Cristina rivera garza habia mucha neblina forest

A Geological Writing by Claudia Peña Claros

The Dying of the Senses

There are trees in “Destello/ Flare”, the first short story included in Los árboles/ The Trees, a collection authored by Bolivian writer Claudia Peña Claros, a novelist and a poet. These trees, which oversee everything in the countryside, look as if they were suspended in midair. “Do they feel any attachment?” Someone or something asks. An impersonal voice, a point of view firmly anchored in the third personal singular, relates the time, perhaps ancestral, that signaled their evolution: “Many rains have passed by above those trees and lots of winds and more moons and, when the forest was still here, wild animals, the rituals of the wild packs.” Later on, a similar impersonal voice wonders aloud: “With what eyes would trees look down on this man still wrestling down there, in the red mud of the earth.” The questions about the perception of trees, about the capacity of trees to perceive its surroundings and react to them, continue, facilitating the unfolding of a seemingly simple plot: a man has been killed and, very slowly, at a snail pace, death is dawning on him as he finds himself shoeless and in the open, barely covered by the foliage of the trees. He did not expect the three shots that opened his chest, ripping the night apart with their flares. Death is overcoming him little by little, and language, very much like the dying man himself, is struggling in the mud to open the experience up to him and, simultaneously, to others. The fallen man is learning about his own death while we, the readers, overlook and pry, barely containing our breath. Is this really happening? Is death what is behind this fistful of unruly words? As the senses break down and language refuses to convey meaning as if nothing were happening, at times stuck in a knot of its own making, and at times loosening its own grip in never ending digressions, who or what is in charge of registering in such a great detail t

Earlier this year, the Juan Rulfo Foundation withdrew from its plan to participate in the 9th annual Book and Rose Fair at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The Foundation objected to Cristina Rivera Garza’s scheduled presentation of her new book on Rulfo, Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé que (There was a lot of fog or smoke or I do not know), which it considered to be “defamatory.”

Garza’s book offers Juan Rulfo as an embodiment of modernity’s double bind. Known primarily for El Llano en Llamas (The Plain in Flames) a short story collection from and his novel Pedro Páramo from , Rulfo worked also for Goodrich-Euzkadi, a transnational company responsible for expanding the tourism industry in Mexico. He was also an advisor and researcher for the Papaloapan Commission, the state organization charged with extracting “natural resources” from Southern Mexico; most notably, the commission installed the Miguel Alemán Dam in Nuevo Soyaltepec in Oaxaca. Rulfo legitimized the emblematic projects of Mexican modernity in the mid-twentieth century even as he memorialized the very peoples that his work risked erasing in his writing and photography. Rivera Garza compares Rulfo’s vision to that of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History: a retrospective gaze that observes—even relishes—all the details of the disaster caused by the winds pulling it toward the future.

Modernization and memorilization coincided in Rulfo’s position as head of publishing at the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI), a state institution created to look after the needs of all indigenous Mexicans. Founded in with the goal of integrating indigenous peoples into “national” culture by “acculturating them,” and thus “elevating their condition,” INI’s policies were characterized by a homogenization of Mexico’s “ethnic groups. This understanding of indigenity as a problem to be solved is what links Goodri

Two women stand at the edge of a plaza in Zaragoza, Coahuila, making tortillas by hand. Their “precise movements, perfectly coordinated” suggest to Cristina Rivera Garza—in her deeply researched family memoir Autobiografía del algodón ()—the elegant routines of synchronized swimming. She and her family buy thirty tortillas from these women before driving back to Houston. There, standing in the kitchen, they eat them one after another. In the process, we read, something dissolves, transforming into something else:

Soon, Zaragoza will disappear into our open mouths and will form part of our alimentary bolus thanks to our saliva enzymes, the fate of digestion. Then, once it’s broken down, decomposed by teeth and gastric juices, it will pass into our stomachs, where the molecular bonds will be broken, turning into nutrients. We will walk, we will be kept upright, thanks to the nourishment from Zaragoza.

Why describe digestion in such technical detail? Reading this passage, we are led to imagine a physical trace that is geographical, social, historical, and biological. The food being enjoyed and absorbed into the body comes from elsewhere, which means that it indexes that place, and it was made by other hands, which means that something of those hands remains present. Those hands, in turn, in their precision and coordination, echo earlier “choreographies” of daily life in the same place, where lives were lived that persist in the present, through the habits that are passed down through gesture, language, and culture.

Autobiografía del algodón ends with this scene: three family members standing in a kitchen, talking about Dostoyevsky and eating flour tortillas while they prepare dinner. They had sought, earlier in the day and without luck, to find a family burial place. The reader has followed them through vivid landscapes, bureaucracy, and town life, and in the preceding chapters, through an exploration of

David Naimon: Today&#;s program is brought to you in part by Manzanita Papers, a literary subscription box dedicated to incredible books that have flown under the radar. Each month, a different writer selects a book they cherish and writes a personalized introduction about why you might too. With each month&#;s book, subscribers receive this personalized introduction to it, as well as custom artwork based on the book itself in the form of postcards and bookmarks. So far this year, readers have been treated to Walking on Cowrie Shells by Nana Nkweti, Revenge by Yōko Ogawa, Silk Poems by Jen Bervin, and Labrador by Kathryn Davis with personal introductions by writing luminaries such as Karen Russell, Kate Bernheimer, and Ander Monson writing about the books they love, books that deserve more love, that they want to share with you. If you&#;d like to learn more or if you&#;d like to be surprised and delighted by some great book mail each month, find Manzanita Papers on Instagram or visit to subscribe now. Today&#;s episode is also brought to you by Courtney Maum&#;s The Year of the Horses, which Dani Shapiro calls, “Searing, lucid, tender and wise.” The memoir tells the story of Maum&#;s return to horseback riding after many years away. Charting how she finds her way back to herself not only as a rider but as a mother, wife, daughter, writer, and woman. Alternating timelines and braided with historical portraits of women and horses alongside history’s attempts to tame both parties, The Year of the Horses is an inspiring love letter to the power of animals—and humans—to heal the mind and the heart. Says Lisa Taddeo, “Gorgeously written, wry but loving, heartbreaking and, most of all, roving. . . . The Year of the Horses is a memoir of power and beauty and pain that moves across the world like the beautiful horses that carry it.” The Year of the Horses is out on May 3rd from Tin House and available for pre-order now. Today, I&#;m excited to welcome Cristina Rivera G