TROUBLED LANDS:
Stories of Mexico and Cuba
Translated by Langston Hughes.
ISBN
978 0 691 26841 5
The
authors of these thirty-four stories were born in the late nineteenth or early
twentieth century, none later than 1911. Many of these stories appeared in the
1930s, late enough for influence by Joyce, Kafka, Lawrence, the whole of
“modernism”, however defined. Their tenor, however, is pre-modernist and
non-European. One way or another, they are all concerned with questions of
economic exploitation, colonialism, oppression, brutality, rapacious pursuit of
lucre and noticeably they lack the sense of personhood characteristic of
European fiction. Even Don Quixote, demented though he is, speaks of
individuality. Not individualism which, ironically, is the negation of
individuality, the latter being the genuine fulfilment of a person’s nature, the
former, the debased idea of the adjustment of the individual to the needs of
success in the prevailing unjust and morally dubious order. In Rafael Felipe
Munoz’s Gold, Horse, Man, the drowning of the vicious bandit
Rodolfo Fierro who goes down with his horse and gold, is regretted less than the
loss of the animal and the loot. There is ambiguity in this ending: is refusal
to mourn the death of a brute the right response or is its inhumanity appalling?
Fierro comes into focus as an individual only briefly and what we learn of him
isn’t pretty. Perhaps this is typical: these are stories about countries which
have been plundered and ruled by those greedy for wealth and power. What kind of
individuality can prevail when people are fighting for their survival against
vicious, self-serving brutes? How could we expect novels like those of Jane
Austen to emerge from Gaza?
In a
way, the characters of these stories are the countries, or perhaps it’s better
to say the societies. In Munoz’s A Shot into Space it is Mexico. Here,
the rebels fight the army, but a rebel leader is a nasty killer and one of the
women rebels takes a shot at him. All the women take responsibility, for which
they are brutally rounded up, bound and murdered. This is a society ruled by
brutality, as all colonial societies are. Personality struggles to exist when
violence has become the norm. Hence, these stories trouble the sensibility of
those who have never been on the receiving end of colonialism, or not recently
enough for it to matter.
Mexico, like Cuba, was important for
sugar. It’s ironic that so much violence and suffering should have been cause in
pursuit of a crop which has helped fuel an obesity and diabetes crisis among the
colonisers. Sugar is not a food, by any sensible definition. In its natural form
it is bond up with roughage, but refined it grants glycaemic spikes. In
Francisco Rojas Gonzales’s The Juice of the Cane, a man is caught by the
grinding machine and turned into pulp. The manager is blasé, until he hears that
the blood has contaminated the deposit tank: a whole batch
may be lost. Production must continue. A priest blesses the sugar mill,
the victim’s widow keeps a votive candle burning. The framing device is the
narrator as a youngster being shown the workings of the mill by his father and
taken aside to hear the grisly story. The boy, like his father, will have to
earn his living in the factory that has mercilessly devoured a worker, the death
being both a real tragedy and a metaphor for the purblind greed that powers the
system. The story was published in 1934. By that time in western Europe, factory
legislation, driven by principle, liberal and religious, as well as a legally
recognised worker’s movement, had gone some way to diminish death and injury in
the workplace. The Workman’s Compensation Act of 1906 (notice it didn’t include
women) was deeply flawed and required proof of liability, but it was an
important marker. In Lawrence’s Odour of Chrysanthemums, the death of
Bates in the mine is met with horror and sympathy by workers and managers alike.
Here, however, is the true brutalisation of the colonised. There is no
suggestion of any countervailing force to the pitiless greed of the factory. A
father can do nothing but hand his son over to its murderous logic. The workers
are thoroughly dehumanised.
German
List Arzubide’s The Prisoners is a brief page and a half, but enough to
evoke the summary violence of revolutions. The narrator recognises that “The
revolution makes you hard-hearted”, but is haunted by the execution of a
bedraggled band of Indians, captured and brought in under the rain. When he’s
told they were rounded up because they looked “suspicious”, he shudders when the
lieutenant’s eyes fix on him. It’s a telling reminder of the folly of unleashing
violence, even with the most high-minded motives. The romance of revolution is
an adolescent delusion. Constitutional means of change hold in check the
terrible destructive potential of the dark side of human nature.
The stories are well-written and memorable. There may be no literary geniuses here, but what they have to say is vital and needs to be said over and over: no material or political gain can justify robbing people of their humanity, which lies in their characteristic need to choose how to act. It is, as this collection portrays, among the colonised that the appalling horror of what happens when that is forgotten is experienced most tragicall