If you type “Mexico August 12, 2019” in your browser, you will find that the first page of results includes weather forecasts, reports of an earthquake in Chiapas, the day’s the dollar/peso exchange rate – and finally, if you keep scrolling to the bottom of page 2, “Protest against police abuse scheduled in Mexico City.” As Cristina Rivera Garza notes, protest movements against gendered violence, including #MiPrimerAcoso/#MyFirstAssault, had gained momentum over the previous five years. And on August 12, Mexican security minister Jesus Orta Martinez was pink-glitter bombed after a teenager was raped by police.
Garza’s essays in Grieving lead us toward a communal mourning for the thousands of deaths resulting from Mexico’s narco wars, unremitting femicides, and the savage results of neo-liberal capitalism. The dismal social history of Mexico over the past ten years, a matter of no interest to oblivious Americans, finds its brutalized flesh and spilled blood in Garza’s pages. Early in this collection of crónicas, personal essays and poems, Garza introduces the term visceraless state, “a defleshed capitalism” in which “the bodies of all Mexicans were transformed from vulnerable – a regular mode of the human condition – to helpless – an artificial state caused by torture.” The visceraless state, permitting violence and impunity through its neglect and self-conception “as an administrative system, not as a governmental relationship,” simply does not care about the fate of the pained bodies of its citizens.
But for some American readers, the full significance and shock of Garza’s insights – and the visceraless state — may not register until her final essay, “Touching Is a Verb: The Pandemic and Its Inescapable Questions.” It is here, as the southern border of the U.S. becomes illusory, that we understand how the Covid pandemic has unmasked the attitude of the American regime towards its own lifeblood, a visceraless state “for which bodies are not a matter of care but merely extraction.” The president denies that the dying persists, encouraging perilous behavior intended to keep the markets spinning. In our perception of the surrounding deceleration, we see that “everything we have close by … affects us because it implicates us.” Meanwhile, America’s vilified immigrants and people of color do the dirty work to keep the infrastructure working, and share the highest rates of mortality with the very elderly. But throughout Grieving, Garza insists that our common laments must also contemplate a counter-action:
In other words, how will we resolve to demand that the state comply with its responsibility to protect the health of the population while we simultaneously produce embodied relations, that is, modes of affect and connection that stem from the broad admission that we are bodies, that we need and can provide care?
In Garza’s narratives, the collective merges with the personal and the personal grows into the pan-human. But the personal is the ignition. Thirty years ago, Garza’s younger sister, Liliana, was murdered by a stalking ex-boyfriend “who, to this day, has not paid for his crime.” In “The End of Women’s Silence” she says, “There is only one small step — not a quantum leap — between domestic abuse, workplace inequality daily harassment, sexual assault, economic mortification, cultural belittlement, a lack of opportunities, and the murder of hundreds of thousands of women in Mexico and throughout the world.” Whether considering the 1985 8.0 earthquake, the H1N1 pandemic, Hurricane Katrina, or even the diversion of an essential local stream to feed Mexico City, Garza rages at the dispassion of government officials. “It is more common to play dumb than to pay attention (aesthetic or ethical attention) to what surrounds us,” she writes, “to the very foundation that surrounds us and, by surrounding us, that constitutes us.”
But the murders and rapes of those she knew or whose names became icons of protest penetrate the deepest. Garza mourns, “There are now at least two generations of boys growing up in an atmosphere where it is ‘natural’ to witness the massive death of women, of young men, of everyone.” Part of the blame rests with people like former Mexican defense secretary General Salvador Cienfuegos who was arrested in Los Angeles on October 16, 2020, accused of taking bribes and allowing a Mexican drug cartel to operate with impunity and running cells in the United States. (In the 2017 photograph, he salutes next to Jim Mattis.) As a headline, the story can too easily fade quickly into America’s hazy awareness of all that corruption down there. But reading Garza’s essays, one not only feels the pain of others, but begins at last to perceive the damage from south to north. “I’ve never had much confidence in a democracy of the powerful for the powerful,” she writes. “And I am convinced that the neo-liberal devotion to profit is shared with greater or lesser cynicism by both parties in contention. What we lose in this moment of unmasking is not democracy or equality but the false notion that it’s a good thing to be offered the best part of a bad deal.”
[Published by The Feminist Press on October 6, 2020, 190 pages, $16.95 paperback]
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In my most recent “Book Notes” column, I mentioned Jenny Erpenbeck’s essay in Not A Novel on Walter Kempowski’s novel All For Nothing, in which she underscores his questions, “Can one individual accomplish anything? Or does humanity fall again and again, generation after generation, succumbing to forgetting and repression …” Never forget! But in her piece on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she writes, “Will we lose something if we turn back to the past — as Orpheus loses his Eurydice? Is forgetting our only salvation? Or are our stories the only baggage that no one can take away from us?” Memory may be the fountain of poetry, but imagination revels in the spaces opened by forgetting and its promise of renewal. This may be why when memoir and poetry collapse into each other — the assumed authority of the former often overtakes the diffidence and nuances of the latter.
Lately, forgetting has found its articulate advocates. In his provocative In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (2018), David Rieff notes that enshrined historical narratives that bind people into political and cultural communities are often so distorted and simplistic as to be wildly inaccurate — and provide less a set of informed memories to guide our behavior than a crude distillation of a culture’s biases and illusions. Next, I found Lewis Hyde’s more speculative and allusive A Primer For Forgetting (2019). “Forgetting appears when the story has been so fully told as to wear itself out,” he says, while asking us to consider the difference between recognizing one’s history and being dominated by the past. For the writer and artist, Hyde offers John Cage’s guidance to Philip Guston: “When you start working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – are all there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”
Now, novelist and essayist Gabriel Josipovici has produced Forgetting. One of his initial insights seems to link up with Cage’s “even you leave” – that is, Josipovici points out that “Proust brings involuntary memory to our attention” to show us that “what ordinarily passes for memory tends to be the product only of habit and mental laziness.” In light of cognitive science, he disputes the claim that “memory is what holds the self together” and regards Borges’ story “Funes the Memorious” as symbolic evidence: Funes remembers everything, or rather, he can’t forget anything, which makes him “incapable of thought.” Soon Josipovici, the son of Russo-Italian Jewish parents, turns to consider the European Holocaust and the injunction “at the centre of their affective being … zakhor, remember.” In particular, he deplores how the Israeli right-wing has used the memory of the Holocaust “as a way of justifying aggression and warding off the moral indignation of the world at the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.” He writes:
For what does the injunction not to forget really mean? How many of us have personal memories of those events? In fifty years’ time the question will not even make sense any more. How can we ask people not to forget what they have never known? Is not the word forget perhaps the wrong one? Perhaps what we mean is that people should know the history of Europe in the twentieth century well enough to deal with the rise of new forms of discrimination and violence against minorities and to refute those who deny that these events ever happened … But when politicians and others proclaim the mantra ‘We must not forget!’ they are thinking of something far more immediate, far more visceral, than simply the need for better schooling … Uttering such slogans puts us in company we would prefer not to keep, the company of the likes of Milosevic and Karadzic … For it is striking how often we hear that cry from the lips of those we regard as dangerous demagogues.
Josipovici cites Rieff’s book in “Reticence and Repression,” a chapter on historical reckoning. There is Jacques Chirac in 1995, finally admitting to France’s role four decades earlier in collaborating with the Nazis to deport thousands of Jews to death camps. And this, about Charles de Gaulle: “When, in the early 1960s, he made the momentous decision that France would have to accede to Algerian independence, the story goes, one of his advisors protested: ‘So much blood has been shed. Was that all for nothing?’ To which de Gaulle replied: ‘Rien ne seche plus vite que le sang.’ Nothing dries quicker than blood.” Josipovici’s method is to show a range of response to the memorable, and then suggest a balanced if demanding approach: “What can be said for certain though is that the modern mantra that only full disclosure will bring closure is itself as much of a myth as that of the entire French nation united in its resistance to the Nazis.”
But the historical examples may be the easiest to consider and from which to extract advice. Josipovici wants us to get a feel for the ways in which we neither properly remember nor effectively forget. The deeper gratifications of Forgetting issue from his wide-ranging consideration of perspectives by Goethe, Nietzsche, the Iliad, Beowulf, Virgil’s Eclogues, Hamlet, Wordsworth, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Kafka, Eliot, Muriel Spark, and Wallace Stevens – always with recent events in mind. In the end, meditating on Stevens’ late poem “The Plain Sense of Things,” Josipovici lands on the memory-vs-imagination entanglement that the demanding artist must confront: “Imagining forgetting is as impossible as imagining the absence of imagination, yet with the one as with the other we are hungry for that experience, feeling that if only we could reach behind our imaginings, behind our memories, we would find our true place in the world at last. This remains, however, always tantalizingly out of reach.” Unless, if you’re lucky, even you leave.
[Published by Carcanet on March 26, 2020, 147 pages, $15.99 paperback]
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