Chile: Seix Barral, 2024. 144 pages.
There is something ineffable in the recent Venezuelan tragedy. Something still undigested, uncomprehended, that resists simplification and account. And in a time of tweets and Google searches, few have the patience to listen to a long and intricate account, full of nuances and contradictions, which does not lend itself to a comfortable ideological read. Those of us who witnessed it, at different stages of its development, are always hard-pressed to explain exactly what is happening, how it is happening, and whether things really are what they are said to be. This is partly because we do not always remember what happened, nor do we understand what we remember, nor are we fully able to convey what direct experience has etched into our understanding.
Such difficulties, of course, are not unique to our people, or even to our generation; rather, they are inherent in the dynamics of trauma. In his “1976 Appendix” to If This Is a Man, Primo Levi, an Italian Holocaust survivor and one of its foremost thinkers, identifies two main categories of survivors, depending on their attitude toward what they lived through: those who try desperately to forget, never speak of the subject, and attempt to go on with their lives, and those who, very much to the contrary, live only to remember, and, especially, to prevent the world from forgetting their tragedy. The latter, according to Levi, are those who found meaning in their time at the Lager, and understood it as something other than the arbitrariness of chance and, for that very reason, as something that can and must be communicated.
A similar approach inspires Atrás queda la tierra (Seix Barral, 2024), the debut book by Arianna de Sousa-García (1988), a Venezuelan journalist based in Chile. The text straddles literary craftsmanship and journalistic rigor, which at times nods to Truman Capote and the New Journalism of the United States. In the pages of her book, drawing inspiration from Vicente Gerbasi’s prophetic verses in “Mi Padre, el Inmigrante,” she takes on the construction of a story of family and country that responds to the worries of a son born in Venezuela, but raised in Chile.
This entails an exploration into memory and, at the same time, a register of the journalistic sources offered at the end of the book, which is to say, a joining of the intimate with the public, through a winding method that obeys the fragment and the seemingly unconnected, thereby dodging the temptation of Manichean narratives and total explanations. It is instead “the private history of nations,” which, according to Balzac, was the purpose of every novel. More than a chronicle of the journey of leaving a country in ruins to resettle on the other side of the continent, Atrás queda la tierra is an attempt to organize the past, to find useful answers there to the challenges of the present. An attempt, it could be said, to understand who we are and where we come from.
“In an international media context in which the Venezuelan story is fuel for the most eccentric political and electoral narratives, this book insists on the relevance of that which is human.”
Interestingly, at the same time, the book does not hesitate to explore the limits of its own racconto—that is, the limits of what can be recounted. And it does so, furthermore, in a way that is removed from victimhood, that draws on the mandate of the journalistic chronicle according to Juan Villoro—that is, to give voice to others: the victims of hunger, the pro-Chavez parents, the migrants suffering in their host country, even the son who no longer has memories of Venezuela, but still does not manage to feel Chilean. A collage of experiences that reveal the difficulty of telling, of ordering and transmitting lived experience, and therefore also of discerning, of forgiving, of reassembling the puzzle of our culture.
In an international media context in which the Venezuelan story is fuel for the most eccentric political and electoral narratives, this book insists on the relevance of that which is human, namely, the contradictions of affection and the hidden corners of memory, the messianic fervors and the silent regret, and above all the death, remote for now, of those who simply suffered a worse fate. Therein lies the irrevocable responsibility of testimony: that of offering future generations an honest account of the pain. And, as the author noted in a recent interview, “what they do with it, preserve it or work on it or do absolutely nothing, is their decision.”
Translated by Whitni Battle
