Eduardo Halfon
“Literature is not about
answers. But questions”:
Eduardo Halfon, Author
of Canción
“We only found marbles, toys, coins, cooking
utensils, sandals and flip-flops next to their bodies.”
Argentine Forensic
Anthropology Team
“Life is not an easy
matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and
cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above
personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
― Leon Trotsky, Diary in
Exile, 1935
“Learning carries within
itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's
enemies.”
― Leon Trotsky,
Literature and Revolution
Eduard Halfon’s novel just
over 150 pages is written in the first person and contains autobiographical
segments. It begins with the author visiting Tokyo for a conference to honour Lebanese
writers. The innocent-sounding title of the book refers to a killer known for
his not-so-pretty voice.
Halfon has a deceptively
natural way of portraying the murderously complex social and political issues arising
from the bitter civil war in Guatemala 1960-1996. Halfon’s prose is simple but exquisite.
Canción like all of Halfon’s previous books Polish Boxer, Monastery, and
Mourning is excellently translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel
Hahn.
The book would appear to
be meticulously researched and in a recent interview Halfon explains his
methodology “When you’re writing a story that’s part of a historical account,
that history must be believable. In the case of Canción, that means its
historical background, the Guatemalan Civil War, and the country’s recent
history. I needed to investigate all of that, and I felt like I had to include
it more for the feeling than for the facts. Some details are in the
background—they’re props, so to speak—and some details are part of the story.
That weaving is very
organic, though. There’s no premeditation. It’s just a feeling of what should
be where on the stage. What should be in the foreground? What should be in the
background? It’s a very natural process of selection and placement. The
research in books like Canción must be very methodical because I am trying to
recreate a specific moment in time. So, newspapers, records, logbooks,
accounts, the CIA file on my grandfather’s kidnapping—these were all available
to me. Sometimes I need little details, but mostly I just need the prop of
facts for the theatre to be believable. That is, for the atmosphere to be
believable. I’m not interested in the facts, but in the smell and taste that
the facts leave behind.”[1]
David L. Ulin writes “Like
so much of Halfon’s writing, the narrative of “Canción” unfolds in an elusive
middle ground where heritage becomes porous. For anyone familiar with his
project, this will not come as a surprise. The author is a diasporic figure:
Born in Guatemala City, raised there and in Florida and educated in North
Carolina, he has lived in Europe and Nebraska. His metier is family: the way we
are shaped by it and the way we push back on or move beyond it; how it both
supports and limits us. In “The Polish Boxer” (2012), his first book to be
translated into English, this leads him to consider his other grandfather, who
survived Auschwitz with the help of a fighter who came from his village.
“Mourning,” his most recent book, revolves in part around his uncle Salomon,
whose drowning as a child resonates in “Canción” as well.”[2]
Like many of his
generation of Guatemalan writers Halfon never witnessed first-hand the
murderous civil war and faced the problem of how to write a book which includes
historical facts and events he didn’t witness. As Halfon correctly says “Every
writer of fiction is an imposter “. When he returned to Guatemala in 1993, he
suffered persecution. Along with other writers and journalists, he was targeted
by the government. Halfon often spoke of how he was followed and threatened in
his own house after his first novel was published in 2004.
The treatment of writers
and journalists by the Guatemalan state shows that the so-called peace accord
brokered by the United Nations was nothing of the sort. The Guatemalan civil
war was a social, economic and political disaster. Andrea Lobo writes “Nearly a quarter million
people were killed between 1962 and 1996 in Guatemala, 93 percent at the hands
of pro-government forces. The UN-backed Commission for Historical Clarification
classified the massacre of Mayan Indians, treated by the military as a potential
constituency for guerrillas, as genocide, including the destruction of up to 90
per cent of the Ixil-Mayan towns and the bombing of those fleeing.[3]
Halfon believes that not
much has changed since 1996, He writes that “Certain things in Guatemala are
simply not spoken or written about. The indigenous genocide in the 1980s. The
extreme racism. The overwhelming number of women are being murdered. The
impossibility of land reform and redistribution of wealth. The close ties
between the government and the drug cartels. Although these are all subjects
that almost define the country itself, they are only discussed and commented on
in whispers, or from the outside. But a second and perhaps more dangerous
consequence of a culture of silence is a type of self-censorship: when speaking
or writing, one mustn’t say anything that puts oneself or one’s family in
peril. The censoring becomes automatic and unconscious. Because the danger is
very real. Although the days of dictators are now gone, the military is still
powerful, and political and military murders are all too common”.[4]
Unfortunately, this will
not change with the election of the new government of Bernardo Arévalo. Arevalo’s
election was challenged by dominant sections of the Guatemalan capitalist
oligarchy who sought to overturn his election through many legal cases alleging
electoral fraud, illegal financing and other irregularities. All of which
failed.
As Andrea Lobo writes “Arévalo
is the son of the country’s first elected president, Juan José Arévalo
(1945-1951), who remained within the left nationalist government of his
successor Jacobo Arbenz when it was overthrown in a CIA-orchestrated military
coup in 1954. A series of military-civilian dictatorships followed, crushing
opposition from below to protect the interests of US capitalists and their
local partners.
Cancion is well worth a
read, as are his previous books. It remains to be seen if Halfon’s next novel
reflects illusions that exist within left Guatemalan journalists and writers
regarding the new Arevalo government.
[1] “Literature
is not about answers. But questions”: An Interview with Eduardo Halfon, Author
of Canción-//www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2022/10/12/literature-is-not-about-answers-but-questions-an-interview-with-eduardo-halfon-author-of-cancion/
[2] Review:
How a Guatemalan kidnapping inspired Eduardo Halfon’s auto fictional ‘Cancion’ www.latimes.com
[3]
wsws.org
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/books/the-writing-life-around-the-world-by-electric-literature/2015/nov/04/better-not-say-too-much-eduardo-halfon-on-literature-paranoia-and-leaving-guatemala
