Month: June 2018

One of the Colombian novels that I purchased to help acculturate me was The Armies by Evelio Rosero. It won the Tusquets International Novel Prize in Guadalajara, Mexico but nothing from me.

While the pace of the story made it a book I was able to quickly pick up and put down, I found a number of its literary qualities not to be to my taste. Interesting, yes, and I’m glad to have read it – but besides the few long descriptions of unimportant things that I found broke up the story’s pacing, the plot needed more to make it more engaging to my taste.

The story, in short, is of a perverted old school director named Ismael whose life of spying on the much younger female neighbor who enjoys sunbathing nude and being generally skeevy to the local female population is interrupted by armed forces – paras, guerillas and the army – coming to his town and killing and kidnapping several people including, we learn at the end, his wife.

This isn’t the first time such kidnappings and violence has it’s happened. In fact, it’s become an annual tradition for one of the widowed wives to put on a party on the day of her husband’s capture. But since this is happening at a time that Ismael is starting to feel the effects of his 70 plus years, his quest to ameliorate new health concerns causes him to avert meeting some and to encourage him to meet others outside his daily routine. This, along with the eventual realization that his wife is not coming back, gives him a new attitude toward death that causes him to stop caring for his appearance and informs his decisions in dealing with the aftermath of the battle in San Juan – such as picking up and throwing away a live grenade that hadn’t detonated outside the front door that he had “forgot about for weeks”.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez writes about the book in the following way: “The Armies has done what Colombian literature has been trying to do for decades: to chronicle the conflict without jingoism, sentimentalism, or empty rhetoric.” This to me, however, is its greatest weakness as a work of literature. Jingoism and sentimentalism are the organizing principles of the antagonists of the book – and their occlusion to focus on the age and trauma-induced perspective of the elderly Ismael strikes me as an opportunity missed.

Paras, Guerillas, and the Military are all described as having little to no regard for human life – the captain of the military is described shooting civilians in a moment of anger while his troops drug, rape, and assault others while; the guerillas gruesomely decapitate a collaborator and his dog in a way that is meant to highlight their inhumanity.

While the story itself is generally engaging – I find that in contrast to a work like Dona Barbara, which clearly uses the characters in the book to signify archetypes in the Venezuelan llanos and region immediately outside of it – Rosero constructs all his characters as individuals. This itself isn’t blameworthy, but I feel that so much is potentially lost.

As a voyeur and former teacher that appears to know everyone in San Jose, one would expect to have some sort of strong thoughts or opinions about the armed forces which occupy his town and disrupt his life, however he expresses largely only fear and helplessness. The principles behind the motive for violence – to support the state, to contest the state, to achieve bumper profits without the state’s interference – are never reflection upon.

I believe that all this that I perceive as a dearth in Roserio’s work is also a condition of the audience in Colombia as well as taboos limiting political speech rather than aesthetic neglect. In this way the work takes on a different significance other than a novel that missed some opportunities for interesting speech – it becomes an indicator of the type of worldview propagated by those forces limiting potential literary-aesthetic constructions. I this way the book becomes fascinating and the almost hallucinatory trance that Ismael enters into towards the end is indicative of the horror of “magical realism” as living conditions under which one must live and the tensions involved in choosing a political position.

One River by Wade Davis is one of the most compelling ethnographic, historical, biographical accounts I’ve ever read.

The book goes back in forth in time and place – though staying within the orbit of the Amazonian jungle – and covers a wide range of ethno-botanical history. From the great 18^thcentury German naturalist Alexander Von Humbolt whose writing would light a fire in hundreds of explorers to Richard Gill, who was the person responsible in 1938 for bringing to the University of Nebraska voucher specimens or moonseed tube curare that had the properties of increasing muscular relaxation and reducing nausea and vomiting in patients undergoing surgery – which would save countless lives – Davis shows just how much in debt modern medical and industrial science is to the curadernos of the various tribes of South and Central America. This is not just an account of how plants along with various innovations and technologies managed to revolutionize the automobile, health, and other industries but also contain brief accounts of important ethnobotanists that always manage to be fascinating narratives. While the main story is that of Wade Davis’ mentor and professor, Richard Evan Schultes, it is his placement in a tradition of a long line of previous explorers with fascinating stories and historical context that helps make the book so compelling.

After it’s translation into Spanish, it became an overnight sensation in Colombia. Since reading it I’ve had discussions with several people here about it, learned that there is a Colombian company that has ordered research and writing along these lines to be completed in detail about Colombia’s major rivers, and watch an excellent film loosely based on the travels of Schultes and Theodore Koch Grunber called Embrace of the Serpent, which is the source of the screenshots below. I’ve included them as they are excellent points to begin thematic discussions of the book.

Four years before Albert Hofmann accidentally ingested LSD and went on his famous bike ride – Richard Evans Schulte’s found its natural analog in the seeds of the morning glory plant – which was worshipped as a god incarnate of the peoples now living in Mexico.

The American Midwest and Mexico are the places where Schultes first cuts his teeth in research. It’s here that he has his first experiences with psychedelics and despite his Bostonian pride and semi-monarchical learnings comes to perceive the indigenous tribes of the Amazon as more worthy of his attention than the “modern” world.

Davis describes a large number of groups that Schultes, and later he, would encounter and the varieties of their bio-centric worldviews.

“They [the Shuar tribe] believe that ordinary life is an illusion: Everything you see – that mountain, this truck, your own body. The true determinants of life and death are invisible forces that can be perceived only with the aid of hallucinogenic plants” (Davis 147).

Davis drops from the near present to the Colonial past were almost all tribal customs and beliefs were seen as an antithetical to the Catholic worldview. The monks took great care to acts as enforcement agents and Davis covers the various attempts by priests and later politicians to place the responsibility for poor industry on the part of the indigenous.

To motivate their adoption to Western values requires targeted violence. The killing of shamans that know of the rituals to accompany psychedelic mushrooms; the prohibition of rituals considered sacred for eons; the attempted takeover and regulation of the coca leaf industry; the vicious butchery enacted at rubber plantations under the justification that this agricultural lifestyle would help them abandon their semi-nomadic ways and “demon”-worship.

While such colonial and evangelical endeavors was widely described as a means of “bringing Jesus to the poor savages,” the more God was attempted to be brought at the end of a whip the greater the resistance was. Yet such resistance was never fully successful, and hundreds of years later Davis recounts Schultes dismay at learning that a number of peoples had lost their ancestral connections to the plants and animals that they once formed their worldview around.

As time progressed and science advanced, scientific interests in the forest widened. While the focus is on the adventures and misadventures that Shultes takes – filled with tropical illnesses, fortuitous encounters, and major setbacks on government-sponsored expeditions – Davis always makes a point to highlight the various interests interested in exploiting the environment of the Amazon.

Britain’s conflict in India lead to a heightened need for more quinine, and a greater willingness to discipline those that lived in regions rich in it that did not want to work to send it to them. The mining of precious stones and metals, something which had gone on unabated since the Spanish first landed, completely changed the worldviews of the indigenous. People’s that once looked upon gold as sunlight made solid came to see it as something planted in their ground by devils to bring suffering to their people as so many died and were injured extracting it. Natives killed their children at birth rather than have them grow up in servitude.

And then there was the rubber boom, which made the prior inhumanities pale in comparison.

How big was the boom? Well in 1911 “at a time when New York and Boston still had horse drawn trolleys, Manaus had sixteen mile of streetcar tracks and an electric grid built for a city of a million, though the population had yet to reach forty thousand” (Davis 234). People flipped a coin to go seek gold in California, or to go to Brazil to enslave indigenes and have them supply rubber for the ever-growing automobile industry.

Davis shares a similar story about Fordlandia, written about in more detail by Greg Grandin, and other areas which have a quick boom which radically disrupts the local environment and peoples and the bust that leaves the area depressed.

The seizure of Singapore by Japan during World War II lead to the need for new sources of rubber and re-vamped extraction enterprises in South American – something which Schultes is tasked with.

Clearly, a recurring theme of One River is the contrast between Civilization and the Savage. In the way that Davis describes the effects to the land and people touched by industrial civilization, he is clearly no booster of unrestricted capitalism. Not only does capital’s deterritorializing logic lead to people being dispossessed of their traditional lands and ways of life, their profound knowledge as to the effects of plants is as well. His concern is not merely that “science” will lose from their loss, but in his descriptions of the horrors inflicted upon South American natives for quinine, rubber, coca and other plants that industrial civilization itself is a sort of cancer.

Quoting from Schultes’ own writing about his interactions with the Kofan people in 1942, Davis includes the following passage: “The naturalist, interested in plants and animals, both close to the Indian’s preoccupation, usually is immediately accepted with excessive collaborative attention… Until the unsavory veneer of western culture surreptitiously introduces the greed, deception and exploitation that so often accompanies the good of ways foreign to these men of the forests, the preserve characteristics that must only be looked upon with envy by modern civilized societies” (Davis 224).

In close, I just want to share that One River by Wade Davis is a great read and I highly encourage all with an interest in anything that I’ve written about thus far to pick up this incredibly great work.