Dissatisfaction
Imagine traveling thousands of miles through dangerous territory to reach what you thought was paradise, only to discover that you brought all your problems with you, and faced new problems at your destination. How would you feel? Would you become bitter and condemn your new surroundings as unwelcoming, brutal, and predatory? Would you long for the home you left behind, the friends and family that you would probably never see again?
Such is the story of many immigrants to other countries, those shining havens of freedom and light to which many disaffected people have flocked over modern history. Maybe humanity evolved to wander and expand into new territory, or perhaps the success of the species simply created pressure due to overpopulation and diminished resources that pushed those less fortunate to move. Whatever the cause, this displacement of people to other lands invariably creates friction between the established occupants of the new land and its novel immigrants, often to the point of disrupting both indigenous populations and newcomers.
Such is the story of present day immigrants to the United States, as depicted in Christina Henriquez’s novel The Book of Unknown Americans. This book collects the short histories of several supporting characters and longer first person accounts of principal characters to illuminate a community of immigrants in Wilmington, Delaware: mothers, fathers, and children. It attempts to put the reader in those people’s predicaments through their life stories, set against a backdrop of economic decline of the post 2008 financial crisis.
Henriquez pairs these two forms of disruption, social and economic, to heighten the tension of her plot. This presages the current climate, where political aspirants mine these disruptions for angst to fuel their careers. Currently, some citizens of the United States express their frustration by singling out immigrants as the cause of their many woes. This diffused form of scapegoating offers simple solutions to complex problems: build a wall, send them home, or lock them up. This age-old tactic tends to polarize the populace, gathering those in favor or those opposed to such rhetoric into easily manipulated groups.
Togotherness
One common trait that binds the people in these groups together is the perception of the other: people outside your group, unlike you, and easily singled out for either condemnation or sympathy. What nobody recognizes is that in reality there is no other, but only humanity in its various guises, differentiated by customs, skin color, and other superficial traits enforced upon people by their environments.
Isolation for much of prehistory created these differences as a way to adapt to particular circumstances, to confer some sort of advantage. In our modern global culture, with its enhanced mobility via improvements in transportation, as well as increasing pressures forcing mass migrations, these differences mark their bearers as foreign and therefore subject to scrutiny. Those traits no longer offer survival advantage, and conversely might place these outliers in peril.
People naturally seek access to resources, be it food, water, shelter, or procreative partners. They compete for these resources in times of scarcity, and seek dominance by excluding others from privileged positions of power. They also congregate into groups that seem most like themselves, out of instinct for herd protection.
Henriquez invites us into one such group, namely Latino immigrants from Central and South America. Together they share a common language and possibly common histories of hardship and turmoil that drove them from their homes in the first place, and their universal faith in the United States as a place they can earn greater wealth and prosperity. Ironically, these enclaves reinforce their sense of otherness by drawing invisible boundaries between them and the more established European immigrants that have adopted the language and customs of the majority. Never mind that they were once usurpers of native American lands.
Children as Bridges
How did previous immigrants assimilate the traits of the majority and become comfortable in the mainstream? Usually the young performed that service by learning the language and socializing with friends outside their family sphere. This generally offers a degree of hope for future generations, and allows older and less adaptable parents to endure their quasi-outcast status for the sake of their children.
In a perfect world, those children would be unmarked by their heritage and easily integrated into their new surroundings. Indeed, this represents the experience of most immigrants, especially those with white skin. Such predictable and natural trajectories do not make for dissonance, but harmony. While satisfying on one level, this does not make for a dramatic story. It does not reinforce the idea of otherness that Henriquez seeks to showcase.
Henriquez creates child characters that somehow fail in this assimilation role. She deliberately interrupts this progression to prolong the alienation of her principal characters, and drive home her message of cruelty and misfortune. She does this to engage her readers and elicit emotional reactions, especially from mainstream readers who have experienced parenthood and all its tribulations.
This diminishes the potential for character development in both the adolescents and adults. Instead of invoking enlightened responses from parents, she paints a rigid and highly claustrophobic social structure from which nobody can escape. That may reveal one of Henriquez’s objectives with the book, but it severely limits its psychological and deep human potential.
Narrative Compromise
Readers empathize with fictional characters that struggle against outside forces. We cannot help but reach out to an injured child, and Henriquez supplies us with a particularly tragic but beautiful young girl, Maribel, who suffers from a brain injury as the result of a fall from a high ladder. From an energetic and enthusiastic ten-year-old she becomes a withdrawn, silent, and developmentally arrested invalid, still able to walk and fulfill most body functions independently, but lacking in that spark or spirit she once had.
She begins to emerge from that shadowland with the help of her newfound friend and future romantic partner, Mayor. He recognizes her difference not as a stigma, but as an opportunity to establish a special level of trust. She does not judge him and he feels comfortable in her presence. Mayor has his own differences, which undermines his sense of self worth. He is not the athletic over-achiever that elevates his brother in the eyes of their father, and Mayor’s unsuccessful attempts at soccer leads to deception and the creation of a gulf between him and his parents.
While these two child characters play out their dramatic roles, those of the adults illustrate more mature challenges: securing a job, providing food and shelter, and learning the English language. None of these tasks prove to be easy. Their circumstances become just as desperate in their new homes as they were in their previous predicament in their countries of origin.
While Henriquez attempts to plumb the depths of Alma’s grief at the end of the book, her reporting of Alma’s actions seem cold and detached, as if Alma was writing about it rather than actually living it. We witness it rather than feel it, and the scene seems not intimate but an embarrassing episode of voyeurism. We are almost like the nosy neighbor who witnesses Maribel and Mayor’s most intimate moment.
Henriquez attempts to weave all of these trials, those of both the children and the adults, into a coherent narrative, but in the process dilutes the several themes: the plight of immigrants, hatred that descends to extreme violence, and the tragedy of childhood injury and doomed romance. She does this to promote emotional hooks as well as plot beats, but in the process loses the power and authenticity which each story could claim were they handled as separate, more sensitive novels.
The Problem of Empathy
You may have encountered the supposed Native American wisdom: "To truly understand another, you must first walk in their moccasins." This sentiment expresses the difference between empathy and sympathy, where we must somehow enter into the life of another to fully appreciate their predicament. Anything less provides a shallow perception of the difficulty of others, preserving their otherness and maintaining the comfort of our own separation from their situation.
While fiction in general maintains a boundary between the mundane world of experience and the imagined world of possibility, it does offer the state of catharsis most developed in tragedy. Readers, and their counterpart in theater audiences, feel the anguish and pain of protagonists in the safe environment of the fiction, and withdraw from the story after its conclusion somehow changed, but uninjured.
Who can remain aloof from the tragic stories of Oedipus Rex or Romeo and Juliet? They wrench rivers of sorrow, anger, lust, and grief from onlookers and then apply the healing balm of universality and fate, creating vessels in which we may safely carry those elemental forces of the human psyche into our ordinary lives. This provides the means for individuals to navigate their own crises with poise and dignity.
Split Consciousness
It takes a master to create powerful tragedy on the stage or in a novel. Maintaining focus intensifies the emotional hooks that draw us into the tragic characters. Generally we only have enough capacity to identify with one tragic hero: Antigone, Dido, Oedipus, Hamlet or the couple Romeo and Juliet. Attempts to widen the scope of the tragic risks diffusing that energy among lesser characters.
Henriquez attempts to evoke the tragic muse in her story, but fails to focus upon a single character or unit. She instead alternates her narrative between various first person perspective accounts, mostly between Alma, Maribel’s mother, and Mayor, with other minor characters stepping in occasionally to provide milieu and community. This suggests that Henriquez regarded the tragic circumstances of Maribel and Mayor as central to her plot, but she fails to engage us fully with the predicament of the adolescent couple or Maribel’s mother Alma.
Oddly missing from this jumble of first person narratives is Maribel. We are not allowed into her mind, possibly because of her brain damage. She remains unapproachable, except in some extent through Mayor. This handicaps the tragic potential of her and Mayor’s budding romance. It also foils the tragic potential of her injury and subsequent mistreatment by society.
Similarly, we are not taken into Alma’s deepest emotions. She no doubt feels great love for her daughter, and a degree of guilt in the part she played in her daughter’s injury, but we never experience her emotions directly. Instead Alma relates events as if she were telling us her story rather than encouraging us to live it by stepping into her shoes. We are continually pulled away from her deepest inner life by the shifting point of view which structures the novel.
Descent Into Melodrama
Dante’s Divine Comedy led us into the depths of Hell via his first person narrator, guided by the spirit of the great poet Virgil and later, outside the Inferno, via the soul of his lost love Beatrice. The Comedy also includes numerous stories by those condemned to eternal suffering, but always through the mind of the narrator. We never step outside his mind.
Henriquez loses that narrative focus by oscillating among various characters, each telling their story, but without a central mind that perceives them. This jostling point of view creates a documentary form rather than an intimate narrative experience and interrupts the dramatic flow of events. Perhaps she feels she is providing some narrative relief, but in reality she robs the reader of total immersion.
Alma reports on her struggles with communicating, purchasing food, securing services for her daughter, and attempting to maintain a normal family life through the tensions of an unemployed husband and loss of visa legality. Mayor reports on his difficulties with his father, other bullying students at school, and his frustrated attempts to further a friendship and later romantic relationship with Maribel. Interspersed among these events are completely unrelated life histories of unimportant characters.
Notably absent is any insight into the two characters that precipitate the violent climax, the boy from the gas station Garret and his homicidal father. Perhaps Henriquez did not want to depart from her format of only giving voice to the immigrants, but to prevent our peering into the lives of two pivotal characters in the story is to condemn them as stereotypical epitomes of evil. They become the agents of misery always present in melodrama.
We never enter deeply into any one character. Nor do we experience any true sense of agency they might have in directing their lives. They act according to inner drives and outside circumstances, but we never accept them as fully functioning human beings taking charge. We see instead a series of impotent characters who fill slots provided by an impersonal society.
This lack of connection ultimately transforms personal tragedy from something we feel into something we look at. They are words in a news story or second-rate actors on an amateur stage. The characters lack the depth and solidity to create the intense emotional involvement demanded by poverty, abuse, injustice, and oppression. Instead we see these mishaps as plot elements that drive the narrative forward, creating tension and a sense of dread, without any of the deep human commitment to the plight of the protagonist, or the intense psychic pain of the perpetrators.
Objective Treatment
Authors who empathize with their characters treat them with respect and confer upon them whatever dignity they deserve, regardless of their circumstances. This establishes a degree of trust between the author and her characters, and between the reader and the author. All of these entities share a common humanity and internalize that bond through carefully protecting everyone’s personal integrity.
Henriquez violates that trust in several instances, most notably with her indelicate handling of Mayor’s involuntary reaction to Maribel’s reciprocal desire. What should remain as an intensely personal event emerges into the limelight when a neighbor spies Mayor exiting his father’s car with a wet spot on his pants, after an intense make-out session with Maribel. The author then compounds the betrayal by having that neighbor relay this information to Maribel’s parents. Henriquez treats these highly vulnerable characters as objects to be manipulated and exploited.
While this shocking revelation propels the plot, giving Alma and her husband the justification for cutting off contact between Maribel and her newfound friend / lover, it does so at a huge cost: parading something sweet and innocent between two adolescents in front of the adult world, with all of its prejudices and taboos. Henriquez violates Mayor’s privacy for dramatic effect. This destroys not only the budding romance, but our trust in the author.
She treats other characters with similar brutality. Alma herself carries guilt for her daughter’s accident, making her somehow complicit in the unfolding debacle. Her husband’s demeaning employment at the mushroom farm degrades into an endless stream of rejection when he loses his job and searches for another. Never mind that he was a skilled tradesman in his home country, providing essential shelter for not only his own family, but for others.
Chains of Victims
Henriquez injects a moral component into her novel by depicting the immigrants as hard-working, honest people subject to injustice and exploitation. This chain begins back home, where political or economic motives create intolerable conditions for these people. The author does this to build sufficient pressure to force her characters to abandon their homes and move to the United States.
Once there in the supposed promise land, the oppression continues in new forms, social and economic, where established citizens exploit the newcomers and continually remind them of their perilous status as immigrants. Forces beyond anyone’s control, such as the Great Recession of 2008-2009 further emphasizes this hierarchy of misery. Nobody escapes.
Both Maribel’s and Mayor’s parents deepen this descent into oppression by their heavy-handed parental interference in their adolescent children’s unfolding lives. Mayor’s father continually restricts his son’s freedom. Maribel’s mother stifles her daughter’s recovery with overly-protective surveillance.
Henriquez justifies these recursive levels of victimization by injecting a real sense of danger, brought to horrifying light when Alma rescues her daughter from the clutches of Garret, the teenage miscreant who attempts to rape Maribel. Alma’s appeal for police protection goes nowhere, since by her interrupting the crime, no crime was committed.
The Point of Suffering
Why should we follow Henriquez into this nightmarish underworld? Does she lead us like Virgil into Hell so that we may enter Purgatory and possibly Paradise? If Dante’s journey had stopped in Hell, his masterpiece would have taken on a distinctly sadomasochistic tone. Instead, he completes the journey to restore dignity and hope to humanity.
My own personal reaction to Henriquez’s tale was one of revulsion. I had to stop reading once it became clear to me how Maribel’s and Mayor’s romance would end. I could think of no reason to continue this dismal journey, which would never climb back out of the pit. To inflict this much pain on myself felt unholy and perverse.
In retrospect, I had to detach from the characters to stomach the plot. This robbed them of their emotional weight and reduced them to two dimensional objects, like cardboard puppets on a Punch and Judy stage. The story ceased as tragedy, and became something common and reprehensible, similar to malignant gossip.
Clearly this was not Henriquez’s intent. I am not sure just what her intent was, and I wonder if she also suffered from such ambiguity. Why else would she compromise two promising stories? It seems almost that she herself was miserable and wished to make her readers miserable.
I Would Die if I Were You
Emily Rapp Black uses this phrase for the title of her book about art and truth-telling. She explains how her own personal tragedy became the grist for creative expression. Suffering from a birth defect and undergoing amputation of her left leg as a child, she struggled with numerous fittings for a prosthesis and became the object of ridicule, and maybe worse, sympathy. Later, the early death of her son deepened her grief.
Rapp Black expands the meaning of this phrase with the following unstated postscript: Since I would die if I were you, you should be dead. This brutal logic underscores the insensitive, inept gestures of the more fortunate to offer both condolence and establish their own superiority. Such condescending attitudes only further the suffering of the victim.
The antidote to this poisonous ignorance is for the writer to present suffering with authenticity and sensitivity. Readers enter into the suffering person’s life, feel it deeply, and see with an inner eye. By contrast, authors who fail and represent trauma untruthfully violate this sacred duty. They abuse their authorial privilege.
Henriquez unwittingly commits this offense in the way she handles her characters. She does not take us into their inner lives to validate their worth as human beings, but regards them as objects of sympathy, implying that we would die if we were them, so logically they should be dead.
Ironically, this may explain the victimization of immigrants in our modern social and political climate: I would die if I were an immigrant like you, so you should be dead. All the oppression and hate towards these unfortunate outsiders follows logically.
Henriquez misses this profound insight. She could have added a powerful frame of meaning to her narrative had she realized what she was doing and made it more explicit, so that readers could see their own attitudes towards immigrants not as enlightened concern but as subtle condemnation. This would have forced readers to view something morbid in their own beliefs.
Instead, she baldly reports the murder of Arturo with minimal insight into the motives of the killer, relying perhaps upon widely held tropes of redneck hatred towards immigrants. As a result, readers can hardly believe Arturo is dead, just as Alma has trouble accepting the fact. From a dramatic and narrative standpoint, this is a huge jump, one that seems rushed and forced at the climax of the story to add shock value and promote hysteria.
Why We Write About Suffering
Rapp Black devotes a chapter in her book to this question. Why would a person choose to revisit the most painful parts of her life, the endless operations as a child and later the tragic death of her infant son from a neurological disease? The answer: to understand those events in some way, and to create meaning where none exists naturally.
Rapp Black not only serves herself and her deepest needs, but in the very act of disclosing something so primal about herself, she establishes a link with everyone else who has suffered. Readers take not a morbid fascination in the suffering of others, but instead recognize a common thread of human existence. We are somehow fundamentally similar, members of the human race, and subject to the trials of the human condition.
Henriquez aborts this bonding between writer and reader, between one victim and another, between all people regardless of gender, ethnicity, or circumstance. She falls short of the deepest truth-telling that Rapp Black exhibits, treating her characters as objects for dramatic effect. She undermines our trust via her documentary format, acting more as a tabloid reporter than a sensitive and compassionate participant.
She invites the morbid fascination of those who revel in the misfortune of others, just as hungry wannabes delight in the travails of the rich and famous. She exploits the twisted motives of the more fortunate in their quest for "wokeness," people who contort their arms to pat themselves on the back for being so honest about their insensitive participation in an oppressive social structure.
Self Flagellation
Certain Medieval Christian sects would parade down village streets dressed in rags, chanting and whipping themselves. They sought to atone for the sins of all humanity by making themselves miserable. They perceived the gross injustice of their world and sought relief from realizing that they participated in the crime through punishing themselves. They purified their strong sense of judgment by sentencing everyone to Hell.
Our current ideological quagmire offers similar opportunities for self flagellation. We painfully perceive injustice but see no easy way to prevent it, and instead adopt a sense of agency for which we must be punished. This serves a complicated purpose: to avoid a feeling of impotence while at the same time reclaiming a higher moral stature.
This curious phenomenon may have motivated Henriquez to write her novel and may have fueled the book’s sales. When we experience cognitive dissonance we seek any means to ease the pain. One way is to punish ourselves by wallowing in the muck, and then treating ourselves to a hot shower. We have done our moral penance, and can now perhaps enter Purgatory.
Rapp Black proposes an alternative. Write truthfully. Connect on a fundamental level through our common experience of suffering. Treat others not as objects for derision nor as objects for sympathy, but as fellow human beings engaged in a struggle for survival, and on a quest for meaning.
Entering the Realm of Fantasy
When Henriquez ends her book with Alma and Maribel’s return to her former home in Patzcuaro, Mexico, she slips into an unreal dimension. While we may accept Alma’s heartache for home, she gives up the chance of special education for Maribel that drove her to the United States in the first place. She does not explore the possibility of finding employment to reinstate her visa, which she may have been able to do with adequate support from family, friends and neighbors. After all, Alma is a good cook of authentic Mexican food.
Instead Alma dreams of flying her husband’s body back to Mexico so she can bury him in the Panteon Municipal and celebrate his life / death on el Dia de Muertos, preparing pan de muerto and calabaza en tacha for him to eat in his new spirit existance. While Alma may believe in this logic, Henriquez cannot expect her readers to follow. Yet the author forces the dream by having the neighbors chip into a fund, accumulating the astonishing $5000 necessary to realize this fantasy. All of this is even more incredible given the bleak financial environment of 2008-2009, when people of all types lost their jobs, homes, and faith in the American Dream.
Henriquez employs her magic wand one more time on the trip back to Mexico. She abruptly restores Maribel to her former self. This transformation defies the psychological momentum of Maribel’s regression after being separated from Mayor the first time, and yet again from both him and her father, post-climax. There is no coherent chain of mental development from that state of decline to the miraculous return of the once-vivacious girl.
Conclusion
Forcing myself to read the last third of the book did not redeem it, and reinforced my initial disappointment. The only way I could endure the chain of events that followed Maribel and Mayor’s oppressive separation was to detach from all the characters, both the children and the adults. This defeated the purpose of tragedy and turned the story into a grotesque fable of woe, with no possibility of catharsis. I was not cleansed and renewed as Greek audiences were millennia ago.
Nor does the book offer any sense of meaning to the trials and tribulations the characters undergo. Events just happen. Garret accosts Maribel. Mayor and Maribel are caught in a huge snowstorm. Arturo impetuously confronts Garret and his father. Maribel wakes up. This bewildering stream of "one damn thing after another" might help us accept some of our own difficulties, but it does not provide that extra element which elevates them into something coherent, universal, true, and perhaps beautiful.
No doubt readers will react to this book in their own personal way, depending upon their experience and expectations. On a superficial level the story does grind along to its gruesome end, and that may be satisfying to some. Others may question the dark turns of the narrative and ask "Why did it have to turn out this way?" Has the author convinced us that it must fall apart for Alma, Maribel, and Mayor, as it did for Dido, Romeo and Juliet? No she does not.
Since the book is not tragedy, then what is it? Is it high school drama? Is it tabloid reporting? Who is the intended audience? Is it the immigrants who might identify with this predicament? Is it liberal white people trying to deal with grime on their shoes? These question remain in my mind, without any satisfying resolution. The book seems as muddled in its final form as it is in its plot, characterization, and thematic overtones.
The fact that an amateur writer like myself would discover such glaring inconsistencies and faults in a major novel says something about the decline of editorial acumen in our modern publishing industry. An astute editor should have caught these deficiencies during the initial stages of review, demanding that the author either correct them or suffer rejection of the work. Instead it seems that editors today are no more proficient in their trade than the common reader whom they supposedly serve.
Perhaps authors of the glowing advance comments wanted their name on the back cover, to ride the wave and keep them in the limelight. This reveals the ugly underbelly of modern writing and publishing, where commercial interests take precedence to fine literature. Money dictates art. Art no longer strives for the true or beautiful, but the sensational and ugly.
This reflects upon our own confusing and troubled times. People deliberately misrepresent or twist facts to gain Internet fame. Institutions of public interest become distorted by corporate influence. Displaced people become more common as political, economic, and environmental disasters proliferate.
Literature and art can help people make sense of these troubling conditions by encapsulating experience into meaningful stories, carrying us out of our own cherished belief systems so that we might perceive and somehow understand the chaos of modern culture. This can be its vital function and incalculable value to society. Failure to do so devalues literature and art.
Henriquez’s book does not bring readers to a sincere experience of suffering or compassion for the characters as fellow human beings, nor does it offer readers a way to digest the turmoil in their own predicaments or in the modern world. It does not provide a vessel to help us carry our own grief. It fails to take us inside the true nature of these people, and leaves them just as opaque to us as they were before. We are handed a look at these unknown Americans, but we never truly see them.