| |
April 25, 2005
By Mark Brown
------
The penchant of the Communist Party of Peru, known
as the Sendero Luminoso (or the “Shining Path”), for
hanging the remains of butchered, black-haired canines from Lima
lampposts, complete with political slogans around their necks, has
long been a noted eccentricity of Peruvian politics. As the Taliban
are to Islam, Sendero are a cringe-inducing embarrassment to the
international left.
In the inauspiciously titled “Lima, Peru, July
28, 1979,” one of the nine short stories in Peruvian-American
writer Daniel Alarcón’s collection War by Candlelight
, we find young activist Pintor engaged in an evening’s mutt
murder. Lima’s supply of jet dogs all but exhausted, a brown
animal is slain. The young Communists debate whether the creature’s
coat is dark enough to pass for black, or will they, as has been
the case so often of late, have to paint it the required color?
It is a wonderful piece of ludicrous, macabre humor.
In the hands of a lesser writer, it would have remained a stand-alone
gag or a comic weapon lent to the water-privatizers and associated
free-market fundamentalists descending upon Latin America.
In the dog killing tale, as in other stories, such
as “Flood” and the title story at the book’s heart,
the Peruvian state has fashioned the opposition it so despises.
University professors and promising young artists have desperate
and bereaved rural people scratch an existence from the rubble of
towns destroyed by landslides. They have seen aging relatives work
themselves to blindness in a land where a pension is akin to a unicorn.
Corruption and military power create a magnetic attraction to Chairman
Mao’s insistence that power emanates from the barrel of a
gun. The professor abandons the lecture podium for gun training
in the forests, the painters learns to use explosives.
Alarcón, who is not yet 30, writes with tremendous
humanity and fluidity. The “perverse generosity” of
burglars who assault housemaids, in order that the latter’s
employers do not suspect them of involvement in the thefts, illuminates
the realities of urban poverty.
These stories, set largely in Peru, but also occasionally
following the lives of Peruvians in New York City, are truly tales
from the front lines of what is so casually called “globalization.”
Alarcón’s great achievement is to explore the personal
consequences of a shrinking world with the same sensitivity as he
considers the established horrors of history.
|
|
