Yuri Herrera's Season of the Swamp
Interlude in New Orleans.
Let’s start with a claim: that the best fiction of my lifetime is historical fiction of one form or another, either in the form of fictionalized accounts of real people (such as Hilary Mantel’s portrayal of the life of Thomas Cromwell in the Wolf Hall trilogy) or as fiction inspired by historical events (as in the story of Margaret Garner that inspired Toni Morrison’s Beloved).
The draw of historical fiction is similar to that of fantasy or sci-fi: the heroic journey, the world-building, the chance to write about something that changed the world, regardless of whether or not that world is our own. It’s not a coincidence that the hit shows Game of Thrones and Shogun have such similar opening sequences. They’re signaling (well, at least Shogun is signaling) that you’re in for a very similar viewing experience, an exploration of politics and power in a world that is both recognizable and distinctly foreign.
Yuri Herrera’s Season of the Swamp, translated into English last fall, tells the story of Benito Juárez, exiled from his native Mexico in his middle age. He spent this exile in New Orleans and lived there for eighteen months. It was a time unchronicled: Herrera states in the introduction that “apart from two or three vague anecdotes that appear in multiple biographies of Juárez, no one knows what happened in New Orleans.” Herrera has a blank canvas for those eighteen months in which his novel is set. That said, I’m curious about the autobiographical connections as Herrera, like Juárez, was born in Mexico only to find himself in New Orleans in his middle-age.
The main feeling in the opening chapter is that of confusion, the babble of unknown tongues, the search for the other Mexican expats, the sight of an encounter between a man and the local authorities over a stolen compass.1 Juárez’s confusion is amplified by the confusion of the reader, who is given few clues about which characters and conflicts are important to follow. Things are happening, but they are happening in the space around the protagonists rather than directly to them. This situation finally coalesces into a kind of melancholy, a terrible admission of defeat:
The minute he left the hotel he foresaw, with terrible clarity, the prospect of mediocrity and monotony on the horizon. His family back there, sad and stricken. The country held hostage by a one-legged madman, deluded he was emperor. And all of them there, waiting. He’d melt on the spot, in the cold, of preemptive tedium, be reduced out of sheer boredom to bones, to dust, to nothing.
This was not the isle of Elba and they were not heroes: they were pariahs, freeloaders.
Just then, a few blocks away, something burst into flame like an enormous match, and a man walked by singing a song.
This passage contains both the novel’s problem and its solution. First, what to do about being exiled from Mexico and separated from everything that is meaningful? We know2 that Juárez will return and become one of Mexico’s most important public figures, but he doesn’t, he’s in the middle of it, grappling with what it means to be a stranger in a strange land, consumed by doubt.
At the same time — New Orleans! — what a wild and interesting place to be exiled, this melting pot of the antebellum south. Herrera makes this turn in the surreal closing sentence of the chapter: “Just then, a few blocks away, something burst into flame like an enormous match, and a man walked by singing a song.” Something is happening here beyond tedium, beyond the biographers’ vague anecdotes. That something is conveyed via fire and song, and it should come as no surprise that a fire is still burning as the novel concludes:
He put down the paper and went out to stand on deck, and saw that the fire was burning furiously. He walked out to the prow, leaned over the railing, and began to look forward, at the way home, illuminated by the glow behind.
I find it hard to explain exactly what I find so compelling about Season of the Swamp. The characters and plot flicker like the flames that flare up time and again, the tone meanders from melancholy to comically picaresque.3 If historical fiction leans towards heroic journey and world-building, this novel is 10% the former and 90% the latter.
And yet there is something deeply alive here. Herrera’s language is beautiful, employing the careful economy of the poet. Consider the following description: “Thisbee looked inward, like a piano trilling on the low notes, and exhaled a puff of smoke.” Or this one: “The badge’s eyes were watery, murky. Something moving slowly beneath the surface.” Or finally:
The city—first gradually, then vertiginously—stopped being a city of cons and wheeling and dealing and became a living creature, an animal that initially begins to wriggle and writhe as if shaking off sleep or fleas and then as if nothing in the world mattered more than dancing.
The images are all different, but they fit into a common pattern, the continuum of discovery: the hidden tones of bass notes, the concealed menace of something lurking, the emergence of an animal, perhaps roused by the song of a man in the street.
As in his other novels, Herrera finds his way to a moral imperative. In Season of the Swamp this center is American slavery, the people he describes as “captured” in the novel. He is unsparing in his criticism, here aimed at a Northerner involved in the slave trade:
As the New Yorker spoke, a feather fluttered in a window or fled the kitchen and landed on his shoulder. The man went Hey to a passing waiter and with an eyebrow indicated his shoulder. The waiter whipped out a handkerchief and removed the feather. And that too was a horror: what have we lost when you can’t shake off your own jacket or wash a single dish, when comfort is your only concern. What are we willing to ignore, or let atrophy, for the right to indolence?
This flareup of anger is also the sudden flame of the first chapter; it provides the purpose that makes meaning of Juárez’s time in New Orleans, that takes the weeks and months and over a year and compresses them into something both real and fantastical, a coloring in of a blank spot on the canvas of history.
Just look at the chaotic mass of people on the cover.
Perhaps after a Wikipedia search.
There’s an amazing dream sequence titled “Melchor Ocampo: Socialist Vampire Slayer” that is worth the price of admission alone.