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Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America

2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.52.1.0222

1528-4212

Thomas O. Beebee,

Disaster Management and Resilience

Mark Anderson makes an informative and largely original contribution to comparative Latin American studies with this book, whose topic and approach are expressed quite well in its full title. Notably, “literature” appears nowhere in Anderson's title, and his argument moves from literary to other kinds of writing, such as journalistic reporting and political treatises. Fiction and poetry do remain at the heart of his undertaking, however, since in fact he argues that literary texts play a mediating role in the conversion of the brute facts of disaster to symbolic ends (e.g., in facilitating the renegotiation of national discourse or critique that is inevitably provoked by natural catastrophe). The author opens by answering two fundamental questions that ground the study: Why link disaster with Latin America in particular? And, what is the value of approaching the topic comparatively? The answer to the first question is partly geographical, given the presence of the Ring of Fire on the western borders of the Americas. From the east come hurricanes. As in other parts of the world, man-made disaster complements these natural hazards. More distinctive than the mere presence of disaster, however, is the integration of them into the national discourses of various countries. An important aspect of the comparative approach, therefore, is that comparison “opens apparently self-contained discourse to reevaluation” (26).Anderson's four main study examples are: Cyclone San Zenón's role in allowing the construction of Trujillo's “Nueva Patria” in the Dominican Republic in 1930; the extensive body of writing—fictional, historical, political, and scientific—on drought in northeastern Brazil; the volcano in Central American writing; and the 1985 earthquake that devastated Mexico's capital.San Zenón coincided almost exactly with the beginning of the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, and the dictator exploited it to maximum effect, by declaring martial law, renaming Santo Domingo as Ciudad Trujillo, and sponsoring propagandistic campaigns and journalistic efforts that promoted his role in dealing with the disaster. The centerpiece of this chapter is one such quasi-propagandistic effort, Ramón Lugo Lovatón's Escombros: Huracán de 1930, gathered together as a book in 1955 but based on newspaper accounts published shortly after the storm. Anderson follows the various rhetorical and poetic devices used by Lugo to identify the storm cleanup with a more general purging of Dominican politics and society under the paternalistic gaze of Trujillo. A number of other writings are analyzed in this chapter, such as books on architecture, where Trujillo is praised for his modernization of the building codes that dated back to Spanish rule, and that were considered partly responsible for the disaster. While skilled and nuanced, the effect of Anderson's selection of readings is somewhat numbing due to their univocality. Finally, on page 52 we turn to Trujillo's opponents (many of them former supporters, such as Juan Bosch), who add Trujillo himself to the lexicon of Dominican disaster. This section is only four pages long, but it concludes the chapter.I am somewhat familiar with the theme of northeastern drought—or more generally, of economic disaster and transformation—in Brazilian writing treated in the second chapter, which makes me all the more impressed with Anderson's scholarship and analysis here. For example, the long list of “drought fiction” he provides on page 59 goes beyond the well-known examples from authors such as Euclides da Cunha, José Américo de Almeida, Rachel de Queiroz, and Graciliano Ramos to include numerous lesser-known works, many of them published prior to 1900. Anderson's argument—that the demarcation of the Northeast as a risk to national stability and progress was carried out via fiction and poetry rather than by means of statistics or political rhetoric—is convincingly argued, and he makes excellent use of the plot lines of various novels, as well as of comparison of fictional and nonfictional “drought writings” of the politician Almeida, to illustrate his points. Given the vast amount of material and the historical sweep of this chapter of fifty pages, the author can be forgiven a few solecisms and oversimplifications, such as that Canudos was founded by “religious fanatics” (81). (This was the view propagated for decades, especially under Da Cunha's long shadow, but recent scholarship provides a more nuanced view of the Canudenses' varied motivations.)The third example, the image of the volcano in writing by Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, and El Salvadorian authors, is the only one to present contested interpretations: On the one hand, as a highly visible part of the landscape, the volcano has been co-opted by nationalist discourse, such as when five of them are depicted on the coat of arms of El Salvador. At the same time, nationalistic volcanic symbolism has been both directly and indirectly contested—for example, the idea of eruption from beneath the earth can suggest revolutionary action on the part of the hitherto-invisible masses. The volcano as symbol thus “enshrined the conflict between the ruling classes that instituted volcanoes as key tropes in the national imaginary and the largely indigenous residents of the volcanoes themselves, who also identified with volcanoes as symbols, but of their struggle against oppression by those same ruling classes” (143). A touchstone of Anderson's analysis in this chapter is Rubén Darío's 1907 poem “Momotombo.”The fourth and last chapter, on representations of Mexico's catastrophic 1985 earthquake—or more accurately, on analyses of the government's failure to respond adequately to the disaster—stands out more for its political than its literary analysis, peppered as it is with sentences like: “I am primarily interested here in the strategies that the Coordinadora Única de Daminificados and its affiliated organizations used to establish themselves as legitimate interlocutors of the state within the corporatist framework” (162). Anderson does provide a thesis about genre, namely that the crónica's power in reporting the damage and critiquing the government's role derived from its historical importance and foundational expressions of Mexican identity going back to New Spain chroniclers Bernardino de Sahagún and Bernal Díaz del Castillo. And there emerges, as in other chapters, a key author: Elena Poniatowska, whose Nada, nadie (1987) continued the genre of “collective testimonial” she had begun in 1971 with La noche de Tlatelolco. But on the whole, this chapter tells far more than it shows, with very little close reading of its supposed literary examples.Cyclone, drought, volcano, earthquake. Anderson does not reveal whether he was thinking of the Four Horsemen when he conceived this book's architectonics, but as with the cardinal directions, this quaternity of disasters seems to mark off the universe of possibilities for South America. Anderson does remark that his four examples can be grouped in two pairs, of protracted (drought, volcano) versus single-event (cyclone, earthquake) disasters. One notes that the protracted disasters seem to have produced the most interesting literature, which raises the question of whether this always holds true. Another, related issue concerns whether the choice of catastrophe discourse to be analyzed here begs the question of the relation of disaster to national discourse, both in its adherence to large-scale events, and in its restricted focus on catastrophes that are unambiguously provoked by natural forces. (The suffering from “natural” disasters is, of course, greatly dependent on social factors and the unequal distribution of resources, as Anderson makes abundantly clear throughout.) People of the Americas live under constant threat of mini-disasters, ranging from oil and chemical spills, to heavy rainfalls that destroy crops and wash houses down hillsides (e.g., in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro), to more generalized environmental degradation. What sort of writings do these American disasters produce? Perhaps Anderson would be interested in pursuing this other side of disaster in a sequel.