Homeland Security Ate My Speech Read online

  Origins, however, are never merely personal, but deeply collective, and especially so for Latin Americans such as myself, who feel an entrañable fellowship with natives from other unfortunate countries of our region. A stubborn history of thwarted dreams has led to a shared sense of purpose and sorrow, hope and resilience, which joins us all emotionally, beyond geographic destiny or national boundaries. To stroll up and down the grocery aisles of that store is to reconnect with the people and the lands and the tastebuds of those brothers and sisters and to partake, however vicariously, in meals being planned and prepared at that very moment in millions and millions of homes everywhere in the hemisphere. There is canela from Perú and queso crema from Costa Rica and café torrado e moido (O sabor do campo na sua casa) from Brasil. There is coconut juice from the Caribbean and frijoles of every possible and impossible variety and maíz tostado from Mexico and fresh apio/celery from the Dominican Republic (they look like tiny twisted idols) and hierbas medicinales para infusiones from who knows where, and albahaca and ajonjoli and linaza and yuca and malanga and chicharrones de cerdo and chicharrones de harina.

  If you were to go to Sao Paulo or Caracas or Quito, if you were to try to shop for this assortment of staples or delicacies in San José or La Paz or Bogotá, if you were to ask in any major or minor city of Latin America where you might be able to pick your way through such a plethora of culinary choices in one location, you would be told that a place like that does not exist anywhere in that country. There is no shop in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, that next to an array of carioca fare would allow you to select among eighteen multiplicities of chile peppers or buy Tampico punch or sample some casabe bread.

  That is what is most fascinating about this grocery store sporting the name COMPARE—a name which cleverly works in Spanish and English and Portuguese. Who would have thought that in a small town of the Southern United States (population 267,587) there could be a greater representation of variegated Latin America than in Rio with its six and a half million inhabitants or in the megapolis of Ciudad de México with its twenty million?

  This is what Donald Trump and his nativist cohorts need to understand: five hundred and twenty-four years after Cristobal Colón sighted the land that would be called by some other visionary’s name, the sheer reality of a store like this one (and countless others like it all across the United States), resoundingly proves that the continent of Juárez and García Márquez and Eva Perón can no longer be understood to stop at the Rio Grande but extends far into the gringo North.

  The food that hails me at that mega-Latino supermarket is not, of course, purely something that you sniff and peel, cook and devour. Hands reach for the potatoes that originated thousands of years ago in the Andean highlands, mouths water for the pineapple that the conquistadors did not know how to describe, bodies tremble at the thought of using their tongues, Proust-like, to return to a childhood home most of them will never see again. Behind hands and inside mouths and beyond bodies, there flourishes a cosmic piñata of stories, like mine, of escaping the native land, of alighting elsewhere, of crossing frontiers legally or surreptitiously, of border guards and guardian angels, of fighting to keep in touch with the vast pueblo latinoamericano left behind, of memories of hunger and repression, and also of solidaridad and vivid dreams. A woman from Honduras is piling onto her cart a ton of bananas that are the color of a red sunset and, though well on their way to decomposing, will be perfect, she assures me, with tomatillos and pinto frijoles. A couple from Colombia (I detect the soft specificity of excellent Spanish from Bogotá) discuss whether to experiment and add to their ajiaco that night some Mexican Serrano Peppers (shining green as they curve under the neon light). The husband says that’s fine, so long as she doesn’t forget to mix in the guascas herb they have just bought and which he first relished when he was an infant. Inside each of them, as inside me and my Angélica, there is a tale of heartbreak and heart warmth, of hearths orphaned back home and hearths rekindled in our new dwellings.

  Where else could these shoppers (and so many other unrecognized ambassadors from every country and ethnicity of the Americas) meet in such an ordinary way, chatting in every conceivable Spanish accent (and some murmur to each other in indigenous tongues I cannot identify) next to this Chilean-American born in Argentina as if nothing could be more natural?

  How many of them are threatened with concentration camps and deportations and families sundered, how many of these compatriots of ours are adrift and in danger of living on the borders of legality? I dare not ask. But what is certain, what I can proclaim from the haven of this pungent paradise full of undocumented food, is that the men and women who make this country work, who build the houses and pave the roads, who clean the houses and cook the meals and care for the children, who come from every one of our twenty-one Latin American republics and who only meet here in los Estados Unidos de América, what I can unequivocally declare is that they are not going away.

  Your wall, Senor Trump, has already been breached, your wall has already been defeated by our peaceful invasion.

  Along with our food, we are here to stay.

  5.

  FAULKNER’S QUESTION FOR AMERICA

  Does America deserve to survive?

  That is the question that William Faulkner publicly posed in 1955 when news reached him that Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth, had been murdered and mutilated in a town in Mississippi for having dared to whistle at a married white woman—a lynching that acted as a catalyst for the creation of the civil rights movement.

  Whether America deserves to survive was not the question I had expected to be asking myself on this literary pilgrimage that my wife and I had taken to Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner lived most of his life and wrote the torrential masterpieces that made him the most influential American novelist of the 20th century. We had been planning such a journey for many years, seeing it as a chance to meditate on the life and works of an author who had dared me since my Chilean adolescence to break all conventions, to venture every risk, in order to portray the multiple flow of time and mind and grief, who goaded me into trying to express what it means “to be alive and know it” in one of the remote backwaters of the wide world. And yet, it is that question about the survival of America that haunts me as we visit the grave at St. Peter’s Cemetery where Faulkner was lowered into the earth 54 years ago, it crops up as we walk the streets he walked, it cannot be avoided as we wander through Rowan Oak, the antebellum mansion he called home.

  Because if Faulkner were alive today, as his country faces “an incomprehensible moment of terror,” the most drastic election of our maelstrom era, where an egomaniacal demagogue could conceivably occupy the White House, the author of The Sound and the Fury would surely once again painfully hurl that question about the future of the United States at his fellow citizens. And also, I have no doubt, he would issue a challenge to Trump’s supporters, hoping that they, like so many of his own characters, will not doom themselves and their land to destruction out of rage and frustration, subjected to the darkness of an untamed past.

  Faulkner’s words today would not be addressed to African Americans, though he wrote of their dilemma with remarkable sensitivity, describing how the descendants of slaves carried, “with stern and inflexible pride,” the burden imposed upon them by a corrosive and unjust system. But a man who preached patience as a way to overcome race barriers, a man who did not hear Martin Luther King’s speeches, a man who could not have imagined even the possibility of a president born of miscegenation and even less of a Black Lives Matter movement (not to mention Oprah Winfrey!), would have little to teach a multicultural America that he would find unrecognizable. Equally difficult for him to deal with would be the women empowered by the feminist revolutions he could not have anticipated.

  Other, less enviable, aspects of contemporary America would, however, be more sadly familiar to Faulkner.

  He would have been appalled, but not in the least surprised,
by the rise of Donald Trump or the deranged danger he represents. Faulkner had created in his fictional universe a minor Southern incarnation of Trump: Flem Snopes, an unscrupulous and voracious predator with “eyes the color of stagnant water” who claws and lies his wily way to power, cheating and conning anyone naïve enough to think they can outsmart him. In Flem and his clan, Faulkner excoriated many of his fellow citizens who “know and believe in nothing but money and it doesn’t much matter how you get it.” He harbored no doubt about the harm people like the Snopes tribe could inflict if allowed to reign and proliferate, if their “stupid chicanery and petty corruption for stupid and petty ends” were ever to prevail. Given the latest polls, such an electoral apocalypse seems increasingly unlikely, but the mere fact that Trump is even a viable candidate, would be terrifying to the author of Absalom, Absalom!

  Faulkner would have understood why so many of his fellow citizens feel that they are trapped in a historical tide not of their making, that their American dream has gone berserk.

  Though politically liberal and progressive for his time, Faulkner’s attitude toward the Donald’s followers would have been, therefore, sympathetic. He lovingly and often good-humoredly portrayed the lives of those whom we might identify today, forgiving the generalization, as core Trump supporters—hunters and gun owners; ill-informed men clinging to their threatened virility and old time traditions; white Americans of small rural or economically depressed communities overwhelmed by the harsh rush of modernity, unprepared for a globalization they cannot control. Without ever condoning their racial prejudices and paranoia he also never condescended to them, never looked down upon their bafflement and blindness, always afforded them the one thing they deeply desired then and still desire now: respect for their human dignity. Faulkner would have understood the roots of the present disaffection of those people he cared for so much and the fear from which that disaffection is derived.

  This is what makes Faulkner so valuable a voice today.

  The empathy that this extraordinary, sophisticated novelist felt for the less educated, religiously conservative inhabitants of his imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha and their sense of loss and disorientation, the fact that he preferred their enduring and dignified company to the abstractions and elitism of privileged intellectuals, makes him ideally suited for delivering a message that Trump’s devotees should try to heed, a plea against bigotry and dread and divisiveness that is not tainted with even a hint of paternalism or contempt.

  As I contemplate the fragile, tiny desk in his study at Rowan Oak where he composed the words for his daughter Jill’s high school graduation, I can hear the echo of these words today, and am honored to convey them once more to Faulkner’s present day compatriots. He urged his daughter’s class, and urges us right now, to become like “men and women, who will refuse always to be tricked or frightened or bribed into surrendering.” He told them, and tells us again and yet again, that we have not just the right, “but the duty too, to choose between…courage and cowardice…” He speaks to me and to them and to all of us when he demands to “never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed.”

  Will we stumble and falter into the abyss, come to grief?

  Are we doomed to tragedy, like so many of Faulkner’s relentless characters, or do we still have the chance and wisdom to prove that this country deserves to survive?

  6.

  NOW, AMERICA, YOU KNOW HOW CHILE FELT

  It is familiar, the outrage and alarm that many Americans are feeling at reports that Russia, according to a secret intelligence assessment, interfered in the United States election to help Donald J. Trump become president.

  I have been through this before, overwhelmed by a similar outrage and alarm.

  To be specific: on the morning of Oct. 22, 1970, in what was then my home in Santiago de Chile, my wife Angélica and I listened to a news flash on the radio. General René Schneider, the head of Chile’s armed forces, had been shot by a commando on a street of the capital. He was not expected to survive.

  Angélica and I had the same automatic reaction: it’s the CIA, we said, almost in unison. We had no proof at the time—though evidence that we were right would eventually, and abundantly, surface—but we did not doubt that this was one more American attempt to subvert the will of the Chilean people.

  Six weeks earlier, Salvador Allende, a democratic Socialist, had won the presidency in a free and fair election, in spite of the United States’ spending millions of dollars on psychological warfare and misinformation to prevent his victory (we’d call it “fake news” today). Allende had campaigned on a program of social and economic justice, and we knew that the government of President Richard M. Nixon, allied with Chile’s oligarchs, would do everything it could to stop Allende’s nonviolent revolution from gaining power.

  The country was rife with rumors of a possible coup. It had happened in Guatemala and Iran, in Indonesia and Brazil, where leaders opposed to United States interests had been ousted. Now it was Chile’s turn. That was why General Schneider was assassinated. Because, having sworn loyalty to the Constitution, he stubbornly stood in the way of those destabilization plans.

  General Schneider’s death did not block Allende’s inauguration, but American intelligence services, at the behest of Henry A. Kissinger, continued to assail our sovereignty during the next three years, sabotaging our prosperity (“make the economy scream,” Nixon ordered) and fostering military unrest. Finally, on Sept. 11, 1973, Allende was overthrown and replaced by a vicious dictatorship that lasted nearly 17 years. Years of torture and executions and disappearances and exile.

  Given all that pain, one might presume that some glee on my part would be justified at the sight of Americans squirming in indignation at the spectacle of their democracy subjected to foreign interference—as Chile’s democracy, among many other countries, was by America. And yes, it is ironic that the CIA—the very agency that gave not a whit for the independence of other nations—is now crying foul because its tactics have been imitated by a powerful international rival.

  I can savor the irony, but I feel no glee. This is not only because, as an American citizen myself now, I am once again a victim of this sort of nefarious meddling. My dismay goes deeper than that personal sense of vulnerability. This is a collective disaster: those who vote in the United States should not have to suffer what those of us who voted in Chile had to go through. Nothing warrants that citizens anywhere should have their destiny manipulated by forces outside the land they inhabit.

  The seriousness of this violation of the people’s will must not be flippantly underestimated or disparaged.

  When Mr. Trump denies, as do his acolytes, the claims by the intelligence community that the election was, in fact, rigged in his favor by a foreign power, he is bizarrely echoing the very responses that so many Chileans got in the early ’70s when we accused the CIA of illegal interventions in our internal affairs. He is using now the same terms of scorn we heard back then: those allegations he says, are “ridiculous” and mere “conspiracy theory,” because it is “impossible to know” who was behind it.

  In Chile, we did find out who was “behind it.” Thanks to the Church Committee and its valiant, bipartisan 1976 report, the world discovered the many crimes the CIA had been committing, the multiple ways in which it had destroyed democracy elsewhere—in order, supposedly, to save the world from Communism.

  This country deserves, as all countries do—including Russia, of course—the possibility of choosing its leaders without someone in a remote room abroad determining the outcome of that election. This principle of peaceful coexistence and respect is the bedrock of freedom and self-determination, a principle that, yet again, has been compromised—this time, with the United States as its victim.

  What to do, then, to restore faith in the democratic process?

  First, there should be an independent, transparent, and thorough public
investigation so that any collusion between American citizens and foreigners bent on mischief can be exposed and punished, no matter how powerful these operatives may be. The president-elect should be demanding such an inquiry, rather than mocking its grounds. The legitimacy of his rule, already damaged by his significant loss of the popular vote, depends on it.

  But there is another mission, a loftier one, that the American people, not politicians or intelligence agents, must carry out. The implications of this deplorable affair should lead to an incessant and unforgiving meditation on our shared country, its values, its beliefs, its history.

  The United States cannot in good faith decry what has been done to its decent citizens until it is ready to face what it did so often to the equally decent citizens of other nations. And it must firmly resolve never to engage in such imperious activities again.

  If ever there was a time for America to look at itself in the mirror, if ever there was a time of reckoning and accountability, it is now.

  7.

  THE RIVER KWAI PASSES THROUGH LATIN AMERICA AND THE POTOMAC: WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE TORTURED

  When Donald Trump promised that, if elected President, he would “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” I could not help but remember a man I met twenty-two years ago, not in my native Latin America or in faraway lands where torture is endemic, but in the extremely English town of Berwick-upon-Tweed.