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Tag: Mexico

  • PEN Atlas – One Year On

    PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis looks back at a year of dispatches from around the world, and looks forward to more cutting-edge literature, essays and articles in translation in 2013

    Dear Readers,

    The looking back and summing up season is upon us, and I’d like briefly to look at the PEN Atlas as it nears the end of its first year of life. Our main aim has been to look at new voices and literature all over the world and to introduce them to an audience in the UK by commissioning new and original blogs written by writers, critics and translators.

    English PEN itself has a translation programme helping both the promotion and translation of international literature via two Writers in Translation Awards – PEN Translates! and PEN Promotes! – and some of the books featured in the Atlas come to us through these grant schemes.

    In many of our 2012 blogs we looked at how writers dealt with political problems and conflicts in their countries, in this way supporting the core PEN activity of defending and promoting the freedom to write and the freedom to read. We will be returning to many of these countries again next year, as unfortunately most of the conflicts covered by the Atlas are still underway. These continue to make it difficult for writers to express themselves freely as well as endangering their lives. Samar Yazbek wrote to us from Syria about the perils of reporting from a war zone and in January we will have another Syrian, Nihad Sirees, one of the winners of a 2013 English PEN Writers in Translation Award, writing about Aleppo and its incomprehensible destruction. And later in the year we will be covering another of the PEN Award Winners: Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus, which compiles some of the most exciting new writing borne out of the Arab Spring.

    Hassan Blasim discussed the aftermath of the war in Iraq and the role literature plays in how society deals with tragic events. The Devil’s Workshop by Jachym Topol, again one of the winners of a Writers in Translation Award, deals with the more distant past of concentration camps in Belarus. We will be talking to Jachym Topol later this year.

    Selma Dabbagh wrote very movingly from the Palestinian Literary Festival about the fragile situation in Gaza. Alas, the crisis there has deepened and we will return to the festival next year to look at the response of writers to the events there. Lydia Cacho’s reporting from Mexico has won awards and accolades. For us, she wrote about taking risks and being afraid. She is still reporting and still in danger.

    We hope that as the reviewing space in print media shrinks, PEN Atlas, like some other literary websites, is filling that gap and providing more outlets for literary criticism and debate. 

    We also have been following trends and reported on developments in international publishing by featuring specialists’ opinions. We have looked out for new writers who might be interesting for a British audience and for publishers here. In this way, we have introduced Alisa Ganieva from Dagestan, Yuri Herrera from Mexico and Park Wan-Suh from South Korea among others.  

    PEN Atlas dispatches in 2012 took us all over the world, from Mexico and China to Greece, the Netherlands, Croatia and Russia. And as we continue to explore the world’s literature in the New Year, we hope to bring you closer to interesting places and introduce you to new writers.

    And if you still have any presents to buy, you might find inspiration here in our list of books recommended by publishers, writers and festival organisers. And for literary inspiration look at one of our most moving stories this year – Santiago Gamboa’s ‘Of Poets and Aviators’.

    In the meantime, happy festive reading and all the very best in the New Year!

    Tasja Dorkofikis,

    Editor, PEN Atlas

     

  • Day of the Dead 2012

    To celebrate Day of the Dead, starting today in Mexico and throughout the world, PEN Atlas reports on the history of the festival, the poetry it has inspired, and its ongoing political relevanceDay of the Dead is a holiday that takes place across Latin America, in particular Mexico, during the 1st
    and 2nd
    of November. Coinciding with the Catholic holidays of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ day, it is the time of year when the dead are remembered by the living. As it is a festival as much a memorial, the event takes the form of colourful rituals, music, and the building of elaborate altars in homes and public spaces. These are decorated with crosses, statues of the Virgin Mary, photographs, mementos and sugar skulls. Offerings are made at the altars – food, drink and flowers – to draw the souls of the dead so that they might hear their loved ones praying for them, as well as telling each other family jokes and favourite stories about the departed.In recent times, Day of the Dead has also become a date for protest. Following the murder or disappearance of dozens of Mexican journalists, editors, bloggers and writers in recent years, PEN centres around the world have begun holding their own Days of the Dead. Last year in the UK, English PEN and PEN International gathered outside the Mexican Embassy to remember all missing and murdered writers. We prepared a traditional altar with candles, photographs, bowls of water, fruit, and paper skulls; handed out mementos containing information about individual writers and  read real-life case studies in both Spanish and English.In the first six months of 2012, more writers were murdered in Latin America than in any other region in the world. Between January and August 2012, eight print journalists were killed, making Mexico the second most dangerous country in the world in which to be a writer, closely followed by Honduras and Brazil.To mark Day of the Dead this year, we’re posting poems by Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco on the PEN Atlas. These poems will appear in PEN International’s anthology Write Against Impunity 2012, the first texts of which are released Friday November 2. The full anthology will be published on November 23, the International Day to End ImpunityThree Poems by José Emilio Pacheco (1939 ~) 1. The Altar of the DeadThis atrocious month has finally passedAnd left us so many deadThat even the air breathes deathAnd death is drunk in the water. I can’t resist the wound of so much death.Mexico cannot be the plural cemetery,The enormous common graveWhere our hopes lie exhausted. We already drown the futureIn the abyss that opens each day. 2. The Hour of the ChildrenThe children traffic in a new species of rats,Ringed like lobsters and colored magenta and sky blue.Strange flavor at firstBut since hunger doesn’t lieWe grow used to baking them. Since you are what you eatIn less than a yearWe become like them.First their panicked little eyes, fur and tail.Then, quickly, teeth like drill bits,Claws like a bone saw.(Is it necessary to say that in this regardThey didn’t have to teach us much?) Now the children who lived off the rats are men.They operate like hit men contracted by an invisible powerAnd little by little but night after nightThey eliminate us with gunshots. 3. TomorrowAt twenty they told me: “You mustSacrifice yourself for Tomorrow”. And we offered life up on the altarOf the god that never arrives. At the end of things I would like to find myselfWith my old teachers from that time. They would have to tell me ifAll the present’s horror truly was Tomorrow. (Translation by David Shook) TRES POEMAS1. El altar de los muertosEl mes atroz ya se fueY nos dejó tantos muertosQue hasta el aire respira muerteY en el agua se bebe muerte. No resisto la herida de tanta muerte.México no puede ser el cementerio plural,La inmensa fosa comúnEn que yace deshecho lo que esperábamos. Al porvenir ya lo hundimosEn el abismo que se abre todos los días. 2. La hora de los niñosLos niños traficaban con una nueva especie de ratas,Anilladas como langostas y de color magenta y celeste.Sabor extraño al principioPero como el hambre no mienteNos habituamos a hornearlas. Ya que uno es lo que comeEn menos de un añoNos volvimos como ellas.Primero los ojitos alarmados, la pelambre y la cola.Poco después los dientes de taladro,Las garras como sierra de partir huesos.(¿Hará falta decir que a este respectoNo tuvieron gran cosa que enseñarnos?) Ahora son hombres los niños que vivían de las ratas.Actúan como sicarios de un poder invisibleY poco a poco pero noche tras nocheNos eliminan a balazos. 3. El mañanaA los veinte años me dijeron: “HayQue sacrificarse por el Mañana”. Y ofrendamos la vida en el altarDel dios que nunca llega. Me gustaría encontrarme ya al finalCon los viejos maestros de aquel tiempo. Tendrían que decirme si de verdadTodo este horror de ahora era el Mañana. About the AuthorJosé Emilio Pacheco (Mexico, 1939) is a poet, essayist, translator, novelist and short story writer; a central figure of Mexican and Latin American literature. Pacheco has been a member of the National College since 1986 and is an honorary member of the Mexican Academy of Language and has received numerous awards, including the Cervantes Prize in 2009. For Pacheco, poets are the true critics of their time. His poetry is simple, blending everyday language with irony and black humour, but it is also profound and experimental. This writing, he says, belongs to everyone, not just the author.José Emilio Pacheco (Mexico, 1939) – poeta, ensayista, traductor, novelista y cuentista. Figura central de la literatura mexicana y latinoamericana. Miembro del El Colegio Nacional desde 1986 y miembro honorario de la Academia Mexicana de la Lengua. Ha recibido numerosos premios, entre ellos el Premio Cervantes 2009. Para Pacheco, el poeta es el crítico de su tiempo. Su poesía parece sencilla con su lenguaje cotidiano y sin ornamentos, con su ironía y humor negro. Pero es profunda y experimental. La escritura pertenece a todos, dice, no a un autor específico.About the TranslatorDavid Shook’s poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in Oxford Magazine, Poetry, PN Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. A chapbook of his translations from the Isthmus Zaptec of Víctor Terán is available from the Poetry Translation Centre, and his work also appears in the anthologies Oxford Poets 2010 (Carcanet) and Initiate (Blackwell). His translation of Mario Bellatin’s Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction is forthcoming Shook lives in Los Angeles, where he edits Molossus.Additional informationYou can read more about the PEN’s Case list by following this link.To find out what you can do to help, please consider joining The Rapid Action Network (RAN). This network was founded by the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International in 1991.  The purpose of the network is to alert members and supporters as rapidly as possible to disturbing developments affecting the welfare of writers and journalists around the globe, and to encourage them to respond instantly by writing a letter of appeal, taking other forms of action, and by passing the information on to their contacts.Distributed by email, each alert or ‘RAN’ gives members the confirmed facts of the case; a paragraph stating clearly what PEN’s concerns are about the case; a sample appeal; and the address or fax numbers to which appeals should be addressed. Joining the network does not mean you are obliged to respond to every RAN, although each letter can be enormously helpful in reinforcing the work we do here. However, we do ask that if you decide to send an appeal you do so as soon as possible after you receive the alert. The Rapid Action Network will also be used to bring you updates from the Writers in Prison Committee (for example, when a prisoner is acquitted) or when specific appeals arise.To subscribe to English PEN’s Rapid Action Network, ple
    ase click this link.

  • Why we keep going

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece, Lydia Cacho writes about the post-traumatic stress of being a persecuted journalist, and the media’s appetite for titillation rather than indignation

    This is an edited and updated version of the piece ‘Reluctant Heroes’, which originally appeared in ‘Beyond Bars: 50 years of PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee’, a special issue of Index on Censorship.

    The first call is the one you never forget. The person uttering the death threat has spent days preparing for this moment – to let you know that your fate is sealed. Up until this phone call, or email, threats were something ethereal and alien, something that happened to other people.

    Over time, I learned what many journalists and writers have learned before me: acquiring powerful enemies as a result of revealing deeper truths unsettles us and sets us apart from our colleagues and loved ones. Against our will the threats somehow become as important as the original story we wrote.

    This dilemma dominates the rest of our lives, because for us to come through safely we need to be out there, in public, and never be silenced. At the same time, we have to always remain on guard, watching our backs, alert whenever we see a police or military patrol, reacting instantly to any sound resembling a gunshot, tensing every time a motorcycle accelerates or approaches, permanently on the lookout for a weapon in case the rider is a hitman. And on and on, we have to proclaim to the four winds, until we’re fed up with doing so – and everyone else is fed up with us too – the name of the mafioso, the politician, the policeman or the corrupt businessman who has put a price on our heads. Yet we yearn for the privacy and anonymity that would allow us to move around without being recognised, for those times when we used to have no need to conceal the names of our family members (for they are now vulnerable too).

    As well as the threat of death, there is the threat of imprisonment. Many of my colleagues, from Iraq to Colombia, Cambodia to Kenya, have published memoirs that deal with post-traumatic stress they have suffered as a result of their experiences in jail. Once out of jail, there is the coming to terms with working and earning money, no longer now simply to feed our children, to pay for fuel and water, or for cinema tickets, but to pay lawyers in whose hands – like a small fish out of water – our provisional freedom rests. We spend years in courtrooms, gathering evidence and convincing witnesses to risk their lives by coming on board with us. Cases of defamation are regularly brought against us with the intention of exhausting us emotionally and financially. The courts become yet another weapon the mafia or corrupt politicians can use against us.

    There are lessons to be learnt here. As more journalists become victims of the courts, those whose plight they are trying to expose also become victims. We must learn how to interview a victim without obliging them to relive their suffering. Let us learn to show compassion for those who dignify us with the confidence of their personal histories. Let us discover how to conduct investigations so that we do not hurt further those who have already suffered. Let us develop methods of inquiry that protect those victims (of war and the mafia, of natural disasters and domestic violence) whom we interview.

    We need to learn to operate in a world where mainstream media has been captivated by the spectacle of cruelty, by a morbid fascination with pseudo-pornography of violence, in which there is no pain without blood. In the fabulous world of ratings, to survive and maintain one’s dignity is hardly good news. There are always those who demand drama: a few tears from the Mexican journalist who was tortured and imprisoned, then raped in order to ensure her silence, feeds the morbid desire for titillation, not for indignation.

    In Uganda, the reporter whose hands were mutilated by the military in order to stop him ever writing again is asked to display his stump as if begging for pity. The media ask the Iraqi journalist to recount a hundred times over how US soldiers murdered her children to quell her voice, and how she herself washed their little bodies alone in her house. They insist the South African poet stops reading his verses of love and hope and instead relives the darkness of his cell, shows the camera the marks of the torture he has spent the last ten years trying to forget, and explains how the love of his family faded to the point where, one autumn afternoon, nobody at all came to visit him in prison. And they ask Anna the Russian female journalist – only two months before she dies – “Are you afraid that they’ll kill you? Have you ever thought what might become of your children?” To which she stoically replies, as one who recognises her struggle as moral as well as political must reply, that for as long as the lives of others are not secure, then neither is our own. Later, alone in her hotel room, she calms her sobs by burying her head in a feather pillow. In her dreams, she begs her children’s forgiveness and visualises a world in which those who tell the truth – about shameful acts of war and humanity’s incapacity to negotiate conflict, about the rapaciousness of the powerful, who use war to exterminate or for the acquisition of material goods – do not pay with their lives.

    When I was abducted and incarcerated by corrupted police, during the 20-hour torture I kept thinking “if this is it and I will die at least I did what was right for the children I interviewed”.

    I love being a journalist. I believe it is useful to society and I am proud of it, it’s a privilege to be able to publish my investigations and to stay alive. Our role as journalists is to push people beyond complacency; journalism is not about fame or ratings, is about offering an echo to the voices of otherwise voiceless people.  Every morning, I remember that if I do my job well I will help citizens acquire reliable, accurate information to make decisions in their community, and that is truly powerful; it makes me remember my job is meaningful and useful to society.

    Lydia Cacho would also like to mention other journalists whose work helps to give voice to the voiceless:  

    Carolin Emke from Germany, Amal Jumah Khamis from Palestine, Blanche Petrich, Lucía Lagunes from Mexico, Natasha Walter from the UK,  and Renee Nowtarger, photojournalist from Austria.

    About the Author

    Lydia Cacho is an award-winning author, journalist and women’s rights activist. Following the publication of her book on child pornography inMexicoin 2005, she was illegally arrested, detained and ill treated before being subjected to a year-long criminal defamation lawsuit. She was cleared of all charges in 2007 but has continued to be the target of harassment and threats due to her investigative journalism. In August 2012, she was forced to temporarily flee her native Mexico in the wake of particularly terrifying death threats.

    In addition to her work as a journalist, she founded and directs the Refuge Centre for Abused Women of Cancun and is president of the Centre for Women’s Assistance, which aids victims of domestic violence and gender discrimination.

    Lydia Cacho was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize for an International Writer of Courage in 2010.

    About the Translator

    Amanda Hopkinson has been active in Human Rights and literature throughout her life. Much of her writing has been concerned with and for, and influenced by publications on, human rights and freedom of expression. She has contributed, through writing, translating and editing, regularly to the magazine Index on Censorship. As an academic, she has been involved in establishing both Swansea and Norwich as ‘cities of refuge’, offering a haven to refugee writers. She has long supported the goals of PEN, a founding and enthusiastic member of PEN Writers in Translation committees, both in the US and UK, and is an active member of English PEN’s Writers at Risk Committee.

    Launch of ‘Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking’

    Published by Portobello Books: 6 September 2012

    ‘Illegal, inhuman, and impervious to recession, there is one trade that continues to thrive, just out of sight. The international sex trade criss-crosses the entire globe, a sinister network made up of criminal masterminds, local handlers, corrupt policemen, wilfully blind politicians, eager consumers, and countless hapless women and children. In this ground-breaking work of investigative reporting, the celebrated journalist Lydia Cacho follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, to expose the trade’s hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, the selling of body organs, money laundering, and even terrorism.’ 

    English PEN will be co-hosting the launch of Lydia’s latest book Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking (translated by Elizabeth Boburg) and belatedly presenting her with her PEN Pinter Prize at the Free Word Centre on 29 August.  Please join us for what promises to be a fascinating discussion, and to show your support for Lydia.  Event details here. 

  • Lydia Cacho has gone

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece, Sanjuana Martinez pays tribute to her friend and colleague Lydia Cacho who has been forced to temporarily flee their native Mexico in the wake of terrifying deaths threats. 

    Translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Cat LucasI am writing this from the heart. There is no other way for me to do it. Lydia Cacho is not just a colleague and fellow journalist, but has been a friend of mine for years. We are united by a passion for our profession, by our commitment to the causes both of women and human rights, and of course by a friendship filled with affection and solidarity.The work that Lydia Cacho does in Mexico is as indispensable as the air we breathe. Her investigative journalism aims to remove the decadent layers of political corruption, both in business and in government.We know that nowadays independent and critical journalism has become a high risk profession, but Lydia has spent seven years living under impending threats from the people in power that she has so bravely identified in her work.Her books are her evidence of it. The most recent, Esclavas del Poder: un viaje al corazón de la trata sexual de mujeres y niñas en el mundo edited by Grijalbo (Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking) is an in-depth investigation not only into human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation and financial gain, but also into the people in power who profit from it. In addition there are her newspaper columns, which have become essential reading due to the amount of information they contain, stuffed with facts that shed light on subjects that normally would remain concealed because of the vested interests of differing sources of power.When a journalistic career is characterised by constant criticism and denunciation, it is sadly not unusual to be treated as a discomforting presence, and so become persecuted and banned from numerous professional outlets.  What is unusual is for the State to remain impervious to all the death threats that Cacho and so many other journalists have received. And what is shameful is that a journalist like Lydia Cacho, under threat of death, is forced into temporary exile to save her life and her life’s work.She is not the only one. A number of Mexican media professionals have found themselves forced into exile thanks to the indifference of Felipe Calderon’s government has shown towards more than 100 crimes against journalists that have gone unpunished.In Lydia’s case the lack of governmental action is particularly alarming. Since 2009, the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACHR) has been calling on the government to take precautionary measures for her protection, but Calderon and his negligent officials (from the Ministry of the Interior and the failed Special Prosecutor for Crimes Committed Against Journalists) have consistently ignored the urgency of adopting such measures.  It is obvious that they would prefer not to come to the defence of a critical voice.In the meantime, the journalist has been subject to accusations and persecution from one source after another.  On this most recent occasion [29 July 2012] the message was clear: “We already told you, vile bitch, don’t mess with us. We can see that you haven’t learnt from that little trip that we gave you. Next time we get you, you’ll be cut into little pieces, and that’s how we’ll send you home, idiot.”No prizes for guessing where the threat comes from. It originates in organised crime linked to political power. Lately, Lydia has been highly critical of the PRI [Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or Institutional Revolutionary Party]and of other parties in government in the many different states of the Republic, whilst her work on the networks that deal with sexual exploitation have revealed the disgusting abuses of many famously corrupt PRI officials.Mexico is now second only to Thailand in the extent of its sexual trafficking. It is a haven for traffickers who collaborate with regional governors in order to maximise their already substantial profits, then expend them in the exploitation of thousands more women and children.Lydia has always worked on a wide range of issues: she denounces paedophiles, but also corrupt politicians, members of the State who abuse human rights, authorities that exploit migrants, and legislators who refuse to review the law in favour of women’s rights. With her pen, she defends the most deserving of social sectors: indigenous communities, children, homosexuals, migrants, sex workers, and a whole range of other vulnerable groups. Her information sources have enabled her to build up a comprehensive archive of predators.As independent journalists, we know that difficult times are approaching regarding freedom of expression. The PRI has never been a model of respect for our members or our craft. Hindsight is revealing. And one only needs to look at what has happened in the last month for examples of attacks on the media, for example on the daily Monterrey newspaper El Norte. Censorship is the monster with a thousand heads, which never reveals its actual self but appears in myriad forms, such as that of the news service MVS, whose pressure on leader-writer John Ackerman led him to resign rather than yield to the silence of political complicity.Persecution is still in its earliest stages. The swords of Damocles drawn in order to silence independent or critical voices are advancing stealthily. The silence among colleagues who benefit from the present power structure is palpable. Pathetic attempts to cover up corruption, crimes and abuses are apparently far more important that the life of a single journalist, which counts for nothing in Mexico.No doubt there will be many who dream of a country without independent journalists; others will breathe a sigh of relief when critical journalists are exiled; and the rest of the shameless lowlifes will rejoice at the prospective demise of investigative journalism. But it won’t happen, make no mistake.Some of us have decided to continue the fight. Lydia Cacho will soon return. She is not prepared to leave her home, her loved ones, her friends. Nor will she abandon her country. This break is simply to allow her to work on a security strategy that will allow her to sustain her work in future.To those who dream of a Mexico where journalism submits to political power, I warn you: do not let yourselves be deceived. Such a day will never come. There will always be voices prepared to defend the truth, to fight to uncover the dark corners of the power structure, and to expose the content of its filthy sewers. All in good time. Only lies are in a hurry.Insisting on freedom, independent journalists like us are answerable only to our sources, to the human beings who trust us to tell their stories; not to the government, nor to politicians of any party. We owe it to the quest for truth, for justice, and to the victory of the common good.Sensing the fetid breath of evil at our backs only serves to give us the wings to fly higher. To the prophets of evil, to those governors that prefer silence, I suggest you don’t become over-confident. I remind you of the words of Bertolt Brecht: When truth is too weak to defend itself, it has to go on the attack.So it will be.The original version of this piece, ‘Lydia Cacho, se va’ was published on SINEMBARGO.MX, and has been translated and published on the
    PEN Atlas with the permission of the author.

    About the Author

    Multi-award winning Mexican journalist Sanjuana Martinez was born in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico in 1963. Her work focuses on issues related to the defence of human rights, gender violence, terrorist activity and organised crime in Mexico, the United States and Europe. Martinez has been subject to threats, harassment and persecution for her reporting since 2006, in retaliation for writing about alleged links between child sexual abuse and the Catholic Church in Mexico, and was the focus of a PEN International action to mark Women’s Day in 2009.Martinez, who has worked for a range of major media outlets in Mexico, now works as a freelance journalist, and is also a regular contributor to one of Mexico’s leading daily newspapers, La Jornada.

    About the Translators

    Amanda Hopkinson has been active in Human Rights and literature throughout her life. Much of her writing has been concerned with and for, and influenced by publications on, human rights and freedom of expression. She has contributed, through writing, translating and editing, regularly to the magazine Index on Censorship. As an academic, she has been involved in establishing both Swansea and Norwich as ‘cities of refuge’, offering a haven to refugee writers. She has long supported the goals of PEN, a founding and enthusiastic member of PEN Writers in Translation committees, both in the US and UK, and is an active member of English PEN’s Writers at Risk Committee.Cat Lucas is Writers at Risk Programme Manager at English PEN, responsible for campaigning on behalf of PEN’s cases of concern around the world. She graduated from University College London in 2007 with a BA in French and Spanish. Her translations of poetry and short stories by Cuban writer Jorge Olivera Castillo have been published in the magazine Index on Censorship and online.

    Additional Info

    Lydia Cacho is an award-winning author, journalist and women’s rights activist. Following the publication of her book on child pornography inMexicoin 2005, she was illegally arrested, detained and ill treated before being subjected to a year-long criminal defamation lawsuit. She was cleared of all charges in 2007 but has continued to be the target of harassment and threats due to her investigative journalism. In August 2012, she was forced to temporarily flee her native Mexico in the wake of particularly terrifying death threats.In addition to her work as a journalist, she founded and directs the Refuge Centre for Abused Women of Cancun and is president of the Centre for Women’s Assistance, which aids victims of domestic violence and gender discrimination.Lydia Cacho was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize for an International Writer of Courage in 2010.

    Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking

    Published by Portobello Books: 6 September 2012‘Illegal, inhuman, and impervious to recession, there is one trade that continues to thrive, just out of sight. The international sex trade criss-crosses the entire globe, a sinister network made up of criminal masterminds, local handlers, corrupt policemen, wilfully blind politicians, eager consumers, and countless hapless women and children. In this ground-breaking work of investigative reporting, the celebrated journalist Lydia Cacho follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, to expose the trade’s hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, the selling of body organs, money laundering, and even terrorism.’English PEN will be co-hosting the launch of Lydia’s latest book Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking (translated by Elizabeth Boburg) and belatedly presenting her with her PEN Pinter Prize at the Free Word Centre on 29 August.  Please join us for what promises to be a fascinating discussion, and to show your support for Lydia.  Event details here. 

  • Bodies not corpses

    In his latest PEN Atlas piece, Juan Pablo Villalobos introduces new voices which demonstrate Mexico’s rich literary landscape

    When I was asked to write this blog, the first option immediately suggested to me as a possible topic was that of the literature about the violence in Mexico. I have to confess that my first reaction was to refuse and get defensive; however, after thinking it over, I decided to turn this refusal into my topic, which was what I was trying to do in my two previous pieces (‘I Don’t Want To Be In This Film Any More’ and ‘Against Narcoliterature’).

    My refusal came from a fear of helping to reinforce what – in my opinion – is a reductionist reading of contemporary Mexican literature, which, when you look beyond the cliches and stereotypes, is tremendously diverse. Far from the clamour of the literature of violence, there is another Mexican literature, a literature of intimacy and the body, of identity and memory. Here are a few examples.

    Written as a diary, El animal sobre la piedra [the animal on the rock] by Daniela Tarazona is an exploration of metamorphosis as a medical symptom. After the death of her mother, the protagonist goes on a trip to the beach as a way to deal with her grief. There she meets a man – who is to become her ‘partner’ – and his ridiculous pet Lisandro (an anteater), who will witness her transformation into a lizard. In Tarazona, the fantasy genre seems a ‘natural’ result of somatization:

    ‘After shedding my skin I should have gone to the doctor. But I didn’t, because this event and all the subsequent ones, which defined me as a mutating being, have been beneficial. There’s no doubt in my mind about it. The hallucinations, however, obey their own logic, and maybe this is why there are days when I don’t understand how I lost my identity. Am I no longer a person?’

    Bodily mutation is also the theme of El cuerpo en que nací  [the body I was born in] by Guadalupe Nettel. However, what in Tarazona is a hallucination, in Nettel is the critical employment of memory, uttered in the psychiatrist’s office.

     ‘The body we are born in is not the same one we leave the world in. I don’t just mean the countless number of times our cells renew themselves, but to its more distinctive features, the tattoos and scars that with our character and our convictions we gradually add to it, feeling our way, as best we can, without guidance or tutoring.’

    An autobiographical novel or what some theorists call autofiction, it tells the story of the author’s childhood and adolescence in a progressive family. The concepts of open marriage, alternative education and sexual freedom, advocated by her parents, undergo the trial of personal history, that intimate court from where children contemplate their parents.

    The body vanishes in Los ingrávidos by Valeria Luiselli [Faces in the Crowd in Christina MacSweeney’s English translation]. The narrator, a mother of two small children, is pretending to write a novel about the writer Gilberto Owen while watching her marriage fall apart. Her tale weaves together two ghostly existences: her own youth, and that of Owen, separated in time but which encounter each other by chance as spectres in the New York subway.

    ‘I wanted to have a professional photo taken (…)  just to see whether people can see me or not,’ Luiselli’s Owen says. ‘The owner of the studio sat me on a stool (…) She made a first attempt, and a second. She readjusted the height of the stool, tried again. She changed the backdrop. At the fourth attempt, she apologised. I can’t take your portrait, sir, something’s wrong with our equipment.’

    Just like the photograph of Owen, Faces is the simulacrum of a novel that is not being written; it is not a novel of ghosts, it is the ghost of a novel.

    A body that mutates, a body that scars, a body that vanishes: three wonderful novels by three writers from a country where, sadly, we speak less and less about bodies and more and more about the corpses on the ground around us.

    About the Author

    Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel will be out in Spanish in September and in English in the first quarter of 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.

    About the Translator

    Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Her recent translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

    Additional Information

    Daniela Tarazona: El animal sobre la piedra, Almadía: Oaxaca, 2008.

    Guadalupe Nettel: El cuerpo en que nací, Anagrama: Barcelona, 2011

    Valeria Luiselli: Los ingrávidos, Sexto Piso: México D.F., 2011. Faces in the Crowd has just been published in the UK by Granta.

    http://grantabooks.com/3012/Faces-in-the-Crowd/2578

    http://www.untitledbooks.com/features/features/by-valeria-luiselli/

     

     

  • Contra la narcoliteratura

    La narrativa de la violencia en México 2: tres razones para no usar la palabra narcoliteratura

    Juan Pablo Villalobos

    La palabrita es un neologismo desgraciado cuyo uso pareciera inevitable hoy en día al hablar de la literatura mexicana actual: narcoliteratura. Como buen neologismo, surge de la necesidad de nombrar un fenómeno nuevo. En realidad, en este caso el fenómeno, la literatura que aborda el mundo del tráfico de drogas, no es nuevo, pero sí lo es la necesidad de nombrarlo. En México, el término se impuso sobre todo en los medios de comunicación – un poco menos en la academia, donde no goza de unanimidad –, ante la proliferación de libros en torno a este tema.

    Nombrar es un primer paso para intentar identificar, definir, encasillar, clasificar o agrupar, entre otras actividades igualmente reduccionistas. La dichosa palabrita es una especie de saco, muy amplio, donde parece caber todo: novelas policiacas, biografías de capos o crónicas amarillistas, por citar tres tipos de libros que abundan desde hace unos años en las librerías mexicanas.

    Su uso – y su abuso – está produciendo algunos efectos negativos sobre la recepción de la literatura mexicana. Para comenzar, provoca una cierta desconfianza en los círculos intelectuales ante las obras que abordan el tema. “Otra novela de narcos”, es una frase despectiva que puede oírse con regularidad, como si existieran temas despreciables en sí mismos, lo que supone ya una lectura prejuiciosa. Pero lo más importante es que el término no ayuda en nada a entender la literatura que hoy en día se está haciendo en México, empobrece el debate y oscurece el aporte de algunos de los mejores libros que se han escrito en los últimos años.

    Trabajos del reino, la primera novela de Yuri Herrera, es citada sin falta dentro del incipiente canon de la narcoliteratura. La historia de las peripecias de Lobo, un joven cantante de corridos, en el palacio de un poderoso narcotraficante llamado El Rey, es una alegoría de las relaciones entre el arte y el poder, una apología del arte como pureza, como medio de salvación: “Lo único extraño era él, que veía todo desde afuera. El único especial era él. Fue tan lindo comprenderlo, fue como un suave brillar entre la gente, un como sentir que las cosas son mejores cuando uno entra en un cuarto”. Decir que Trabajos del reino es una narconovela es negarle su filiación: la prosa elegante de Herrera se inserta de manera contundente en la rica tradición novelística latinoamericana del siglo XX, de la que supone una continuidad. Herrera pertenece a la estirpe de Miguel Ángel Asturias, Augusto Roa Bastos o Juan Rulfo y se erige como un heredero directo de la literatura del boom, igualmente influido por la tradición narrativa norteamericana.

    Si el término narcoliteratura opaca la aportación de Herrera, Julián Herbert y Carlos Velazquez se quedan, felizmente, en sus márgenes, resistentes a la clasificación, a pesar de haber escrito dos libros donde la droga es la gran protagonista.

    Cocaína (Manual de usuario), el brillante libro de relatos de Julián Herbert, explora el otro lado del fenómeno: el consumo. Con una ironía seca y sórdida, Herbert se propone, entre otras cosas, redactar el prospecto de uso de la cocaína, en el hilarante “Manual de usuario”: “1. ¡¡¡Felicidades!!! Por haber adquirido la mejor oferta del mercado. Durante cien años hemos contado con la preferencia de un sinnúmero de clientes a lo largo y ancho de la geografía internacional, así que no exageramos al decir, con orgullo, que nuestra mejor carta de recomendación es la historia reciente del mundo”. Sus personajes se debaten entre la euforia química y el insomnio, las crisis de abstinencia, el abandono hedonista y el propósito de rehabilitación: el mundo no es un pañuelo, es un papelito en el que reposa el preciado polvo blanco, y el camino es una larga raya.

    La biblia vaquera (Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica) de Carlos Velázquez es el apocalipsis narco. Plagado de neologismos, infectado sin remedio por el inglés, autorreferencial hasta donde es posible serlo, cayendo a veces – hay que decirlo – en el chiste fácil, Velázquez crea una geografía propia, su mapa imaginario de Coahuila y Nuevo Léon, las zonas controladas por la Biblia Vaquera. “El díler de Juan Salazar” narra el infierno de la abstinencia cuando el dealer falla: “Su regresión se contaminó por las teorías de los relatos de cantina acerca de San Pedroslavia. Una tierra mágica. La droga no se termina nunca. Todo mundo es díler. La heroína es baratísima (…) Decía de la abstinencia que era como mascar un chicle sin sabor. El cuarto menguante de la malilla rápido alcanzaría los límites de la luna llena y la estación completa se poblaría para él de vampiros aztecas”.

    En el fondo, hablar de narcoliteratura parece más propio de quien quiere vender el fenómeno, y una cierta idea de país, que de quien quiere leer libros. Es la lógica del tráfico versus la lógica del consumo.

    Desgraciadamente, nuestros mejores libros no vienen con manual de usuario.

     

    Información adicional: 

    Yuri Herrera: Trabajos del reino, Periférica, Cáceres, 2008.

    Julián Herbert: Cocaína (Manual de usuario), Mondadori, Barcelona, 2009.

    Carlos Velazquez: La Biblia Vaquera (Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica), Sexto Piso, México D.F., 2011.

     

     

     

  • Against Narcoliterature

    This week for PEN Atlas, Juan Pablo Villalobos writes against ‘Narcoliterature’.  This piece has been translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey.

    The Narrative of Violence in Mexico 2: Three Reasons Not to Use the Word narcoliteratura

    Translated by Rosalind Harvey

    Narcoliteratura: this little word, meaning literature about drugs, is a vile neologism whose use seems inevitable nowadays when we come to speak of contemporary Mexican literature. Like all good neologisms, it arose from the need to name a new phenomenon. In actual fact, the phenomenon in this case – the literature that deals with the world of drug trafficking – is not new, but the need to name it is. In Mexico, the term rose to prominence above all in the media (somewhat less in academia, where it has not been unanimously adopted) in the face of the proliferation of books on this theme.

    To name something is the first step in attempting to identify, define, categorise, classify or bracket it, amongst other equally reductionist activities. The blessed little word is a kind of sack, a very roomy one, into which everything appears to fit: detective novels, biographies of drug lords or sensationalist non-fiction, to mention three sorts of books that for some years now have been in plentiful supply in Mexican bookshops.

    The term’s use – and abuse – is having some negative effects on the reception of Mexican literature. For a start, in intellectual circles it inspires a certain suspicion towards novels dealing with this topic. ‘Another drug novel’ is a derogatory phrase that is regularly heard, as if there were themes that were contemptible per se, which presupposes a prejudiced reading. But the most important point is that the term does not help at all to understand the literature currently being written in Mexico; it impoverishes the debate and obscures the contribution made by some of the best books written in recent years.

    Trabajos del reino [Kingdom Cons], the debut novel by Yuri Herrera, is cited without fail as part of the nascent canon of narcoliteratura. The story tells of the exploits of Lobo, a young corrido or ballad singer, in the palace of a powerful drug trafficker called El Rey [The King], and is an allegory of the relationship between art and power, an apologia of art as purity, as a means of salvation: ‘The only strange thing was he, who saw everything from the outside. He was the only special one. It was so wonderful to realise this, it was like something softly shining among people, like a feeling when one enters a room that things are better.’ To say that Trabajos del reino is a drug novel is to deny where it comes from: Herrera’s graceful prose fits emphatically into the rich 20th century Latin American literary tradition, of which it is a continuation. He comes from the same line as Miguel Ángel Asturias, Augusto Roa Bastos and Juan Rulfo, and establishes himself as a direct heir to the literature of the Boom, influenced just as much by the North American literary tradition.

    If the term narcoliteratura overshadows Herrera’s contribution, Julián Herbert and Carlos Velázquez remain happily on the margins, resistant to classification, despite having both written books in which drugs are the main protagonist.

    Cocaína (Manual de usuario) [Cocaine: A User’s Manual], the brilliant collection of short stories by Julián Herbert, explores the other side of the phenomenon: abuse. With pithy, sordid irony, Herbert sets himself the task of, among other things, writing the directions for use of cocaine, in the hilarious story ‘User’s Manual’: ‘1. Congratulations!!! You have acquired the best product on the market. For a hundred years we have been the preferred choice for countless numbers of international customers around the world, and so it is not an exaggeration when we say with pride that our best letter of introduction is recent global history.’ The characters swing between chemical euphoria and insomnia, hedonistic abandon and attempts at giving up: the world is not an oyster, it’s a twist of paper in which the precious white powder lies, and the way there is a long line.

    La biblia vaquera (Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica) [The Biblia Vaquera (A Triumph of the Ballad over Logic)] by Carlos Velázquez is the narco apocalypse. Riddled with neologisms, hopelessly infected with English, as self-referential as it is possible to be, lapsing at times – it has to be said – into facile gags, Velázquez creates a geography all his own, an imaginary map of Coahuila and Nuevo Léon, the regions controlled by the Biblia Vaquera. ‘Juan Salazar’s dealer’ tells of the hell of cold turkey when the man’s dealer doesn’t come through: ‘His regression became contaminated by the theories surrounding the barroom stories about San Pedroslavia: a magic land where the drugs never ran out, everyone is a dealer, and heroin is incredibly cheap (…) He used to say that withdrawal symptoms were like chewing a tasteless piece of gum.  The last quarter of his cold turkey would soon reach the size of the full moon and the whole station would become filled just for him with Aztec vampires.’

    Essentially, speaking of narcoliteratura seems to be something done by those who want to sell the phenomenon, and a certain idea of Mexico, rather than those who want to read books. It is the logic of the trafficker versus the logic of the consumer.

    Unfortunately, our best books do not come with a user’s manual.

    Read the original text in Spanish here: Contra la narcoliteratura

    About the Author

    Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel will be out in Spanish in September and in English in the first quarter of 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.

    About the Translator

    Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Her recent translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

    Additional Information

    Yuri Herrera: Trabajos del reino, Periférica, Cáceres, 2008. (To be published later this year by Faber and Faber in a translation by Lisa Dillman)

    Julián Herbert: Cocaína (Manual de usuario), Mondadori, Barcelona, 2009.

    Carlos Velazquez: La Biblia Vaquera (Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica), Sexto Piso, México D.F., 2011.

  • Yo ya no quiero salir en esta película

    La narrativa de la violencia en México 1: el cuento.

    Juan Pablo Villalobos

    Creo ciegamente que los escritores mexicanos estamos condenados a decepcionar a nuestros interlocutores extranjeros. Escribí una novela que ha sido traducida a varios idiomas y cada vez que tengo una entrevista o que participo de una lectura en el extranjero acabo con la sensación de no haber cumplido con la expectativa, frustrado por no poder ser suficientemente auténtico, lo que en el caso de México quiere decir folclórico. Me siento justo como el narrador de “Amigos mexicanos”, el divertidísimo y lúcido cuento de Juan Villoro, en el que un famoso periodista estadounidense, Samuel Katzenberg, contrata a un escritor mexicano para que sea su “contacto hacia lo genuino”, para que le ayude a diferenciar lo que es horrible de lo que es “buñuelesco”, para que le muestre el verdadero México. Al describir el México que Katzenberg quería conocer, Villoro resume a la perfección el abismo que separa a mexicanos y extranjeros al construir la imagen de nuestro país: “Él deseaba una realidad como los óleos de Frida: espantosa pero única”.

    En los últimos años la situación no ha hecho más que empeorar: la llamada “guerra contra el narco” del presidente Calderón ha provocado alrededor de 50.000 muertes violentas en el país. Nuestra realidad se ha vuelto espantosa, a secas, sin que tenga absolutamente nada de “única” o fascinante. De manera paralela a la escalada de violencia, ha surgido una escalada literaria, porque un número importante de escritores ha intuido la necesidad – social, diría yo – de buscar un lenguaje para narrar la violencia. Se escriben por igual novelas, cuentos, obras de teatro, guiones de cine e incluso poemas o performances, que recrean nuestro horror cotidiano. Comenzaré por el cuento.

    Narrar la violencia supone narrar el mundo del crimen organizado, las entrañas del monstruo aficionado a la decapitación. En el genial “Ese modo que colma”, Daniel Sada relata la fiesta de un grupo de narcotraficantes, fiesta que se suspende porque en una hielera de cervezas se realiza el hallazgo de tres cabezas humanas. Las páginas transcurren mientras las viudas pican hielo para evitar que las cabezas se pudran y apesten, los narcotraficantes comienzan a indagar quiénes son los traidores y las mujeres piensan en cómo dar sepultura a las cabezas: ¿en un féretro chiquito?, ¿en una caja de fruta? Sada culmina el cuento con una admonición escalofriante: “eso de las decapitaciones se estaba poniendo de moda”, “una moda que podría durar varios años”.

    ¿Qué nos ha pasado?, ¿cómo llegamos aquí?, son dos preguntas terroríficas que nos agobian. La realidad nos obliga a volver a pensarlo todo, a regresar, incluso, a lo elemental, a la definición de las cosas, para tratar de descubrir dónde nos hemos perdido. Francisco Hinojosa cree necesario, y lo es, citar el significado del verbo descuartizar en “Lo que antes eran calles”, cuento en el que un sicario con dislalia, apodado El Bóiler, termina descuartizando, por calentura, a la novia que lo ha engañado: “Descuartizar. Verbo transitivo que significa cuartear, hacer cuartos, despedazar, hacer pedazos, desmembrar, destrozar. Dividir en cuartos, a modo de castigo, el cuerpo de una persona”. Y sigue.

    Hay que volver a nombrar las cosas, narrarlas, porque ya no son lo que eran, o porque ya no son lo que parecen, o porque ya no parecen lo que son. En “Ojos que no ven” Iris García relata el reclutamiento de actores para un película entre los borrachos asiduos a una cantina. Su papel en el filme consistirá en declararse miembros del Cártel de Sinaloa culpables de algunos asesinatos. Delante de la cámara, a fuerza de golpes y balazos para dar realismo a la escena, porque no hay presupuesto para maquillaje, acabarán descubriendo que están siendo usados por el Cártel del Golfo para que se culpe al cártel rival de “todo lo que pasa”. Uno de los borrachos reclutados chilla una frase que bien podría decir cualquier mexicano que ve invadida su cotidianeidad por ese tipo de violencia que antes solo veíamos en el cine o la televisión: “Yo ya no quiero salir en esta película”.

    Algunos empezamos a delirar con visiones apocalípticas. Antonio Ortuño imagina en “Historia” que un país extranjero decide invadirnos, debido “al tráfico de drogas, el contrabando de órganos, el secuestro y homicidio de extranjeros, el estado de anarquía que priva y la migración masiva”. El protagonista del cuento intenta huir al tiempo que nos relata el miedo de los varones locales a que sus mujeres se ofrezcan a los soldados invasores para tener hijos rubios. Al final, justo antes de sucumbir al ataque de los tanques enemigos, se salva al encontrar refugio tras una puerta que le abre una mujer “gorda y renegrida”, “el cabello teñido de rubio y los dientes cubiertos por casquillos de oro”.

    Es la patria.

    Posdata: a los extranjeros aterrados con el presente texto, me gustaría transcribirles, para tranquilizarlos, una frase de Burroughs que Villoro repite en el cuento citado: “No te preocupes: los mexicanos solo matan a sus amigos”.

     Sobre el autor

    Juan Pablo Villalobos nació en Guadalajara, México, en 1973. Después de ocho años en Barcelona ahora vive en Brasil. Tiene dos hijos mexicanos-brasileños-catalanesitalianos. Su primera novela, Fiesta en la madriguera, fue publicada en 2010 y está siendo traducida a catorce idiomas. Su segunda novela se publicará en septiembre en español y en inglés durante el primer semestre de 2013. Escribe para diferentes revistas, periódicos y blogs de México, España, Brasil y Colombia.

     Sobre la traductora

    Rosalind Harvey ha vivido en Lima y en Norwich, donde se enamoró del español y de la traducción, respectivamente. Actualmente vive en Londres, donde traduce ficción en español. Su reciente traducción de Fiesta en la madriguera fue nominada al premio de primera novela del diario The Guardian. Es co-traductora, junto con Anne McLean, de El olvido que seremos de Hector Abad y de Dublinesca de Enrique Vila-Matas. El pasado otoño fue una de las primeras traductoras en residencia en el Free Word Centre.

    Información adicional

    Juan Villoro (DF, 1956): “Amigos mexicanos” en Los culpables, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2008.

    Daniel Sada (Mexicali, 1953-2010): “Ese modo que colma” en Ese modo que colma, Anagrama, Barcelona, 2010.

    Francisco Hinojosa (DF, 1954): “Lo que antes eran calles” en El tiempo apremia, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2010.

    Iris García (Acapulco, 1977 ) “Ojos que no ven” en Ojos que no ven, corazón desierto, Tierra Adentro, México, 2009.

    Antonio Ortuño (Guadalajara, 1976) “Historia” en La señora rojo, Páginas de Espuma, Madrid, 2010.

  • I Don't Want To Be In This Film Any More

    The PEN Atlas series continues with a powerful despatch by Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos.  This piece has been translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey.

    The Narrative of Violence in Mexico 1: the short story

    Translated by Rosalind Harvey

    I believe unconditionally that Mexican writers are condemned to disappoint our foreign readers. I wrote a novel that has been translated into several languages and each time I do an interview or take part in a reading abroad I end up with the sensation of not having lived up to people’s expectations, frustrated at not being authentic enough, which in the case of Mexico means ‘colourful’. I feel just like the narrator of ‘Amigos mexicanos’ [Mexican friends], the hilarious and perceptive story by Juan Villoro, in which a famous American journalist, Samuel Katzenberg, hires a Mexican writer to be his ‘contact with the genuine’, to help him distinguish between what is hideous and what is ‘Buñuelesque’, to show him the real México. When he discovers the Mexico that Katzenberg wants to see, Villoro sums up perfectly the gulf separating Mexicans and foreigners when they come to construct an image of our country: ‘He wanted a reality like Frida’s paintings: horrific but unique’.

    In recent years the situation has done nothing but worsen: president Calderón’s so-called ‘drug war’ has caused around 50,000 violent deaths in the country. Our reality has become simply horrific, with nothing ‘unique’ or fascinating about it. The increase in violence has seen a parallel increase in literature, as a significant number of writers has sensed the need – a social need, I would say – to seek out a language for writing about the violence. Novels, short stories, plays, screenplays and even poems and ‘happenings’ are being written in equal measure, recreating our daily horror. I’ll begin with the short story.

    Writing about violence means writing about the world of organised crime, the inner workings of the monster so fond of decapitation. In the brilliant ‘Ese modo que colma’ [Sense of achievement], Daniel Sada describes a party thrown by a group of drug traffickers, a party called off because of the discovery in an ice box of three human heads. The story rolls on while the widows crush ice to stop the heads from decomposing and stinking, the traffickers start to investigate who the traitors are, and the women think about how to bury the heads: in a tiny little coffin? In a fruit crate? Sada ends the story with a chilling warning: ‘this decapitation thing was starting to become fashionable’, ‘a fashion that could last several years.’

    ‘What has happened to us?’ and ‘how did we get here?’ are two terrifying questions that are currently overwhelming us. Reality is forcing us to re-think everything, to go back, even, to basics, to the definition of things, in order to find out where we got lost. Francisco Hinojosa believes it is necessary – and it is – to cite the meaning of the verb descuartizar (to quarter, dismember or chop up) in ‘Lo que antes eran calles’ [What once were streets], a story in which a hitman with a speech impediment nicknamed ‘The Boiler’ ends up dismembering, in a fit, the girlfriend who has cheated on him: ‘Dismember. Transitive verb that means quarter, divide into quarters, disjoint, tear apart, break into pieces, chop up, destroy. To cut into four parts, as a form of punishment, a person’s body.’ And it goes on.

    We have to re-name things, write about them, because they are no longer what they were, or because they are no longer what they seem, or they no longer seem like what they are. In ‘Ojos que no ven’ [What you don’t know can’t hurt you], Iris García writes of actors being recruited for a film from among the regular drunks of a cantina. Their role in the movie is to admit to being members of the Sinaloa Cartel guilty of certain murders. In front of the camera, beaten and shot at, so as to lend the scene some realism since there is no budget for make-up, they discover that they’re being used by the Gulf Cartel so that their rivals in Sinaloa are blamed for ‘everything that happens.’ One of the hired drunks screams out a phrase that could well be uttered by any Mexican who sees his daily existence invaded by this kind of violence, which we used only to see in the cinema or on TV: ‘I don’t what to be in this film any more.’

    Some of us started to hallucinate with apocalyptic visions. In ‘Historia’ [History], Antonio Ortuño imagines that a foreign country decides to invade us, because of ‘drug trafficking, the illegal organ trade, the kidnap and murder of foreigners, the prevailing state of anarchy and mass migration.’ The story’s protagonist attempts to flee while describing the local men’s fear that their wives will offer themselves to the invading soldiers so they will have blond children. At the end, just before he surrenders to the enemy tanks, the man escapes by taking shelter behind a door opened by a ‘fat, blackish’ woman, ‘her hair dyed blonde and her teeth covered in gold caps.’

    She is the motherland.

    …

    Postscript: for foreigners terrified by the present text, I would like to transcribe, so as to reassure them, a phrase of Burroughs’ repeated by Villoro in the above cited short story: ‘Don’t worry: Mexicans only kill their friends.’

    Read the original text in Spanish here: Yo ya no quiero salir en esta película

    About the Author

    Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel will be out in Spanish in September and in English in the first quarter of 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.

    About the Translator

    Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Her recent translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

    Additional Information

    Juan Villoro (Mexico city, 1956): “Amigos mexicanos” in Los culpables, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2008.

    Daniel Sada (Mexicali, 1953-2010): “Ese modo que colma” in Ese modo que colma, Anagrama, Barcelona, 2010. Almost Never his last novel is published by Graywolf in the US.  He began his career as a poet and was one of Mexico’s most admired novelists and story writers.

    Antonio Ortuño (Guadalajara, 1976) “Historia” in La señora rojo, Páginas de Espuma, Madrid, 2010. His writing has been translated into many languages. ‘Small Mouth, Thin Lips’ is a new story and can be read in Granta magazine 113.

    Francisco Hinojosa (Mexico city, 1954): “Lo que antes eran calles” in El tiempo apremia, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2010.

    Iris García (Acapulco, 1977 ) “Ojos que no ven” in Ojos que no ven, corazón desierto, Tierra Adentro, México, 2009.

  • I Don’t Want To Be In This Film Any More

    The PEN Atlas series continues with a powerful despatch by Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos.  This piece has been translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey.

    The Narrative of Violence in Mexico 1: the short story

    Translated by Rosalind Harvey

    I believe unconditionally that Mexican writers are condemned to disappoint our foreign readers. I wrote a novel that has been translated into several languages and each time I do an interview or take part in a reading abroad I end up with the sensation of not having lived up to people’s expectations, frustrated at not being authentic enough, which in the case of Mexico means ‘colourful’. I feel just like the narrator of ‘Amigos mexicanos’ [Mexican friends], the hilarious and perceptive story by Juan Villoro, in which a famous American journalist, Samuel Katzenberg, hires a Mexican writer to be his ‘contact with the genuine’, to help him distinguish between what is hideous and what is ‘Buñuelesque’, to show him the real México. When he discovers the Mexico that Katzenberg wants to see, Villoro sums up perfectly the gulf separating Mexicans and foreigners when they come to construct an image of our country: ‘He wanted a reality like Frida’s paintings: horrific but unique’.

    In recent years the situation has done nothing but worsen: president Calderón’s so-called ‘drug war’ has caused around 50,000 violent deaths in the country. Our reality has become simply horrific, with nothing ‘unique’ or fascinating about it. The increase in violence has seen a parallel increase in literature, as a significant number of writers has sensed the need – a social need, I would say – to seek out a language for writing about the violence. Novels, short stories, plays, screenplays and even poems and ‘happenings’ are being written in equal measure, recreating our daily horror. I’ll begin with the short story.

    Writing about violence means writing about the world of organised crime, the inner workings of the monster so fond of decapitation. In the brilliant ‘Ese modo que colma’ [Sense of achievement], Daniel Sada describes a party thrown by a group of drug traffickers, a party called off because of the discovery in an ice box of three human heads. The story rolls on while the widows crush ice to stop the heads from decomposing and stinking, the traffickers start to investigate who the traitors are, and the women think about how to bury the heads: in a tiny little coffin? In a fruit crate? Sada ends the story with a chilling warning: ‘this decapitation thing was starting to become fashionable’, ‘a fashion that could last several years.’

    ‘What has happened to us?’ and ‘how did we get here?’ are two terrifying questions that are currently overwhelming us. Reality is forcing us to re-think everything, to go back, even, to basics, to the definition of things, in order to find out where we got lost. Francisco Hinojosa believes it is necessary – and it is – to cite the meaning of the verb descuartizar (to quarter, dismember or chop up) in ‘Lo que antes eran calles’ [What once were streets], a story in which a hitman with a speech impediment nicknamed ‘The Boiler’ ends up dismembering, in a fit, the girlfriend who has cheated on him: ‘Dismember. Transitive verb that means quarter, divide into quarters, disjoint, tear apart, break into pieces, chop up, destroy. To cut into four parts, as a form of punishment, a person’s body.’ And it goes on.

    We have to re-name things, write about them, because they are no longer what they were, or because they are no longer what they seem, or they no longer seem like what they are. In ‘Ojos que no ven’ [What you don’t know can’t hurt you], Iris García writes of actors being recruited for a film from among the regular drunks of a cantina. Their role in the movie is to admit to being members of the Sinaloa Cartel guilty of certain murders. In front of the camera, beaten and shot at, so as to lend the scene some realism since there is no budget for make-up, they discover that they’re being used by the Gulf Cartel so that their rivals in Sinaloa are blamed for ‘everything that happens.’ One of the hired drunks screams out a phrase that could well be uttered by any Mexican who sees his daily existence invaded by this kind of violence, which we used only to see in the cinema or on TV: ‘I don’t what to be in this film any more.’

    Some of us started to hallucinate with apocalyptic visions. In ‘Historia’ [History], Antonio Ortuño imagines that a foreign country decides to invade us, because of ‘drug trafficking, the illegal organ trade, the kidnap and murder of foreigners, the prevailing state of anarchy and mass migration.’ The story’s protagonist attempts to flee while describing the local men’s fear that their wives will offer themselves to the invading soldiers so they will have blond children. At the end, just before he surrenders to the enemy tanks, the man escapes by taking shelter behind a door opened by a ‘fat, blackish’ woman, ‘her hair dyed blonde and her teeth covered in gold caps.’

    She is the motherland.

    …

    Postscript: for foreigners terrified by the present text, I would like to transcribe, so as to reassure them, a phrase of Burroughs’ repeated by Villoro in the above cited short story: ‘Don’t worry: Mexicans only kill their friends.’

    Read the original text in Spanish here: Yo ya no quiero salir en esta película

    About the Author

    Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel will be out in Spanish in September and in English in the first quarter of 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.

    About the Translator

    Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Her recent translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

    Additional Information

    Juan Villoro (Mexico city, 1956): “Amigos mexicanos” in Los culpables, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2008.

    Daniel Sada (Mexicali, 1953-2010): “Ese modo que colma” in Ese modo que colma, Anagrama, Barcelona, 2010. Almost Never his last novel is published by Graywolf in the US.  He began his career as a poet and was one of Mexico’s most admired novelists and story writers.

    Antonio Ortuño (Guadalajara, 1976) “Historia” in La señora rojo, Páginas de Espuma, Madrid, 2010. His writing has been translated into many languages. ‘Small Mouth, Thin Lips’ is a new story and can be read in Granta magazine 113.

    Francisco Hinojosa (Mexico city, 1954): “Lo que antes eran calles” in El tiempo apremia, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2010.

    Iris García (Acapulco, 1977 ) “Ojos que no ven” in Ojos que no ven, corazón desierto, Tierra Adentro, México, 2009.