{"id":28657,"date":"2023-12-02T05:03:47","date_gmt":"2023-12-02T11:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/?p=28657"},"modified":"2023-12-18T03:27:15","modified_gmt":"2023-12-18T09:27:15","slug":"seeking-publisher-from-no-way-back-translated-by-allana-noyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/2023\/12\/seeking-publisher-from-no-way-back-translated-by-allana-noyes\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeking Publisher: from No Way Back, translated by Allana Noyes"},"content":{"rendered":"

No Way Back<\/span><\/i>, Claudia Morales\u2019 debut novel and winner of the prestigious Rosario Castellanos Prize in 2015, intertwines three distinct narratives in linked chapters. Through its portrayal of the complex relationships that fill a lifetime, <\/span>No Way Back<\/span><\/i> examines the acts of storytelling and remembering, and how retrospectively re-imagining our most intimate experiences becomes its own manner of displacement. On the surface, <\/span>No Way Back<\/span><\/i> is a moving novel about immigration, but it also keenly addresses another issue: our earnest desire to be remembered despite the ephemeral nature of life. It invites the reader to consider what makes a life truly exceptional\u2014if it is the justice we fight for, the distances we cross, the work we complete day to day, or if it is something more.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

An elderly translator, Dorrey Malcolm, is being interviewed about her adoptive sister, Janet Marren, and Janet\u2019s partner, famed photographer Marcey Jacobson. The narrator has difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction as she recounts falling in love with her adoptive sister as a young girl and their first sexual experiences in the Bronx apartment where they were raised. The lives of Dorrey and Janet collide with Marcey\u2019s in the 1930s when they become involved with the Communist Party. These chapters explore themes of social unrest, political dissent, and sexuality, as these women who are artists, lesbians, and communists are forced to immigrate to Mexico during the height of McCarthyism. The narrator slips into memories of Ota Benga, the Mbuti Pygmy man who was kidnapped from what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo and put on exhibit at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. Her obsession with the details of Ota Benga\u2019s life and suicide reflect a connection to the pain of relocation, assimilation, and the longing for one\u2019s place of origin.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Two Central American teenagers, Oliver and El Gavil\u00e1n, begin their journey North to reach the \u201cOther Side.\u201d They must reconcile the brutal life they\u2019ve known with the choices that lie before them as they struggle against their own conflicts of personality. Oliver is attuned to the thoughts and feelings of others and is disturbed by the ruthlessness exemplified by his traveling companion. Their relationship becomes increasingly strained as they cross Mexico by foot and train, and through a series of flashbacks in these chapters it is revealed that Oliver is gay and closeted. These chapters disrupt stereotypical depictions of young gang members, refugees, and teenage boys left with few options in the Northern Triangle region.<\/span><\/p>\n

An academic returns home to southern Mexico to work on her dissertation after her professor\u2019s suicide abruptly ends their affair. While there, she is destined to reconnect with her family and confront their complicated history, including the patriarchal abuse suffered by her grandmother, the history of a disabled cousin who is the son of the protagonist\u2019s grandfather and an indigenous housemaid, and the class tension that surfaces between her family and the workers who harvest coffee beans on their ranch. These chapters address experiences of womanhood in a patriarchal society, class tensions, and the question of what we are ultimately willing to sacrifice for love and stability.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Interspersed throughout the novel are several stand-alone chapters describing La Bestia, the freight train that Central American migrants and refugees ride in order to reach the United States. La Bestia becomes a character in itself and is a looming presence in the lives of these characters as their dramas unfold.<\/span><\/p>\n

This excerpt, \u201cAnimal Memory,\u201d comes from the first chapter of <\/span>Now Way Bay<\/span><\/i>. My translations of Claudia\u2019s work have been published by <\/span>The Offing<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Lunch Ticket<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>Mexico City Lit<\/span><\/i>. In 2020, I was awarded the Banff BILTC Emerging Translator Fellowship to continue my translation of this novel (postponed). I have permission to translate this 150-page novel, which was originally published by Coneculta Chiapas (2017) and reissued electronically by Los Libros del Perro (2021).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Allana Noyes<\/span><\/p>\n

Animal Memory\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Animal memories don\u2019t work the way ours do. Our minds are so forthcoming, so willing to invent, fill in the gaps. Our memory is forever reconstructing, censuring, cherry-picking. I\u2019ve always admired animals for that reason, especially the large mammals of Africa, such powerful creatures with such objective memories.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was born in 1909 in New York City and lived near the Bronx Zoo. You don\u2019t know how it was back then. The zoo was enclosed by only a short fence, and when I was a girl coming home from the synagogue, I\u2019d hop over to see the animals, always snagging my dress on the top of the iron bars. There was almost no security in those days, and I wasn\u2019t the only one who wandered around the zoo after hours. Ota Benga was there too, a Pygmy from the Congo who\u2019d been brought to New York as a special exhibit, wandering around the darkened zoo.<\/span><\/p>\n

He was a small man, the teeth in his mouth filed down sharp as a shark\u2019s. The excited crowds would gather in front of his cage to watch him take up his bow and aim it toward the clouds. A filmmaker had fashioned his costume especially for the exhibition; just a mottled scrap of fabric made to look like jaguar fur. Ota seemed to genuinely enjoy the attention during visiting hours, but in his down time after the zoo closed its doors for the day he\u2019d wander around in silence, wearing an old pair of boots and a jacket that hung down to his ankles, chain-smoking cigarettes. I saw him like that a few times and looking back I\u2019d like to imagine he enjoyed strolling around the exhibits, taking a good look at the animals from the opposite side of the bars. \u201cThe African Pygmy, Ota Benga, twenty-three years of age, four-foot-tall, 105 lbs. Brought from the Kasai River of Congo, Central Africa, by Doctor Samuel P. Verner. On display every afternoon this September,\u201d so read the little plaque outside his quarters.<\/span><\/p>\n

I suppose he\u2019d been unhappy though because I remember the day I learned of his suicide. It was the summer of 1916, the same day I saw Mrs. Marren sobbing in the kitchen. The war had been going on for two years at that point, and she\u2019d just been notified that her brother, who\u2019d been in France fighting for the Germans, had died. As this scene was unfolding in our kitchen, Ota Benga was lighting his own funeral pyre somewhere in Virginia. He grit his teeth and shot himself in the head with a stolen pistol.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Mrs. Marren cared as much about my fascination with Ota Benga as my passion for animals, which is to say, very little. Although she was certainly a very polite and decorous woman, she was profoundly indifferent to anything that didn\u2019t have to do with theatre or the suffragette movement, including her own daughter Janet, and me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

They thought of me as a sort of wild child, but I wasn\u2019t really. Truth be told, I was distant and melancholy. The reality is that I felt a kind of kinship with that wandering pygmy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even though I didn\u2019t know who my birth parents were, I knew from very early on that they were no longer among us. I\u2019d always lived with the Marrens. They were old friends of my parents and had been impacted by my orphanhood almost as much as I had, though they weren\u2019t affected by the orphanhood of my brother, who I never saw again after Christmas in 1915. I received a final letter from him some time after I\u2019d moved to Mexico.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was in that letter I found out he\u2019d fought in the second world war and survived, though it left him with a limp. He lived in Miami where he was married to a young Korean woman. I don\u2019t remember exactly what the letter said, but I do remember he\u2019d written, \u201cWar is beautiful, if it weren\u2019t so terrible, we\u2019d be smitten forever.\u201d I imagined him penning this letter while reclining in a beach chair before a wide expanse of warm saltwater, his demure Korean spouse at his side. I imagined that as he wrote, he reminisced about the battlefield where he\u2019d nearly lost his leg. Had our Jewish parents been on his mind? Had he filled in the gaps of this heroic narrative while on the frontline, desperately trying to instill some greater purpose into the senselessness of war? I often thought about visiting him but never seemed to make time, and then later I learned he died. Of course, I was unable to attend the funeral because something came up with Janet. Always something to do with Janet\u2014or to do for her.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What else can I tell you that might be of use? There\u2019s so much I want to tell you, but I don\u2019t know how important any of it is for your project\u2014if it\u2019ll be useful for your research on the life of the photographer, Marcey Jacobson. Our lives were only connected by our mutual love for Janet and our ruthless competition for her affection. Perhaps if I tell you my life story then some things will make themselves clear. But would you mind sitting by the window over there? It\u2019s hard for me to see your face without the light.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As I was saying, my adoptive parents were liberal and Jewish; art lovers who rented a building in the Bronx where they held their theatre rehearsals. They belonged to a group of painters and writers who all lived together and took turns educating us roving neighbor kids. Every afternoon, artists and poets came to chat with the Marrens and thanks to that I was allowed to skip most of Hebrew school, getting my education at home, though it was often informal and vague as far as education goes. The Marrens depended on the goodwill of these volunteer teachers, and when no one was around to hold class, they\u2019d turn me loose to wander around the old, ten-story building where many newly arrived immigrants lived. That\u2019s how I learned Spanish, from a Cuban woman who spent her mornings sewing costumes for the theatre, as well as Portuguese, from an old, toothless sailor who always spit when he spoke.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes, friends of the Marrens, people who saw me running around and who had known my parents, would say with surprise, \u201cShe\u2019s the spitting image of Liz.\u201d For that reason, I always made sure to always play near the adults where I could eavesdrop and hear them say such things, and this became a seemingly innocent routine that was in fact an essential part of my childhood identity. The only thing I knew about my mother was that her name was Eva, but that she changed it to Liz when she made it to the US. Why I still don\u2019t know.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I was a bit older, I started to investigate her and her friends and siblings and\u00a0I found out she was born in Germany, though back then it was still ruled by the King of Prussia. She was raised in a kosher household governed by her father, Fred Gustav, a respected doctor in Cologne. She enjoyed a charmed life, growing up in a house in Koenigsplatz with a terrace that overlooked the woods. Her family was the first in the city to own a telephone and every Saturday they went for cake and coffee at the Monopol Hotel.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But something about my mother must have radically shifted as the new century drew near, because one carnival season in Cologne she met Jacob Malcolm, a Jewish socialist and the disowned son of two merchants from Hamburg. Liz, Eva at the time, stopped covering her hair and fled to America with him in 1908, just before World War One began.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After her arrival she found work, first in the grey cement factories of Chicago and then as a spirited union organizer for the first worker strikes. For many years part of me wished I were more like her. Now, as an old woman, and because I knew you were coming to talk to me about my life, I\u2019m starting to think my mother couldn\u2019t have been the idealized image of her I\u2019d dreamed up while hiding under my bed from Mrs. Marren, terrified she would scold me for having snagged yet another one of my dresses on the zoo\u2019s wrought-iron fence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The thing about getting old is that there\u2019s no doubt in your mind that you\u2019ve failed in some way. It doesn\u2019t make a difference how you choose to spin it.\u00a0 Whatever it was you did in life, none of it seems to justify the fact that you\u2019ve become old. Nothing can justify the fact that you\u2019re not dead yet\u2014that I had the gall to outlive Janet and Marcey. It\u2019s hard for me to tell how much of what I\u2019m telling you is the truth, which memories I\u2019m making up and which ones really happened. Since my sight started going the world has become a frothy, white cloud. I open my eyes and no matter how much I blink, I can\u2019t focus. The only thing I\u2019m sure of is that the love I had for Janet was a timeless thing, and that it\u2019s still the most vivid sensation I\u2019ve felt in my life. It\u2019s clear and precise like some understated thing, like the monotonous, enduring love of two old people who wake up together in the same bed day after day after day.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I knew I was in love with her from the beginning. We shared everything, a bedroom, shoes, classrooms, parents. I remember I\u2019d begun to study ballet and she, painting. We must\u2019ve been about thirteen, and our only worldly possession was life itself. We\u2019d hide under the covers in bed to chew gum and look at the pictures Janet had pinched from the theatre teacher\u2019s room. Black and white postcards of naked women with soft, full bosoms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We were curious about the ways our bodies had begun to change, and under the covers in our bedroom in that old Bronx building we would touch each other\u2019s breasts. I remember her linen nightgown, the shape of her girlish body opening underneath. We kissed for a long time, getting to know one another in the darkness, and back then Janet was mine alone, but I was destined to lose her. She met John at a party on the East Side, but that\u2019s not really when I lost her. The thing with John was just her way of distancing herself from me. It wasn\u2019t until she met Marcey that I lost her for good.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What else? I\u2019ve been working on forgetting all this my whole life, my memory is like a sandcastle left in the spray, dissolving little by little. At first you can still see its outline raised in the mud, shaped like a fresh grave. Then the shore smooths out again, wide and pristine. Even your own footsteps get washed away. I\u2019ve always felt that way, as if all the tracks I made in life were buried, diluted, covered up ever since I made the trip back to New York. \u201cI\u2019m\u00a0drunk off my sorrow, I devour myself \/ and my sorrows I cry \/ vulture I am I rise \/ I wound and soothe with my singing \/ both vulture and arrogant Prometheus.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You know Mart\u00ed? I translated him into English, it was my life\u2019s work. Now that most of my eyesight is gone and I can\u2019t read, I recite it from memory, though sometimes I don\u2019t remember the exact lines, so I improvise. Instead of \u201csinging\u201d I say \u201csobbing.\u201d Here it is again, \u201cand I wound and soothe with my sobbing\u201d sounds like a Mexican bolero, doesn\u2019t it? I like to think about boleros sometimes. \u201cWe will triumph with the power of love, unite your voice with mine, and sing our victory,\u201d isn\u2019t that beautiful? That\u2019s the bolero Marcey used to sing to Janet sitting out on the patio at their home in San Cristobal in the evening when the heat would finally break. Marcey would pick up her guitar and Janet would fold a quilt over her lap. I think I have a picture of that somewhere. I took a polaroid when I saw them out there on the patio once.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure I have it, you should take a look through my things. I just have the basics here, but you should go to my old apartment and look through the boxes I brought up from Mexico. Rose Malcolm, write that down, she\u2019s the one who can help you. Rose is my cousin. She keeps my apartment in Brooklyn now.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But anyway, as I was saying, I never was religious, though I did go to the synagogue as a girl. I liked the way the candlelight rippled along the golden altars and the chanting and songs have always instilled a comforting sort of drowsiness in me. As Janet and I walked home hand in hand we\u2019d sing them together, <\/span>Baruch atah, Adonai<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Translated by Allana Noyes<\/span><\/h5>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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Purchase books featured in this issue on our Bookshop page<\/a><\/center>.<\/span><\/p>\n
Photo: Roman Kraft, Unsplash.<\/span><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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