Madrid: Lecturas de arraigo. 2023. 96 pages.
The latest book from the Venezuelan author and researcher Raquel Rivas Rojas, who lives in Scotland, is a set of nine stories that revolve around Isa and Eli. These two migrant characters represent a good amount of Latin Americans and people in the twenty-first century: travelers who find themselves (and look for themselves), see the world as a fascinating multicultural and multilingual spectacle, make life in the transitions (with their uncertainty), and think about their shared roots, histories, and memories. Their job as language interpreters indicates their status among various codes and cultures.
In her novelistic and poetic works, Rivas Rojas has built a personal writing style. She often creates uprooted travelers; her prose is artisanal, with delicate textures, usually expressed with a calm rhythm, removed from breakdowns and excitements. Estación de ruegos joins that stylistic universe and gives it consistency. For those who enjoy intertextual connections, there are nods to Rivas Rojas’s other literary worlds, like El patio del vecino (2013). Additionally, to delve into the experiences of this book, the author adds a new formal dimension to her work. Readers interested in the combination of different formats, to appreciate books as a modeled piece, will like the illustrations by Kevin Torrado. The visual poetry expands the experience of the characters and readers by way of oneiric visions.
Starting with the fundamental elements of the journey, these stories connect us to our humanity and its social and existential dimension—who doesn’t ask themself what it means to be human when traveling and listening to other languages, when learning to be uprooted, when telling stories, when finding themself in a fragmented and imperfect romantic relationship? Questions like these await the reader-travelers.
I mention romantic relationships because they constitute a somewhat novel dynamic in the narrative universe of Rivas Rojas, which powerfully emerges—love appears as much in its splendor and perseverance as it does in its darker forms with jealousy, infidelity, guilt, and pain. As readers, we travel through certain emotional paradoxes, through questions about the moral dimension of pleasure and love, and through relationships that are vital yet outside of matrimonial and traditional structures. Like the seas the characters traverse, the author shows us the parallels between living in a transitory and fragmentary way, the state of life, and affective relationships, through the bonds that are made and remade.
These characters go through many journeys: from South Africa to Argentina, each place and culture bringing lessons and speaking on the state of the traveler (i.e. of human beings). Logically, the settings tend to be sites of transit. In train stations, like the one from the book’s title, we observe the “spectacle of the world” and emotional situations that connect us to one another and to our own stories. In cafés, during journeys through small towns, we see communities where being the other, the foreigner, almost excludes the travelers from human status, putting them in a risky position. It is no accident that in the book’s first story, “Toro negro,” the author shows us that dimension of traveling unfortunately known by many—even in the twenty-first century, being a foreigner exposes people to the instinctive and violent intolerance of those who cling to the idea of the nation and nationalistic imagery. The author shows us physical and psychological zones of cultures in which being foreign implies a fate of not being… and a position at its own risk.
Although one of the existential challenges of these characters is their awareness of the ephemerality of life, the book written by Rivas Rojas and its artistic nature show that it is worth telling those universal experiences.
Although I have said that Rivas Rojas often models her writing with a calm rhythm and tone, stories like “Toro negro” prove that the author knows how to utilize those elements to create tense atmospheres. As a good traveler, a good reader of the world’s spectacle, the author knows that there are invisible and ancient beliefs and prejudices in every culture that manifest in various ways. In a small village café, two travelers can meet their end facing xenophobic locals and these tensions, with their historical significance, live within the glances, in lethal silences.
Fortunately, those problems do not exhaust this book’s spectrum of experiences, which has a positive close—Isa looks to assimilate into the host country through a new year’s ritual, looking into the future. The main challenge for these uprooted characters would appear to be looking for a chance at establishing roots through a relationship with someone and, curiously, through looking at the world through travel. Eli and Isa build a sense of home in their reunions in different cities, in the resources and categories with which they grasp experience, i.e. the world. The journey is categorized by sporadic moments and relationships which, like many of us immigrants know, can be a form of building family, love, and a new identity or one that retains something from life in the country where they felt rooted.
One of the ways this book establishes an accurate parallel between the journey and the text is through the senses—attention to the world and the other heightens our awareness. It is the awareness that in our mother tongue we learn to view and navigate the world, that with our loved ones we sometimes understand each other without speaking, or that we do not always understand others. It is the awareness of the body and perceptions and their relation to memory and identity.
For this book’s readers, it is a journey with diverse dynamics: traveling to breathtaking places, losing oneself, observing human relationships and how they work, reading the streets and dramas of a generation, including the current refugee crises. Dynamics like coping with the traumas and memories from life in the land where we were born, imagining a different version of the past in that land, debating between believing in destiny or in choosing one’s own, choosing between one relationship and another or between relinquishing the materiality of the past or preserving it.
Although one of the existential challenges of these characters is their awareness of the ephemerality of life, the book written by Rivas Rojas and its artistic nature show that it is worth telling those universal experiences. Therefore, when Isa and Eli visit the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, inspired by Orhan Pamuk’s novel, they talk about transforming fiction into a concrete space. Estación de ruegos seems to achieve the inverse effect, rather indicating that the driving force continues to be imagination. With contemporary characters, references, and descriptions of cities, objects, and cultural experiences, she creates stories and a powerful literary space-time to travel and accompany the other travelers. All this, and certain connections between the book’s stories, reminds us that we too are beings from stories and memories shared with others. Let’s read this book as travelers, observing “the spectacle of the world.”
