Scan barcode
A review by longl
Salvador by Joan Didion
4.0
I upped my rating after having a night to think about it. I felt indifferent (or is it ambivalent) after finishing it last night but it's still haunting me. I'm going to try and figure it out.
It took me a long time to finish Salvador. From the date, I can see that it's been almost exactly three years. It was always there in my bag; I snuck in a few pages here and there for a few minutes here and there. Thinking about it now, given the collective psychic trauma we've had to endure throughout the last four years, I can see that I actively avoided this book. US experimentation with inducing political dystopia had come home in a real way.
"It was certainly possible to describe some members of the opposition ... as 'out-and-out-Marxists," but it was equally possible to describe other members of the opposition ... as a 'broad-based coalition of moderate and center-left groups." The right in El Salvador never made this distinction: to the right, anyone in the opposition was a communist, along with most of the American press, the Catholic Church, and, as time went by, all Salvadorean citizens not of the right. In other words there remained a certain ambiguity about political terms as they were understood ..., where 'left' may mean, in the beginning, only a resistance to seeing one's family killed or disappeared. That it comes eventually to mean something else may be ... the Procrustean bed we made ourselves," (p. 94).
And here we are. 2021.
I won't comment on the specific sociopolitical or cultural commentary of Salvador but will say that it's a critique of US neoimperialism/neocolonialism/neoconservatism as viewed through Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and what it's wrought in places like Salvador, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
I suppose that if Didion had spent two weeks in Afghanistan, she may very well arrive at the same exact book but with a different title and more contemporary names. That too is also the point, as "names are understood locally to have only a situational meaning, and the change of a name is meant to be accepted as a change in the nature of the thing named. ... This tactic of solving a problem by changing its name is by no means limited to government," (p. 63).
The continual/cyclical displacement of names marks El Salvador as not so much a country but a forever process of displacement. As Didion points out, it exists in only five-year horizons, in which every montanza, every killing, resets the horizon. It's not so much the events themselves that are important (in fact, they're irrelevant), but the repetition itself, and what's left in the wake at the end of each cycle. It is bound by its history to the point of being ahistorical itself. "There is a sense in which the place remains marked by the meanness and discontinuity of all frontier history, by a certain frontier proximity to the cultural zero," (p. 73).
There is a lot to unpack here, especially when thinking about Gloria E. Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera.
I think most people who read Joan Didion know what they're getting into. Sharp, transparent, almost mundane prose that obfuscates an ineffable sense of violence, misanthropy, and weariness. It's the language of post-traumatic stress and the sites of violence are no longer in the faraway jungle (which in a helicopter flyover, Didion sees is actually not that far away) but are now the church, the embassy, and the Sheraton.
What happens to the psyche when the safe places are now the danger and home, is the place of evil. How do you reconcile that?
It took me a long time to finish Salvador. From the date, I can see that it's been almost exactly three years. It was always there in my bag; I snuck in a few pages here and there for a few minutes here and there. Thinking about it now, given the collective psychic trauma we've had to endure throughout the last four years, I can see that I actively avoided this book. US experimentation with inducing political dystopia had come home in a real way.
"It was certainly possible to describe some members of the opposition ... as 'out-and-out-Marxists," but it was equally possible to describe other members of the opposition ... as a 'broad-based coalition of moderate and center-left groups." The right in El Salvador never made this distinction: to the right, anyone in the opposition was a communist, along with most of the American press, the Catholic Church, and, as time went by, all Salvadorean citizens not of the right. In other words there remained a certain ambiguity about political terms as they were understood ..., where 'left' may mean, in the beginning, only a resistance to seeing one's family killed or disappeared. That it comes eventually to mean something else may be ... the Procrustean bed we made ourselves," (p. 94).
And here we are. 2021.
I won't comment on the specific sociopolitical or cultural commentary of Salvador but will say that it's a critique of US neoimperialism/neocolonialism/neoconservatism as viewed through Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and what it's wrought in places like Salvador, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
I suppose that if Didion had spent two weeks in Afghanistan, she may very well arrive at the same exact book but with a different title and more contemporary names. That too is also the point, as "names are understood locally to have only a situational meaning, and the change of a name is meant to be accepted as a change in the nature of the thing named. ... This tactic of solving a problem by changing its name is by no means limited to government," (p. 63).
The continual/cyclical displacement of names marks El Salvador as not so much a country but a forever process of displacement. As Didion points out, it exists in only five-year horizons, in which every montanza, every killing, resets the horizon. It's not so much the events themselves that are important (in fact, they're irrelevant), but the repetition itself, and what's left in the wake at the end of each cycle. It is bound by its history to the point of being ahistorical itself. "There is a sense in which the place remains marked by the meanness and discontinuity of all frontier history, by a certain frontier proximity to the cultural zero," (p. 73).
There is a lot to unpack here, especially when thinking about Gloria E. Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera.
I think most people who read Joan Didion know what they're getting into. Sharp, transparent, almost mundane prose that obfuscates an ineffable sense of violence, misanthropy, and weariness. It's the language of post-traumatic stress and the sites of violence are no longer in the faraway jungle (which in a helicopter flyover, Didion sees is actually not that far away) but are now the church, the embassy, and the Sheraton.
What happens to the psyche when the safe places are now the danger and home, is the place of evil. How do you reconcile that?