“Fernando, take out the paper that talks; note down what you hear so you can keep all of it in your mind…It must be told. Note it down, Fernando…” – from ‘The Book of Lamentations’
Maybe I’m not done talking about The Book of Lamentations or the Mexican Revolution yet.
Even giving myself a little more book space than usual in Friday’s column, there’s something I want to scratch at deeper. Absorbing these two different pieces of media—each with their own different goals—has really underscored something about novels and poetry and the argument for their continued existence, as if such arguments are ever productive.
So I’m going to put the onus on the drier media: history podcasts are lousy are conveying how it feels to be alive during history.
Won’t be able to find it, but I remember reading some Mad Men recap way back in the day—maybe on Slate? Can’t remember the writer or the season, tbh—where something along the lines of “it’s unclear if Mad Men is trying to say anything or if it’s just a snapshot of how it felt to live in the 60s.” As if that’s such a bad thing! That’s the power of literature. I can read about how everyone was freaked out by Medgar Evers’ assassination or how the Moon landing captivated the viewing public’s imagination, but seeing characters I’ve gotten to know experience those things is entirely different.
One simplistic way to put this is: the entirety of The Book of Lamentations (if it were a nonfictional event) would cover about 10 minutes of something like the Revolutions podcast. I’m talking a broad history podcast, not one of those shows that zooms in on a single murder case in West Virginia and gets five seasons out of it. The type of uprising depicted in the book, when described by historians, does not often focus on characters like Marcela Gómez Oso or César Santiago. What I’m saying is, I can and have read dry facts like “Mexico has had its own racial caste system” or “many Indigenous tribes and nations still live within the borders of Mexico” and not really understand what that means. Not on a visceral level.
Before this gets too high-in-the-sky, “books-can-save-the-world-man,” I want to give the “it’s not literature’s responsibility to do anything” caveat. Salmeen Sinai might be a self-conscious stand-in for India in Midnight’s Children, but metanymy only goes so far, you know? Just as living people are not statistics you see in a newspaper, just as demographics are not monoliths, a novel or poem is never going to be the definitive take on an event. There are other stories to be told about World War II than just The Tin Drum.
The notion of fractals kept hitting me over and over while reading The Book of Lamentations. There’d be a scene of conflict with Indigenous characters, but their issues were meaningless to the Ladino characters, whose issues were meaningless to the government workers trying to implement land reform, whose issues were not meaningless but also not the first priority of Church higher-ups whose motivation was mostly to secure the Catholics’ power in Central America. Ghosting over all this was a sort of meta-notion that to the average U.S. citizen, all of these characters would be categorized in an undifferentiated mass misnomered as “Mexicans.” Which is to say: the ability of empire to flatten out peoples’ stories is unparalleled, and something society needs to actively guard against.
Empires, unfortunately, do reverberate throughout history. We still talk about Alexander as a “The Great” without talking much about the people he crushed underfoot. We rattle off the names of dictators with little recall of their victims. Empires crush stories—especially ones that make them look bad—until the red pepper becomes known as “paprika.” Why do you think Beloved gets banned but Gone With The Wind is the definitive portrait of an era for some people?
This seems to be a theme for me this year, this idea of reading history and literature in conjunction with each other. Maybe I struggle with a sense of higher purpose more than I’m willing to admit. Maybe I want everyone to acknowledge literature as valuable more than is healthy. There’s something, though, in learning human stories alongside broader histories. As Rosario Castellanos says in the epigraph to the afterword in my edition of The Book of Lamentations: “writing has been, more than anything, explaining to myself the things I don’t understand.”
Sorry you got an email,
Chris