Source of book: Borrowed from the library
A few years back, I read my first Valeria Luiselli novel, Faces in the Crowd, and rather enjoyed it. That short novella was rather interesting, an amalgam of intertwining threads and a blending of real life, dreams, and the past and present.
Lost Children Archive is a very different book, and yet contains a lot of the same elements. For example, Faces in the Crowd was, like nearly all of Luiselli’s books, written in Spanish, then translated into English. For Lost Children Archive, Luiselli wrote it in English (and it has been translated into Spanish.) While Faces in the Crowd was quite short, Lost Children Archive is nearly 400 pages long, with a lot more detail and description. Faces in the Crowd has elements of magical realism, and, as I noted in my review, literally everything in the book appears or turns out to be fabrication, lies and forgery eventually blending into a story that certainly didn’t happen. In contrast, Lost Children Archive is a believable, mostly realistic story, told in chronological order.
But there are definite similarities. Luiselli blends together three stories, which at the end combine to create a fantastical and harrowing climax.
First, though, a bit about Luiselli, and why I love her writing. She was born in Mexico City, but moved to Wisconsin as a toddler. Her father worked for NGOs, so they lived around the world during the rest of her childhood: South Africa, South Korea, and Costa Rica. That’s three continents right there. And then, as a young adult, she went even further afield. She attended college in India, then Mexico, where she earned a BA in philosophy. She then performed as a dancer, studied comparative literature at Columbia and got her PhD, lived in Spain and France, worked as an intern for the United Nations, volunteered as an interpreter for immigrant children seeking asylum (this will be important later), and now teaches at Bard College, writes librettos for the New York City Ballet, and, well, also writes award-winning books. And, she’s still in her 30s.
Luiselli is clearly multilingual - and not in the broad sense, but in the sense of writing superbly in multiple languages. She also is amazingly well read, as evidenced by the creative use of literary allusions in her books. (This one has five pages of notes at the end explaining the allusions from Homer to Pound to Conrad to Eliot, to a number of Latino writers that are not well known to English speakers.) It’s not just name checking either, she lifts phrases from poems and novels and repurposes them in wonderfully creative ways. The book is a veritable Easter Egg hunt for the literary-minded. So that’s one reason I love her books.
Another is that her writing draws you in emotionally, with great insight into her characters, particularly when she is taking you along the journey of a relationship coming apart. And that is just one facet of what makes this book compelling.
The main plot is of a family road trip. The unnamed narrator (none of the characters get names) is the wife in a blended family. She has a daughter from a prior relationship, he has a son from his. They are referred to as “the boy” (age 10) and “the girl” (age 5). The parents met as the result of a project - they were creating a recording of ambient sounds as a documentation of life in New York City - it’s languages and people and machines and so on. It actually sounds like a fascinating idea. They marry and live together for a number of years, but by the start of the book, the edges are fraying.
The husband (that’s all the name he gets) has decided that his next project will be to go to the homeland of the Apaches in New Mexico and Arizona. The wife does not want to go, but he is clear that he will go with or without her. The compromise is that they put off the inevitable breakup by taking an extended road trip from New York to Arizona. The wife justifies the trip with a promise to a friend to try to find out what happened to her children, who tried to migrate alone to join her. (That’s where Valeria’s experience comes in - she knows the stories of child migrants from Central America from her own experience translating their narratives.)
The road trip itself is fascinating, from the prejudice the family experiences as non-whites traveling through some deeply prejudiced parts of America, to the everyday challenges of long drives with young children. The first two-thirds of the book is devoted primarily to this story, told by the wife. Interspersed increasingly with this story are the two secondary narratives. First is the story of the last of the Apaches, led by Geronimo, which the husband tells to the kids as they travel. The story comes out in pieces, with repetitions and jumps in time, because Luiselli presents it as snippets of conversation along the way. The second sub-narrative comes from a fictional book that the wife brings along, Elegies for Lost Children, which is a story of migrant children traveling from South America with the hope of settling in the United States. The “elegies” are patterned off of various other works (as detailed at the end, as I noted above), and thus form a continuous narrative in different styles.
So far, this is a mostly conventional narrative. But then things take a crazy turn. Inspired by the stories, deeply insecure as a result of the obvious tension between his parents, and obsessed with David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” the boy takes his sister and runs away, the two of them attempting to get from Truth or Consequences to Echo Canyon, the site of Geronimo’s last stand. They hike and jump trains to get there, just as the migrant children did. The boy believes that if they can find the lost children, and reunite with the spirit of the Apaches, they can save the family. As I said, it gets crazy. This part of the narrative is largely told by the boy, in a stream of consciousness format that gets more and more convoluted and less coherent as the desert heat, hunger, and fatigue take their toll on his psyche.
Obviously, this part is a bit unrealistic - although to be fair, various of my kids at age 10 might have been able to navigate with a map through the desert. But man, this journey was hard to read as a parent. Luiselli’s great writing makes it downright terrifying - as she intends.
Because one of the reasons she wrote this book is to bring home in graphic manner the degree of desperation that would lead a parent to send a small child on a journey to seek asylum.
That’s at least enough of a summary. There is a lot more to the book than that, though. The first few sections have quotes at the beginning, a couple of which are fantastic.
“Searching for roots is nothing but a subterranean way of beating around the bush.” ~ Jose Bergamin
That’s a pretty succinct way of summing up what is happening with the husband. His looking for the Apache roots conceals his dissatisfaction with his marriage and his life.
“An exile feels that the state of exile is a constant, special sensitivity to sound.” Dubravka Ugresic
This ties in with both the sound recording - the “archiving” as it is called by the characters at various times - and the undocumented immigrant experience.
I also was intrigued by the wife’s musings on the political, moral, and ethical concerns about her work. Here is one of the best passages:
Political concern: How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum? Aesthetic problem: On the other hand, why should a sould piece, or any other form of storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? I should know, by now, that instrumentalism, applied to any art form, is a way of guaranteeing really shitty results: light pedagogic material, moralistic young-adult novels, boring art in general. Professional hesitance: But then again, isn’t art for art’s sake so often an absolutely ridiculous display of intellectual arrogance? Ethical concern: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering? Pragmatic concern: Shouldn’t I simply document, like the serious radio journalist I was when I first started working in radio and sound production? Realistic concern: Maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, anyway, because the more attention a potentially controversial issue receives in the media, the more susceptible it is to becoming politicized, and in these times, a politicized issue is no longer a matter that urgently calls for committed debate in the public arena but rather a bargaining chip that parties use frivolously in order to move their own agendas forward. Constant concerns: Cultural appropriation, pissing all over someone else’s toilet seat, who am I to tell this story, micromanaging identity politics, heavy-handedness, am I too angry, am I mentally colonized by Western-Saxon-white categories, what’s the correct use of personal pronouns, go light on the adjectives, and oh, who gives a fuck how very whimsical phrasal verbs are?
Oh man, the shitty results of instrumentalism. That one hits home growing up in a religious subculture where “art” was nearly always viewed as an opportunity for indoctrination.
Here’s another gem:
I have never asked a bookseller for a book recommendation. Disclosing desires and expectations to a stranger whose only connection to me is, in abstract, the book, seems too much like Catholic confession, if only a more intellectualized version of it.
Luiselli proceeds to describe the kind of books she might “confess” to wanting, and, while too long to quote, is hilarious. And a bit too close to home.
I also found it interesting the dynamic between the parents and children. For reasons that are not explained, the parents didn’t think to bring any kid-level audiobooks. After finding several options either unpopular or inappropriate, they end up spending a lot of the trip listening to The Lord of the Flies. Which, well, a bit weird for ages 10 and 5, but, I probably shouldn’t talk. (Poke around on this blog to see the books that I exposed the kids to over the years, including Neverwhere and The Hate U Give. Maybe it was growing up in a subculture where kids were expected to be denied basic knowledge of the world, sex, racism, and so on - at the same time my own parents believed we were able to handle all of that and encouraged us to read widely at a young age - I just haven’t seen the point in doing much “sheltering.” Interestingly, the parents in this book seem to think the same way.
[W]e both decided, even though we never really spoke about it, that we should treat our own children not as lesser recipients to who we, adults, had to impart our higher knowledge of the world, always in small, sugarcoated doses, but as our intellectual equals. Even if we also needed to be the guardians of our children’s imaginations and protect their right to travel slowly from innocence toward more and more difficult acknowledgements, they were our life partners in conversation, fellow travelers in the storm with whom we strove constantly to find still waters.
That’s just beautiful, and very much how I feel - and felt as a child. Luiselli has a knack for listening and picking up on things, and that passage is an example. Another is far less pleasant. The family runs across a local newspaper in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, filled with nasty racist descriptions of immigrant children. I’d think it was an exaggeration, but, living in Bakersfield, home of a lot of Okies, I know it is not. Because I have heard this fucking filth dribble from the lips of my neighbors, former church friends, and even family. Oh, and you can find this nasty shit in stuff written by James Dobson and Phyllis Schlafly too. And from pretty much every Trump supporter. Here is what the wife thinks after reading it, and I think it is spot on.
I think of Manuela’s girls, and it’s hard not to be overcome with rage. But I suppose it’s always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man’s-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world’s economic and military powers. Reading articles like this one, I find myself amused at their unflinching certitude about right and wrong, good and bad. Not amused, actually, but a little bit frightened. None of this is new, though I guess I am simply accustomed to dealing with more edulcorated versions of xenophobia. I don’t know which is worse.
I mean, mic drop. That’s fantastic. And completely true. That’s why our family hasn’t participated in organized religion for the last four years, and have no intention of ever doing so again. This is the shit that lies at the theological core of American religion. The cultural and moral superiority of powerful abusers. The fear of brownness. The breathtaking arrogance that they and they alone know right and wrong, good and evil. It’s a convenient narrative to be sure.
This is a good time for another quote. This one is pretty pointed.
“And it is we who travel, they who flee,
We who may choose exile, they who are forced out.” ~ James Fenton
Notice how white people generally can travel anywhere they want in the world without restriction? Notice how white people who move to other countries are “ex-pats” rather than immigrants? We, who have much of the world’s wealth, are free to go and live where we want, but we deny those fleeing violence and poverty that right?
Another pointed passage takes place as the family travels through northern New Mexico.
For the next twenty minutes or so, we’re all silent inside the car, listening to the songs that shuffle and play, looking out our windows at a landscape scarred by decades or maybe centuries of systematic agricultural aggression: fields sectioned into quadrangular grids, gang-raped by heavy machinery, bloated with modified seeds and injected with pesticides, where meager fruit trees bear robust, insipid fruit for export; fields corseted into a circumscription of grassy crop layers, in patterns resembling Dantesque hells, watered by central-pivot irrigation systems; and fields turned into non-fields, bearing the weight of cement, solar panels, tanks, and enormous windmills.
It’s a powerful picture. Not sure what to do about things like industrial agriculture, and the windmills and solar panels are necessary for getting off of fossil fuels. But living in the rural West does sometimes feel like this. A soulless exploitation of the natural world. It’s a tough question, not least because a true “return to the land” would require a much smaller population. And, as Wendell Berry - a back-to-the-lander himself - points out, when we start talking about reducing the population, we often come to poisonous conclusions about who should be eliminated.
The last two quotes didn’t really fit anywhere else, but here goes. The first is the wife’s memory of her dysfunctional mother, who never got anywhere on time, and blamed the kids for her own problems.
That encounter with our mother, although it was a failed adventure, planted a seed in me that would later, as I grew older, flower into a deeper understanding of things. Of things both personal and political and how the two got confused; and about my mother in particular and about women more generally. Or perhaps the right word is not understanding, which has a passive connotation. Perhaps the right word is recognition, in the sense of re-cognizing, knowing again, for a second or third time, like an echo of a knowledge, which brings acknowledgment, and possibly forgiveness. I hope my children, too, will forgive me, forgive us, one day, for the choices we make.
Or, as Oscar Wilde said, “Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.” As person with a complicated relationship with his parents, significantly related to impossibility of separating the personal from the political - religion, politics, and personal relationships have been melded together ever since our family got into Bill Gothard - this expresses the difficulty and complexity.
The final one here is in one of the “Boxes” sections. At the end of chapters, there is an inventory of one of the boxes the family takes on vacation. This one has a picture of Geronimo and his followers as prisoners on their way to the army base. And also, this note, which is outstanding.
§ LOOSE NOTE §
Euphemisms hide, erase, coat.
Euphemisms lead us to tolerate the unacceptable. And, eventually, to forget.
Against a euphemism, remembrance. In order not to repeat.
Remember terms and meanings. Their absurd disjointedness.
Term: Our Peculiar Institution. Meaning: slavery. (Epitome of all euphemisms.)
Term: Removal. Meaning: expulsion and dispossession of people from their lands.
Term: Placing Out. Meaning: expulsion of abandoned children from the East Coast.
Term: Relocation. Meaning: confining people in reservations.
Term: Reservation. Meaning: a wasteland, a sentence to perpetual poverty.
Term: Removal. Meaning: expulsion of people seeking refuge.
Term: Undocumented. Meaning: people who will be removed.
Euphemisms - Newspeak really - are the bane of our political moment. The American Right can’t say outright what they mean, because it is morally repugnant - deplorable. If they would say it out loud, it would be like this:
We white people expelled and dispossessed the brown people from their lands. We continue to interfere in their politics in a way that is calculated to keep them in perpetual poverty. When they come here, we expel them. And for those who made it here anyways, we seek to ethnically cleanse them.
That’s the bottom line behind the immigration debate. Once you get behind all the euphemisms and dog whistles, it’s just straight-up racism, and a continuation of the Native American Genocide. That’s how you get to the place where people from my faith tradition who I thought were decent people can literally call for shooting people crossing the border on sight - men, women and children. Who can refer to undocumented immigrants as “fugitives from justice” who need to be tracked down and expelled. As if there were anything “just” about our racist laws, or that there is anything moral or decent about hunting down refugees from violence or crushing poverty and evicting them.
It’s a source of frustration and, yes, rage, that those from my faith tradition, who claim to follow Jesus Christ, turned out to not have believed any of it after all. That “love your neighbor” and “what you do to the least of these (including ‘the stranger’ - that’s immigrants and refugees!) you do to me” thing was just put in the Bible for show, I guess, and the real values are “hate and persecute the vulnerable, particularly if they aren’t white.” As has been said by many, including American hero Anthony Fauci, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care for others.” America in general, and white Evangelicals in particular, have somehow been carefully trained for decades to have a pathological lack of empathy and human decency, and I don’t know how to fix that. How DO you fix sociopathy? Can you? I don’t know.
Bottom line, as this book masterfully sets forth, if you can see children risking their lives crossing half a continent dependent on the assistance of human smugglers, many dying along the way, and not see your own children and your own selves in the parents desperate enough to send them, there is something WRONG with you. Your soul is so diseased that you lack normal human empathy. If your response to the suffering of others is to build giant fucking walls for people to die outside of, you are a monster. I was raised better than this. WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THE PEOPLE WHO RAISED ME????
Someday, when the dust settles on this era, whether this ends - as I sincerely hope and pray - in the near future with a national reevaluation of our morally catastrophic trajectory, or if it will require a few generations of hideous civil war and environmental catastrophe before a new generation is able to regain its soul, those who brought us to this point will be remembered with the same contempt as the generations whose hatred and greed and thirst for violence brought us two world wars.
The cure for these toxic euphemisms is remembrance. In order to not repeat. That’s one big reason I write this blog.
Having now read two of her books, I have to say that Valeria Luiselli is indeed a powerful writer. For our society to heal, we need repentance, and a new generation of prophets - many of them female and of color - are calling us to that repentance. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is another.) Will we listen?
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