Spanish, is a long Homeric poem that, traveling between different times and places, narrates the adventures of a Syrian refugee and some modern Argonauts who pick her up on their ship and set off trying to find out what the true meaning of Europe is.

Migration, for the author, is not a current crisis, but an eternal condition of this continent, something that we have to understand.

“It is a tragedy of modern times that we do not know how to put the context: we go through a magnifying glass without realizing history,” he said in a recent interview with this newspaper.

Another journey from Syria is the graphic novel

Hakim's Odyssey

(Bruguera, 2022) by Fabian Toulmé, which narrates the real adventures of a young Syrian who, due to war and torture, leaves his country and his family hoping to find a future in the neighboring country.

Also in the territory of the comic is

El cielo en la corazón

(Norma), a graphic novel by Antonio Altarriba and Sergio García focused on the migration to Spain of a child who works in those African coltan mines so necessary to manufacture our

smartphones

.

Irish reporter Sally Hayden also addresses the issue in

The Fourth Time I Tried, We Drowned

(Captain Swing, published February 5).

The story begins when Hayden receives a message on Facebook in which an Eritrean refugee held in a Libyan detention center asks for help.

From that message she begins a story about the migration crisis that North Africa is suffering, in which hundreds of refugees who tried to reach Europe and were trapped in Libya give their voice.

Cover of 'Solito' by Javier Zamora, published by Random House.

What is literature for?

A crisis, the Mediterranean one, that is not of much interest in the United States.

“In general right now, migration is no longer an issue here,” says Zamora, “there was a peak of interest around 2016, but it was not even the period of greatest migrations.

“More people arrived in 1999, when I arrived.”

In general, he considers that the interest in migration is usually a political interest.

Trump airs it in his campaigns and the progressive media also uses it to attack Trump.

Then everything is forgotten.

In fact, with the new elections, Zamora foresees that the issue will return to the foreground.

Is so much ink spilled by migrations useful for anything?

“I wrote

Solito

for myself, to heal, but also so that other people's hearts can heal.

And that they learn to have empathy,” says Zamora.

In El Salvador there is a generation of writers from the 1950s called the Committed Generation, in which young people are educated, so that, according to the author, for a Salvadoran, art and literature are unequivocally linked to political and social commitment.

His country of origin is frequently in the spotlight due to the news generated by its young president Nayib Bukele: bitcoin as the official currency, the treatment of gang prisoners, populism.

Zamora sees his country very changed and prefers not to give his opinion, because he could cause problems there.

He considers his silence significant enough of him in this regard.

“We have to dream of a world that we don't have yet.

In 2024, migrants are not considered complete human beings.

They think we are just migrants.

That we are only what we have suffered.

But we are also people who contribute to this world,” he concludes.

Alone

.

Javier Zamora.

Random House.

2024. Translation by José García Escobar.

464 pages.

23.90 euros.

Alone

.

Javier Zamora.

Editions of Periscopi.

2024. Translation by Marta Marfany.

530 pages.

23.90 euros.

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