— Alberto
Manguel
Reading
has a history. But how can we recover it?'
Robert
Darnton
"For
the desire to read, like all the other desires which distract our unhappy
souls, is capable of analysis. It may be for good books, for bad books, or for
in different books. But it is always despotic in its demands, and when it
appears, at whatever hour of day or night, we must rise and slink off at its
heels, only allowing ourselves to ask, as we desert the responsibilities and
privileges of active life, one very important question — Why? Why, that is,
this sudden passion for Pepys or Rimbaud? Why turn the house upside down to
discover Macaulay's Life and Letters? Why will nothing do except Beckford's
Thoughts on Hunting? Why demand first Disraeli's novels and then Dr Bentley's
biography?
Virginia
Woolf on Sir Thomas Browne
But who
shall be the master? The writer or the reader?
—Denis Diderot, Jacques le fataliste et son
maître, 1796
"The
Bishop Gerardi case, it showed Guatemalans that what they had thought was
impossible and which usually is impossible could be done, that you could get
justice for a crime like that in a country where - of complete impunity, where
state crimes always go unpunished. And the courage of that prosecutor and the
young people who investigated that day is like nothing I have ever seen or
witnessed in my life. It is - it was the great honour of my life to be close to
them and to work with them for so many years".
Francisco
Goldman
In our
country, the truth has been twisted and silenced. Discovering the truth is
painful, but it is, without doubt, a healthy and liberating action.
Msgr.
Juan Gerardi, Never Again, xxiv.
In his
book The History of Reading, the writer Alberto Manguel makes the following
pertinent and insightful comment "We all read ourselves and the world
around us in order to glimpse what and where we are. We read to understand, or
to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as
breathing, is our essential function".
I am sure
Francisco Goldman would agree with that sentiment because his latest book is
written in the spirit of that comment. Monkey Boy is not an orthodox
autobiography. The author employers an alter ego, Francisco Goldberg, much like
the writer Philip Roth and many others do to examine certain aspects of his or
her life with great effect. This type of autobiographical novel should not be
seen as a "dying genre" but is, in reality, a form of writing that
seeks to make sense not only the life of a writer but their place in the world,
and through his or her book, we can begin to understand our place in the world.
A great man once said, "Art is the Cognition of Life.[1]
The real
narrator of "Monkey Boy" is course, Francisco Goldman. Goldman mixes
fiction and fact to great effect in this novel autobiography. He is a seriously
gifted and thoughtful writer, and like all high-level works of literature, his
book works on many different levels. Monkey Boy is an open dialogue with its
readers. The book poses the question, "who shall be the master? The writer
or the reader?
Goldman
believes there should be a dialectical relationship between author and reader,
and the reader for him is not just a passive bystander. Goldman does his utmost
to de-mystify the writing process saying, "Sometimes people want to
mystify where novels come from, but often novels come from the most obvious
source, simply what the writer is most persistently thinking about".
Goldman
thinks about many things, and it is gratifying that in this age of instant
gratification and the rise of inane videos produced by the TikTok generation,
someone spends so much time trying to raise people's intellectual level.
Childhood
By any
stretch of the imagination, Goldman had a really bad childhood. He was the son
of a Jewish father and a Guatemalan mother, and his early life was spent in the
predominantly working-class area of Boston. The novel depicts his own
experiences, including being physically assaulted by his dad and being
physically and verbally abused at school.
The title
of the book stems from these disturbing experiences. As Goldman explains, "I
chose it as the title because part of the source of the book was that I wanted
to go back and look at some very difficult years, my childhood and adolescence.
You know, a couple of years ago, I had a fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe
Institute in Cambridge, which brought me back up to Massachusetts for the first
time in years. And I got together with some of my old high school friends, people
who played on that sophomore football team that you read about in the book. And
one of them laughed and said to me, oh, yeah, I remember now. Everybody used to
say you look like a monkey. And it sort of came back to me there, you know,
that how much of my childhood and youth had been sort of shaped by these kinds
of nicknames, which, you know, we can interpret in so many different ways in
the course of the book".[2]
I suppose
you could say that Goldman is lucky in one sense in that being such an
outstanding writer, he has been able to understand his terrible childhood and,
through writing about it, come to terms with it. Many people, including myself,
are not that lucky. Not that I had a terrible childhood far from it, but I was
on the receiving end of a bully at secondary school, much like most people are.
The bully made children's lives hell until he picked on the wrong guy who
battered him. His bullying days were abruptly ended. The most perverse aspect
of this story is that he tried to befriend me on Friends Reunited a long while back. I was tempted to
meet him and give him another beating or hire someone bigger than me to do it,
but I turned him down. I am, after all, a civilised human being.
This book
is an easy read primarily because Goldman is such a good writer. But it would
be a mistake to believe that this is an easy book to understand. While an
uninformed reader would still get a lot out of the book, you need to have at
least a rudimentary understanding of the history and political situation in
Latin America, particularly Guatemala, which is an important part of Goldman's
life.
Guatemala
is a rich and beautiful country, but it is a hell hole for most of its people.
It is one of the world's unequal countries, with most of its people being socially
and politically disenfranchised. As Angelina Godoy points out in her book,[3] "Guatemala
has the seventh-highest degree of income inequality in the world, and the
highest in Latin America … Some 83 per cent of the population – and 90 per cent
of the indigenous population – lives in poverty. And although most Guatemalans
are poor, regardless of their ethnicity, the socioeconomic exclusion of the
country's indigenous – mostly Mayan – majority by the ladino minority has led
to an especially notable disconnect between the few fairer-skinned elites who
control the bulk of the county's resources and the mostly indigenous masses who
toil in its fields and factories. Yet just as peasants often cultivate
subsistence plots on the sides of volcanoes, the country's social and economic
structure is pitched atop these unstable relations of mass exclusion. Like the
land that occasionally rumbles beneath Guatemala's feet, the nation they have
constructed atop this precarious social scaffolding has been prone to periodic
eruptions of brutal violence".
The Art of Political Murder
Goldman's book, The Art of Political Murder, is a masterpiece of journalistic investigation and writing. Its writing and publication came close to getting him killed, and Goldman received several death threats. For much less, the Guatemalan death squads have killed many journalists and political figures.
"The
Art Of Political Murder" is about the assassination of Juan Gerardi, a
bishop and human rights activist. Goldman explains why he was killed "Because
the army and the guerrillas in the peace accords - the army were the victors.
The guerrillas were, you know, a very defeated force that was pulled into the
peace accords and wanted to survive. They decided that there would be no
accounting for the war's crimes, a war in which 200,000 civilians have been
killed, that there be complete amnesty. And Bishop Gerardi already knew that
that was not the way forward, that a country cannot have peace with that kind
of incredible crimes against humanity going unaddressed and unforgiven.[4]
This
search for justice for the oppressed animates Goldman's book. As he writes,
" There are many reasons I wanted to go back and write about this time in my
life. One is I was thinking about, you know, the kinds of hierarchies I place
on myself, right? Without a doubt, the - such a formative experience, the most
formative period of my life, was the time I spent in my 20s covering the wars
of Central America Guatemala, writing my first novel. But, you know, being so
close to that, you know, was, in fact, a genocide, a terrible, terrible war.
The way that that takes centrality in your life, every time you sit down to
write, you think, well, you know, really, that is the key experience. I owe
that yet again to go back there and find more meaning from that.[5]
The Art
of Political Murder is now a documentary film showing on HBO. It has been
produced by Academy Award winners George Clooney and Grant Heslov. I have included
a discussion with the author and the director shown on Youtube. Goldman fully
collaborated with this excellent documentary and said, "it is kind of
amazing that a prosecutor had the guts and gumption to pursue the evidence. And
they convicted three members of the military for the killing, and probably
those who ordered it still were never brought to justice".
According
to Goldman, the exact figure of how many people were killed during this
investigation is unknown. But at least ten potential witnesses were killed. The
younger brother of the chief prosecution lawyer was found tortured and murdered
in 2006. According to Goldman, "They had torn a leg off while he was still
alive".What worries you is that they can go after people close to you. My
wife loved Guatemala, but I had to tell her: 'You will never set foot there
again".
Goldman
believes the Guatemalan elite is drenched in the blood of hundreds of thousands
of people, along with its partner in crime, Yankee imperialism. Goldman is one
of the few internationally recognised writers who has written about this
genocide. The indigenous population has received hundreds of years of colonial
and imperialist exploitation and death. Even today, 80 per cent live under the
official poverty line. The plunder of Guatemala as a platform for cheap labour
and natural resources by transnational corporations continues today. The
country has been turned into a militarised concentration camp to benefit
Guatemalan and American capitalism.
While the
book is predominantly about Goldman coming to terms with the political choices,
the book delves into a lot of his personal life. Many important women play a
crucial role in his personal and political development. His mother, of course,
plays a central role and numerous girlfriends, most of whom seem to be
beautiful and a lot younger than Goldman. He seems to have an uncanny knack for
attracting beautiful young women into his life. Goldman's personal life is not
without tragedy. Losing his wife Aura Estrada, who died in a bodysurfing
accident in Mexico in 2007, was a devastating loss written about in the
brutally honest book Say Her Name[6].
The book reminded me of Isabel Allende's book about her daughter Paula.[7]
I fully
recommend this book and hope it gets the wide audience it deserves. Let us hope
Hollywood does a good job when it buys the rights. The book undoubtedly gives
us a deep insight into this extremely rare and gifted writer. Perhaps more
importantly, it gives you a political and historical understanding of the
country that is a big part of who Goldman is.
Notes
Guatemala
as a National Crime Scene: Femicide and Impunity in Contemporary U.S. Detective
Novels Susana S. Martínez DePaul University, Journal of Interdisciplinary
Feminist Thought, Vol. 3, Iss. 1 [2008], smartine@depaul.ed
"The
Divine Husband and the Creation of a Transamericana Subject." Latino Studies.
Vol. 11, no. 2 (Summer): 190 – 207.
"Jewish
characters, subalternity, and the rewriting of the foundational narrative in
Francisco Goldman's The Divine Husband," presented at "Returning to
Babel:Jewish Latin American Experiences and Representations," University
of Nebraska - Lincoln; April 19.
"Discovering
Her: Gender and Truth in Francisco Goldman's The Long Night ofWhite
Chickens," presented at the Latin American Studies Associate Annual Congress;
May 24; Chicago, IL
Understanding
Francisco Goldman (Understanding Contemporary American Literature) by Ariana E.
Vigil (Author) Ariana E. Vigil is an associate professor in the Department of
Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
She is the author of War Echoes: Gender and Militarisation in U.S. Latina/o
Cultural Production. avigil@email.unc.edu
About the
Author
Francisco
Goldman is the author of Say Her Name (2011), winner of the Prix Femina
Etranger, and of The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle 2014, was
awarded the Premio Azul in Canada. His first novel, The Long Night of White
Chickens, was awarded the American Academy's Sue Kaufman Prize for First
Fiction. His novels have been finalists for several prizes, including The
Pen/Faulkner and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award. The Art of
Political Murder won The Index on Censorship T.R. Fyvel Book Award and The
WOLA/Duke Human Rights Book Award. In December 2020, the documentary film of
that book will be shown on HBO. He has received a Cullman Center Fellowship, a
Guggenheim, a Berlin Prize, and was a 2018-19 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute
for Advanced Studies at Harvard. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts
& Sciences. He was awarded a 2018 PEN Mexico Award for Literary Excellence.
He co-directs the Premio Aura Estrada and teaches one semester at Trinity
College in Hartford, CT. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The
New York Times, The Believer, and numerous other publications. Monkey Boy, his
latest novel, is out now from Grove Atlantic. Francisco lives with his wife
Jove and their daughter Azalea in Mexico City.[8]
[1]
https://mehring.com/product/art-as-the-cognition-of-life/
[2]
https://www.kunr.org/2021-05-11/novelist-francisco-goldman-revisits-his-difficult-childhood-in-monkey-boy
[3]
Popular Injustice: Violence,
Community, and Law in Latin America Paperback – 15 May 2006 by Angelina Godoy
[4] https://www.kunr.org/2021-05-11/novelist-francisco-goldman-revisits-his-difficult-childhood-in-monkey-boy
[5]
https://www.kunr.org/2021-05-11/novelist-francisco-goldman-revisits-his-difficult-childhood-in-monkey-boy
[6]
Say Her Name Hardcover – 1
Aug. 2011-by Francisco Goldman (Author)
[7] The Aura Estrada Prize is awarded
biannually with the intention of honoring aspiring female writers like Aura who
are under 35, write in Spanish, and live in either Mexico or the United States.
[8]
https://lithub.com/author/francisco-goldman.
