A country at war, with an enemy, or with its own people, turns overnight into an open air cemetery. Bodies hanging, left without a grave under the burning sun. It is a collective display of hate and suffering, a collective trauma for which there is no end of grieving. Personal trauma may be never healed. ´National´, collective dramas are the dramas of individuals unable to heal. The suffering is never ending, as it is the grieving.
In Grieving. Dispatches from a Wounded Country translated by Sarah Booker, Mexican academic and author Cristina Rivera-Garza is attentively observing the effects on the war on drugs and the subsequent violence that took over the Mexican society. A social violence rooted in the anti-democratic realm polished during the enormous amount of time when the political scene was dominated by one single party: Partido Revolucionario Institutional (Institutional Revolutionary Party - PRI) who reigned between 1929-2000. Indeed, revolution can become an institution too. Everywhere, dictatorships plant the seeds of death and violence.
Rivera-Garza´s dispatches are delving deep into the social effects and implications of the outburst of violence: on the victims´ families, on women, on the social rituals and the resistance to pain. It is a different journalistic approach that one may expect, because it allows the author to scream ´injustice´ instead of just enumerating and exploring facts. Keeping yourself calm and detached is as toxic as passing near corpses on the way to work, day after day.
Grieving. Dispatches from a Wounded Country is an insightful and minutious journalistic and anthropologic chronicle. I wish we don´t have to read such accounts. However, for the times we are living, it offers inspiration on how to deal with such heavy social encounters, as it opens up the doors of perception and understanding to tell the truth, both in terms of displaying feelings and explaining facts. We may need it more than we wish for.
Rating: 4.5 stars
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