Mexican Literature – corkucopia

The Untameable

The Untameable Guillermo Arriaga

Guillermo Arriaga is a prize-winning novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker. Arriaga’s signature style is to tell parallel stories. In The Untameable his task seems particularly unwieldy in that short extracts from the life of Amaruq, an Inuit wolf-hunter, must interact with a story of vengeance located in the barrios of Mexico City. A clue comes early, in an aside about a neighbourhood dog, ‘a cross between an Alaskan Malamute and a Canadian wolf’. This beast, named ‘Colmillo’ translatable as ‘Fang’ references Jack London’s 1906 novel about a wolfdog, White Fang.

In the darkness of the south poor caged Colmillo howls to invisible peers but in the north of the continent, on snowy plains free from constraint, Nujuaqtutuq, translated as ‘Untameable’, silently leads his pack across a frozen river. In spite of his literary credentials Arriaga identifies as ‘a hunter who writes’. In this novel he uses the wild animals, the hostile terrain and the seemingly hopeless mission undertaken by Amaruq as metaphors for the less romantic struggles of young Juan Guillermo who is trying to lift himself from the mire of the slums.

Amaruq tracks wolves and sells their pelts as his livelihood, although owing to his initiation by, and relationship with, his grandfather, it is also his vocation. Man and wolf are equal in the contest. If Amaruq continues with his quest he will surely die: only two bullets remain, he has very little food and his windproof clothing is torn. The wolf pack sleeps, encircling his tent like wagons forming a malevolent laager. Nujuaqtutuq, his foe, wears the crown, having won it from the previous holder, Tulugak, who was left in a gully bleeding out. Now the new king must prove himself and find food for his subjects or they will perish and his genes will be lost.

It is different in the alleyways and rooftops of the city. Corruption infiltrates every layer of society, even the primary classrooms. Nothing is natural. Children become foot soldiers and fight and die, their pre-pubescent bodies maimed and their minds warped before matriculation.

Juan Guillermo lost his twin, Juan José in utero and is now living for two. The surviving child seems to have the characteristics of an oppositional pair within his psyche. He is intelligent and prepared to study. At the same time he is obsessed with girls and women, getting expelled from elementary school, for heavy petting. He is involved in criminal activities and an enemy of the police commandant, Zurita. But he is also an aesthete, drawn to the local Christian society, the ‘Good Boys’, a group of self-flagellating, Bible-spouting teenagers.

Arriaga intersperses his double narrative with mini-treatises from philosophy, anthropology and religion. Many of these focus on ideas or legends, from around the world and from history, about death and the concept of the soul. They are presented as Juan Guillermo’s perusings since his tale is told in the first person. Amaruq’s third person story might be seen as a wolf fable as the quest is passed between grandparent, uncle and nephew. Readers of The Untameable can learn from the contest between man and wolf but Juan Guillermo must take his lessons from the travails of life in the favelas.

The Untameable is macho: female characters are stereotypical, one-dimensional and likely to be raped. Men are physically strong and often violent with a propensity to murder. It is a fast-moving, intriguing and virile novel: Jack London would have recognised a call from the wild.

Works cited

Arriaga, G. The Untameable. Translated by Frank Wynne and Jessie Mendez Sayer. MacLehose. 2021. First published as El Salvaje by Editorial Alfuguara. 2016.

London, J. White Fang. Macmillan. 1906.

A version of this review was first published on page 34 in the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 22nd May 2021. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

The Pianist of Yarmouk Aeham Ahmad

From every conflict emerges an iconic photograph. Nine-year-old Kim Phuk, in 1972, running naked from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War, or the body of refugee Alan Kurdi, aged three, washed up on the shore near Bodrum in 2015. The 2014 image of Aeham Ahmad, playing an upright piano surrounded by the debris of Yarmuck, is also unforgettable.

It does not have as much pathos, of course, as depictions of wounded or dead children, but there is poignancy and romance in the idea of music floating through devastated streets. The minaret piercing the dust-laden air provides an alternative hint of hope. On the one side is art, culture and religion and balanced against it is hatred and violence. These are the creations of humankind.

A picture is, allegedly, worth a thousand words. And here is the nub. The Pianist of Yarmouk presents itself ‘as told to Sandra Hetzl and Ariel Hauptmeier’ and then translated by Emanuel Bergmann. It is like a camel, in that the ungainly humped animal is, it is said, a horse developed by a committee. Hetzl and Hauptmeier, and many other people, appear in the final acknowledgments, credited as having ‘stood by the side’ of Aeham Ahmad and given him support, help and encouragement.

Collaboration is admirable but it doesn’t make the book well written. The language is inelegant and the structure is clumsy and repetitive. But it is a great story. Or, in fact, two. Firstly Ahmad describes his blind father, a character who merits a memoir or biography of his own. His relationship with his talented son, Aeham, and with the music they make, is extraordinary.

Secondly Ahmad tells the tale of the Seige of Yarmouk. His account of the former refugee camp and its fate provides another piece of the jigsaw which Europeans need to construct if they are to get a better understanding of Syria and its ongoing war. Sitting cosily in Ireland, worrying about the availability of tinned tuna after Brexit, becomes ridiculous.

Ahmad, who won the International Beethoven Prize for Human Rights in 2015, demonstrates immense strength of spirit in his refusal to sell out to extremism even in the most difficult and dangerous circumstances.

Ahmad was born in 1988 to parents of Palestinian heritage. The family lived in Yarmouk which had grown beyond its refugee camp origins to become an impoverished suburb on the outskirts of Damascus in Syria. Because his father is blind his elder son became his seeing-eyes guide and companion. The lack of eyesight did not affect the patriarch’s ambition and confidence. He made his living as a carpenter and a wedding violinist but determined that his son would be a classical musician.

المعهد-العالي-للموسيقا-1.jpg — Higher Institute of Music, Damascus

The first section of The Pianist of Yarmouk details the struggles that father and son faced to secure places at prestigious music establishments where the boy faced hostility and prejudice from wealthier, more bourgeois Syrians. Being blind meant that Ahmad’s father could often get entry to places from which his lack of status would normally have excluded him, and enabled him to persuade school authorities to accept his son as a pupil.

Ahmad’s studies demanded all sorts of unaffordable equipment such as solfège exercise books, music scores and, of course, a piano to replace the family’s lowly electronic keyboard. Although Ahmad was naturally musical he was no genius and success came only as a result of hours of practice. Sometimes, as is natural, Ahmad preferred to go out and play football in the streets but the influence and wrath of his father repressed these urges most days.

The story that Ahmad tells lists events in his progress through his musical training but does not really explore his relationships with his mother or brother. Neither does he provide a three dimensional impression of his own character and emotions. He states baldly that from an early age all he wanted was a family of his own but he does not seem that interested in girls. After many attempts he persuades his mother to find a wife for him and then he gets married. That’s it, really. Although the young couple seem to have been inseparable from the moment they met.

Equally sparse are references to religion. It appears that Ahmad’s attitude to God is pragmatic and not in any way fanatical. He prays passionately only when he is in trouble. It is reminiscent of most people’s attitude to Christianity. Much of the time they don’t give it a thought but at times of crisis they turn to God for help. On the other hand his faith in humanity is strong. He states, ‘whether someone was Jewish or Christian or Muslim, Orthodox or agnostic, gay or not, didn’t matter to me. The only thing that matters is being a wonderful human being’.

Yarmouk before the civil war. Alexios Konstantos

In Yarmouk life was a constant struggle for Palestinian Syrians. They had very few conveniences. Journeys to school, involved three buses and walking, taking two hours or longer each way. Building and labouring had to be done by the men of the family. Everything took forever. Money was short. But they were happy within their community. Ahmad says, ‘we’re sitting in our store throwing another log onto the stove, roasting chestnuts in the embers’.

But then the Syrian Civil War intruded. The streets were barricaded and their neighbourhood sealed off. Tahani, his wife, gave birth to a son. The small family existed surrounded by ‘hunger and death’. Reports came in from the rest of the country. Towns controlled by the Free Syrian Army were now besieged by President al-Assad’s forces and their populations were being starved to death. Before long the citizens of Yarmouk would also be eating clover and leaves. Ahmad’s brother, Alaa, disappeared in 2013 and his parents have still found no trace of him.

Ahmad himself was not entirely despondent. He and a friend, Abu Mohammed started a street choir. At first it was for men only. The participants brought in poems and Ahmad set them to music making refugee songs about longing and survival. The band had the idea of taking a piano out into the street and a local journalist filmed them. The song, ‘Oh You Emigrants Return’ was uploaded on YouTube. Thus the concept of Ahmad as the piano man of Yarmouk was launched on January 28^th, 2014.

The Yarmouk Boys soon disbanded. It was the usual story of ‘petty jealousies’. For a while Ahmad played with a choir of children until a young girl, Zainab, was killed by a sniper as she sang, ‘Yarmouk Misses You Brother’. Now Ahmad felt he could risk no one but himself. And so it was in April of the same year that he was photographed by Niraz Saled, wearing his green shirt – a pianist amid the rubble. The image went viral.

Chronologically The Pianist of Yarmouk terminates in 2018. By then Ahmad had escaped from Syria and brought his wife and children and then his parents to live in Wiesbaden in Germany.

The image says Ahmad, ‘can never tell you what happened before or what came after’. His book can and does.

Works cited

Ahmad, A. The Pianist of Yarmouk. 2019. Michael Joseph.

A version of this review was first published on pages 33 and 34 of the Weekend Section of the Irish Examiner on 18th May 2019. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

From argot to Austen: a wetback odyssey

The Gringo Champion by Aura Xilonen, translated by Andrea Rosenberg.

Some novelists expect their readers to learn a new language. Clockwork Orange is challenging, and so, more recently, is Trainspotting. The Gringo Champion is equally demanding. ‘Yes, they’ve left me stratospherically muddled: my headlights are burned out, racooned, straticated like a panda. Black and blue. Turkeyfied. Back in my hometown they say I’ve got peeperitis – like the green-eyed monster. I can barely see where my peepers are reaching out their claws to touch things. My ears are asymmetrically buzzing, endecibelled by my ass-whuppative encounter with the addos.’

The novel is skilfully translated from Spanish by Andrea Rosenburg. The words that she and, young Mexican author, Aura Xilonen, pour out of the mouth of the narrator, Liborio, are an energetic torrent! Reading it is exhausting but addictive. The words are versions of actual words, and, in reading them the brain is engaged in an interpretative workout.

Liborio’s language comes from a series of foul-mouthed ‘carers’ and ‘employers’ although they give him scant food and no wages. 41vzwXE+YcL._SX324_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg Whilst slaving in a bookstore he teaches himself to read, starting with The Golden Age of Spanish Poetry. By the time the action begins he has read ‘Virgil and Dante, Catullus and Bécquer, Boccaccio and Balzac, Homer and Tolstoy, Cervantes and Dickens, Austen and Borges, Pylorus and Aesop. His idiolect ranges from high culture to the lowest but lacks the normal register that most of us use to communicate.

It’s a crazy read. The language is wild, there are no chapters and the narrative is fragmented. Sometimes, in italics, there are flashbacks to Liborio’s childhood in Mexico and his swim across the Rio Grande into the US. In the ‘present’ Liborio lives a perilous existence threatened by street gangs, immigration cops, imminent starvation and worms.

In a way it’s exactly the sort of novel that I do not like. I particularly hate reading about violence. In the early pages, Liborio, 17, gets beaten up at least once a day. If he’s not being physically assaulted he’s being chased or cursed. It’s horrible. ‘They raise their crushing clubs and give me a few tastes, one after another, on my back, shoulders, and braincase. One precise blow on the back of the scullery knocks me out.’

But then it segues into another type of tale that I would not choose: the unlikely and soppily sentimental sort of Rocky Balboa rags-to-riches boxing story. I hate boxing too. This is because it requires people to hit other people in the head, sending the brain in its fluid slapping into the inside of the skull. Result? Serious lesions. ‘The scruff leaps at me in a rage – I can smell his tense, jumbled musculature, scented with incendiary, malodorous, murderous perspirations – but before he can tear me to shreds, I see him coming at me and just like that, palindromed, I leap to one side and bring my fist down on his right temple.’

To top all this organised, and disorganised, violence there is romance. Boy meets girl, things go wrong, can they be overcome? ‘Without saying anything, just like that, out of the blue, I plant a kiss on her sleepy lips. Like that, swift, adolescent. Taking her face in my hands.’

The Gringo Champion is probably aimed at the young adult market although I am not sure how many teenagers have the necessary vocabulary. Their parents, furthermore, might not like them to have access to so many swearwords; the language is extremely coarse, as well as poetic. In spite of these caveats it is a charming book, centred on a charismatic, if unreliable, narrator.