With so many wonderful pieces in the Summer 2024 issue, where to start? Read the blog editors’ top picks.
We loved Eduardo Galeano when he spoke of “the infinite and invisible altars of our Latin America”, but perhaps we paid not enough attention when he called reality “. . . life that sings with multiple voices”. Despite the efforts of many historians and writers in establishing the distinctions and singular complexities of Latin American countries, outsiders tend to cohere the regions in a syncretic whole, held by the commonalities of language, Iberian colonialism, and modals of development. The term “Latin America” originated with the Chilean philosopher and politician Francisco Bilbao, who sought to contrast Europe and the Americas as past and future, instating a rhetoric in which the archaisms of the former could be overturned by the luminous visions of the latter: “. . . reason against religion, hope against tradition, union against isolation. . . the logic of sovereignty against oligarchic constitutions”. This summation of continents may have served him when the routes of imperialism carved the globe up into the Old World and the New World, but we’ve no use for such simplistic declarations today.
In “neozone”, the Chilean writer Juan Carreño is on the road. In a diaristic frenzy, this excerpt translated by Maya Feile Tomes moves from Mexico’s San Cristóbal to the city of Comitán, then past the Guatemala border with a stop at the capital, before urging its way towards the Nicaraguan capital of Managua (“crossing the whole of El Salvador and that little stretch of land where Honduras borders on the Pacific”). All the while the writer’s mind is running faster than the speed of any car or bus, threading in memories and markers across this immensely varied continent in the electric instantaneity of mobility, when every new encounter sends itself hurtling across the mind, awakening memories, desires, references, the middles of anecdotes, connecting itself to the great shifting web of a body amongst. Yet, even as the sights, the people, the landscape are playing their own pinball game within the ratting corridors of Carreño’s journals, the stark insider-outsider paradigm finds plenty of iterations in movements and border-crossings, illumed within the subtle details of social code—“I try to speak Spanish in a generic fashion”—that characterises the Chilean against the Guatemalan, the Mexican, the Nicaraguan. Regionalisms, habits, and assumptions abound, and the people who offer their company or a splinter of their story are as open as they are fleeting, honest in a way that is only possible without surnames. Holding to the shared language that occasionally sizzles with the separateness of nationalities, they share opinions, invitations, songs, insights. There’s something familiar, profound in this incidental intersection of the passing-through, when finding oneself in a different country and suddenly given the position of ambassador, as if a person is a miniaturised model of a nation. And when you tell them about where you came, you give the truth as only you could, and the country glows a little in response, in that stranger’s mind, and another house is built on the phantasmagorical, long accumulated, imagined atlas of the world—that which makes the maps seem paltry in comparison.
Brigette Giraud searched across another realm in her work: the one between the living and the dead. In “Widows”, Laurel Berger’s intuitive translation renders out the Goncourt-winning author’s probings against that titular, haunted title, searching out a newfound identity built upon the chasm of loss. Giraud lost her husband in 1999, an accident which held her motions against that everlasting stasis of death, and in this collision of presence against absence, one is reminded of a definition’s living contours, that one must be alive to search for their place, while the dead are certain of theirs. From the inevitable cruelty of growing—“One day they’ll be old enough to be their husbands’ mothers, making them the mother of that dead child.”—to the newly strange habits, stoically adopted—“Here is what the widow dare not say: good riddance.”—death becomes a pattern by which the living weave their days. Giraud is frank with pain, unafraid of the word “inconsolable”, and as such she reinstates grief back into the everyday, insinuating it with social existence in a way that insists on being looked at, that reminds us of how easy it is to defer another’s pain.
In an imperative voice that embeds widowhood with its own mythos, Giraud grasps at how this particular variant of grief is just as private as it is public. “Widows get pointed out in the neighbourhood: there’s something about them.” That something, whether to do with their perceived incompleteness—their inability to participate in their roles—or the fact that they carry not only their personal loss but a loss of their community, is often meticulously analysed. There are certain ways that mourning must be performed, characteristics one is meant to take on, and the measurement of widowhood comes to be representative of wifehood—as if the amount of tears shed is a calculation for how much one has loved. Throughout history, it was the company of a partner that assigned women their space; in a world that feels so much like it has evolved, it is the continued ambiguity and indeterminacy of the widow that forces us to address the unnegotiated, open-ended meanings that still pervade womanhood: her assertions against her assignments.
—Xiao Yue Shan
“Here we are again: me and him, this other I don’t quite recognize any more, today, as I write these lines,” writes Patrick Autréaux in Tobias Ryan‘s lucid translation of Autréaux’s “New Prose“. This is a chronicle of Autréaux’s journey from doctor to cancer patient, a journey whose distance is that between the sick self and the well. The hospital is the setting both of Autréaux’s former career—his description of the sacred and the petty in the study of medicine is captivating, told in a totalizing rush—and of his present treatment, the whole of his journey contained in this place so full of death and life, hope and hopelessness, ambition and the possibility of care. There is a beautiful symmetry here between form and subject, the piece confined like an invalid to the hospital, the consideration of what illness does to a person, and to writing.
Pooya Monshizadeh‘s “Red Meadow“, in a lovely and lyrical translation by poupeh missaghi, is, too, about the sick person and the well—specifically, about the way memory loss renders a mother a stranger to her daughter and to herself (“Today mom forgot that she had decided to die,” the story begins, in a line that sets the tone for the piece’s startling emotional bluntness and its painful existential stakes). The story asks what our obligations of care are, and to whom they are owed, when our loved ones become strangers. There is a purgatorial, almost Kafkaesque quality to the story’s plot: mother and daughter stuck in Switzerland, the mother’s memory loss undoing her choice to die, a choice made because she was losing her memory—and they can’t even get a refund. It is also a tender, conflicted, and beautiful excavation of the violence of love and care and the pain we do not, or cannot, spare those we love.
Both end with literature: Autréaux’s desire to write “for times of woe”, the last few pages of the book the mother in Monshizadeh’s story never finished. For Monshizadeh’s narrator, these last few pages of Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night offer not comfort but a sense of recognition, Ferdinand and the narrator similar in their wish not to join the world after the death of a loved one. Autréaux, too, writes about illness as leading towards “tenderness for others and their solitude”, as Virginia Woolf wrote about illness as an experience both common to all and utterly solitary. Autréaux writes towards a “new prose” of illness, as Woolf wrote that more than a new language but new literary forms were needed for a literature of illness.
—Meghan Racklin
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