(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Norway is rich in newspapers and magazines. But what we lack, but Sweden has, is a magazine that is entirely devoted to non-European literature. In the magazine K#aravan – which has been published for several decades – the Latin American reports signed by Henrik Nilsson are among the highlights. In The Hole in the Fence: Journeys with Latin American Literature is a larger selection of these edited travel articles of encounters with literature and people now collected in book form. Partly impressionistic sketches from many travels, late nights and partly literary studies. There is also extensive reading behind the studies. Big names are treated. There are the dark paranoid stories from Ernesto Sábato, and the more romantic Roberto Bolaño.
My own prejudices about Latin America as the most tragic of continents is confirmed. Latin America is in many ways an extension of Europe, with widespread poverty. But also a Europe inflated to mega size. Cities, human destinies, misfortune, love, everything seems bigger. Much of this is of course a consequence of colonialismns inherited injustices. Literarily, things started out well, with Latin American writers taking their rhetorical models from Romantic Europe but applying them in a new epic breadth for the vast continent. With modernism in the 1900th century also came a golden age, especially in Latin American poetry, in both Spanish and Portuguese.
roque dalton
On the poetry side, Henrik Nilsson highlights El Salvador's most famous contemporary poet, Roque Dalton, who is portrayed on the country's stamps and has achieved the status of national poet. He nevertheless belonged to the country's socialiste left-wing opposition and was the victim of murder, albeit not by the government, but by a rival leftist faction. A short excerpt from his poem “Poema de amor”, the title of which should be understood as ironic, provides a quick portrait of Latin American reality – with the power of Pier Paolo Pasolini:
«those who were stitched together by gunfire when they crossed the border, / those who died of malaria / or from / the bite of the scorpion or the lance snake / in the hell of the banana plantations, / those who cried heartily to the national anthem // during the hurricanes of the Pacific or the snow in the north, / the homeless, the beggars, the marijuana smokers, / the destitute young men, / those who could barely return, / those who had only a shred of hope, / those who never received any identity documents, / those who do anything, sell anything, eat anything» (re-poem by Henrik Nilsson).
Nicaragua
In the neighboring country Nicaragua According to Henrik Nilsson, political poetry has declined since the Sandinista revolution subsided, and later generations of poets avoid taking words like 'revolution' and 'liberation' seriously. Critical voices have claimed that this new generation wants nothing at all! The post-revolutionary the surrender to everyday realities and commercialism seems enormous. Nilsson compares these poets to jaguars in cages and to wandering nocturnal insects, to birds that refuse to sing. Nor does the utopia of love seem to have survived, or as the Nicaraguan poet Alejandra Sequeira (born 1982) puts it in Nilsson's re-poem: "after everything, after all hopes, all love, all words, nothing deceives."
Black novel
At the other end of such resignation awaits the popular drug literature, a Latin American subgenre of the crime novel. This hard-boiled, violent literary form, also called Novelty in Latin America, has grown so to speak of natural causes, from Colombia to Mexico. With the cocaine cartels and the murders of women as a backdrop, "from sunrise to sunset, the carpenters work on coffins."
'Mördaränglar' is the common term for underage assassins there. According to Henrik Nilsson, narco-literature has taken over from Latin American literature's former main export, the so-called magical realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende etc.). Quotes in the book sound like our own crime writers, a Jo Nesbø, or rather a Stieg Larsson, but on steroids! – Violence is inevitable in Latin America, Nilsson seems to think – with its legacy of military dictatorships and civil wars, continued by drug trafficking and corrupting crime.
San Pedro Cemetery
A strong episode in The hole in the fence is a visit to the old cemetery from the 1800th century in the Colombian city Medellín, San Pedro Cemetery, a kind of Latin American Père Lachaise of dilapidated romanticism and stately mausoleums. In its day it was built for the city's mercantile elite, but it has now become the popular burial place for modern gangsters and cocaine kingpins. 'Foot soldiers' in their early 20s are also laid to rest here; the cross symbol is often replaced by a picture of a marijuana plant or the emblem of your favorite football team.
According to Henrik Nilsson, narco literature has taken over from Latin American literature's former main export, the so-called magical realism.
With a new printing technique, many tombstones a color photo of the deceased over the entire surface of the stone. But the sky darkens, and during a torrential rain the author seeks shelter under a grave roof, where he stands for a long time, with lonely thoughts. Not a glimpse of people – he has been left among the dead. On other occasions Nilsson occasionally finds help from initiated guides – reformed criminals or poetry-writing drug addicts – for his excursions into the back streets and nightlife. These add their stories to the author’s own impressions.
Nilsson's reading recommendations for more serious literature are too numerous to list. But one particularly prominent recommendation is directed at the Peruvian author Alonso Cueto (from an older generation, born in 1954), who, after the family returned from exile in Mexico, describes events related to the Peruvian Maoist guerrilla Sendero Luminoso ('Shining Path'). The novel The blue hour (2005) is described as “one of the most important Latin American novels of recent years.” I cannot find it translated into Scandinavian languages, but an English translation was published in 2014: The Blue Hour. In this novel, the protagonist Adrián searches for his dead father's missing mistress, Miriam. She comes from the very poor population of the Andes, from which the guerrillas sprang. This leads the protagonist/narrator to a confrontation as much with the secrets of the past as with the most neglected neighborhoods of the Peruvian capital.
So when it comes to Latin American misery, my prejudices were not entirely wrong. But Nilsson also manages to capture human richness in all this, and to sense a continuous struggle for future possibilities, in individual or social life.
