Chilean-American author and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman is both a leading Latin American man of letters and one of the most important cultural and political critics living in the United States. Among his many works is world-renowned play Death and the Maiden subsequently made into the 1994 film by director Roman Polanski starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley.
With recently published Darwin’s Ghosts Mr. Dorfman has written a novel for our time. Penetrating, profound and highly stimulating, Darwin’s Ghosts grabbed me right from the first pages and kept me eagerly reading on – the story was so engrossing, almost to the point of hypnotic, I could hardly put the book down.
Here’s the opening: the tale’s narrator, American whiz kid Roy, short for Fitzroy, Foster recounts the defining event of his life back in 1981: on his fourteenth birthday, having just masturbated for the very first time (bye, bye boyhood), he joins his mom, dad and two younger brothers downstairs for a birthday celebration. His father wants to catch this special Polaroid moment with his new SX-70 and “click” takes a photo of his family all smiling for the camera. Perfect shot, only there’s a problem – Roy's head is not Roy's; it’s the head of a young man with black eyes, high cheekbones, snub nose, thick lips and bad Beatles haircut looking straight out at the photographer with one hell of a rebellious, inscrutable attitude.
Dad can’t believe his eyes. Must be a technical glitch (Mr. Foster is Vice President of Marketing for the Polaroid Company). He insists on another shot and yet another, this time a close up. “Click.” "Click." Same result. Roy snatches the close up photo from shocked Dad and the entire family peers at the stranger’s strange head atop Roy's familiar body.
Thus, in the rich tradition of Latin American magical realism, we have a tale of the fabulous, but not in a Colombian village, not in a suburb of Santiago, Chile, not in an Amazonian outpost, not in an ancient Mayan temple, but set in good old apple pie Yankee New England, Cambridge, Massachusetts to be specific.
So, the question arises – how will our affluent all-American family deal with an infusion of Latin American fabuloso instantly injected into their lives? Perhaps predictably, Mom and Dad’s initial reaction is entirely pragmatic, to investigate the strange phenomenon using the power of reason via medicine, science and especially technology.
As a sensible first step, Mr. Foster stacks up every camera in the house, not only other Polaroids but also a number from archrival Kodak. “Click” “Click” Click” “Click” “Click.” He then goes off to develop the photos himself and returns home to announce with glee, “It’s every photo from every camera. All brands are equally liable! Look, look, look!” Roy is not surprised his father’s first priority is Polaroid since his father is a company man through and through and his family has a history with famous Polaroid stretching back to his paternal grandfather.
The final, irrevocable decision is made jointly by Roy's parents: none of this is to be made public (ah, the ravenous media and even more ravenous researchers can't get their hands on our son Roy!). Other than several visits to be tested by X-ray machines and a plethora of other medical devises, Roy is to remain indoors since, after all, everyone nowadays owns a camera and there always looms the possibility of a stray photo.
But there’s one other critically important person in Roy’s confined orbit, the love of his life he discovered back when a member of the school swim team: Cameron aka Cam Wood. Cam is also a whiz kid, eventually studying physics and biology at MIT and graduating in a record three years.
Cam picks up more directly with Roy after college and both form a husband/wife detective team to hunt down answers to two key questions: 1) Who is Roy's strange visitor, and 2) What does he want? Actually, the love Roy and Cam have for each other gives the tale an epic, almost mythic quality, one of the more endearing, elegant aspects of the novel.
And herein lies much of the juice of Darwin’s Ghosts. The young couple’s investigations and research lead to a number of disturbing, despicable chapters in the treatment of indigenous peoples in centuries past, brutality and dehumanization focused particularly within the nineteenth century. One such atrocity – eleven tribespeople from Patagonia in southern Chile kidnapped in 1889 to be put on exhibit as a human zoo in Paris.
Those human zoos where the product of many, many decades of harsh, thuggish judgement made by people from the world and culture of Europe. Roy unearths one such culprit, the son of Captain Cook, a young man by the name of Georg Forster (gulp! – one letter away from his own name). Georg joined his father on a voyage around the world in 1772-1775 and described the Patagonians as filthy and degenerate before going on to say “the whole assemblage of their features that formed the most loathsome picture of misery and wretchedness to which human nature can possibly be reduced," and capped off his rant by accusing the Patagonians of being “insensible to the superiority of European civilization.”
As ruthless and cruel as this chapter of history, let me point out the tone of this well-written novel is not heavy-handed or overly preachy. In many respects Roy is well aware of the dangers of preaching since his mother stressed the fact missionaries destroyed much of aboriginal cultures under the pretext of saving souls.
Reading Mr. Dorfman’s novel, I hear echoes of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent as well as a number of other works by the Uruguayan author who wrote in an attempt to rescue the kidnapped memory of Latin America. One particular quote stand out: “In 1492, the natives discovered they were Indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and dress, and had sent to be burnt alive whoever worships the sun, the moon, the earth and the rain that wets it.”
I link this Eduardo Galeano quote with the very first lines of Darwin’s Ghosts: “It came a bit after dawn, the dark condition that was to plague me, so sudden that I was unable at first to give it a name. How to know right away that it had been incubating inside some ancient zone of myself and my ancestors for one hundred years, begin to guess that it had infected the vast, blind world for far longer?”
To what extent are we as members of a highly technical, highly advanced civilization carrying the ghosts of other peoples, other cultures, other civilizations? To explore such questions, I recommend Ariel Dorfman’s well-researched, compelling, philosophical novel. I guarantee it will prove a reading experience that will stick with you for a long time.
19th century stupidity and cruelty in action - Indigenous tribespeople kidnapped and brought to Europe to be put on display as part of a human zoo
Comments
Post a Comment