Madrid: Siruela. 2023. 182 pages.
At the time of writing, the Regional Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants of Venezuela (R4V) registers 7,774,494 Venezuelan people dispersed across the globe. Of these, 6,590,671 find themselves in countries within Latin America and the Caribbean. According to the R4V, in Brazil alone the population of Venezuelans is now as high as 568,058. The majority of these people reached said country over land and even on foot. As in other places, the arrival of this contingent has had complex implications for the receiving country. Midway through 2018, for example, the Brazilian municipality of Paracaima, on the border with Venezuela, was the scene of unprecedented violence sparked by xenophobia. A large group of locals decided to confront the migrants who were camped out, waiting to be able to continue their journey deeper into Brazil. They did not only attack the people who, in such conditions, were occupying public space, but also burned their belongings, including the tents that had become temporary homes for whole families.
María Elena Morán writes from São Paulo. She was not in Paracaima that fateful August evening, but her protagonist was. Originally from Maracaibo, land of petrol and heat, Morán now speaks with a foreign twang, the product of her various migrations. In Venezuela, she studied Social Communications and, in Cuba, screenwriting. In 2012, she migrated to Brazil, where she completed a Master’s and a PhD in Creative Writing. She has written scripts for shorts and feature films. Among her literary texts are two novels. The first, Os Continentes de Dentro (Zouk, 2021) or Los continentes del adentro (Ménades, 2021), was published almost simultaneously in Portuguese and Spanish. In said novel, Morán already begins to explore a family drama permeated with fantasy. This is a preoccupation that comes back even stronger in Volver a cuándo, her second novel, winner of the Premio Café Gijón 2022, and published by Editorial Siruela in 2023.
Volver a cuándo narrates the complications that result from migration, through a ruptured family which serves as the immediate nucleus, and subtle pretext, for untangling Venezuela’s recent reality. The novel opens with the outbreak of violence that filled the streets of Paracaima in August 2018, introducing us to Nina, who rescues what she can from the flames. Like her author, Nina is from Maracaibo. And there she has left her teenage daughter, Elisa, with her “mami”, Graciela. Elisa—whose life has been put on hold in some way by the crisis—resents Nina’s escape as “abandonment,” even though the latter’s intention is to get herself into a position that would allow for a future reunion. Graciela, meanwhile, seems to have renounced her earthly existence after the death of her husband, Nina’s father. Elisa therefore takes charge of the household, forging unexpected alliances, until her father, Camilo, reappears. Despite his prolonged absence (memories of their relationship date back to Elisa’s now long-ago childhood), he is received in a shy but hopeful way.
“The configuration of ‘a loss that we do not know how to name’ emerges in Volver a cuándo as the enunciation of a subjective experience that is also a shared historical experience”
Within this framework, rather than privileging the Venezuelan “humanitarian tragedy,” Volver a cuándo illuminates the subjective experiences of its characters, recovering the contours that give them meaning and direction. The ruination of the country is embodied not so much in queues and hunger (although they form part of the general panorama), as in the unspoken nostalgia, the house they are driven to abandon (through a transaction tarnished by state corruption) and the search for transcendental connections which (in their interferences and instability) are similar to the calls Nina makes from Brazil, exposed to the elements. Ruin is the rundown city and its scarcity, but also the subterfuges that people create to find joy in the darkness (in the midst of the collapse of the electrical grid) and to survive the debacle as a community, transcending old grudges between neighbors and previous moral judgements.
But, above all, ruin is in the consequent materialization of a failed political project, no longer conceived of here as an outside, top-down operation, but embedded in the frustrated hopes of Nina and the other characters who inhabit the novel, conceiving the crisis from the intimacy of shared participation in the Chavista Revolution and its failure. Thus, on the one hand, the novel is able to create tension within the Manichean polarization present in analyses that hegemonize the (attempted) understanding of this reality, while, on the other hand, it retraces and displays the threads that connect highly personal experience with the future of a nation. In this way, mourning the loss of a father merges with material ruin, which is also mourning for now remote imaginaries of wealth, founded on oil, and repurposed in the Chavista era by the bombastic ideals of a “new” Latin American socialism (and the claim of Venezuela as an energy powerhouse).
Ruin is, in the end, the country as a “promesa zombie” [zombie promise], in Morán’s words. “Zombie,” a term that refers to death in life, seems appropriate for describing a collapse so sudden and drastic it is hard to assimilate. But the term also refers to a corporality emptied of a soul and content. Although it may seem inappropriate (and impertinent) to speak of Venezuela as a body without a soul (though, in some areas, the crisis and mass migration have laid waste to a large part of its signs of life), it is certain that we are witnessing the emptying-out of an imaginary geography fed by the Venezuelan “magical state” that is constantly reborn, which shaped our national identity and everyday lives. The county, as a “zombie promise,” is therefore precisely that which “dejó de ser lo que era para ser una ruina” [stopped being what it was to be a ruin], which is, but at the same time has stopped being. Hence the eloquence of memory, in a temporal key, which is present from the title of the novel.
In summary, Volver a cuándo (to when, not where) articulates a comprehensive view of a reality that, at first, might seem to us mere background. With this, Morán constructs a way into what Raymond Williams, in Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977), calls “structures of feeling.” With this concept, Williams attempts to account for “specifically affective” states, whose emerging and elusive sensitivity escapes, as such, academic rationalizations and language, absorbed by the “semantic figures” of literary and artistic artefacts. From this point of view, the configuration of “una pérdida que no sabemos nombrar” [a loss that we do not know how to name] emerges in Volver a cuándo as the enunciation of a subjective experience that is also a shared historical experience. The “zombie promise” is the affectation that results from the impossibility of returning to the country “we were,” as a collective mourning, but also a metaphor for the uncertain future of a void, waiting to be filled.
Translated by Katie Brown
