At the beginning,
The maelstrom
It is a story of escape: Arturo Cova escapes with his beloved Alicia from the landowner who wants her.
Then, she is kidnapped and Arturo enters the Amazon jungle undertaking a very violent odyssey in the domains of the rubber tappers.
This story, considered the national novel of Colombia and written by José Eustasio Rivera, is now celebrating 100 years of its publication.
To commemorate it, the Colombian Ministry of Culture has announced several actions, including the launch of the La Vorágine Library, made up of 10 titles that reflect on the book and its context.
The purpose is to make visible a story that “was criticized and schooled as an adventure novel and not as what it is: an attempt to account for the horror suffered by the indigenous people who extracted rubber and were enslaved and murdered,” says the Minister of Culture, Juan David Correa, who is also promoting “biocultural territories” to promote narratives that put nature at the center.
This is what Rivera did in
La vorágine,
displaying the biodiverse exuberance of the same space that the latex seekers destroyed.
For the ministry, it is time to no longer close our eyes, neither to terror nor to natural powers.
Photograph from November 2022 of Cocha Yarina, a lagoon in the Pacaya Samiria nature reserve, in the Peruvian Amazon. Manuel Vazquez
Sara Jaramillo did not close them.
His father was killed when he was 11, and as an adult he wrote a book about it,
How I Killed My Father.
After her murder, Ella Jaramillo grew up in her house on the outskirts of Medellín, walking barefoot through the mountains, reading in increasingly neglected gardens.
In her novel
Where the Whales Sing,
an eccentric family lives isolated in the mountains.
Her father, a whale sculptor, leaves home.
The vegetation grows without control, the mother talks to the stones and the brother of Candelaria, the 12-year-old protagonist, grows hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Nature expresses itself strongly, creating an environment with echoes of Macondo.
Colombian literature stands out among those most connected to its nature, generally betting on the novel, which has a virtuoso in Juan Cárdenas.
In
Transparent Pilgrim
,
Cárdenas follows the trail of Henry Price, an English painter involved in a scientific expedition that shows how the eye and desires of an artist soaked in streams, fronds, and valleys are educated.
The book itself contains the sensitivity that Cárdenas narrates: sober and crystalline, elegantly intense, his phrasing and vocabulary dazzle.
With a good part of the intellectuality focused on cities, the Spanish language has been moving away from nouns associated with non-urban nature
With a good part of the intellectuality focused on cities, the Spanish language has been moving away from nouns associated with non-urban nature, and finding those who use them well is an impact like a discovery.
These findings have been common lately in Colombia, where authors who turn to art to reclaim the non-human wildness after so many dark years are reproduced.
The taming of the guerrilla and drug trafficking seems to have encouraged the call (narrative) of the jungle.
And from the plain.
And from the mountain range.
And from the river.
The Magdalena, by the way, has an unmissable reference in the ethnobotanist Wade Davis.
In
The River,
Davis compresses 14 years dedicated to following the trail of his mentor, Richard Evans Schultes, who for decades studied the regional flora.
Schultes located El Dorado of hallucinogens in the Sibundoy Valley, extolled the value of coca and identified more species than anyone else.
Davis's Canadian passport does not prevent him from being seen almost as a Colombian creator, and invites us to think of Alexander von Humboldt.
The Spanish crown financed the American expedition that made the naturalist a legend, but as Von Humboldt criticized colonial slavery and encouraged liberators, his surname was banished.
Why not get it back?
In
I will put my ear to the stone until I speak,
William Ospina brings it to our attention by biographing the German in a novel.
Sticking to non-fiction, Santiago Wills is preparing a book about the jaguar that took him from Arizona to Mato Grosso.
He obsesses him.
He already published the novel
Jaguar
but now seeks to “give a voice” to all the jaguars in America.
He wants to test narrative formulas that allow him to “listen to it.”
More or less as María Ospina has done in
Only a little here,
a novel for which he has received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.
In it, Ospina adopts the perspective of a porcupine or a tanager to describe her world and that of the humans around her... after opening the book with a quote from Cervantes'
The Colloquium of Dogs
, because the Hispanic desire to dialogue with other species comes from far.
This award coincides with the several received in 2023 by the Spanish Pilar Adón, author of
Of beasts and birds
,
evidencing the recognition of this type of literature beyond the children's or bucolic box with which it has been associated for years.
In fact, in 2022, the Meeting of Writers and Critics of Verines, Asturias, was dedicated to nature literature for the first time in four decades.
There it was significant to observe the importance that philosophers have had in maintaining this flame in Spain.
Jorge Riechmann is a capital figure.
From essays, journalism, poetry... his ecosystemic vision is reflected in avant-garde milestones such as
Mudanza del isonaut,
a book of aphorisms with a lot of manifesto packed with proposals and challenges to rethink our natures.
And the philosopher Marta Tafalla begins her
Ecoanimal
by warning about the absence of smell that conditions her sensoriality before undertaking an absorbing exploration of why we have cornered nature from our creative thinking, pointing to Hegel as the instigator: “He defended that aesthetics should abandon “reflection on nature and concentrating exclusively on artistic creation.”
Since then, Tafalla says, the West has tended to marginalize stories about non-human natures, reducing them to a scientific topic, considering them so alien to the superior-civilized that they did not deserve even literary criticism.
In this context, authors such as Julio Llamazares, Alejandro López Andrada or Joaquín Araújo, who persisted in hostile territory, have special merit.
'Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series)', 2020, work by Lucas Arruda.Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York
Other essential Spanish authors of
literature
are Antonio Sandoval, with a
What are birds for?
that awakens the world of ornithology by stringing together stories as amazing as they are close, even from statistics it extracts beauty, creepiness or emotion.
The anthropologist Santiago Beruete, author of books about our relationship with, literally, the earth
—Jardinosofía, Verdolatría, Un poco de tierra—,
stands as a beacon of naturalist revolutions, just look at his titles.
Books that certainly dialogue well with
The Third Paradise
,
starring a gardener writer, which earned the Chilean Cristian Alarcón the Alfaguara 2022 Novel Prize.
And the door that finally opens from science is exciting, with the archaeologist Jordi Serrallonga squeezing the knowledge acquired in the Galapagos or the Tanzanian savannahs to talk about how they evolve from turtles to butterflies in his
Gods with Feet of Clay;
the biologist Enric Sala presenting
The Nature of Nature
,
where he addresses the current situation of seas and oceans, or the director of the Minimum Intelligence Laboratory, Paco Calvo, who in
Planta sapiens
appears placing electrodes on tomatoes to demonstrate the intelligence of plants.
Although it should be noted that Sala resides in the United States and Calvo wrote the book in English when he lived in Scotland.
It is striking that, until 2018, whenever we referred to a book about nature we said “a
nature writing book.”
The use of a foreign expression expressed the distance between literature and nature in the Spanish sphere.
Aspiring to reduce it, the journalist Emma Quadrada and I proposed a word of proximity:
literature.
Today, international festivals, reading clubs, literary residencies, sections in bookstores and libraries, publishing houses are growing around them... and, together with the people who are linked, we wonder why countries with impressive natural spaces have not generated a solid
literature ?
In Spain, the unbridled real estate speculation of the sixties turned nature into a tourist resource, eliminating any narrative that did not point to money... and the majority of intellectuals assumed they would forget about the beings and elements that kept the business afloat.
Like the water.
Why does a peninsula with two magnificent archipelagos have almost no recent literature on water?
In much of Latin America, writing with a certain realism about natural spaces is risking your life.
In much of Latin America, writing with a certain realism about natural spaces is risking your life, so many imaginaries have been moving away from those universes out of fear.
Furthermore, a large number of writers are urban.
Among them are very few indigenous people, those who could best tell so many things, also conditioned by their oral tradition.
The Peruvian Joseph Zárate is a phenomenal exception, because he has turned
Wars of the Interior
into inexorable reading to understand what happens with wood, gold and oil in that country.
Grandson of a woman from the Kukama Kukamiria community who moved early to Lima and spent his life waiting to return to the jungle, Zárate wrote this book to explain himself, and to understand the country where seven out of ten social conflicts are caused by the exploitation of natural resources.
The latest edition of the Centroamérica Cuenta festival brought together several—most of them women—environmental journalists from Central American countries.
A good number were exiled or threatened.
Noting that a physical war is being waged through narrative, the Brazilian Eliane Brum emphasizes in her recent
The Amazon
the urgency of changing the idea of “center” and moving it from the metropolises to the largest tropical forest on the planet, the authentic center of the real world.
She argues that, if many peripheries become the new center, the global narrative will change.
In Ecuador, Natalia García Freire, who grew up in the mountains with a grandmother who was a gardener and knows what the pressure of multinationals is, demands respect with disturbing novels touched by dark poetry in which nature pulsates as a healing and transforming force. although often lethal.
And, in
A terrible greenness
,
the Chilean Benjamín Labatut also explores darkness by adding the subatomic world to the literary debate.
Combining history, science, journalism and fantasy, this collector of scientists and infinities focuses on natures that literature had hardly contemplated, encouraging us to intuit both the great human potential and the invisible forces that surpass us, leading us through sinuously abstract holes towards the light... electromagnetic.
And, attracted by the voids, he reveals: “One of the things that has always surprised me about Chile is the aversion we feel for the mountain range.
“We do not inhabit the mountains.”
However, in
The Misplaced Lands,
the Buenos Aires historian Graciela Silvestri explains very well how a multitude of geographers, ethnologists, archaeologists and paleontologists were seduced by the spectacular nature of the heights, won by the Andean centrism that turned the mountain into the star of naturalistic study. .
Who knows if this has had an impact on the Argentine imagination, full of flat vastnesses, but the current scarcity of
literature
there is curious, with that delta of the Tigre and those pampas once so well written.
With Haroldo Conti or William H. Hudson—although she wrote in English, she grew up from the Pampas—mythically elevating the wetland, the gauchos, and the horses.
Tributary of the Vichada River, Colombia, December 2023. Manuel Vazquez
Today, Selva Almada breathes the air of Conti with, among other novels,
It's Not a River,
in which the mountains, the casuarinas, and the mud are the protagonist-scene of the extreme tensions between islanders and fishermen.
Less belligerent is Mariana Travacio, whose
Quebrada
exposes how rural isolation complicates the life of a couple who must decide whether to go out in search of her missing son.
And both are connected through fiction with the Spanish Txani Rodríguez
(La seca).
Mexico filters a promising batch that includes Andrés Cota Hiriart, a hyper-reading zoologist whose
Familiar Beasts
has airs of Gerald Durrell.
Cota still surprises his mother in the shower by appearing with a python that describes how it preys on the axolotl, introducing us to the daily life of rather rare animals with a seductively illustrated self-confidence.
Animals that Isabel Zapata challenges through the most suggestive poems in, for example,
A whale is a country.
And Jorge Commensal orients
This boiling void
to the Chapultepec park fire that killed a good part of the zoo's animals to confirm that everything, or a lot, is connected, and understanding this helps conserve what is alive and mineral.
The three Mexicans will participate in one of the Literature festivals that will be held this year in Honda (Colombia) and Los Angeles.
Meetings where we will talk about magnificent works that address the most burning issues and therefore attract new audiences to narratives, essays, poems, until recently condemned to the environmentalist box.
Some governments already realize the key value of this enormous quality literature that helps to understand and take positions in the current socio-climatic crossroads, and are working to give their citizens access to books that stimulate a different sensitivity.
If it is true that we are the story we tell ourselves, reading
literature
can be a way of reconnecting with our natures and, perhaps, soon breathing a little better.
Gabi Martínez (Barcelona, 1971), writer, is the author of
Delta
(Seix Barral, 2023).
Reading List
The maelstrom
José Eustasio Rivera
Cátedra, 2006
392 pages.
14.90 euros
Transparent pilgrim
Juan Cárdenas
Periférica, 2023
256 pages.
18.50 euros
Ecoanimal
Marta Tafalla
Plaza y Valdés Editores, 2019
364 pages.
19.50 euros
A piece of land
Santiago Beruete
Turner, 2022
304 pages.
21.90 euros
Wars of the interior
Joseph Zárate
Debate, 2019
136 pages.
16.06 euros
Family beasts
Andrés Cota Hiriart
Asteroid Books, 2022
296 pages.
20.95 euros
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