Ralph Waldo Emerson, Notebooks”
"The best things come, as a general thing, from the
talents that are members of a group."
Henry James 1879 biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne
‘Is imagination so fanciful that it can invent a memory and
then transform it into something we understand as true?’
Eduardo Halfon
“First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the
free play of fantasy, feelings, and moods: art is not the expression of merely
the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the
goal of primarily awakening in the reader good feelings. Like science, art cognises
life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. But sciences analyse,
art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the
mind of man, art to his sensual [i.e., sensory] nature. Science cognises life
with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living,
sensual contemplation.”
Aleksandr Voronsky
Eduardo Halfon is part of a new generation of Latin American
writers who, to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, have seen further than most
because they have stood on the shoulders of giants. These giants are well-known.
In a recent interview, Halfon was asked about his earliest influences. “Mostly
North American writers, and most of them in the short story tradition. Maybe
that’s why I constantly go back to that genre. I’m essentially a short story
writer. That’s where I feel most comfortable, or least uncomfortable. My
technique or approach in constructing a short story is very much based on the
North American tradition, much more so than the Latin American one. I feel much
closer to Hemingway and Carver and Cheever, for example, than I do to Borges
and Cortázar and García Márquez.[1]
Halfon and others are still paying their debt to these
greats, but they are also now striking out on a new road. As Halfon succinctly
put it, “ My house, then, is built on two pillars. But a writer must begin by
destroying one's house.
Like their earlier counterparts, these writers have to deal
with their respective countries' violent political pasts. In Halfon’s case, the past is the genocidal
campaign by the Guatemalan ruling elite against its Mayan and working-class
population. Although Halfon clearly is influenced by Guatemala’s great writers
such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Augusto Monterroso and modern day writers such Francisco Goldman and David Unger his work is
“intensely autobiographical, migratory and steeped in memory” Halfon’s focus on
migration, memory and identity can be read as testimony to the real material
dislocations produced by imperialism and capitalist restructuring throughout Latin
America.
It is worth noting that every single Guatemalan writer or
poet of note has been forced into exile due to the distinct possibility of being
murdered by their respective dictators. Halfon noted this in an interview in 2015,
“For the past century, Guatemalan writers have been writing and dying in exile.
Miguel Ángel Asturias, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967,
wrote his books about Guatemala while living in exile, in South America and
Europe. He died in Paris and is buried at Père Lachaise. The great short-story
writer Augusto Monterroso, after being detained by the military forces of
dictator Jorge Ubico, was forced to leave the country in 1944. He fled first to
Chile, then to Mexico, where he lived the rest of his life, and where he wrote
most of his stories, and where he’s now buried. Luis Cardoza y Aragón, arguably
Guatemala’s most important poet of the last century, suffered a similar fate
—he was also forced into exile in Mexico in the 1930s, where he wrote his
poetry and where he, too, died. Guatemala’s greatest playwright, Carlos
Solórzano, fled the country in 1939—first to Germany, then to Mexico—and never
returned. The writer Mario Payeras, a guerrilla commander in the 1970s, also
wrote while exiled in Mexico, where he suddenly and mysteriously died (his
remains were buried in a cemetery in the southwest of the country, but have
since vanished). One of the most important Guatemalan novels of the last few
decades, El Tiempo Principia en Xibalbá (Time Commences in Xibalbá), was
written by the indigenous writer Luis de Lión, who in 1984 was kidnapped by
military forces, tortured for twenty days, and then disappeared. His murder
wasn’t confirmed until fifteen years later, in 1999, when his name and number
appeared in the now infamous “Military Diary”, a haunting military document
that secretly listed the fate of all the Guatemalans disappeared by the
military forces between August 1983 and March 1985. Luis de Lión, born José Luís de León Díaz, is
number 135. His novel was published posthumously, that most extreme of
exiles.”[2]
Halfon’s recurring motifs of displacement, cross-border
families, and fragmented memory are not merely personal or cultural; they are
literary expressions of material processes driven by the global capitalist
system. Halfon is not a Marxist, but he clearly uses these literary expressions
in much the same way that the great American writer Phillip Roth did in his
work to uncover the past and prepare for future struggles. How else would you understand
Roth’s extraordinary prescient novel The Plot Against America?
Halfon does not explicitly examine the growth of Fascism in
Guatemala. Rather, evocations in his stories are an indirect examination of the
expansion of informal, precarious labour, the restructuring of national
economies through neoliberal “adjustment,” and the integration of millions into
transnational labour markets, all of which create the objective conditions for
mass migration and social struggles.
According to the International Labour Organisation, more
than 2.1 billion of the world’s 3.6 billion workers now labour in the informal
economy. Platform and casual work are central mechanisms of modern labour
casualisation These processes force families to fragment, livelihoods to be
uprooted, and memories to be reconstituted around loss, survival and mobility, the
precise themes of Halfon’s fiction. It has been said of Halfon’s collective work
that it seems to flow into a single ongoing novel.
Chris Power points out that Halfon’s “ other recurring
themes include Guatemalan history, the Holocaust, questions of Jewish identity,
and the nature of violence. The books recycle stories, such as Eduardo’s
grandfather’s experience of Auschwitz and subsequent emigration to Guatemala;
the family’s relocation to the States; and Eduardo’s own career as a writer.
When a novel’s narrator and its author share a name and identity, it naturally
prompts questions about what is true and what is invented. But Halfon’s primary
concern seems not to be with establishing facts, as a memoirist might, but to
rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth
disappear.”[3]
Before discussing other things, it is worth commenting on
the translations of Halfon’s books, which merit a book in themselves. Eduardo
Halfon’s fiction—works such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Lost
Boy—explore memory, migration, identity and the tangled legacies of war and
displacement. It is important to study the translations seriously and treat
them not as incidental “products” but as historical-cultural documents.
For instance, Halfon’s The Polish Boxer was worked on by an
international group of five translators who worked in concert with each other
to deliver a very good manuscript. These
translators understand how translations shape how working people around the
world encounter cultures and struggles not their own. Translation determines
which voices reach mass audiences and under what political framing.
Halfon and his translators stand on the shoulders of the groundbreaking
translator Gregory Rabassa. His translations helped define an international
readership’s image of Latin American culture and politics. Understanding these
processes exposes the cultural market’s role in commodifying exile, migration,
and anti‑imperialist themes and creates a basis for challenging
who benefits and who is represented.
Gregory Rabassa’s work, most famously his English
translations of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Clarice Lispector, offers
a model for studying translation as both a literary and political activity. It is
important to learn from Rabassa methodically. The reader should combine a close
technical study of his translations with an analysis of the publishing, class
and cultural forces that shape which books circulate internationally.
As Rabassa once wrote, “The translator, we should know, is a
writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because
all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all other essentials
have already been provided, so he can sit down and write his ass off.”[4]
Eduardo Halfon’s new book is elliptical, memory-driven and
obsessed with names, absence and family traces. Still, it is also a powerful
entry point for understanding how imperialism and transnational capital shape
private lives. Reading Halfon alongside the history of the United Fruit Company
(later Chiquita) provides the reader with a powerful understanding of the Guatemalan
civil war, fought from 1960 to 1996, which was triggered by the United States
at the behest of the United Fruit Company.
The US oligarchy was the largest landowner in the Central
American republic. The United Fruit, in collaboration with the US government,
sanctioned and organised alongside the Guatemalan ruling elite and its
military, systematic kidnappings and murders that were part of the government’s
counter-insurgency campaign saw death squads murder hundreds of thousands of
political opponents and Mayan people.
The United Fruit Company was not a benign employer but a
transnational corporation whose profits depended on control of land, labour,
and transport. In Guatemala and across Central America, UFCO backed oligarchic
politics, shaped infrastructure for export agriculture, and collaborated with
US state power to secure its property and markets. The company’s role in
creating the “banana republic” form, where export interests dominated politics
and security, helped produce recurrent repression, dispossession and
intervention that set the context for the civil war and ongoing violence.
US imperialism’s hand in Guatemala (1954 coup against
Árbenz, long-term support for military regimes and counterinsurgency) turned
economic disputes over land and labour into matters of geopolitical strategy.
The Guatemalan state served as a repressive instrument of the dominant class.
In Guatemala, this meant the security forces acting to defend plantation and
export interests against labour organising and land reform.
The successor firms to United Fruit have continued the
pattern of corporate power shaping violence and act with impunity. Contemporary
cases, such as Chiquita’s payments to Colombian paramilitaries and the
company’s light legal consequences, illustrate how transnationals use force and
collusion to secure profits and suppress labour, often with the tacit
protection of governments.
Eduardo Halfon’s fiction, memory-driven, autobiographical
and formally inventive, provides a vital entry point into understanding how
class, imperialism and genocide shape subjective experience. To study Halfon in
relation to the Guatemalan civil war means reading literature as historical
testimony: to connect aesthetic form and private memory with the social forces
that produced mass murder, displacement and the long-term campaign of state
terror.
Understanding Halfon together with the historical record
helps expose the continuing rule of the oligarchy, judicial impunity and US
influence, factors central to contemporary struggles over land, indigenous
rights and militarisation.
Halfon rarely offers direct economic history; instead, his
stories register the aftershocks: absences, silences, disrupted families,
migrations and the odd conjunctions of identity that result from capitalist
domination. Where Halfon evokes a vanished aunt, a rented house, a childhood
street, those private traces map onto structures of class power: plantations
that displaced communities, export economies that enclosed common land, and
states that protected corporate assets rather than popular needs.
To read Halfon politically is to read the gaps as social
symptoms: the inability to name perpetrators, the sense of illegible history,
the recurring motif of “not knowing” where a relative went or why a place
changed. These are not merely aesthetic devices but the subjective remnant of
forced migrations, economic coercion and political terror produced by export
capitalism and imperialist intervention.
Like most Guatemalan writers, Halfon learned to write as if
his life depended on it. For most readers of his books, it must be hard to
understand that writers like Halfon are in constant fear of assassination because
of what they write and uncover. A prime example of this is Francisco Goldman.
His book The Art of Political Murder nearly got him killed.
In an interview with the Guardian, Halfon recounts feeling
paranoid about being followed. My understanding of the political situation in
Guatemala is that Halfon is not paranoid. Given Guatemala’s track record of
killing writers and journalists who get in their way, it is a real threat, not
just paranoia.
It is worth quoting in length from Halfon’s Guardian article.
Halfon believes that many things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about.
“ Just after I published my first novel in Guatemala, in
2003, I had a beer with the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, who was
living there at the time. We met at an old bar called El Establo. As soon as he
saw me walk in, he raised his bottle of beer, congratulated me, smiled a crazy
man’s smile, and then warned me to leave the country as soon as possible.
Guatemalan writers, and Guatemalans in general, have lived
for almost a century now in a climate of fear. If anyone dared to speak out,
they either disappeared into exile or disappeared literally. This fear is still
prevalent, woven deep into the subconscious of the Guatemalan people, who, over
time, have been taught to be silent. To not speak out. To not say or write
words that might kill you.
The first consequence of this, of course, is overall
silence. Certain things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about. The
indigenous genocide in the 1980s. The extreme racism. The overwhelming number
of women 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
discussed and commented on only 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, 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.
It was at a bookstore called Sophos. I was browsing some
books on the table when an elderly man came over and introduced himself. He was
dressed in a coat and tie. He said he had read my novel and talked for a few
minutes about his impressions. He then shook my hand again and, still holding
on to it, said it had been a pleasure to meet me, that I should take care, be
careful. I asked him carefully about what. He just smiled politely and went on
his way. I considered it strange, but didn’t give it much thought. Maybe he was
just being nice? Maybe I misinterpreted his greeting (usted cuídese, you take
care)? Anyway, I had almost forgotten about it until several weeks later, when
I received a phone call. The voice on the phone said I didn’t know him, but
that he was calling as a friend to warn me about my enemies.”[5]
Suppose you make the effort to read Halfon’s work; it is a
joy. His work opens questions about the culture of migration, the
commodification of memory, and the role of literature in representing
displacement.
“It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not
created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by
economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. It
is very true that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding
whether to reject or to accept a work of art. A work of art should, in the
first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But the
beauty of Marxism is that it alone can explain why and how a given tendency in
art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who
made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why.”
Notes
1.
The Purest Form of Writing, the Most Intimate
Form of Reading-Eduardo Halfon, in conversation with his translators Lisa
Dillman and Daniel Hahn, with Avinoam Patt, massreview.org/sites/default/files/10_60.3Halfom/index.pdf
The UN Historical Clarification Commission, “Guatemala: Memory of Silence”) and forensic anthropology studies on exhumations.
The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? Francisco Goldman Atlantic Books Paperback – 1 Feb. 2010-
5.
Mastermind, by David Unger -AKASHIC BOOKS Paperback
– 19 May 2016
About The Author
[1]
Origin Stories-www.guernicamag.com/origin-stories/
[2]
Better not say too much: Eduardo Halfon on literature, paranoia and leaving
Guatemala-Guardian.com.2015
[3]
Tarantula by Eduardo
Halfon-observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/paperback-of-the-week-tarantula-by-eduardo-halfon
[4]
Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents
[5]
Better not say too much: Eduardo Halfon on literature, paranoia and leaving
Guatemala-Guardian.com.2015
