Photo by Zapata

By Carol Polsgrove

For anyone who has lost a child or has one to lose, El deshabitado—a true account in novel form—cannot be an easy read. The prose is often lyrical, the people undeniably real, but the steady beat of sorrow is always there: not only Javier Sicilia’s sorrow but also the sorrow of thousands who have lost loved ones to death or disappearance in a Mexico devastated by “la violencia” unleashed by a government war against drugs.

Two years after his son’s death, arriving in an ancient abbey in France that is now a retreat from modern life, Sicilia still feels trapped in a diving bell, suffocating. Even with family and friends in this haven, he is as one returned from the dead, stripped of his human self – to use the French word, a revenant, or, as the title suggests, el deshabitado: the uninhabited.

Long before the murder of 24-year-old Juan Francisco and six friends, Sicilia had thought deeply about the nature of evil. He was, after all, a life-long Catholic and wide reader; throughout the book he conjures up other writers who have faced evil – Hannah Arendt, Dante. Now he holds ideas about evil up to the firelight of his abbey room and finds them wanting.

Explanations fail, evil remains – “as brutal and concrete as the body of one murdered, dismembered.” He no longer prays and has abandoned any idea of God intervening in history. He wrote his last poem after his son’s death, for how is poetry possible in in a world where political speech has emptied words of their meaning? Yet he finds he cannot abandon words altogether, and now, by the wood stove, he blows embers into flame, takes out a notebook and begins to write.

 The book he has written to bring himself back into life is a powerful narrative embodying not only his own story but the stories of other mourners who have joined with him in the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity. You can watch YouTube videos of their processions in Mexico and the United States.  You can see Sicilia in his Indiana Jones hat addressing the crowds.  And in El deshabitado you can go behind the scenes, listen to the conversations of men and women planning these processions and walking side by side in them, joining in a river of grief and protest that flowed into the very heart of Mexico City.

It is impossible to suggest, in a few paragraphs, the depth of the book that has emerged from Sicilia’s clinging to words as a man might cling to a raft in a storm. Sicilia has spent a lifetime reading, thinking, joining with others in intentional communities, writing poems, novels, and essays. El deshabitado, more than 400 pages long, opens a window onto the spiritual life of a cosmopolitan man, who, with the death of his son, feels this lifetime of meaning-making crumbling around him and yet goes on, carrying his little grandson on his shoulders, the light of love flickering in the darkness.

It is unfortunate that, as we in other countries experience our own violencia, for the time being only readers who know Spanish will be able to read his story.

Michael Herr was in New York writing the Khesanh section of Dispatches, his book on Vietnam, and hearing, now, voices, real voices in his head, the voices that became the voices of the book, saying the things he had heard soldiers say and sometimes, though not often, saying things he had not heard anyone say. The book would be full of voices – the language of Americans in Vietnam (“Mayhew, crazy fucker, he sleep bare-ass. He so tough, man, li’l fucker, the hawk is out, an’ he’s in here bare-ass.” “What’s that? About the hawk?” “That means it’s a co-o-old Mother Fucker.”

Herr had always been able to re-create the conversation of other people utterly different from himself, and he did that now: re-creating the voices he had heard in Vietnam – all wound together in the long monologue the book became. “Were the voices real?” interviewers would ask him. “They were real,” he said. But he wasn’t writing dialogue from notes. He didn’t remember, later, even taking notes on what people said – just on what he saw, the country, the people, and less and less of that as he went along. And the characters were not always exactly who he said they were. Day Tripper was a composite, Mayhew was mostly Mayhew but in real life he wasn’t called Mayhew. Sometimes Herr thought of the book as a novel, sometimes the best description for it was a “distillation” of an extreme experience “in the honest and truthful way which did not happen to always be the most factual way.”

The narrator’s voice held it all together – the scattered pieces of war: a voice deliberate, tense, holding hysteria back to give an account the narrator knows, knows without any question or doubt, must be given. It was urgently necessary that these things be told, said, understood. The Khesanh pieces were full of dread – death and dread and more death, that “laughing death-face” that hid behind the newsprint and lingered on the television screens after the news reports that denied its presence in the war. Death lingered on Herr’s every page: bodies, stacked, shoved into body bags, torn apart – the object of jokes and anguish and casual disregard. Death and love. Herr had loved the Marines, who were pathetic and fucked up and forlorn and abandoned and lost, but who had real heart. They were an embarrassment to any historical sense of masculinity, but there was something going on there, something that was very moving….

Esquire announced the imminent publication of Dispatches in “Backstage,” October 1969, when the second Khesanh installment ran, but Dispatches did not appear. Herr was living with Valerie Elliott, who worked for Herr’s agent, Candida Donadio. Elliott would say to Donadio, “He doesn’t write, he doesn’t write anything.” And Donadio would say, “You must understand, writers spend years thinking. They just spend years thinking and thinking.”

In fact, Herr was writing, but slowly. Elliott would come home and he would have the television on, and he would be lying on the sofa, and writing on a yellow pad: a few lines, dot-dot-dot, then a blank line, and a few more lines. He was trying to give the Esquire material a frame that would make Dispatches a book – a real book with a narrative that he that he could tell was there, even if no one else could. But the high that had carried him almost all the way had come to an end: he had come home from his adventure in Vietnam, virtually the only one of his New York set who had gone to Vietnam, and he had come home unhurt, full of energy and ego and vanity.

Then two colleagues from Vietnam, photographers Dana Stone and Sean Flynn, went off to Cambodia and never returned, and Life photographer Larry Burrows died in a helicopter accident over Cambodia. A breakdown that Herr would come to feel had been lurking for many years, at least ten, a breakdown he had avoided by moving fast through the sixties, descended on him. He had felt it coming during the summer of 1969, then a year later it hit him hard. He had seen things in Vietnam he really shouldn’t have seen – things he had not prepared to see. He had had pretensions, ambition, and he had gotten in over his head, gone to an extreme place where he was not prepared to go. He had begun to sense what was in store for him when someone in Vietnam asked him, “Are you a reporter?”

“And I said, ‘No, I’m a writer.’ And he said, ‘ Well, be careful, ’cause where you’re going you can’t use an eraser.’

 “And I knew I was being told something of extreme profundity. It really made my blood run cold.

 “You know, I was looking at bodies – but I didn’t believe – I saw this guy shot across the aisle from me in a helicopter, and that didn’t do it. Nothing that I was seeing did it, and then this guy said that to me and it was like –

 “I’ve often wondered where that guy is and wished I could speak to him. Thank him.”

Michael Herr talked with me about writing Dispatches when I visited him and his wife Valerie Elliott at his home near Syracuse in late September, 1993. This passage is an excerpt from my book,  It Wasn’t Pretty, But Didn’t We Have Fun: Esquire in the Sixties (W.W. Norton, 1995).

I’ve posted Kentucky Poet Laureate  George Ella Lyon’s sharp-edged poetic response to the November election in Kentucky. You can read it HERE.

When Oliver Sacks starts writing, he may not stop writing for hours, days, weeks, and when he does, he may need an editor to wrestle a manuscript from unwieldy to publishable length.

He once fired off nine drafts of an article to the editor of The Listener, each so different that the editor could not combine them but finally just settled on one and went with it.

Writing about himself in his new autobiography, On the Move, Sacks says he gets “intoxicated, sometimes, by the rush of thoughts,” and they come out in a tangle that requires “extensive pruning and editing.”

He wrote so many versions of A Leg to Stand On – “each longer, more intricate, more labyrinthine than the last – that after nine years he had produced a manuscript of over 300,000 words, ultimately trimmed to one-fifth that length.

One could nearly conclude that it takes a village to make a writer – not only editors but people who love you, like Sacks’ Aunt Lennie, who, reading his account of his trips in the early 60s wrote to him, “I found the whole thing breathtaking. I was suddenly conscious that I was gasping physically.”

If Sacks, like many writers, has not been flying solo, his prodigious passion for storytelling has kept the plane in the air. Stories zing through his autobiography – long manic motorcycle rides, tender moments, and – of most interest to writers – lightbulb moments when he sees a story he wants to tell.

It is hard to imagine how he managed to tell the story of his own unruly life in a mere 384 pages, but we owe some gratitude for that to Kate Edgar who, he says in his Acknowledgments, “has played a unique role in my life – as personal assistant, editor, collaborator, and friend – for more than thirty years.” – Carol Polsgrove, August 25, 2015

I have known for years that Betty Medsger, a former colleague and friend when we both lived in the Bay area, was working on the book that became The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.

And now, it is here, and I see that one reason it took a long time arriving is that it is a very big book: not only the story of a group of eight anti-war activists who stole FBI files from an office in Media, Pennsylvania, but also the story of the world they unlocked the door to: J. Edgar Hoover’s secret FBI.

For more on Medsger’s long journey into the past – and why it matters to us, see my piece in the Berkeley Daily Planet:

Betty Medsger’s The Burglary: They Broke the Law to Preserve It.

Riches for readers in a centuries-old city

 When I arrived in Oaxaca, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in southwest Mexico, I was expecting sunshine and colonial churches, not a lively literary landscape, but in the coming days, that is what I discovered.

The first week, there was an international book fair that featured booksellers’ and publishers’ stalls under a tent at the Zócalo, the central square crossed by tourists, vendors, and anyone else drawn by the restaurants and bands and political speeches.  While dozens of would-be buyers combed the stalls for good deals, under another tent nearby, a succession of writers, critics, and cartoonists held forth to listeners.

The next week, a series of workshops, manuscript readings, and discussions drew Latin American writers, editors, and others involved in the book business to Oaxaca. Writing workshops were held in the public library and writers read from their manuscripts in its courtyard.

Then came several days of sessions on developing readers’ communities. These were mostly held in a couple of the many other libraries scattered through the city – perhaps the most distinctive element of Oaxaca’s literary scene.

 Octavio Lara, a photographer, tipped me off to the first little library I visited, across from the grand Iglesia de Santo Domingo with its twin domed spires. There, in a modest one-story building housing the Instituto de Artes Gráficas (IAGO), I found a series of quiet rooms, some displaying art exhibits, others lined with books from the collection of Francisco Toledo, an artist and book publisher who created the institute.

This is perhaps Mexico’s most distinguished collection of books and other materials on the graphic arts – and just a few blocks away there’s a second IAGO collection of books on literature and history. Both libraries’ international holdings are freely open to anyone who comes by.

IAGO has been a model for other multi-dimensional cultural centers that provide space not only for books but for workshops, lectures, and performances.

There is, for instance, Biblioteca Henestrosa, which contains the works and book collection of Andrés Henestrosa, a writer who made varied contributions to the study of the Zapotec language and oral tradition. A man who did not speak Spanish until he was 15, he treasured oral tradition but transformed it into written literature.

Sharing a building with Casa de la Ciudad (which is dedicated to preservation and sustainable development of Oaxaca), the Biblioteca Henestrosa offers free workshops for writers, and the night I dropped by at one of those to meet Fernando Lobo,  a writer whose work I like, musicians were setting up in the building’s courtyard for a concert.

Music, art, literature, and history intermingle in Oaxaca like old and familiar friends. A stroll through the Museo de Filatelia took me in and out of multiple worlds: in one room, an exhibit of stamps related to Mexican exports; in another, collages drawn from postal communications; then in the garden, illustrations for two postal-themed children’s books spread out on walls open to the sky.

In the museum’s library, I found David Korminksi Katz, the young staff member in charge of research for the exhibitions. He told me that an important part of the museum’s mission is the production of books based on the exhibits. The books are beautifully designed, their production values high, and, of course, they’re sold in the museum bookstore to bring in income.

 The stamp library and the rest of the 37 libraries that show up on a glossy Oaxaca map devoted to them are just one face of a cultural boom that the city has experienced in the last 10 or 15 years.

There are also small independent publishers like Sur+ Ediciones and bigger ones like Almadía, whose books cover almost an entire wall of its originator, the bookstore­­­ Proveedora Escolar. There are smaller bookstores like La Jicara, which concentrates on selling books by independent publishers in Mexico and elsewhere and, in an adjoining room, offers food and drinks. There are journals like Avispero (Hornets’ Nest), which publishes creative work and receives financial support from the federal government, and El Jolgorio (Revelry), a monthly culture calendar with thoughtful articles.

El Jolgorio, like much of the cultural activity in Oaxaca, carries on with the support of Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú, named for the man who funds it, a former banker and very rich (974th on Forbes’ billionaires’ list). The foundation has played a leading role in preserving and renovating Oaxaca’s historic center – most dramatically in the case of the Ex-Convent of San Pablo, which, along with foundation offices, houses an academic center and library.

 The original sixteenth-century edifice had undergone earthquakes and conversion to other uses and was really a wreck of its former self until finally, in the early twenty-first century, the Harp Helú Foundation invested in its restoration—a dramatic merging of old and new. Along one side of the courtyard, the architect raised a three-story sheet of glass behind which you can see users of a library dedicated to the history of Oaxaca and Mesoamerica – and through the glass, the ghostly old convent wall.

Impressive as the San Pablo edifice is, I suspect I’m not the only one to be just as beguiled by the new public library for children – a series of rooms winding like a snake through a hillside site where the architect was instructed not to cut down any trees.

When I arrived there at dusk one evening to hear a librarian from Colombia, just a few adults and children were dispersed through the library’s rooms. When I left in the dark about an hour later, the lighted rooms I passed were nearly full.

Oaxaca’s riches for readers are astonishing in the capital of a state that is one of the poorest, and most indigenous, in all Mexico. Just steps from the little libraries of the historic downtown, street vendors go from tourist to tourist with their stacks of hand-woven cloth and embroidered blouses, while indigenous families with nothing to sell sit against walls holding out plastic cups for alms.

Coming into the street one day from a session on encouraging reading, I remembered the line erroneously attributed to Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake.”  Given the poverty all around in Oaxaca, I wondered: Was I hearing a variation in these sessions – “Let them read books”?

As in Paris at the time of the French Revolution, discontent rumbles through the streets of Oaxaca. In 2006, rising up against what they saw as the Oaxaca state governor’s indifference to people’s needs, thousands occupied the city center where the libraries are concentrated. The protest began in May with a strike by teachers. Others joined their marches, streets were barricaded, the tourist trade turned upside down, and death squads attacked demonstrators. The federal riot police came in. Six months and at least a dozen deaths after it started, the uprising was over.

But unrest still simmers, and police keep a watchful eye on the city. While I was there, the city hosted a conference of representatives from other UNESCO world heritage sites, and overnight the number of policemen in the tourist area ­– already plentiful by American standards – multiplied. Open trucks bearing police with military-style automatic weapons patrolled the streets.

Then, too, there is the wave of drug-related violence sweeping across Mexico. In a session on reading communities held in Proveedora Escolar, the director of the bookstore’s  radio program on books – Oscar Javier Martínez – linked the crisis of violence in Mexico with the fact that too few Mexicans read.

After the session, he told me he got the idea from Mexican poet José Emilio Pocheco but Javier himself elaborated. In a country where many children are growing up in families that have been destroyed or are themselves violent, he said, the only way those children will learn empathy is by reading – seeing in the characters of novels the humanity of others.

The problem is, by and large, most Mexicans don’t read books. Although Mexico’s official literacy rate approaches 100%, studies show the rate of book reading considerably below the United States’. That’s not surprising, given the low incomes and high prices of books in Mexico. As one librarian told me, Mexicans are busy “trying to survive.”

Indeed. Threaded through my own exploration of Oaxaca’s literary life were confrontations with naked need: a child peddling toothpicks in a cafe, a hunched man in a sombrero offering me his little wooden spoons for a dollar apiece, insisting, over and over, as if I just did not understand: “Es para sal. Es para sal.” (“it’s for salt. It’s for salt.”)

In such a context, I suppose it would be possible to dismiss the little libraries of Oaxaca as entertainments for the privileged, but I can’t help but think that their spaces incubate thoughts that spill into the streets – just as after the 2006 uprising, demonstrators’ graffiti spilled into an IAGO exhibit dedicated to their art.

In one of the Jolgorio articles celebrating IAGO’s 25th anniversary, Pedro Valtierra, the director of Cuartoscuro, a national photo magazine, speculated that cultural centers like those in Oaxaca could be the true solution for social problems in many parts of Mexico.  As a historian, I know there are no single solutions to anything, but perhaps it is not too much to hope that through these open doors will blow winds of change. – Carol Polsgrove, January 2014. Photos by Carol Polsgrove.