Season of the Swamp

Five years before he became the first indigenous president of Mexico, Benito Juárez was in exile, an enemy of the state. In 1853, he was released from prison and travelled to Havana, and then onwards to Europe, before returning to the Americas at the end of that year. He landed in the port of New Orleans on the 29th of December, and would stay there some eighteen months. Yuri Herrera tells us, at the beginning of his new novel on the subject, that Juárez’s autobiography gives only a cursory account of this time: ‘Juárez says not a word about his nearly eighteen months in New Orleans,’ he writes, ‘not a single one… no one knows what happened in New Orleans.’ Season of the Swamp, the fourth of Herrera’s novels to be translated into English by Lisa Dillman, is written into that unexplored territory. It is an attempt to imaginatively fill out the narrative of Juárez’s life by depicting his time in New Orleans: the people he met there, the type of society he discovered there, and his eventual escape.

From the beginning, Herrera explains his project openly. The facts of Juárez’s time in New Orleans, as well as the broad strokes of his political career, are sketched out on the first pages of the book as a kind of brief prologue or author’s note. And the primacy of the setting, far above any real consideration of character in the book, is also made clear: ‘All the information about the city, the markets that sold human beings, as well as those that sold food, the crimes committed daily and the fires set weekly, can be corroborated by historical documents,’ Herrera writes of the city where he himself now lives and works. He continues: ‘The true account of what happened, this one, cannot.’

What does it mean to say, at the opening of a novel, that what follows is ‘the true account’? How seriously ought a reader take this mild provocation? We might see it as a kind of knowing joke, a self-conscious elbow in the ribs, that both deflates the story (it cannot be corroborated, it is made up) and, at the same time, elevates it (such fiction is the only way to get at the real heart of things). Or then again we might not. In any case the construction suggests an uncertainty to what follows—an uncertainty which, by the end of the tale, is frustratingly pervasive.

Though short, Season of the Swamp does not lack detail. The swirl of New Orleans, then the third largest, possibly the richest, and likely the most diverse city in the United States, is brought to life through the aforementioned historical record: ‘A bookstore on Camp Street announced the arrival of new books. A group of men, armed with machetes, had made a jailbreak. The Pelican was showing a comedy that night.’ Or, again: ‘opera season opened with Donizetti’s La favorite at the Théâtre d’Orléans, and theatre season opened at the Saint Charles with Rob Roy MacGregor, based on a Walter Scott novel.’ And again, in a different tone: ‘A man named Young, sentenced to death for killing a child, attempted to commit suicide two days before his execution, stabbing himself in the stomach and slitting his own throat. Young was given just enough medical attention to make it to the scaffold alive.’ There are reports from the Crimean War, thorough accounts of how cigars are rolled, notes on sewage systems. The research here is not hidden—and at times barely even integrated. It flashes up in neon signs and is gone again just as quick.

The most distressing historical details are those surrounding slavery and race relations in the port city. New Orleans was a major hub for the trafficking of slaves from Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the city and its surrounding plantations grew rich on that trade. By 1853, slave importation had officially stopped, but slavery remained a defining presence in the city. The trade was still active for those already captured and for those ‘born into it.’ At the same time, there was a sizable population of mostly mixed-race free people of colour. The relationships between these groups and the whites in the city—Americans, English, French, increasing amounts of Irish and Germans—are explored through the eyes of Juárez, an outsider who does not fit into any of the above categories. He recoils in horror at the slave markets, where he finds a man, ‘more pale than white, unshaven, unwashed, dowsed in filth,’ grasping

a wad of cash as if it were the hand of providence as the trader presented a young, very young, woman, an adolescent, in fact: she was trained to work, of course, had done nothing else since birth, but now—just this week!—she’d become a woman, ready to reproduce. ‘Three for the price of one: worker, fertile, and—not for long—virgin! Who’ll pay top dollar, who’ll pay top dollar, don’t be shy, don’t be cheap, be wise, don’t you see, this investment will pay for itself: you buy her and you’ll never need to buy another; you can produce your own hands! Her children will be additional capital, as Founding Father Jefferson said. And if, after birthing all the hands you need, she can’t give you any more, have no fear, you can free her and guess what, the offspring are still your property! It’s a win-win.’ Win-win, the trader said.

Again and again, it is the cruelty of rationalised, purely economic justifications for slavery and oppression that hit hardest for Juárez, and for the reader too perhaps, as we are confronted with the terrible blend of calculated profit-seeking and unthinking, unseeing inhumanity that structures the many-layered interactions of class and race in this half-formed place. When Juárez meets a local printer named Cabañas, who speaks Spanish, he takes advantage of his company to learn more about these dynamics. The Q&A goes on for several pages, before ending with Cabañas’ shrug: ‘It’s quite complicated.’

That Cabañas speaks Spanish is important—most of the city’s residents do not. An indigenous orphan from a poor family in rural Mexico, Juárez had risen to become the much-respected governor of the state of Oaxaca before a coup by the Conservative Party, led by the returning dictator Santa Anna, overthrew and expelled Juárez and many of his liberal friends. He arrives in New Orleans as a political exile in his mid-forties, in search of his fellow rebels, his compadres. He does not speak much English or French, the two dominant tongues on the streets. He takes the city in through its images, and only learns the names of things later. (The first line of the book mentions ‘the badges’ who we later learn are police.) He wanders around, trying to piece together news as well as the facts of the place, through whatever combination of language and gesture he can manage. Thisbee, a black woman Juárez develops some attachment to, is said at the beginning of their acquaintance to ‘speak with her fingers’, making the motions that ask: would you like something to eat? She brings Juárez and his compatriot, Pepe to a barnacle-clad house ‘outside the old quadrant, in a direction they’d yet to venture, with less blanquitude, more brunitude, and endless untroubled oaks just oaking around,’ where the pair eat gumbo before agreeing to rent out the back room. Their negotiations, on price and timing, also take place through hand gestures and isolated words of understanding: ‘She made a face like Ah, gotcha, mañana, mañana, and then: Mañana, she said in Spanish.’

Juárez is in this sense a gift of a protagonist—everything is new to him, everything is interesting. He is morally upstanding—revolted by slavery, fighting for freedom—but thrown out of his comfort zone, into the vast melting pot of the New Orleans streets. He experiences Mardi Gras, yellow fever, and the blooming of the jasmine. He eats and drinks and dances and meets so many people of so many different kinds. And yet, he remains a mystery. (His name, for one thing, is almost never used. He is referred to only as ‘he’.) Perhaps he is too good a protagonist, and the peripheral transparency of his presence—the very quality that allows him to be such an inviting stand-in for the author—works against his development as a character. We know that he has a wife and children back in Mexico, and that they sometimes send him money, but his feelings about this situation are glossed over. There’s an emptiness there, a vacuum which, if we are generous, might suggest a reticence on behalf of the character, not of the author. Still, Herrera takes no risks with Juárez’s moral standing. He remains a good guy throughout, self-effacing and unmarked by any troubling—or even just outdated—views. There is nothing of that sort to complicate or deepen him, so he functions well as a dry and unbiased observer of the city, which is what Herrera really takes pleasure in writing about.

That said, Juárez spends eighteen months in New Orleans, and such a span of time seems to demand a plot—some set of events that build towards a climax when our hero leaves once again for Mexico and his glittering future. The plot that appears feels sketchy and, ultimately, unnecessary. Here are the broad strokes: a fugitive, a romance, a building on fire, a ship in the port. The emergence of this plot takes the work away from what could have been a rich and pleasurable wallowing in the lived texture of the city, its cultures and its languages. This book is not that book, alas. Instead, the plot mechanics start to hiss and clank as things—for some reason—begin to happen. In that rush, the feeling of observation is lost, and the sense-driven air of exploration and glut disappears. There is no more time for ‘the excess, this terrible excess, the glittering excess.’ ‘Impossible to stay, impossible to leave,’ Juárez thinks, but then leaving becomes necessary and all action turns toward that inevitability.

Season of the Swamp wavers between different ideas of itself, at times seeming a loving meditation on the character of a specific place, while at others it becomes a rollicking tale of rebels in exile, men of history in the interregnum before they arise to their destinies. It is outwardly concerned with the variations of language, the cracks that emerge around its edges when put to unusual use or thrust into contact with another, but such issues remain just that: the concerns of the novelist. The characters themselves have other things to think about. Protagonist Juárez does sometimes ponder the questions raised by the horrors of slavery, colonialism, and racism, but again there is little sense of integration of these questions into the deep structure of the work. They remain on the surface, easy to spot, but disconnected from any underlying logic at play in the book. As the story progresses and the plot takes over, the cast arrange themselves for the final scenes and the earlier concern with linguistic fissures is brushed aside, leaving little trace on the thoughts or actions of the characters. As people, they are neither undone nor reconstituted by any of this fretting about communication and understanding. On the level of sentence and tone, however, the novel is profoundly uncertain, flitting between casual and formal voices, not to mention kitsch and distracting typographical devices:

Herrera drops in headings like ‘MELCHOR OCAMPO: SOCIALIST VAMPIRE SLAYER’ and ‘BENITO’S FIRST DREAM: THE ELEMENTS’, which again walk the line between light-hearted and downright silly. Then you have nights which are ‘filled with confabulation, crowdeder than ever,’ and, of course, as mentioned earlier the ‘endless untroubled oaks just oaking around.’ Is this just a playfulness that I am too miserable to enjoy? It’s quite possible. But when you are presented with passages like this, what are you to do?

The most pivotal thing in the weeks that followed was the drumming; no, the most pivotal thing in the weeks that followed was the dances; no, the most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was the concerts; no, in a way it was kind of the hippodrome, which was fun and also pivotal though in another way; no, the most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was the inner courtyard, yes, that might be it; or maybe the most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was that he met the canaille and learned what funk was; or that he more or less figured out what Thisbee might or might not have done…

I can see the argument that this reflects the uncertain and interstitial subject, the man on the cusp. But even that explanation makes the reading no less frustrating. In the end, there are a great many good ideas whirling around in this short book, but not enough form to hold them together, not enough rhythm to make them dance.