The Secret History of Costaguana

"B efore we start I would like to say that all these books are related to the idea that Latin America will take the North into the next century. There is this idea of the dream of the Indians or, as the French Nobel prize-winner J M C Le Clezio would say, the interrupted thought of American people – that is to say the very notion that the earth should be considered as a common treasury. That is the one key idea that unites these five books and this is why they are so relevant. They also had a huge influence on me when I was writing my own book, What if Latin America Ruled the World? My selection of authors includes South American novelists and economists, a Dominican-American Pulitzer prize-winner, two historians of the Caribbean (one American, the other British) and a Jamaican-American philosopher and black intellectual. This is my first choice because it is one of the most beautiful novels written in Latin America in recent years. It deals with the same theme as my book: the nature of history and of the writing of history. None other than Mario Vargas Llosa has called the author one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature, and there are good reasons for that. The novel is set in London in 1903 via Panama and Colombia. It tells the story of two men destined to clash. The first is Colombian Jose Altamirano; the second is British novelist Joseph Conrad. Conrad is having problems with his latest novel and upon meeting Altamirano and hearing about his life story he pretty much steals Jose’s soul as well as his story. This is a very meaningful metaphor for the relationship between Britain and Latin America during the 19th and early 20th centuries: Latin America’s spiritual lack, articulated as will to universal freedom, became the other side – the darker and anxious side – of the rise to global hegemony of English-speaking cultures. And, just as the history of the pre-Columbian and Latin peoples of the Americas story will become the unacknowledged frame of the history of English-speaking peoples going ‘global’ – and be articulated as ‘lack’ of history, the story of Altamirano becomes central to Conrad’s novel Nostromo. So, in a way, this book is an answer to Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, but also a response to (from within and against) the idea of the solitude of Latin America. But it isn’t written from a nostalgic standpoint; by the time of the novel the tragedy of the peoples of the Americas has already become a farce. Laughter replaces bitterness or resentment. This is ‘history as farce’ taken seriously. Correspondingly, the novel is hugely funny but also incredibly rigorous in its exploration of the links between an individual and the more universal intricacies of time and memory. This book became particularly important to me for at least two reasons. First, because both Juan Gabriel’s novel and my book What if Latin America Ruled the World? share a similar source. This is a short story written by Jose Luis Borges called Guayaquil which deals with the nature of history and history writing. Guayaquil is the city in Ecuador where both the liberators of the Americas, Simon Bolivar and Jose San Martin, met during the campaign of the 19th century – Latin Americans are celebrating the bicentennial of these wars of liberation right now. What is beautiful about that encounter is that no one knows what actually went on, except that San Martin went back to Argentina and let Simon Bolivar continue his campaign. In Borges’s short story two contemporary historians meet one another on the occasion of a letter apparently revealing what happened during that first meeting, and, in fact, their conversation actually repeats the encounter between Simon Bolivar and San Martin; the question of repetition in history is exactly what interests me about this short story and Vasquez’s novel. And the second reason I like Juan Gabriel’s novel is because it features one of the most intriguing characters in recent fiction – a character aptly named ‘the Angel of History’. It so happens that a poem of the same name – inspired by Walter Benjamin – was going to be the entry point of my book. When I spoke to Juan Gabriel about his novel we both discovered that we were sharing this particular interest for the nature of history and that he was exploring that from fiction. He actually blends both history and fiction and I do something similar but start from the side of non-fiction and sometimes use some of the elements that fiction-writers use, like dramatising facts and events rather than merely offering an index of them and passing that discourse as ‘scientific’. What we both discovered is that there are other writers of our same generation doing similar things. One of them is Junot Diaz."