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The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff (2004)

How should democracies respond to terrorist attacks? In particular, How much violence, secrecy and violations of human rights should a Western government deploy in order to safeguard a democratic state which, ironically, claims to deplore violence, secrecy and loudly promotes human rights?

How far can a democracy resort to these means without undermining and to some extent damaging the very values it claims to be defending?

How far can it go to deploy the lesser evil of abrogating some people’s human rights in order to ensure the greater good of ensuring the security and safety of the majority? These are the questions Ignatieff sets out to address in this book.

The book is based on a series of six lectures Ignatieff gave at the University of Edinburgh in 2003. Obviously the context for the lectures and their starting point was the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America.

Historical context – the War on Terror

It’s difficult now to recreate the mood of hysteria which gripped so much public discourse in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. US President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror (18 September 2001) which justified major military attacks on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom starting 7 October 2001), then Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom starting 20 March 2003), alongside combat operations in a number of other Muslim countries (the Philippines, Sudan et al). The US Congress passed a law allowing the President to declare war on anyone he thought was a threat. In his State of the Union speech, 29 January 2002, Bush singled out three likely contenders as the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, being Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Apart from the mismanagement of the two major wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the most contentious aspect of the so-called War on Terror became what many perceived to be the egregious breaches of human rights which a newly bullish America began to practice. Critics claimed the so-called war was in reality an excuse for creating a hi-tech surveillance state, for reducing civil liberties and infringing human rights.

Within a month of the 9/11 attacks the US government passed the Patriot Act which included three main provisions:

expanded surveillance abilities of law enforcement, including by tapping domestic and international phones
easier inter-agency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counter-terrorism efforts
increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify for terrorism charges

The law upset human rights groups on various grounds, for example, the powers given law enforcement agencies to search property and records without a warrant, consent, or even knowledge of the targets. But the single most contentious provision was its authorisation of indefinite detention without trial, which became associated with the notorious detention centre at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba,

Ignatieff’s approach

The lectures were given at the heart of this period (2003), 18 months into the War on Terror, as the Patriot Act was still being rolled out, just after the US government launched its invasion of Iraq (March 2003).

In his introduction Ignatieff makes the point that already, by 2003, there was a well-developed legalistic literature on all these issues. He is not going to add to that (he isn’t a lawyer). He wants to take a broader moral point of view, bringing in philosophical and even literary writers from the whole Western tradition, to try and set the present moment in a much broader cultural context.

My purpose is…to articulate what values we are trying to save from attack. (p.xvii)

It’s worth noting that at the time he wrote and delivered these lectures, Ignatieff was the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I.e. he didn’t have an amateur, journalistic interest in these issues, but was a senior academic expert in them.

The text is full of Ignatieff’s trademark complex, subtle and often agonised moral reflections, mixing reportage on contemporary politics with references to writers of the past, continually teasing out subtle and often very illuminating insights. At the same time, as I worked my way through the rather laborious networks of arguments, I began to have less and less confidence in his arguments. Fine words butter no parsnips and seminars on moral philosophy can go on forever. What were his practical conclusions and recommendations?

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Democracies have often deployed coercive measures, seeing them as the lesser evil deployed to avert the greater evil of terrorism, civil conflict and so on. But it requires that the measures can be justified publicly, subject to judicial review, and have sunset clauses i.e. fixed lengths so they don’t become permanent features of the society.

Government infringement of its citizens’ rights must be tested under adversarial review. This idea recurs again and again in the text. The defining feature of democracies is intricate sets of checks and balances. If some rights have to be abrogated during emergencies, these suspensions can still be independently tested, by judges, by independent advisers, and they will eventually have to be revealed to the citizens for ultimate approval.

There is a spectrum of opinions on suspending civil liberties. At one end, pure civil libertarians maintain that no violations of rights can ever be justified. At the other end, pragmatists eschew moral principles and judge restrictive legislation purely on practical outcomes. Ignatieff is somewhere in the middle, confident that actions which breach ‘foundational commitments to justice and dignity – torture, illegal detention, unlawful assassination’ – should be beyond the pale. But defining precisely what constitutes torture, which detentions are or are not legal, where killing is or is not justified, that’s the problem area.

If lawyers and politicians and intellectuals are going to bicker about these issues forever i.e. there will never be fixed and agreed definitions, the one thing all good democrats can rally round is ‘to strengthen the process of adversarial review‘ i.e. to put in place independent review of government measures.

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

If laws can be abridged and liberties suspended during an ’emergency’, what remains of their legitimacy in times of peace? If laws are rules, and emergencies make exceptions to theses rules, how can their authority survive once exceptions are made? (p.25)

Chapter 2 examines the impact the emergency suspensions of civil liberties has on the rule of law and civil rights. Does the emergency derogation of normal rights strengthen or weaken the rule of law which we pride ourselves on in the Western democracies?

Ignatieff takes the middle ground that suspension of rights does not destroy them or undermine the normal practice of them, indeed helps to preserve them – provided they are ‘temporary, publicly justified, and deployed only as a last resort.’

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Why do liberal democracies to habitually over-react to terrorist threats? Why do we seem so quick to barter away our liberties? One way to explain it is that majorities (i.e. most of us) are happy to deprive small and relatively powerless minorities (in the War against Terror, Muslims and immigrants) of their rights in order to achieve ‘security’.

But our opponents have rights, too. Just as in the debate over freedom of speech, any fool can approve free speech which they agree with, it’s harder to fight for the right of people to say things you dislike or actively think are wrong. But that is the essence of free speech, that is its crucial test – allowing the expression of opinions and views you violently disagree with, believe are wrong and immoral. It is precisely these kinds of views we should make every effort to allow free expression. ‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ as Voltaire famously put it.

It’s easy and uncontroversial to defend the human rights of poets and activists who protested against apartheid or communist oppression. Much harder to insist that detainees being grabbed in Iraq or Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world and flown half way round the world and who might well be members of al Qaeda or ISIL, are provided just the same level of legal representation and rights as you and me. But that is exactly the test of our commitment to human rights: whether we extend them to our bitterest enemies.

Same goes for the other elements in the system of checks and balances, namely the other wings of government, the courts and the media. The temptation and the tendency is for everybody to ‘rally round the flag’ but this is exactly the opposite of what ought to happen. The American constitution vests power in the Presidency to take extraordinary steps in times of crisis or war but that is precisely the moment when the other elements in the division of power should increase their oversight of executive actions.

In his searing indictment of America’s mismanagement of the war in Iraq, Thomas E Ricks makes just this point. The build-up to the war involved questionable evidence (about weapons of mass destruction), wrong assumptions (about the response of the Iraqi population to foreign invasion), criminal mismanagement and the complete absence of a plan for the aftermath. While describing all this in forensic detail, Ricks points out that this is precisely the point when the administration’s plans should have been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny, something which might have saved tens of thousands of lives, billions of money, untold materiel. Instead, in the atmosphere of hysterical patriotism which gripped America, Congress rolled over and approved the plans with little serious examination and the press turned into bombastic cheerleaders. Both miserably failed to live up to the roles assigned to them in a free democratic society.

In fact most of this chapter is taken up with a useful and informative history of terrorism as a political tactic, starting with the Nihilists in nineteenth century Russia, then onto the two great loci of political violence, in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, before turning to post-war terrorism in Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Peru), in Sri Lanka, in Israel, before cycling back to Europe and the 1970s terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades, before a brief consideration of the separatist/nationalist terrorism faced by Britain in Northern Ireland and Spain in the Basque Country.

Ignatieff’s summary from this brief conspectus is that terrorism never works, it never achieves its political aims. The Russian and Weimar regimes weren’t undone by political violence but by the cataclysm of World War One and the Great Depression, respectively. Marxist terrorism in 1970s Germany and Italy aimed to create media spectaculars and psychological tipping points whereby the population would be woken from their slumber, rise up and overthrow the repressive bourgeois state etc. Complete failure with the terrorists either committing suicide or publicly recanting.

In Latin America political terrorism either produced the exact opposite of what was intended, for example in Argentina, where it helped a repressive military junta into power. Or, as in Sri Lanka and some extent Israel, it became a stalemate that extended over such a long period of time that it became the social reality of the country, giving rise to a society characterised by random atrocities, intimidation of local populations by the terrorists, and repressive state apparatuses. The host society wasn’t liberated and transformed but permanently degraded.

Ignatieff then considers how the British, on the whole, managed the Northern Ireland situation successfully by abrogating various civil rights but under the aegis of government and judicial review.

But part of the reason his review of traditional terrorism is so enjoyable is because it’s so familiar from decades of print and TV journalism – but this itself highlights, I think, a weakness of the whole book: which is that the campaign of al Qaeda and related groups was not to achieve political change (like the Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s) or to achieve constitutional change / nationalist independence (as with the Basques or, at the other end of the Europe, the Kurdish terrorist groups in Turkey). Those aims could both be handled in Ignatieff’s model i.e. carefully incorporated into the existing political structures.

By contrast Al Qaeda wanted to destroy the West not only as a goal in itself but as part of an even grander aim which was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together under the caliphate of the prophet Mohammed. Osama bin Laden identified America as the chief bulwark of the existing world order, especially in the Arab world, where it subsidised and underpinned repressive states. So as a first step to remodelling the world, bin Laden ordered his followers to attack Western targets anywhere, at any time.

Ignatieff was writing in 2003. We had yet to have the 2004 Madrid train bombings (193 dead), the 7/7 2005 attacks in London (56 dead), the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013 (3 dead), the 18 March 2015 attack on a beach in Tunisia (21 dead), the 13 November 2015 attack at the Bataclan theatre in Paris (90 dead), the Manchester Arena bombing on 22 May 2017 (23 dead), plus numerous other Islamist atrocities in countries further afield.

If the central aim of al Qaeda and its affiliates is to kill and maim as many Westerners as possible, it’s difficult to see how this can be incorporated into any kind of political process. And in the next chapter Ignatieff indeed concludes that the organisation itself can only be defeated militarily.

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

An examination of terrorism itself.

In this chapter I want to distinguish among forms of terrorism, identify the political claims terrorists use to justify violence against civilians, and propose political strategies to defeat them (p.82)

Ignatieff considers terrorism the resort of groups who are suppressed and oppressed, who have no voice and no say in the power structures which rule over them. He gives a handy categorisation of six types of terrorism:

insurrectionary terrorism aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of a state
loner or issue terrorism, aimed at promoting a single cause
liberation terrorism, aimed at the overthrow of a colonial regime
separatist terrorism, aiming at independence for a subordinate ethnic or religious group within a state
occupation terrorism, aimed at driving an occupying force from territory acquired through war or conquest
global terrorism, aimed not at the liberation of a particular group, but at inflicting damage and humiliation on a global power

With the last one sounding like it’s been made up to describe al Qaeda-style hatred of America.

Terrorism presents a classic challenge for liberals, who have traditionally been on the side of the underdog and oppressed minorities, from the early trade unions to blacks under apartheid, and so often have an instinctive sympathy for the social or political or economic causes of terrorism but who, obviously, want to stop short of supporting actual acts of violence. Where do you draw the line?

Ignatieff says the only practical solution is to ensure that the oppressed always have peaceful political means to address their grievances. Purely military means cannot solve terrorism. It requires political solutions, above all bringing the voiceless into peaceful political processes. He doesn’t mention it but I think of how the warring factions in Northern Ireland were cajoled into joining a political ‘peace process’ which promised to take seriously the concerns of all sides and parties, to listen to all grievances and try to resolve them in a peaceful, political way.

Mrs Thatcher said ‘we do not talk to terrorists’ but, rather as with free speech, it is precisely the terrorists that you should be talking to, to figure out how their grievances can be addressed and the violence be brought to an end.

Thus even if al Qaeda’s values come from completely outside the modern framework of human rights, even if they base themselves on Islamic traditions of jihad and unrelenting war against the infidel, even if they cannot be reasoned with but only crushed militarily, this doesn’t prevent Ignatieff making the obvious point that we in the West can still bring pressure to bear on many authoritarian Arab regimes to try and remove the causes of grievance which drive young men into these causes. These would include overt American imperialism; repressive police policies which enact brutal violence and deny human rights; lack of pluralistic political systems i.e. which allow subaltern voices a say and some influence. And so on (pages 99 to 101).

The weak and oppressed must be given a peaceful political alternative that enables them to rise up against the violence exercised in their name. (p.106)

The Arab future

Trouble is, a lot of this kind of hopeful rhetoric was claimed for the movements of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, when authoritarian regimes were overthrown in Libya, Egypt and nearly in Syria. Just a few years later it was clear that the ‘spring’ comprehensively failed: an even more authoritarian regime was in place in Egypt, Libya had split into warlord-run areas and a ruinous civil war had bedded down in Syria which would pave the way for the rise of ISIS.

Personally, I think the countries in that part of the world which aren’t lucky enough to be sitting on vast reserves of oil will be condemned to perpetual poverty and conflict, because of:

the lack of traditions of individual civic responsibility and the complex matrix of civil society organisations which make the Western countries stable as politically stable as they are;
as the main offshoot of the above – universal corruption
the entrenched political tradition of strong rulers invoking ethnic nationalism or Islamic models of rule or both (Nasser, Gaddafi, Saddam)
what Ignatieff calls ‘the corruption and decay of the Arab and Islamic political order’ (p.152)
the economic backwardness of most Arab countries i.e. preponderance of subsistence agriculture
widespread lack of education
marginalisation / lack of education or political rights for women
the extraordinary population explosion (when I first visited Egypt in 1981 it had a population of 45 million; now it’s 110 million) which ensures widespread poverty
and now, the speedy degradation of the environment by climate change (loss of water and agricultural land)

One or two of these would be tricky challenges enough. All of them together will ensure that most countries in the Arab world will remain breeding grounds for angry, aggrieved and unemployed young men who can be persuaded to carry out atrocities and terrorist acts against domestic or Western targets, for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

This chapter addresses the way that, in the absence of peaceful talks, terrorist campaigns tend to degenerate into destruction and killing for their own sake, as does the behaviour of the authorities and security services set to combat them. Tit-for-tat killing becomes an end in itself. Violence begets violence in a downward spiral.

This is the most serious ethical trap lying in wait in the long war on terror that stretches before us. (p.115)

Ignatieff realises that this well-observed tendency can be used by opponents of his notion of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. the moderate and constantly scrutinised, temporary abrogation of human rights. Their argument goes that what begins as a high-minded, carefully defined and temporary ‘abrogation’ of human rights law has so often in the past degenerated into abuse, which then becomes standard practice, becomes institutionalised, and then causes permanent damage to the democracies which implemented it.

As you’d expect, Ignatieff meets this claim by breaking the threat down into categories, and then analysing them and the moral problems and issues they throw up.

First, though, he starts the chapter with some low-pressure, enjoyably colourful discussion of Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed – which describes a terrorist group which takes over a remote Russian town – and then of Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, which features a nihilistic character named the Professor, who walks round London with an early version of a suicide vest.

Part of the chapter addresses the practical, administrative problem of preventing anti-terrorist campaigns from descending into violence. But, as mention of the novels suggest, he also explores (as far as anyone can) the psychology of the nihilistic terrorist i.e. people who just want to destroy, for no purpose, with no political aim, for destruction’s sake.

It can be an individual who wants to make a name for themselves through a spectacular, for example Timothy McVeigh who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured 680. Lone actors like this are always going to be very difficult to detect or deter.

Then he discusses the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo which carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Terrorists who (claim to) represent an ethnic or nationalist cause can, in principle, be negotiated with for at least two reasons: one is that negotiations may hold out the hope that some at least of their goals may be achieved; the other, is that, insofar as they represent an ethnic group, a population, this population can be worked on to reject the group or moderate its behaviour.

With single actors or death cults, levers of negotiation and bargaining are obviously absent. Having established the key characteristics of these kinds of actors, Ignatieff moves on to a detailed consideration of al Qaeda. In his view it has twisted Islamic teachings so completely as to become a death cult. The 9/11 bombers didn’t leave demands or any way to negotiate – they just wanted to strike a blow at the West, specifically America, and that meant killing as many Americans as possible.

His analysis is on the brief side (there are, obviously, hundreds of books about bin Laden and al Qaeda) but, as usual, throws up fascinating insights and ideas. a) It is impossible to negotiate with a suicide bomber because being negotiated out of detonating is, by definition, a failure of the mission they’ve taken on.

b) More subtly, an organisation that sets out to use suicide bombing as a strategy cannot fail because it has no defined, workable political goals or aims. Bin Laden’s aim of clearing Westerners out of Arab lands, overthrowing the existing Arab states, recreating the 7th century caliphate and implementing Sharia law in full, is not a practical programme, it is a utopian millennarian vision. It is so impractical, it is such a long-term and enormous goal, that true believers can’t, in a sense, be demoralised.

c) And this is where the promise of immortality comes in. Once true believers are promised direct entry into heaven, they have ceased to be political actors and, in this narrow sense, Ignatieff defines them as fanatics.

He adds a distinct and fascinating idea which is that all death cults, and most terrorist groups, have to have a theory which discredits the idea of civilian innocence. Obviously blowing up a load of people going to work in their offices is murder. So, just as obviously, terrorists who do it have been re-educated or indoctrinated not to see it that way. The most basic route is for their ideological leaders to persuade them that nobody is innocent; that so-called ‘civilians’ are as guilty as the acts of repression or infidelity or murder as the armies or forces of their countries.

The Algerian National Liberation Front used this defence to justify blowing up cafes full of civilians as part of their ‘war’. Scores of other terrorist groups use the same justification, erasing the difference between the soldier (a figure defined and attributed specific rights and responsibilities under international convention going back at least as far as the Geneva Conventions) and the civilian (who, under human rights law, is not responsible in warfare and should not be a target).

But this works both ways. For when terrorists are embedded in local populations, emerging to ambush soldiers then disappearing back into the crowd, a tendency develops for those soldiers to come to hate the civilian population and take out their anger and frustration on them. Happened in Vietnam (My Lai etc), happened in Iraq (Haditha etc). And of course all such breakdowns of military discipline it play into the terrorists’ hands by getting the population to move over to support them. That’s why terrorists work hard to trigger them.

So, blurring the difference between soldier and civilian can be practiced by both terrorist and security forces and always heads in the same direction, towards ever-growing atrocity and massacre. Eventually both sides are murdering unarmed civilians, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Something which distinguishes us from the terrorists is that liberal democracies put huge value on human life, and this particularly applies to civilian human life. Therefore the kinds of massacres which US troops carried out in Vietnam and Iraq sully the reputation and undermine the meaning of liberal democracy itself. I.e. they drag us closer to the indiscriminate violence of our enemies.

These pictures of fanatical death cults are by way of preparing the way for the second half of the chapter which moves on to try and define precisely when two anti-human rights tactics may be used, namely selective assassination and torture. Ignatieff is not an absolutist or civil libertarian i.e. he reluctantly admits that, in addressing the kind of nihilistic fanatics he has described, assassination may be the only way to eliminate people you can’t bargain with, and that extremely ‘coercive’ interrogation may be necessary to extract information from fanatics which may save lives.

This is a detailed discussion of contentious issues, but the bottom line is Ignatieff things they may be permitted, but so long as his basic criteria are fulfilled, namely that they are a) approaches of last resort, after all else has been tried b) and that some kind of independent judicial review or oversight is in place. It is when these kind of policies turn into secret death squads that a rules-based liberal democracy starts to be in trouble.

Ignatieff repeats some familiar objections to torture, namely that it simply doesn’t work, that it produces intense hatred which can motivate those who survive and are released into going on to carry out atrocities, and it degrades those tasked with carrying it out. There’s evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American operatives tasked with torturing during the War on Terror.

Typically, Ignatieff adds another point I’d never considered which is that there is a slippery slope from torture to plain murder. This may be for two reasons: the tortured may be converted by the process into such inveterate enemies of the state that their interrogators realise they will never be rehabilitated; and, more sinisterly, the torturers realise they can never release their victims because they themselves, will eventually be implicated i.e. the truth will out. Therefore it’s easier all round just to bump them off. Hence the ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, all those detainees who, after extensive torture, were taken out in helicopters and thrown into the sea. Torture doesn’t just not work, create new enemies and degrade the torturers – it creates a problem of what to do with the tortured? A downward spiral all the way.

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

The book ends with a bleak discussion of what may happen as and when terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction i.e. terror attacks on a devastating scale. Are our democracies strong enough to withstand such attacks? How can we strengthen our institutions to ensure that they are?

Ignatieff has a number of suggestions about how to prevent the proliferation of terrifying WMDs. But he comes back to his fundamental position which is that the way to defend and strengthen liberal democracies in the face of increased terrorist threats is to make them more liberal and democratic, not less.

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

The text is continually spinning off insights and ideas which I found distracted me from the main flow. For example, the notion that every terror campaign, sooner or later, with complete inevitability, ends up terrorising and killing people on their own side – moderates and ‘sell-outs’ and anybody in their ethnic group or repressed minority who threatens to engage in political discussion with the oppressors. In a sense, moderates are more threatening to a terrorist group than their overt enemy, the repressive state, which is why so many terrorist groups end up killing so many people on their own side (p.104).

2. The threshold of repugnance

The savagery of the Algerian fighters for independence in the 1950s left a permanent scar on the national psyche of all concerned so that when, 30 years after independence (1962) in 1992, the ruling elite disallowed an election which would have given power to the new radical Islamist party, the country very quickly descended into a savage civil war, with Islamic terrorists and government security forces both murdering unarmed civilians they considered guilty of aiding their opponents.

Both sides, with generational memories of the super-violence of the struggle for independence, invoked it and copied it in the new struggle. There was little or no threshold of repugnance to deter them (p.105). Violent civil wars set new lows of behaviour with after-comers can then invoke. The whole process ratchets ever downwards.

3. The world is watching

There’s plenty of evidence that if a movement judges that it needs the help of the outside world (of the ‘international community’ which Ignatieff is so sceptical about in his previous books) then it will tailor its behaviour accordingly. It will, in other words, try to restrain violence.

The African National Congress knew it had strong support across the Western world and put its faith in international pressure eventually bringing a settlement, so that its political leaders (and its defenders in the West) chose to play down the violence of the movement’s activist wings (which, as per rule 1, above, were mostly directed against their own i.e. the black community, witness the invention and widespread use of ‘necklacing).

In other words, the international community counts. It can exert pressure. It can use its leverage to turn liberation movements away from terrorist methods. Up to a point. As long as the movement is well organised, as the ANC was and is. At the other extreme is the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), little more than a rag-tag band of psychopaths, who led an 11-year ‘civil war’, little more than a campaign of terror against their own populations (as described in stomach-churning detail in Anthony Loyd’s book, ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’). They had nothing whatsoever to gain from outside influence except being shut down. So with nothing to lose, they continued their killing sprees for 11 long years (1991 to 2002).

At the other end of the organisational scale, Russia was able to carry out atrocities and conduct a war of total destruction in Chechnya because they know no-one was looking (it was almost impossible for foreign journalists to get in) and nobody cared (it wasn’t a location of strategic significance, no oil, none of the racial discrimination the West gets so worked up about) so mass murder proceeded with barely a ripple in the Western press.

These examples prove a general rule which is that the ‘international community’ can have some moderating influence on some insurgences, terrorist campaigns and wars (p.98).

Notes and thoughts

This is a complex and sophisticated book. The language of human rights often segues into discussion of particular conventions and international declarations in such a way that to really follow the discussion you have to be pretty familiar with these documents and laws and rules.

I also found some of the political concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around quite obscure and unfamiliar – communitarianism, the conservative principle, adversarial justification, the decision cycle and so on.

I got along with his first political book, ‘Blood and Belonging’, very well. Ignatieff began his discussions with detailed descriptions of the political situations in half a dozen countries, giving plenty of colour and a good feel for the place, its history and issues and people, before getting on to the philosophical discussion, and only applied a handful of relatively simple ideas in order to shed light on the nationalist conflict he was covering.

This book is the opposite. It is sustained at a high academic level, continually introducing new concepts and making fine distinctions and drawing subtle conclusions, with only passing reference to real world examples. It sustains a level of abstraction which I eventually found exhausting. I wasn’t clever enough, or educated enough in the concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around, to really make the most of it. Probably the best way to read it is one chapter at a time, going back and working through the logic of his argument, chewing over the tumble of clever conclusions. It’s certainly the most demanding of Ignatieff’s half dozen politics books.

Seven days later

Having pondered and revisited the book for a week, maybe I can offer a better description of how the text works. The best bits of ‘Blood and Belonging’ were where Ignatieff shed light on the psychology of different types of nationalism (especially the crude sort of ethnic nationalism which so quickly degenerates into violence).

The same is true here, as well. The best bit about, say, the chapter on nihilism, is Ignatieff’s categorisation of different types of terrorist psychology, and then his exploration of what each psychology is, how it comes about and works in practice. This is fascinating and hugely increases the reader’s understanding, especially when he applies the categories to real historical examples.

What I found harder going, where I think the book comes adrift, is when he moves on to discuss how ‘we’ in liberal democracies ought to deal with the new post-9/11 terrorism threat. It’s at this point, throughout the book, that he keeps using his concept of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. we should, temporarily, and with supervision by some kind of objective person like a judge, abrogate some of our treasured human rights in some circumstances, where it’s absolutely necessary – it’s these passages, and the entire concept of ‘the lesser evil’, which I sometimes struggled to understand and never found completely clear or convincing.

Ignatieff’s categorisations and definitions of types of society or politics or terrorism, and his descriptions of the psychologies behind them, I found thrilling because they’re so incisive and instantly clarified my own thinking; whereas his discussions of the ‘morality’ of the political response to terrorism, I found confusing and unsatisfactory.

Credit

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2004. All references are to the 2005 Edinburgh University Press paperback edition.

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by Simon on May 17, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Politics, War

Tagged #democracy, 1970s, 7/7 attacks, 9/11, Afghanistan, African National Congress, Al Qaeda, Algerian National Liberation Front, Another Bloody Love Letter, Anthony Loyd, Arab Spring, Arab world, assassination, Aum Shinrikyo, axis of evil, Baader-Meinhof Gang, Bataclan theatre, book, Bosnia, Boston Marathon bombing, Britain, Carr Center for Human Rights, checks and balances, Chile, civil liberties, Colombia, death squads, democracies, Dostoyevsky, Egypt, Ethics, Geneva Conventions, global terrorism, Guantanamo Bay, Haditha, Harvard, human rights, insurrectionary terrorism, international community, interrogation, Iran, Iraq, ISIL, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Joseph Conrad, Kosovo, Kurdish terrorism, Latin America, lectures, liberation terrorism, Liberty and Armageddon, loner terrorism, Madrid train bombings, Manchester Arena bombing, Marxist terrorism, Michael Ignatieff, moral philosophy, Mrs Thatcher, Muslim countries, My Lai, Nihilists, North Korea, Northern Ireland, occupation terrorism, Oklahoma City bombing, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Osama bin Laden, Paris, Patriot Act, Peru, political philosophy, political theory, Politics, President George W. Bush, prophet Mohammed, Psychology, revolutionary Russia, Revolutionary United Front, RUF, separatist terrorism, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, surveillance, terrorism, terrorist attacks, the Basque Country, the caliphate, The Ethics of Emergency, the Great Depression, the lesser evil, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, The Philippines, The Possessed, the Red Brigades, The Secret Agent, The Strength of the Weak, The Temptations of Nihilism, The Weakness of the Strong, Thomas E. Ricks, Timothy McVeigh, Tokyo subway attack, torture, UK, University of Edinburgh, US Congress, Vietnam, violence, Voltaire, war on terror, Weimar Germany, Western democracy, WMDs, World War One

Posted by Simon on May 17, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/17/the-lesser-evil-michael-ignatieff/

Spain and the Hispanic World @ the Royal Academy

Historical scope

This is a vast exhibition, almost intimidatingly, almost bewilderingly so. Not so much because of the number of objects – although the 150 artifacts it contains must be at the top end of anybody’s ability to really process and appreciate. No, it’s the scale of the subject matter. The poster and promotional material gives the impression that it’s largely an art exhibition but this is way wrong. In fact it’s more of a historical exhibition which aims to give an overview of Spanish cultural history from the earliest times, from around 2,500 BC, to the time of the Great War. Imagine an exhibition which set out to give an overview of British culture starting with the earliest finds at Stonehenge and going century by century through to the War.

But more than that, it also aims to cover the cultural history of Spain’s colonies in the New World i.e. central and South America. Imagine one exhibition which set out to cover the complete cultural history of Britain and its empire! That’s what I mean by the scale and scope of the thing being challenging.

So there are paintings, yes, lots of paintings, quite a few by masters of the Spanish tradition – but there is a lot, lot more besides, lots of other types of object and artifact. At places across the website the RA use the strapline ‘Take a journey through 4,000 years of art-making across Spain and Latin America’ and that’s closer to the mark.

The Hispanic Society

The key fact to understanding the exhibition is given in its sub-title, ‘Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library’. The Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York was founded in 1904 by philanthropist Archer M. Huntington in a set of buildings commissioned specially for the collection and which remain its home to this day. It is home to the most extensive collection of Spanish art outside of Spain.

So this exhibition is by way of presenting the greatest hits of the HSM&L’s collection. It contains some 150 works, including:

masterpieces by Zurbarán, El Greco, Goya and Velázquez
objects from Latin America including stunning decorative lacquerware
sculptures, paintings, silk textiles, ceramics, lustreware, silverwork, precious jewellery, maps, drawings, illuminated manuscripts

The exhibition is divided into 9 rooms and because each one makes such huge leaps in place and time and culture this seems the most manageable way of summarising it.

Room 1. The Iberian Peninsula in the Ancient World

A glass case of fine silver torcs and bracelets and suchlike made 2400 to 1900 BC by the so-called Bell Beaker people. By the third century BC the peninsula was inhabited by the people the Romans called the Celts.

The Palencia Hoard by unknown artists (172 to 50 BC)

Quite quickly we’re on to the Roman colonisation, consolidated in the first century BC. The room contains a floor mosaic of Medusa and a breath-taking marble statue of the goddess Diana.

I was surprised there was no mention of the Carthaginians who colonised eastern Spain and exploited its famous silver mines, something I read about in Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles (2010) among other sources.

Moving swiftly we beam forwards to the collapse of Roman rule in the 5th century AD and the arrival of the Visigothic tribes. There’s a case with a lovely cloisonne belt buckle from the 6th century, reminiscent of the much better one from the Sutton Hoo horde.

Room 2. Al-Andalus

In 711 Arab and Berber invaders overran the Visigothic kingdom and installed their own Islamic governments. The territory came to be known as al-Andalus. In 756 Abd al Rahman I named himself Caliph and established a celebrated court in Córdoba. The peninsula remained under Muslim rule for the next 700 years with power moving between different dynasties and power centres. The room contains some stunning fabrics.

Alhambra silk from Nasrid, Granada (about 1400)

Among the most prized works by Muslim artisans from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries were ceramics and this room contains a lot of plates and bowls.

Deep Plate by an unknown artist (1370s)

This plate is made of tin-glazed earthenware and has been given an iridescent finish by applying a very thin layer of metal oxide. Potters would glaze with tin, lead, copper, silver, gold, or platinum, depending on availability and the desired outcome. For added extravagance, some of the dynamic patterns have been painted in vibrant (and very expensive) cobalt blue. In the centre is a coat of arms of one of the oldest aristocratic families in Catalonia, the Despujol. Designs like this were ostentatious showpieces for Europe’s rich and powerful. The two small holes at the top of this plate indicate that it was designed to be hung as art on a wall rather than piled with food on a table.

Locks and knockers

My favourite case in this room displayed eight or so fine metalwork door knockers and chest locks. The Hispanic Society’s collection of ironwork comprises some 300 pieces, including door knockers, pulls, locks and lock plates. I liked their medieval feel and especially the way they incorporate animals and imaginary beasts, such as a lizard, a wolf and a dragon, with intricate geometric designs influenced by Islamic tradition.

Two metal door knockers, on the left in the shape of a crab’s claw, on the right a bird with a long dropping neck (both around 1500)

The Reconquista

Throughout the Middle Ages Christian kings from the north fought the Muslim invaders, without much luck. The pace of military campaigning picked up from the 11th century onwards. This came to be known as the Reconquista and was the west Mediterranean equivalent of what, in the East, came to be known as the Crusades. Unlike the Crusades it was successful and in 1492 the last Muslim state, of Granada, was overthrown under forces led by the joint monarchs, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, whose marriage and joint rule marked the de facto unification of Spain.

Slavery

The Spanish pioneered the European slave trade from Africa. The ruthless and forceful displacement of Africans to the Iberian Peninsula began as early as the 1440s. Following the discovery of the Americas the majority of enslaved Africans were trafficked directly across the Atlantic where, throughout the American continent, they were forced to work on plantation and in the notorious silver mining industry. By the sixteenth century, it is thought that Spain had the largest population of enslaved Africans in Europe.

Room 3. Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Room 3 is the biggest in the exhibition and the overwhelming impression in entering is the arrival of painting. There are works by Spanish masters such as El Greco, Velasquez and Zubaran. But, as with the exhibition generally, there’s much more to it than painting. The room covers the period from the triumph of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile over the Moors in 1492. They began a programme of forced conversion and violent expulsion of Muslim and Jewish communities as they bid to unite their realms under the Catholic faith. The Catholic Monarchs were followed by Charles V (1500 to 1558) and Philip II (1527 to 1598).

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were known as the Age of Gold. This was funded by slave labour in the New World, and especially the gold and silver mined by forced labourers working in terrible conditions in Spain’s Central American colonies.

It was also the Age of the Counter-Reformation when first Charles V then Philip II took it upon themselves to reinforce the Catholic Church at its most fierce and repressive (these were the glory years of the Spanish Inquisition which became notorious across Europe). Spanish rulers commissioned art which emphasised a sickly, sentimental, reactionary form of Catholicism or produced lickspittle portraits of terrifying, brutish kings, politicians and generals.

The Penitent St Jerome by El Greco (1600)

The most prominent painters of the period included artists such as El Greco, who moved to Toledo in 1577, and Diego Velázquez, who was appointed court painter to Philip IV in 1623. I appreciate that El Greco (1541 to 1614) is a classic of European art but I have never liked him. The milky eyes of his sickly saints and martyrs staring up into Catholic heaven have always revolted me.

The room is packed with lots of other nauseating Catholic imagery including an ascension, an altarpiece, images of Mary and Martha, a Mater Dolorosa, crucifixions, mothers and babies, a Pieta, images of the Immaculate Conception. There’s a big painting of St Emerentiana by Francisco de Zurbarán which is dire. The depiction of the fabric is impressive in a stiff late medieval way, but the face is awful.

Revolting in a different way are the power-worshipping portraits by the likes of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599 to 1660). There’s a huge portrait of Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, who carried out negotiations with the young Prince Charles who came to Spain to sue for the hand of the Infanta in 1623. With characteristic arrogance Olivares insisted that Charles could only marry her if he promised to convert to Catholicism along with all the British court. This was a non-starter and explains why Charles went onto the court of France and won the hand of Henrietta Maria from the much more pragmatic Henry IV.

Spanish wars of repression

The huge wealth Spain creamed from its black slaves and the enslaved Aztecs and Incas in the New World paid not only for a re-energised and harshly reactionary Catholic Church, but for its wars of conquest designed to undo the Reformation and reimpose Catholicism on Protestant countries. It was with this aim that King Philip II launched the Armada in 1588 which was designed to defeat the English, overthrow their queen, Elizabeth I, who, along with most of the aristocracy would have been treated as heretics and executed, and then a foreign ideology (Catholicism) imposed on the entire population, anyone complaining being subjected to summary execution.

Luckily the English navy disrupted the Spanish fleet and the ‘Protestant wind’ did the rest. But the Netherlands was not so lucky. Originally under the control of the Dukes of Burgundy, with the end of their line the Netherlands fell to the house of Hapsburg, which itself inherited the Spanish throne. Largely Protestant the Netherlands rebelled against Catholic rule in the 1570s starting the prolonged period of rebellion which is known as the Eighty Years War. In 1567 Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba arrived with an army of 10,000 Spanish and Italian soldiers and proceeded to institute a reign of terror. As Wikipedia puts it:

Acting on orders of Philip II of Spain, Alba sought to exterminate all manifestations of Protestantism and disobedience through inquisition and public executions.

There was not a lot of difference between this and the Nazi conquest of the Low Countries 400 years later. None of this is mentioned in any of the wall labels. Spain’s role as arch enemy of free Protestant countries in the 16th and 17th centuries simply goes unmentioned.

The Duke of Alba in 1549 by Anthonis Mor, the man who ‘sought to exterminate all manifestations of Protestantism and disobedience through inquisition and public executions.’

Besides paintings testifying to the lachrymose religiosity of the Counter Reformation and the genocidal macho-ness of Spain’s generals, the room also includes:

many early maps of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast and the New World
a baptismal font, a pilgrim flask, a chalice, a reliquary cross, a pendant, a huge bishop’s brocade
a set of illuminated manuscripts including a Book of Hours
glazed earthenware, goblets and suchlike

My favourite piece was much earlier, a medieval wooden carving of St Martin on a horse from the late 15th century before the Reformation split Europe, before Columbus discovered the New World, before art became really professionalised – from a simpler time.

St Martin 1450 to 1475 by unknown artist

Room 4. Colonial Latin America I: People and place

A huge modern map on the gallery wall gives a sense of the breath-taking amount of territory Spain arrogated to itself after Christopher Columbus stumbled across the New World on his failed attempt to find a western passage to India. He had, in fact, landed on Guanahani, an island in the Caribbean which he renamed San Salvador (in modern-day Bahamas).

His mistaken belief that the natives were Indians condemned indigenous peoples in north, central and south America to be known as ‘Indians’ for centuries afterwards, despite belonging to a huge range of peoples, languages and conditions and explains why the Caribbean islands are erroneously referred to as the West Indies to this day.

The Spanish conquistadors promptly conquered the empires of the Mexica (Aztecs) and Inca, massacring them where necessary, setting the survivors to work as forced labour on huge plantations or in the silver mines which they discovered in 1547 at Potosí in the southern highlands of Bolivia.

Spain divided its vast territories in the Americas into two viceroyalties: Nueva España (New Spain, modern-day Mexico and Guatemala), and Peru (which included Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador). Later, additional viceroyalties were created: Nueva Granada (made up of Colombia and Venezuela) and Mar de la Plata (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay).

Spain was to rule over this huge colonial empire until independence movements in the 1820s forced them to relinquish these territories allowing for the emergence of modern nation states.

Race rules – apartheid

The conquering Spanish implemented a strictly hierarchical society based on purity of bloodlines and skin tone denominating ‘casta’ (caste). Close ties to Spain and white skin elevated the status of the individual: ‘peninsulares’ (literally those from peninsular Spain) dominated the colonial administration; followed by ‘criollos’ (creoles), those of Spanish (or European) descent born in the Americas; ‘mestizos’, those of mixed parentage; and finally ‘indígenas’, those of indigenous descent. At the bottom of the pile were the hundreds of thousands black African slaves.

This room contains a lot of surveys and maps, for example several surveys of the new settlement of Mexico City, and including the famous World Map of 1526 by Giovanni Vespucci. This map was a copy of the padrón real, Spain’s master nautical chart which was kept in a secret location in Seville. It’s thought this ornate version was a gift for King Charles V. It includes decorative details such as ships in the ocean, camels and elephants across Africa, a collapsing Tower of Babel, and a Red Sea coloured vivid scarlet.

Detail of Giovanni Vespucci’s World Map (1526)

Room 5. Colonial Latin America II: Decorative Arts

In the decades after the conquest there was, surprisingly enough, a flourishing of the arts. Indigenous artists who were skilled with local materials, techniques and iconography adapted their work to satisfy European tastes and religious beliefs. As it was prohibitively expensive to import domestic objects from Spain there was significant demand for locally produced decorative arts. This gallery contains 20 or so examples of this hybrid art including a number of bateas or trays, vases, caskets, bowls and jars, and an impressive shawl.

Shawl (1775 to 1800) by unknown artist

A large rectangular shawl with fringed ends, the rebozo, is perhaps the most enduring of all traditional Mexican garments. It was first recorded in the 1580s, and is still worn by women across the country today.

Room 6. Colonial Latin America III: Religious Art

A room devoted to art and artifacts created for the Spanish Catholic church which moved quickly to lay out a network of ecclesiastical districts or dioceses under the jurisdiction of bishops alongside a far-reaching programme of church and convent building – all designed, of course, to convert the entire native population.

Not many Spanish artists volunteered to go and live in the New World so the religious authorities had to rely on converting and then training indigenous artists. These created fresco cycles, paintings and polychrome sculptures which were made in vast quantities, likewise fine ornamented silver and gold objects, and fabrics.

This gallery contains a range of religious paintings, sculpture and other objects from across the Americas that reveal how local artists used local materials and adapted traditional techniques, incorporating pre-Columbian symbols or other
local references such as flora and fauna in their work.

The room contains a number of dubious paintings of varying levels of amateurishness and kitsch, one incorporating fish scales into its surface. The objects, such as lamps, are more persuasive. But the standout item, and one of the highlights of the exhibition, is the set of four small sculptures of figures demonstrating the four states of people after death, namely a rotted skeleton covered in maggots, a flame-red soul burning in hell, a pale white naked person undergoing the torments of purgatory, and a dressed and serene personage enjoying the bliss of heaven.

The Four Fates of Man: Death, Soul in Hell, Soul in Purgatory, Soul in Heaven attributed to Manuel Chili, called Caspicara (around 1775)

Room 7. Goya

The Spanish are everso proud of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 to 1828) but visiting the National Gallery’s exhibition Goya Portraits back in 2015 destroyed my respect for him. That exhibition revealed Goya to be a shockingly bad painter, particularly of portraits. He looks like a bad caricaturist. At one point in that exhibition they had hung Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington alongside one British painter Sir Thomas Lawrence and there was no comparison. The Lawrence portrait is a brilliantly penetrating, superbly finished and completely convincing portrait. The Goya portrait is far more muddy, murky and unfinished.

In this room there are only six or so works, three big paintings and three small sketches. To my astonishment the Spanish curator of the exhibition, Guillaume Kientz, makes the wild claim that Goya’s portrait of the Duchess of Alba is Spain’s equivalent of the Mona Lisa, a lodestone, a high water mark of the art of painting. Really? I think it’s dire.

Francisco de Goya The Duchess of Alba (1797) © Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York

The Duchess of Alba by Francisco de Goya (1797)

The background is drab and dead, her posture is stiff, and her face! And yet the curators are so confident that this is a great European masterpiece that they made it the poster for this exhibition. The fact that she is pointing with her right hand to the words ‘Solo Goya’ (‘Only Goya’) written in the sand only make it seem more clumsy, gauche and amateurishness.

Luckily, the room has a redeeming feature, which is a display of three small drawings from what came to be called Albums A and B. These small-scale sketches were to culminate in the better known series of sketches known as Los Caprichos. Goya’s depiction of faces in these is still dire, but the sketches aren’t about the faces, they are about striking and often unusual physical postures and positions, capturing the activities of everyday life of people and peasants with swift, vivid strokes.

This smudgy reproduction doesn’t do justice to the dynamic energy of the original sketch, the excellence of composition, the straining man’s calf muscles, the woman’s hauntingly blank face sketched in with ink. Million times better than the silly duchess standing on a beach.

Peasant Carrying a Woman by Francisco de Goya (1810)

Room 8. Sorolla, Zuloaga and the Hispanic Society

Now, at long last, after what seems like an immensely long and exhausting journey, we finally enter ‘recent’ history i.e. the twentieth century. This is the last proper room of the exhibition and it contains a dozen or so huge paintings, 3 or 4 of them by ‘the Spanish Impressionist’, the master of light, Joaquín Sorolla.

The wall label gives an account of Archer Huntington’s founding of the ‘Spanish Museum’ in New York which opened its doors to the public in 1908. Soon after, Huntington visited Europe, where he saw works by the contemporary Spanish painters Ignacio Zuloaga in Paris and Joaquín Sorolla in London. Archer immediately planned to exhibit their work at
the Hispanic Society the following year as well as setting about buying works by other contemporary Spanish artists including Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa, Isidre Nonell and José Gutiérrez Solana.

Sorolla and Zuloaga can be seen as presenting differing views of Spain, from the lovely sunlit world of Sorolla to the darker vision of Zuloaga which is why the curators have hung them on opposite walls.

After the Bath by Joaquín Sorolla (1908)

Sorolla is less like an impressionist than the Spanish equivalent of John Singer Sargent, but painting in a Mediterranean setting drenched with light. His paintings look best from the other side of the room where the details of the composition fade a bit and the main impact comes from the drama of light and shade.

Possibly my favourite painting in the whole exhibition was Ignacio Zuloaga’s ‘Lucienne Bréval as Carmen’ from 1908. Why? Because I think I’m right in saying that she is the only human being in the exhibition’s 60 or so paintings of people who is happy, who is laughing. After scores of black-clothed clerics, members of the Inquisition and brutal, exterminating generals on the one hand, and countless Immaculate Conceptions of the Holy Virgin Mary and El Greco saints looking milky-eyed up to a heaven pullulating with baby angels, how lovely to come across an actual human being looking like they’re enjoying being alive.

Lucienne Bréval as Carmen by Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta (1908)

As usual this internet copy isn’t a patch on the size and vibrancy of the original. The more I looked the more relaxed and happy I felt and so so relieved to have escaped the centuries of bleak Catholic oppression.

Room 9. Vision of Spain

More Sorolla. Following the success of the Hispanic Society’s exhibition in 1909, Huntington and Sorolla embarked on an ambitious project that would dominate the rest of the artist’s career. Huntington wanted him to paint a series of murals for the Hispanic Society’s main building. Originally he wanted scenes from Spain’s long colourful history but Sorolla demurred – he wasn’t that kind of painting. The project evolved into the idea for a series of fourteen monumental canvases depicting the peoples, costumes and traditions of different regions of the country and to be titled ‘Vision of Spain’.

Painted between 1911 and 1919, the panoramic series was opened in a purpose-built gallery at the Hispanic Society in 1926, three years after the artist’s death.

Now it would have been very impressive to end the exhibition with one of these finished panels but, for whatever reason, the curators haven’t. Instead, the final room is a long narrow gallery in which is hung a preparatory sketch for the panels.

The wall label tells us that Sorolla produced around 80 of these preparatory studies, painted in gouache. They display a more sketchy, expressionist approach than the final work along, with modern processes such as the collaging technique papier collé.

This is sort of interesting but not as impressive as the final thing would have been. In fact it’s an odd, parochial, anti-climactic way to end an exhibition which, in its central rooms, encompassed the military and religious history of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known.

Sketch for the Provinces of Spain: Castile by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1912 to 1913)

In-depth video

Thoughts

Two thoughts:

1. The end of the exhibition – and so, presumably, the Society’s collection – is strangely incomplete. What I mean is, they have Goya, in 1797 and 1810 and then…Sorolla from 1908: what happened in between? What happened in Spanish art between Goya and Sorolla? There appears to be a big hole in the collection. In France we got reams of Salon art but also Courbet and then the amazing achievement of the impressionists and post-impressionists. Even in unartistic England we had lots of anecdotal and social art and then the pre-Raphaelites morphing into the ‘Olympians’ and then atmospheric fin-de-siècle art with outstanding individuals such as Aubrey Beardsley. Did Huntingdon not buy anything of 19th century Spanish art because he wasn’t interested, because there was nothing worth buying? It’s a big gap.

And then the 20th century. I appreciate Huntingdon was buying in the Edwardian period but…did the trustees of the collection agree not to purchase anything after his commissioning of Sorolla’s ‘Vision of Spain’, nothing from 20th century Spanish culture? For example, by Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali? And, as I understand it, the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1938 was central to Spain’s modern history leading, as it did, to the fascist dictatorship of General Franco which only ended in 1975.

I don’t know what exactly you’d include in the collection or exhibition to cover this period – I’m just saying that the omission of artifacts from almost the entire 19th and 20th centuries feels very strange and surely undermine the collection’s claim to represent ‘Spanish culture’. The last two hundred years are, arguably, the most important part of any modern nation’s history and culture. Which brings me to a bigger question:

2. What is a nation’s culture? I know that the curators at the British Museum or Tate Britain would agree with the curators of this exhibition that a national culture is somehow captured or conveyed by rooms full of medieval ceramics, ancient maps, old paintings and church accessories. But is it? Would you say that the ‘culture’ of Britain would be adequately conveyed by Roman mosaics, medieval church artifacts, Jacobean paintings and some works by John Singer Sargent (the rough equivalent of Sorolla)? Pretty obviously, no. That would just be a collection of miscellaneous historical objects masquerading as a portrait of a culture.

Surely you’d turn to sociologists to learn what a real culture consists of – its language and religion, its human and physical geography, the climate, the agriculture and the traditional foods arising from it (beef and beer in England, tapas, paella and wine inn Spain), its laws and customs and traditions, the things that make it unique, and then how it survived the storms and disasters of the 20th century and has fared in the post-industrial, multicultural world of the last 30 years or so.

I understand the aims of this collection and this exhibition, I see its strong points, I marvel at its breadth and detail. But in a sense, isn’t a living, breathing culture, as lived by a nation’s people, precisely everything which is missing from this exhibition?

Related reviews

Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light @ the National Gallery (April 2019)
Peru: a journey in time @ the British Museum (December 2021)
Goya: The Portraits @ the National Gallery (November 2015)
Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album @ The Courtauld Gallery (March 2015)

The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson (revised edition 2009)

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by Simon on April 3, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Painting, Slavery

Tagged Abd al Rahman I, Al-Andalus, Anthonis Mor, Arabs, Aragon, Archer M. Huntingto, Argentina, Aztecs, batea, Berber, Bolivia, Carthage, casta, Castile, Catalonia, Catholicism, Celts, ceramics, Charles V, Chile, Christopher Columbus, Colombia, Colonial Latin America, Cordoba, Count-Duke of Olivares, Counter-Reformation, criollos, death, Diana, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Diego Velázquez, drawings, Duke of Alba, Duke of Wellington, Dukes of Burgundy, Early Modern Spain, Ecuador, El Greco, Elizabeth I, exhibition, Francisco de Zurbarán, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Gaspar de Guzmán, Giovanni Vespucci, Goya, Granada, Guanahani, Guillaume Kientz, Heaven, Hell, Henrietta Maria, Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa, history, Iberian peninsula, Ignacio Zuloaga, illuminated manuscripts, Incas, indígenas, India, Isidre Nonell, jewellery, Joaquín Sorolla, José Gutiérrez Solana, King Ferdinand II, knockers, Latin America, Los Caprichos, Lucienne Bréval as Carmen, Manuel Chili, maps, Mar de la Plata, medieval Spain, Medusa, mestizos, Mona Lisa, Nueva España, Nueva Granada, Painting, Palencia Hoard, Paraguay, peninsulares, Peru, Philip II, Protestant wind, Purgatory, Queen Isabella I, rebozo, Richard Miles, Roman Catholicism, Roman Empire, San Salvador, sculpture, silverwork, Sir Thomas Lawrence, slave trade, Slavery, Sorolla, South America, Spain colonies, Spanish Armada, Spanish conquistadors, Spanish cultural history, Spanish empire, St Emerentiana, St Martin, Sutton Hoo, textiles, the Age of Gold, the Bell Beaker people, the Caribbean, the Carthaginians, The Catholic Monarchs, the Crusades, the Despujol, The Duchess of Alba, the Eighty Years War, The Hispanic Society, the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, the Mexica, the Moors, the Netherlands, the New World, the padrón real, the Reconquista, the Reformation, the West Indies, Uruguay, Velázquez, Venezuela, Visigothic kingdom, Visigothics, Vision of Spain, Zuloaga, Zurbarán

Posted by Simon on April 3, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/03/spain-and-the-hispanic-world-royal-academy/

Ninety-Two Days by Evelyn Waugh (1934)

It is by crawling on the face of it that one learns a country; by the problems of transport that its geography becomes a reality and its inhabitants real people…[by describing them one offers one’s reader] a share in the experience of travel, for these checks and hesitations constitute the genuine flavour.
(Ninety-Two Days, page 170)

Waugh had a reason for going to Ethiopia, the subject of his previous travel book, Remote People – to cover the coronation of Haile Selassie. The journey described in this book, by contrast, had a much more ramshackle provenance. He chose to go to British Guiana, the colony tucked up on the north coast of South America, north of Brazil, more or less because few other people did. Unlike India or Kenya or Egypt he could find no books on the place and nobody else who’d been there.

By sea to South America

So off he went on a cheap steamer down the English Channel, across the rambunctuous Atlantic, to the fragrant West Indies and so on to dock at Georgetown, capital of British Guiana. Here he is looked after by the Governor and introduced to Mr Bain, the Commissioner for the district, who supervises the purchase of a large number of supplies for his trip and accompanies him by train along the coast to New Amsterdam at the mouth of the River Berbice.

But what exactly is the purpose of his trip? Waugh doesn’t know, even after he’s got back to Blighty, which partly explains why the book opens not with him aboard ship or setting off into the jungle, but domiciled in a nice English house in the country, preparing his desk with nice clean foolscap paper and a pen and ink and then himself wondering… what was that all about?

Quick summary

Well, the basic outline is easily conveyed. From New Amsterdam, Waugh headed by boat up the Berbice River, pausing at various settlements, then leaving the river to trek on foot or horseback through the jungle, crossing the border into Brazil and northern Amazonia, before hiking north along the Ireng River, stopping at isolated ranches and remote settlements, then taking to boat again on the River Essequibo, skirting various waterfalls, including the famous Kaieteur Falls, then a short train east across country to the Demarara River, and so by boat back to Georgetown where the river debouches into the Atlantic.

To Kurupukari

First stop was Kurupukari, 100 miles south. Half the journey is by paddle steamer along the Berbice River (p.33). Then they land and go by horse along a cattle track, These are tracks the vaqueiros use to drive cattle from the savannahs of the interior down to market at the coast. The journey takes six days travelling at 15 miles a day, through rain forest he describes with awe, huge columned trees rearing a hundred feet overhead (p.40).

After talking about it every day of their 6-day hike, Waugh is surprised to find it consists of… a flagpole lying in the grass (it isn’t finished yet and they don’t have a flag) and one bungalow built in a clearing. Not even a jetty, not even native mud huts (p.44). This extreme sparseness of population characterises the entire trip.

Kurupukari is on the Essequibo river and they are awaiting a boat laden with supplies to meet them. Waugh describes the staple foods of the interior which are farine, a tasteless and rather disgusting vegetable product made from the cassava root, and tasso, made from salted wind-dried strips of dead cow.

On this first part of the trip he is accompanied by the talkative Mr Bain and a plan of sorts had evolved, that Waugh proceed in stages along the cattle track, visiting various small settlements along the way, until reaching the larger settlement of Bon Success, from which he could head west to Boa Vista, ‘next to Manaos the most important town in the Amazonas’. Mr Bain paints a picture of a city of inexpressible grandeur, complete with boulevards and opera houses. Sounds great. Waugh adopts the plan. The reader knows with certainty that he is going to be bitterly disappointed.

To Kurupukari and beyond

Bain remains at the primitive government station at Kurupukari. Once the boat with its supplies arrive, they’re unloaded then distributed among several horses, then early the next morning Waugh and his group of 4 servants/natives (Yetto, Price, Sinclair, Jagger) cross the river and set off on horseback. The dominant figure of this section is the egregious Yetto, a black man of surpassing ugliness, but a solid support who he becomes deeply attached to.

There follow 6 days riding along a traditional cattle track, occasionally meeting one or two vaqueiros driving a handful of cattle, sometimes coming across the corpses of cattle, which don’t endure the journey to the coast very well, dying of insect-borne diseases or sometimes attack by large animals. He learns more about his travelling companions.

Jagger is an enigma, a civilised man from a notable family on the coast, he was educated in Scotland. According to Yetto he was ruined in lawsuits with his family and has degenerated into one of the ‘race of tramps who wander the cattle country, there and in Brazil, living indefinitely off the open hospitality of the cattle ranches’ (p.53). He attaches himself to Waugh’s party for a while, then is too ill to keep up the pace and stays behind at one of their temporary camps, never to be heard of again.

He meets half a dozen vaqueiros driving 50 cattle. Next day they meet three Englishmen travelling in the other direction, towards the coast.

On the third day they cross a dry creek and come into a little savannah (i.e. open area of sand and scrubby thorn bushes) named Suranna. There is a native settlement. Waugh explains something about size and scale. A dozen or so mud and thatched huts constitutes a ‘large’ settlement. More than 20 mud huts is exceptional. The largest he ever saw apparently contained 22, though he arrived too late at night to see this vast metropolis. Next day they arrive at Annai which consists of precisely one house (p.58).

In other words the entire region, both the settlements in the savannahs, the so-called ranches, the white ‘settlements’ – all are characterised by emptiness and very sparse population.

After a long hot ride across the parched savannah, he arrives at Christie’s ranch (p.62). Christie is an old black guy who has religious visions and agreeably lunatic ideas. He’s been preaching to the local Indians for thirty years and hasn’t made a single conversion.

Next stop is a ranch owned by Georgetown Chinese named Mr Wong and run by Daguar (p.67). The ranch consists of three wattle and mud huts in a wired enclosure. Primitive, isn’t it? The ranch is on the River Ireng and Waugh is surprised to find this forms an international border. Across the muddy river is Brazil. He describe the pestilential effects of the cabouri fly, whose bite you don’t feel till it’s gorged itself and dropped off, and ticks which burrow into the skin, and bêtes rouges, little red creatures which burrow under your skin and cause unbearable itching.

(Later he tells us the rivers contain stingrays, electric eels and carnivorous fish, p.77. Why were these areas never settled or developed? There’s your answer.)

Next morning’s ride brings him to a village marked on the maps as Pirara but which in fact simply doesn’t exist. The name has been transferred to a ranch five miles away, owned by an American named Hart. This actually amounts to more than one building, with facilities such as a shower room, with very decent meals cooked by the wife, a Creole nanny for the children and – mirabile dictu – a truck, which had been manhandled this far up the trail, didn’t have much petrol and no regular roads to travel.

Waugh explains that South American countries are notorious for going to war over remote bits of territory. Britain nearly went to war with Brazil and Venezuela about different bits of remote savannah. He learns maps are largely invented, and based on rumoured natural features (such as rivers) which often don’t exist. He gives a mocking account of a boundary commission which is meant to be working with Brazilian officials on defining the border (p.71).

Next day’s journey brings them to the ranch of Bon Success owned by Mr Teddy Melville, one of Mrs Hart’s brothers. They drive there in the famous motor van. It is very bumpy (p.73). They have breakfast with Teddy and his charming wife, before driving beside the River Takuru to the missionary settlement of St Ignatius, where Waugh is hosted by the lovely Father Mather. Waugh pays off Price (who’s going on to the station at Bon Success, Yetto and Sinclair (who turn and head back down the trail). Part one of the journey is over.

Again, Waugh remarks on its bareness and lack of people. All over Africa he saw missions, schools and churches packed out with native pupils, congregations, teachers and pupils. Here, almost nobody. A tin and thatch church, and a primitive schoolhouse which holds, at most, a dozen Indian children. The mission building has a second story (first one he’s seen) and, amazingly, a reading lamp. Great relief (p.75).

Most of the scattered ranchers and all the Brazilians across the river are Catholics. Father Mather ministers to them all. There is one shop, the only one for 200 miles in any direction, kept by an affable Portuguese named Mr Figuiredo, who dresses comfortably in pyjamas, treats them to a feast, and charges exorbitant prices for everything (p.79). He is taken to visit local Indians including a charming tattooed witch.

After a delightful restful week, on 1 February he sets off with a guide, David, and his Brazilian brother-in-law Francesco, to cross the river and so the invisible border into Brazil and ride the 3 days to Boa Vista (p.81). They stop for the nights at primitive mud and thatch huts, with a few other travellers kipping in a shack full of hammocks, served weak revolting tasso stew by sleepy womenfolk.

Next day is the longest, hardest, hottest of them all. Waugh is struck by the way the locals carry no water at all, presumably because the land is criss-crossed with streams. Except they’re all dried up and the sun is fierce. Twelve hours without a drink and he hallucinates walking into his club and ordering glass after glass of iced orange juice. At dusk they reach an actual stream and drink mug after mug of freezing water.

Next day they enter the inhabited Rio Branco district and come upon a well organised sugar mill, where they are welcomed and well fed. Teams of workers and passers-though eat in series at a long bench. Next day they reach the Rio Branco opposite which stands the legendary Boa Vista he’s heard so much about.

(It might be worth noting that Boa Vista is simply the Portuguese for ‘Good View’, bom and boa being equivalent to the French bon and bonne i.e. ‘good’, depending on whether the noun is male or female. Rio means river and branco means white. So they arrive at Good View on the White River. Pretty basic, isn’t it?)

Boa Vista

Of course Boa Vista turns out to be nothing like the gaudy fantasies he’s concocted on the tiring journey there. It is a shabby collection of ramshackle buildings laid out on an ambitious grid pattern with a broad muddy high street and cross streets which peter out into bare savannah a few hundred yards in either direction. Population maybe a thousand skinny, scrawny, malnourished, sulky, listless people.

The inhabitants of the entire Brazilian region of the Amazonas were, apparently, descended from convicts sent there as punishment. Waugh found a low, sullen, suspicious atmosphere everywhere. There was an atmosphere of homicide, everyone has guns, there have been well publicised murders. He finds it: ‘a squalid camp of ramshackle cut-throats’ (p.92).

And the population insisting on eating the same monotonous, revolting farine and tasso as everywhere else, despite the achievement of the local nuns in having a very diverse vegetable garden.

Waugh stays at the Benedictine Mission, led by Father Alcuin, and is predictably complimentary about the monks and nuns’ level of quiet, constructive civilisation.

Three things

1. Waugh is easily Bored

According to these books, Waugh had a great capacity for getting very, very bored. He describes sauntering round town to the 4 or 5 people he knows and watching them work, staring at the sky. Attending church is by far the most colourful and interesting thing to do, not only for him but for many of the inhabitants, what with its colour, decorations, smells of incense and singing, no matter how ragged. He gets so bored he reads an edition of Bossuet’s sermons and lives of the saints in French (p.98).

At which point I remembered the almost identical descriptions of his crushing boredom which appear in Remote People. There he gives a comic description of being stuck between trains in the dusty town of Dirre-Dowa, resorting to reading a volume of Alexander Pope’s poems and then, even more desperate, a French dictionary. In his later travelogue, Waugh in Abyssinia, Waugh gets so bored in Addis Ababa waiting for war to actually break out that he buys a baboon!

The point is, Waugh is obviously quickly and easily bored. It would help if he had any hobbies but the issue of boredom highlights two others.

2. Music

He has no ear for music. None at all. He doesn’t enjoy hearing music and, at one point, when he is in a particularly good mood riding among beautiful scenery, he says he’d like to sing, but doesn’t know how. Having no sensitivity at all for music means living in a greatly reduced world of experience.

3. Waugh is no naturalist

Waugh is walking, riding or taking boats through exotic and varied country (savannah and rainforest) and yet his observations of the natural world are rudimentary. He notes the way rainforest consists of enormous tree trunks like columns with all the interesting stuff way at the top. He notes the 3 or 4 super-irritating bugs (the carouba fly et al). He gives detailed notes on all the horses he rents, hires, buys, and that he and his various colleagues ride at various times.

Apart from that – nada. Nothing about the birds or rodents. Occasional general references to blossom but no detail about the flowers, flowering bushes and so on. Maybe the savannah is parched and sandy as he describes, but still.

Pondering these absences makes you realise what is present in his writing. Thinking about what isn’t in the travelogues, made me reflect on what is. Which is people. He’s interested in people, characters, what they look like, how they behave, and really interested in how they talk.

Every single person he meets on a trip like this is foreign, non-English. True, many of them speak a form of English, but generally mangled and contorted, creoles or stumbling phrases. Or they don’t speak English at all and he has to struggle by with his schoolboy French. And then he observes other people who don’t speak each others’ languages struggling to communicate by talking pidgen Portuguese or German to each other (p.96).

What emerges from this little ponder is that Waugh is interested in – and devotes his energies to – people and how they speak. Thus he gives a peremptory description of Boa Vista, but his account only comes to life when he is describing people. People such as Mr Figuiredo who keeps the only decent store for hundreds of miles around, the mysterious German, Herr Steingler (p.95), Father Alcuin who is convinced England is run by freemasons (p.97), the little Brazilian Boundary Commissioner (p.99), Martinez the low-spirited manager of the town’s main story (p.100), Eusebio, a plum native of the Macushi tribe who is striking for not having one belonging in the world (p.117), Mr Hart the kindly middle-aged American with a lovely wife and a Creole nanny who looked like Josephine Baker (p.119).

It is a significant moment right at the end of the book when, assessing what he had learned or seen and done on the trip, he says he has added the religious visionary Mr Christie ‘to my treasury of eccentrics’ (p.168). And:

In Georgetown I met an agreeable character named ‘Professor’ Piles who lived by selling stuffed alligators. (p.168)

Evelyn Waugh’s ‘treasury of eccentrics’. Quite.

And where his ears really prick up is with gossip and the way people are inter-connected. There isn’t that much to say about a man who lives by himself or who you encounter on his own. But a man and his wife are immediately more interesting to gossip and speculate about, and a man and wife and various children, hopefully by different wives, gives you a lovely, juicy subject to explore. Thus, in this account, Waugh comes to life when he discovers that so and so is married to Mr Hart’s sister. Or that Teddy Melville is a legendary man of the area with countless children and grand-children. People are his thing: stories, gossip, the quirks of how they behave and talk. This is what makes his famous diaries so wonderful, a lifetime of observing people and giving little anecdotes.

The turning point

After a week he is desperate to get away from Boa Vista and reckons on taking boat with the Brazilian Boundary Commissioner who is steaming down the River Branco and so will be able to take him to the legendary metropolis of Manaos. Except that, after days of waiting, the Boundary Commissioner refuses to take him (p.99). By now Waugh is quite concerned about catching malaria – everyone he meets has malaria and suffers malarial fever for half the week, starting with his host Father Alcuin who is wretchedly ill during his entire stay.

So he decides to stop trying to penetrate further south into Brazil, but to turn about and retrace his steps back across the river and into British Guiana. Back to St Ignatius Mission, Bon Success, Pirara and Daguar’s ranch BUT, at that point, instead of completely retracing his route i.e. a long trek through the rainforest back to Takama, turning north-north-west and taking a new route, through forest hugging the border with Brazil and then beside the River Potaro with its many waterfalls, to where it joins the mighty Essequibo river, fifty miles or so along this, and then by train east to join the smaller Demarara River which runs down to the sea at Georgetown.

Highlights of the return journey

After crossing back into Guiana, Waugh gets wildly lost and rides his horse north instead of east, stumbling by chance over the shack of an old Indian who very kindly leads him back to the proper trail and so on to St Ignatius’ Mission. Here he stays with kindly Father Mather for ten days, as he assembles the goods which will be needed for the new route home.

Calling the travel bluff, myths of travel (pages 114 to 116)

Here he includes an amusing digression in which he sets out to debunk some of the myths which surround solitary travelling, such as:

You feel free

On the contrary every single item you want to take becomes an encumbrance which slows you down and there are very often only two possible directions along long lonely trails, forward or back. He often feels trapped by limitations of time, energy, money and distance.

You are untrammeled by convention

On the contrary, Waugh feels he knows a wide range of eccentrics, bohemians who dress and behave in all kinds of florid ways back in England. It’s true that you meet a wide range of people on a trip like this, and some of them are very scruffy, and the native Indians may be almost naked, and so on. But you aren’t. Conventions must be maintained, especially in the Tropics where, if you begin to slip, it’s easy to go completely to pieces.

You have a hearty appetite and sleep the sleep of the blessed

Rubbish. The food is inedible, everywhere they go the monotonous inevitability of farine and tasso nearly drives him mad. Often he can barely eat what villagers offer and prefers to go hungry.

And the ‘beds’ are generally hammocks or, if you’re lucky, lumpy tin beds, or a thin sheet on stony savannah. Either way, the Tropics, specially the rainforest, are filled with noise, the endless racket of hooting wild animals. And then there are the mosquitoes, flies and ticks which mean a moment’s lack of attention can lead to any numbers of bites and then the whole night spent itching and tossing and turning. And then, when you’re at the end of your tether, it starts to rain and you get soaked to the skin (p.141).

River baths

If there was one thing he definitely enjoyed and was unique to the trip, it was bathing in cool river waters, ducking under waterfalls, lying in pools near waterfalls. Nothing in England could match the sheer physical bliss of this experience, particularly after a long day’s horse ride or trek.

Karasabai

The primitive little village of Karasabai which prompts an extended meditation on the character of the Amazonian Indians. He ropes in recent books about the existence of primitive matriarchal societies, and throws in some general cultural speculation about the noble savage, the myths of the garden of Eden and so on. Very run-of-the-mill. What came over for me was the Amazon Indian’s listlessness. Their flat, unemotional, morose affect.

He has an interesting passage explaining that the Indians have no hierarchy at all, no words for sir or servant, no words conveying superior or inferior status. They do things when they want to, and stop when they don’t and nobody can make force them.

The Indian villagers stare at him but never move, never say anything, never display any real curiosity. He unpacks various marvels from his bag and then goes for a wash and when he comes back the things and the Indians are in the same position.

He compares this with the blacks he met in Africa who all showed far more energy and creativity and inventiveness and would have pinched everything in his bag if he turned his back. The Indian women wear shabby little linen dresses and try to hide in them. He contrasts them with what he calls ‘the swagger and provocation of a Negress’ (p.124). When they take a shallow boat down the river, the two blacks with him enjoy strenuously rowing and showing off their strength. The little Indian family with them have a vague got at it, dangle paddles in the water, uninterested, then give up and huddle together.

The Indians are divided into ‘peoples’ and refuse point blank to cross from the territory of their people into another people’s, or to have anything to do with other peoples. Peoples Waugh meets include the Macushi, Kopinang Indians, the Patamonas. (Wikipedia suggests the correct term is ‘indigenous tribes’ and lists nine residing in Guyana: the Wai Wai, Macushi, Patamona, Lokono, Kalina, Wapishana, Pemon, Akawaio and Warao.)

You could choose to interpret the Indians’ listlessness and incuriosity to a special spiritual understanding of the world, lack of interest in material goods or the white man’s worldview. Waugh doesn’t comment much till the very end when he is driven to deep dislike of the selfish Indian family who share the paddled boat down the river. They can’t be bothered to walk a few hundred yards to see the Kaieteur Falls, one of the wonders of the world, and Waugh bluntly ascribes it to ‘mere stupidity and lack of imagination’ (p.158).

Tipuru

At the village of Tipuru they catch up with the Catholic priest Father Keary who is going his rounds of the villages. After his initial surprise at meeting a posh young English Catholic rider, Keary agrees they can travel on together. This makes everything much easier for Waugh, for Keary understands the people, the language, has his own resources and, of course, can speak English so Waugh will have someone to talk to.

So they set off accompanied by a new servant, Antonio, his wive and four native bearers. A sequence of villages, Shimai with five houses, one hut by itself inhabited by an old black woman, an unnamed village of three huts, Karto with three huts, Kurikabaru a metropolis of thirteen huts on a bleak hilltop, and so on. Sparse and empty country. Isolated Indians who are, however, wonderfully hospitable, laying out supplies of cassiri drink, peppers, cassava bread and sometimes milk. (To this day Guyana remains ‘one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries.’)

Mikrapuru

And so via a series of tiny settlements over the watershed which divides Amazonia from the Caribbean rivers and so down out of the rainforest to Mikrapuru, 15 or so miles from the river Essequibo and home to the civilised and hospitable Mr Winter. Waugh had met Winter at a social do back in Georgetown on the coast.

Winter has set up a camp here and employs native Indians to wash for alluvial diamonds in the river Potaro. Waugh describes the ingenious series of filters fed by dammed creek water into which Indians employed for the purpose pour, throughout the day, gravel and mud, in the hope the filters will reveal either river gold or diamonds. Winter had kept his camp for three years. It is very isolated, the few white neighbours who once lived within reasonable reach have all left, and the Indians work for him for a while, to earn simple gewgaws and then, with their own mysterious timing, melt back into the forest. Waugh contrasts the Indians’ wispiness, their ghostliness and general lack of interest, with the bullish enthusiasm of the blacks he sees. Winter’s foreman is black. Coming from the coast they have a better sense of work and discipline.

Journey to the river

After ten days or so, Waugh has exhausted his own provisions and Winter was low on them to start with, so it’s time to leave. He will ride with Winter’s foreman down to the River Potaro to board the first of three boats which will take him the stages between the impassible waterfalls which punctuate the river (being the big one, Kaieteur Falls, then Waratuk Falls and Amatuk Falls).

Haunting description of Holmia which had once been an extensive European plantation, built for the balatá trade (balatá is ‘a hard rubber-like material made by drying the milky juice produced principally by the bully tree). Holmia fell into poverty and ruin, has been abandoned for decades and now largely reclaimed by the jungle.

He describes the 700-foot fall of the waterfall at Kaieteur (p.155). Wikipedia tells me it is ‘the world’s largest single drop waterfall by the volume of water flowing over it’. It is ‘about four and a half times the height of Niagara Falls…and about twice the height of Victoria Falls.’ As you might expect, it prompts Waugh to a burst of lyricism:

I lay on the overhanging ledge watching the light slowly fail, the colour deepen and disappear. The surrounding green was of density and intenseness that can neither be described nor reproduced; a quicksand of colour, of shivering surface and unplumbed depth, which absorbed the vision, sucking it down and submerging it. (p.156)

After they’ve scrambled down the side of Kaieteur Falls, it’s a morning’s boat ride to Waratuk, where they unload the goods and Waugh watches the two blacks lower the boat through gaps in the huge boulders which make up the rapids with astonishing skill, and then 3 hours or so on to Amatuk, where the river is impassible and the boat has to be secured, ready for Winter’s foreman to recover it in 4 or 5 days time after he’s completed the journey to Georgetown to buy stores.

There is something approaching a guesthouse at Amatuk, opened by a Mrs McTurk for tourists who never came, and Waugh pays the old black housekeeper a dollar to sleep in something like a real bed and sit in an armchair and read a book. He is nearly back in civilisation.

There follows a complicated sequence of lorry journeys, two more boat journeys from landing point to landing point, and then the journey east along what I now learn was an abandoned railway from the Essequibo to the Demarara river.

This is a peg for the general point makes which is that the area he was visiting was past its boom years. Twenty years earlier there had been boom times for plantations of ballata, and gold and diamond sieving. But the ballata trees were all used, the gold and diamonds never appeared in sufficient quantities, now Waugh’s journey is through a degraded and stagnating landscape, or a beautiful jungle landscape punctuated with wrecks and ruins. The government is building a proud new road to open up the interior but Waugh gives an impressive list of reasons why this is too little, too late (p.163). If the road fails, then maybe the colony will revert to being just a coastal strip and a couple of coastal towns and the interior will revert to its primitive integrity.

And so by slow boat down the ever-widening Essequibo to Rockstone. This is another settlement which has collapsed, with most of the buildings lying empty and rotten (p.166). It’s the terminus of the railway which runs 50 miles east to Wismar on the Demarara River but it no longer functions as a railway. People walk along it and there is an old tractor which pulls an empty carriage, if anyone can be found to drive it.

He uses all his persuasiveness, and five dollars, to persuade of the boat that brought him and the ‘stationmaster’ to beat the tractor into life and, at midnight, he and other passengers are roused from sleeping on the platform, mount into the open carriage and it shunts off slowly and perilously along the rail line. After a few hours it starts to hiss down and everyone is soaked.

At dawn he arrives at the railway’s terminus at Wismar on the Demarara River where the boat is, mirabile dictu, waiting, and he boards it for a pleasant sail down the river and back to civilisation (of a sort) in Georgetown. Where he looks up friends, buys a ticket and waits to catch the next boat back to England.

The Dickens connection

While staying with Father Mather at the Mission he discovers a passion for reading and discovers that good father has a library of all Charles Dickens’s novels. These make good big chunky reading and Waugh borrows some volumes for the journey to the coast. This, obviously, is the germ of the fate of Tony Last at the grim climax of A Handful of Dust.

Credit

Ninety-Two Days by Evelyn Waugh was published by Duckworth in 1934. All references are to the 1985 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on December 10, 2021 • Permalink

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Tagged Amatuk Falls, Amazonia, Annai, balata, Boa Vista tasso, Bon Success, boredom, Brazil, Brazilian Boundary Commissioner, British Guiana, cabouri fly, Caribbean, cassiri, Charles Dickens, creole, Daguar, Daguar's ranch, Demarara River, diamonds, Dickens, Dirre-Dowa, Essequibo, Evelyn Waugh, farine, Father Alcuin, Father Keary, Father Mather, Georgetown, gold, Guyana, Herr Steingler, Holmia, Indians, indigenous peoples, Ireng River, Jagger, Josephine Baker, Kaieteur Falls, Karasabai, Karto, Kopinang Indians, Kurikabaru, Kurupukari, Latin America, Macushi tribe, malaria, Manaos, Martinez, Mikrapuru, Mr Bain, Mr Christie, Mr Figuiredo, Mr Teddy Melville, Mr Winter, Mr Wong, Mrs McTurk, New Amsterdam, Ninety-Two Days, Patamonas, Pirara, Price, Professor Piles, rainforest, Remote People, Rio Branco, River Berbice, River Essequibo, River Takuru, Rockstone, savannah, Shimai, Sinclair, South America, St Ignatius, Suranna, Tipuru, Travel writing, travelogue, tribes, Tropics, Venezuela, Waratuk Falls, West Indies, Wismar, Yetto

Posted by Simon on December 10, 2021

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Designed in Cuba: Cold War Graphics @ the House of Illustration

Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 26th of July Movement and its allies defeated the military dictatorship of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista in January 1959. The new revolutionary government enacted a wide array of new domestic laws and policies, but Castro always saw the revolution in Cuba as just the beginning of the liberation of the oppressed masses in not just Latin America but war-torn Africa and around the world, wherever the poor and downtrodden were oppressed by colonial or neo-colonial masters.

OSPAAAL

And so the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (in Spanish the Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina – abbreviated to OSPAAAL) was set up to fight globalisation, imperialism, neoliberalism and defend human rights, in Havana, in January 1966, after the Tricontinental Conference, a meeting of over 500 delegates and 200 observers from over 82 countries.

One of the first things the organisation did was establish a magazine to publicise its causes and titled Tricontinental. From 1966 into the 1990s more than fifty designers working in Havana produced hundreds of posters and editions of the magazine which expressed solidarity with the U.S.A.’s Black Panther Party, condemned apartheid in South Africa and the Vietnam War, and celebrated Latin America’s revolutionary icons, as well as criticising the ongoing existence of U.S. military bases in Guantanamo Bay, calling for the reunification of North and South Korea and many other radical causes.

The exhibition includes some 33 of the total of 50 or so artists and designers who worked for OSPAAAL, including leading lights such as Alfredo Rostgaard, Helena Serrano, Rafael Enríquez and Gladys Acosta Ávila.

Unlike artists in the Soviet bloc the OSPAAAL designers weren’t shackled by the deeply conservative doctrine of Socialist Realism, but were free to pick and choose from all the best streams of current art, including Pop Art and psychedelia. They also co-opted images and ideas from capitalist adverts into what they called ‘anti-ads’.

The plan was for the posters to be stapled into copies of Tricontinental, and so distributed around the world. Because the posters were intended to be internationalist they had to use strong primal languages or find inventive ways of conveying their message. If any writing was used it was generally in the three major languages of Spanish, English, French, and sometimes Arabic.

By the mid-1980s heavy trade embargos and sanctions imposed by American had created such shortages that it ultimately forced the organization out of production. By that time approximately 326 OSPAAAL posters had been produced.

Altogether it’s estimated that some nine million OPSAAAL posters were distributed around the developing world. At its peak the magazine had more than 100,000 subscribers, mostly students. At one time, it was common for posters from issues of Tricontinental to be put up on the walls of student community centres.

This exhibition brings together 170 works (100 posters and 70 magazines) produced by 33 OSPAAAL designers, created between 1965 and 1992, which are not only striking and dramatic art works in their own right but shed unexpected insights onto the long history of the Cold War.

The Mike Stanfield Collection

While originally distributed freely in editions of thousands, OSPAAAL posters and magazines are now rare and highly sought-after. The works in the exhibition are all drawn from a single UK private collection – The Mike Stanfield Collection, the largest collection of OSPAAAL material in the world, gathered by British collector Mike Stanfield over a 25-year period. Every work in the exhibition is drawn from his collection.

Posters

The poster designers used every trick in the toolbox of capitalist advertising plus a lot more they invented. The diversity and inventiveness of approaches is astonishing. Obviously the cause, the fundamental political aim of the posters, was deadly serious – but this didn’t stop them using scathing satire to make their points.

And above all they didn’t limit themselves to one aesthetic but seized an extraordinary freedom to experiment, with the result that you see everything from bold typography and photomontage to psychedelic colours and pop culture-inspired graphics, iconic modern imagery or ancient native objects pressed into service, silhouettes, psychedelic reverberating, cartoons and biting satire.

Cuba

The first edition of Tricontinental included an article by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and a folded poster by Alfredo Rostgard, thus inaugurating its two-pronged approach to radical propaganda: text for those who could read, stirring images for those who couldn’t.

Che Guevara (1969) © Alfredo G. Rostgaard, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

It’s almost too obvious to point out but, in the Soviet bloc, the canon of revolutionary heroes from Marx through Lenin, Stalin on down, were all portrayed in real, or heroically socialist realist style. It takes a moment’s reflection to realise how utterly unlike that dull stifling tradition the OPSAAAL images are, freely taking from contemporary pop and op art and psychedelic art.

Africa

The designers were tasked with distilling complex anti-colonial conflicts down into simple but striking images, symbols which would require little or no explanation. This image of African women in traditional costume and carrying their babies in baby-carriers is made vivid and powerful by the addition of the semi-automatic rifles slung over their other shoulders.

The all-consuming nature of the struggle, the need to balance ordinary life with the struggle, the empowered role of women in the struggle, and the lack of facial features indicating that these are just two out of millions and millions anonymous fighters across the continent, are all brilliantly conveyed.

After Emory Douglas (1968) © Lízaro Abreu Padron, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Apartheid

Apartheid was a sore on the conscience of the world throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Many of the OPSAAAL posters were simple images of oppression. This is unusual in being a more narrative image, with its four pictures showing the progressive, and inevitable, collapse of the repressive regime. Note the use of the four cardinal languages, Spanish, English, French and Arabic.

Day of Solidarity with the Struggle of the People of South Africa (1974) Olivio Martinez Viera, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Asia

The Vietnam War came to symbolise neo-imperialist Western super-violence against nationalist independence struggles and crystallised America’s reputation as the great enemy of freedom for many Third World countries.

This clever poster shows the word Saigon slowly morphing from being dominated by the Stars and Stripes to bearing the flag of the communist North, suggesting that the rebels would win in the end. As they did.

Saigon, International Week of Solidarity with Vietnam (1970) © Rene Mederos Pazos, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Anti-America

Cuba is just 90 miles from the American mainland.

From the moment Castro’s revolution succeeded, the Americans tried to overthrow it. In 1961 they launched the embarrassing Bay of Pigs invasion which ended in humiliation, but continued making intermittent attempts to assassinate Castro, as well as imposing crippling sanctions on its tiny neighbour.

In response Cuba helped to focus the world’s attention on America as the heartland of neo-colonial oppression. Some of the most powerful images in the exhibition distort and subvert imagery and symbols central to American culture, such as the Great Seal, the Bald Eagle, the Statue of Liberty or, as here, Uncle Sam himself, zapped by the power of the World Revolution.

World Solidarity with the Cuban Revolution (1980) © Victor Manuel Navarrete, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Using native cultural heritage

As a way into contemporary liberation struggles in Latin America, Asia or the Far East, some OPSAAAL designers had the idea of taking traditional indigenous artefacts and giving them a modern spin, mostly putting a machine gun in their hands. Some of these aboriginal peoples also represented the very first resisters to the colonial oppression which their distant descendants were now fighting against.

This approach tapped into nationalist feelings in the respective countries, and also made contemporary protesters feel, or realise, that they were in fact part of a long, long lineage of resistance and protest. The ten or so images which used old imagery like this were among my favourites.

Guatemala (1968) © Olivio Martinez Viera, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Magazine covers

To some extent the designers’ style was dictated by a shortage of materials, including good quality paper and printing ink, embargoed by the United States. This encouraged the designers to eschew subtlety in shade and contour and favour high-contrast photography and large areas of clearly defined colour. Tricontinental’s often starkly simple covers were printed in four colours by offset lithography.

Anti-America

Although little Cuba suffered badly from American sanctions, during the 60s and 70s there were many radical American supporters of the revolution. The San Francisco-based People’s Press published a North American edition if Tricontinental, and images created by Emory Douglas for the Black Panther Party newspaper were adapted for use by OPSAAAL.

There are posters here supporting the imprisoned black activist Angela Carter, as well as memorials for various black radicals shot or imprisoned in America. But in a way, it was the imaginative symbols of American oppression which make the most impact.

Tricontinental magazine 33

Anti-apartheid

Apartheid was in force in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. It was only the most extreme version of institutionalised white racism, which also included the segregation laws in America, so vehemently protested by the Civil Rights Movement.

For me the OPSAAAL posters and Tricontinental cover art are at their best when they embody a really strong design idea, as in this simple but scathing image, a piece of Pop Art collage used to withering effect.

Tricontinental 76

Thoughts

1. Taken together they make up a fascinating review of visual styles and approaches available to political poster makers in the late 60s and 70s. In many ways the magazine covers are even more inventive and biting than the posters. Lots and lots of them have a really strong visual and intellectual impact, like the image – blown up, here, into a wall-sized hanging – of an American astronaut reaching out to the moon while standing on the backs of two prone African Americans.

2. It’s a reminder of just how much conflict there was around in the world in the 1970s when I grew up, with military dictatorships running most of South America, with colonialist regimes and apartheid South Africa still repressing millions of Africans, while millions of others were caught up in brutal civil wars, and then topping everything the nightmare of Vietnam which was promptly followed by the living hell of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

When you factor in that half of Europe was under Communist tyranny and there was an endless diet of scares about whether this or that incident might trigger World War Three, the world I grew up in seemed a much more violent and dangerous place than it does today.

3. This is embodied in the way there are so many guns in the posters. Almost all the native artefacts-updated ones simply put guns in the hands of tribal gods. In the last room in particular, almost every poster seemed to feature a man or woman or sometimes an inanimate object, holding a sub-machinegun. Stepping back from the rights and wrongs of the causes, the final room in particular gave me a claustrophobic sense of violence and fighting going on in every part of the world.

That’s maybe the main feeling the exhibition gave to me, but other visitors will find their own threads and meanings. Above all I defy you not to be thrilled by the sheer inventiveness and exuberance of so many of the works on display.

Installation view of Designed in Cuba at the House of Illustration. Photo by Paul Grover

And it’s worth pointing out that the curators of the exhibition flew to Cuba specially to interview the surviving OPSAAAL designers and that the exhibition includes the resulting video, in which leading designers such as Alfredo Rostgaard, Rafael Enríquez and Gladys Acosta Ávila explain at length their motivation and approach, the design ideas and technical constraints, which lay behind the Tricontinental phenomenon.

This is another brilliantly conceived and beautifully laid out exhibition from the House of Illustration.

More House of Illustration reviews

More House of Illustration reviews

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by Simon on January 1, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Politics

Tagged 1966, 26th of July Movement, Africa, Africa and Latin America, Alfredo Rostgaard, Angela Carter, anti-ads, apartheid, África y América Latina, Bay of Pigs, Black Panther Party, Cambodia, Che Guevara, colonialism, Communism, Cuba, developing world, Emory Douglas, Fidel Castro, Fulgencio Batista, Gladys Acosta Ávila, Havana, Helena Serrano, imperialism, Khmer Rouge, Latin America, liberation movements, Mike Stanfield, North Korea, Olivio Martinez Viera, Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, OSPAAAL, Pop Art, poster art, propaganda, psychedelia, Rafael Enríquez, satire, Socialist Realism, South Africa, South Korea, the Civil Rights Movement, the Mike Stanfield Collection, the People's Press, the Tricontinental Conference, the Vietnam War, Third World, Uncle Sam

Posted by Simon on January 1, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/01/designed-in-cuba-cold-war-graphics-house-of-illustration/

The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson (revised edition 2009) (1)

Because it comes with the bright orange and white spine of the new-style Penguin histories, and because it said ‘New Edition’ on the front cover, I hadn’t quite grasped that the main body of this hefty 700-page history of Latin America was completed by 1990. The new edition is ‘new’ because it tacks a 40-page chapter at the end, summarising events in Latin America between 1990 and 2008. Obviously quite a lot of water under the bridge since 2008, so probably need to supplement this with a modern modern history of LA.

The text is divided into three big parts:

The Age of Empire, pages 3 to 192 (189 pages)
The Challenge of the Modern World, pages 195 to 310 (115 pages)
The Twentieth Century, pages 313 to 566 (253 pages)

Note how the section on the 20th century, plus the forty pages of the ‘new’ chapter, is as long as the first two parts put together. Here, as everywhere, the more recent the history, the more of it there is, the more people there have been (the higher the population) and the more records have been kept, until we reach the present age where every phone call, every text and every photograph anyone in the world takes is being recorded and stored. Soon we will drown in data.

The conquest of the Aztecs and Incas

Williamson dives right in with the early, legendary history of the Aztecs, when they were a group of nomads traipsing round central Mexico, before they established the largest empire in pre-Colombian America around 1400. Their only rival was the Inca Empire, down in modern-day Peru.

There is, of course, a lot to say about both, but the thing that struck me was the way both of them were empires carved out by one particular tribe or ethnic group which subjugated all their neighbours, and demanded tribute in food, precious metals and slaves (some devoted to grisly human sacrifices).

Both generated complex religious ideologies accompanied by fascinating and complex theories of time – that it moved in cycles and was marked by moments of great significance – but the bottom line was that both the Aztec ruler and the Inca emperor believed they derived their authority from the gods, and were backed up in this conviction by the class of priests and the warrior castes which surrounded and defended them.

Of course the vast majority of the population was peasants, mostly living in abject serfhood, who slaved away for their entire short, unhealthy lives, producing the surpluses which paid for the elaborate costumes and rituals and treasures passed up to their rulers. And the entire populations of conquered tribes, for both the Aztecs and Incas lived by war, and by conquering, subjugating and exploiting neighbouring peoples.

The other striking thing was their backwardness. Both Aztecs and Incas, and all the hundreds of other tribes scattered across central and south America, were illiterate. The Aztecs and Incas had no written language, just a primitive system of markers, and so the important knowledge about the stars and the gods was handed down by word of mouth, and hence the semi-divine regard for the caste of priests who, alone, knew this vital celestial information.

They didn’t have the wheel, nor beasts of burden – no horses or donkeys or camels or bullocks. Therefore they had to carry everything by hand. It is staggering to realise that the awesome Inca city of Machu Picchu was built by massive stones, carried 2,430 metres above sea level, by human power alone.

All this was doomed to come crashing to an end when the Europeans arrived. Williamson describes in detail the four successive voyages of Christopher Columbus, his first landfall in 1492, the chaotic mismanagement of the first islands he and his men settled – Hispaniola – the slow, establishment of colonies and extension of Spanish rule onto neighbouring island, and then, 27 years later, Cortez’s expedition to the mainland against the Aztecs (1519-21).

The eeriest thing about Cortes’s conquest of the Aztec Empire, and then Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Peru in 1532, is the theory that the rulers of both empires were too puzzled and confused by the invaders to respond adequately. They couldn’t believe these little gangs of a few hundred men were serious about planning to overthrow their empires of tens of thousands of warriors – but they couldn’t figure out what it was they really wanted. Williamson attributes the conquistadors’ success partly to guns and horses but shows that in both cases, the conquerors really had very few – when Pizarro finally met with the Inca emperor Atahualpa, in nothern Peru, he had a force of just 110-foot soldiers, 67 cavalry, three arquebuses and two falconets.

More decisive was the Europeans’ superior grasp of strategy, in particular realising that the empires they were encountering were themselves highly stressed, riven by faction fights or stretched by the continual need to control their subject peoples. The Spanish made alliances with enemies and groups wishing to be liberated. They were good at building coalitions.

He doesn’t say it in so many words, but the idea emerges that the Europeans triumphed because they were just more intelligent about strategy and warcraft.

The role of European diseases

Then there’s our old friend disease. As explained at length in Jared Diamond’s classic 1997 study Guns, Germs and Steel, wherever European explorers went they took with them the infectious diseases which, over thousands of years, we had built up immunity to – but which ravaged native populations which had no immunity to them.

This view is reinforced by the revisionist history of America told by Alan Taylor in American Colonies: The Settling of North America (2001). In this Taylor explains how the entire native civilisation of the Mississippi valley was wiped out by diseases, most probably smallpox, brought by a few shipwrecked Spanish sailors to the mouth of the Mississippi delta but which then spread catastrophically so that when, a century later, the first Anglo-Saxon explorers entered the region, they discovered entire cities with complex layouts, large palaces and temples and canals… all abandoned and overgrown by forest.

Indeed, Pizzaro’s job of conquering the Incas was made easier because the Incas were themselves in the middle of a bloody civil war, which was complicated by the fact that not one but two rival claimants to the throne had died from smallpox. Over the decades after the Spanish arrived, there was a catastrophic collapse in native populations caused by the invaders’ diseases. Some experts estimate as much as 90% of the native population of Mexico was killed by European disease within fifty years.

Still, Williamson is always at hand to say that in this, as in everything else, the reality on the ground, and across such vast areas as all of Mexico, Central America and Peru, were far more complex and uneven that contemporaries and many historians realise. Many many other areas of the continent remained relatively untouched and life went on in the same old way, only now you had to pay a tribute of your produce to a new boss, who wore armour and rode a horse.

The geographic limits of Spanish settlement

The book is packed with thought-provoking ideas and insights. I was fascinated to understand more about the geographic limits to the spread of Spanish rule.

When the Anglo settlers arrived in North America in the 1600s they found it relatively easy to spread out into New England and all along the Atlantic coast. But the Spanish, having established their key centres of administration in Mexico City and Lima a century earlier, with waystations and ports in the Caribbean, found it difficult to expand beyond them. Why?

North of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital which the invaders had renamed Mexico City, lies a vast area of arid desert – the territory which centuries later would become Arizona and New Mexico – where the Spanish explorers discovered nothing but impoverished villages of Indians surviving on subsistence agriculture.

Over to the east there were repeated attempts to explore the peninsula they named ‘Florida’, but the Spanish found it consisted of endless everglades with few settlements and nothing to plunder.

Heading south, the Spanish took over the coastal strip west of the Andes, conquering the Inca empire, but found the Andes mountains themselves too high to settle. Only a handful of expeditions went over the Andes to explore east. Williamson describes these expeditions, which got lost in the vast Amazon rainforests, and encountered only the most primitive tribespeople, if, indeed, they lived to tell the tale.

So, in a nutshell, central and south America were more difficult for the Spanish to settle than North America would turn out to be for the Anglos. And this explains the quite startling fact that some parts of South America – Williamson singles much of the interior of what is now called Argentina – weren’t really settled at all until the 20th century.

The other factor which limited the area of settlement was the Spaniards’ motivation. The conquistadors were adventurers, often from the very lowest parts of society. No nobles or aristocrats ventured their lives in the New World. Poor youngest sons of noble families led gangs of criminals and proles. None of them were the type of people who wanted to stake a claim and build a farmhouse and work the land – as the Anglo settlers were to do up north a hundred years later.

Instead, the Spanish wanted to exploit and loot as much wealth as they could from the New World before returning home and buying land, a house and a title. They came to loot. And here’s the important thing – you can only loot people who are already rich. The Spanish took over the two big empires, the Aztec in Mexico and the Inca in Peru, because an infrastructure was already in place whereby the native emperors and the upper class exploited large numbers of peasants in a well-organised system. The Spaniards simply took over the system, co-opting the best of the agricultural produce and all the treasure and artefacts for themselves.

It is this factor – the Spanish approach to colonisation – which explains the limited and very patchy nature of Spanish settlement. In the deserts of north Mexico, and in the south of the area they named California, were only desert dwellers, scraping a subsistence living from the soil by dint of elaborate water works. Nothing to steal. In Florida, endless swamps inhabited by scattered villagers. Nothing to steal, and no ‘society’ worth taking over. Ditto the Amazon rainforests. Nothing like an organised society whose power structures and tributes they could simply appropriate.

The Spanish only settled where there were established and relatively advanced societies which they could parasite onto.

How Spain applied the Reconquista to the New World

Williamson lays out with beautiful logic and clarity just how that imperialist approach to colonisation had arisen in Spain.

It is an enormous historical coincidence that the year that Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas, 1492, just happened to be the very same year that – after nearly 800 years of war and crusade – the Spanish finally kicked the very last Muslim Moorish presence out of the south of Spain. (Muslim forces had crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to seize Spanish territory way back in 711 – the fightback is traditionally dated to their first defeat by Christian forces, in 718 – and it took nearly another 800 years, of slow painstaking battles and piecemeal conquest, for native Christians, sometimes fighting alongside Christian warriors from the rest of Europe attracted by the periodic ‘crusades’ against the Muslim – to finally expel all the Muslim chiefs, emirs and so on from the final southern enclaves.

The point of this historical background is that expelling the Muslims from Spain wasn’t achieved by a modern-style mass army, and in a few years of continuous campaigning – but by ad hoc campaigns led by local Spanish warriors and adventuring knights, which liberated bits and pieces of territory, over a very long period of time.

As and when they seized territory from the Muslims, they applied to the king to rule it. (Spain itself was a very fractured entity, with a number of different kingdoms. It was only as the Reconquista reached its conclusion that the marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon with Queen Isabella of Castile united most of Spain’s territory to form the basis of one unified Spanish monarchy.)

Sometimes large areas of land would be conquered and the new lords were granted what were known as latifundia, originally a Roman word describing a vast agricultural estate. The new owners co-opted the existing inhabitants as serfs to work the land, but often much of the original or Muslim population had fled and so the lords had difficulty filling them with workers and had to advertise for new workers to come in.

The point is that the Reconquista established a model for settling new lands, freshly conquered from the infidel, which was then applied wholesale to the new territory discovered by Columbus and his Viceroys across the ocean, and by the conquistadors and adventurers who followed them.

The Reconquista established the pattern of the monarch granting complete control over large swathes of territory, and all the people on it to, the conqueror or adelantado who had seized it. This resulted in a handful of rich swaggering lords riding among the large population of impoverished peasants working vast areas of land. In the New World it became known as the encomienda system and the grant holders encomenderos.

In fact it was a bit more complicated than that: the native Indians remained, nominally, free subjects of the Crown, which awarded encomenderos the right to enforce labour from the natives, but not complete power of life and death over them. That was the theory, anyway.

Williamson – once he has reported the main military and political events of the conquest – moves briskly on to discuss in considerable detail, this and all the other legal and administrative measures which the Spanish implemented in their new lands.

In fact, the ‘excitement’ of the narrative of Columbus’s voyages and the initial conquests of the Aztecs and the Incas which open the text, might give the reader quite a misleading impression of the book. Williamson is much more a historian of constitutional and administrative systems than he is a chronicler of exciting battles and against-the-odds expeditions. A lot of this book is quite dry. But he develops the constitutional and legal aspects of the conquest in such detail that, to my surprise, the conflicts between the settlers, and in particular between the Viceroys appointed to govern the new provinces and the monarchy back in Spain – and between both of them and Catholic church – at moments become quite gripping.

The Crown protects the Indians

One counter-intuitive learning is that the Spanish crown, right from the start, was concerned about protecting the rights of the native Indians, indeed became their chief protector.

As Spanish adventurers opened up new territory and conquered more and more native peoples, the monarchs became concerned to make sure they were not simply enslaved. Queen Isabella personally forbade the enslavement of the natives, and a series of ‘Laws of the Indies’ tried to stem abuses wherever they were found. Encomenderos may have enjoyed almost complete power over the populations of their vast estates, but Spanish laws commanded them to also set up schools and hospitals, to educate the Indians, protect them from wars and raids, and to enact justice. This effort continued for the rest of the 16th century, for example with the ‘New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians’ of 1547, which explicitly forbade all forms of enslaving the native population. The New Laws prompted violent opposition among the oligarchies of Spanish settlers.

The Church takes the Indians’ side

It’s also surprising to read about the broadly sympathetic line taken by the Catholic Church. The Pope and the Catholic organisations which sent cohorts of missionaries out to the New World took the line that these were people made in God’s image, like us, with souls that needed saving. Certainly, some of the first cohort of priests accompanying the conquistadors helped in the wholesale destruction of priceless documents and artefacts which they considered pagan and devilish. But within a generation, a new wave of clerics began for all kinds of reasons to take the native Indians’ side, deploring their brutal exploitation by amoral Spanish lords.

On a pragmatic note, they also realised they couldn’t convert the natives by preaching at them in Latin or Spanish, and undertaking ‘mass baptisms’ where the Indians didn’t have a clue what was going on. So a whole project was undertaken to learn more about the natives’ languages, which quickly extended into documenting their histories and beliefs. Most of what we know about native Indian religion and history derives from these records taken down by Christian missionaries.

The classic figure of this type was Bartolomé de las Casas, initially a coloniser himself, who became a Dominican friar and spent the last 50 years of his life fighting slavery and the colonial abuse of indigenous peoples. He was appointed by the Spanish crown the first ‘Protector of the Indians’, an administrative office responsible for attending to the wellbeing of the native populations, a function he enthusiastically carried out and which included speaking on their behalf in law courts and even reporting back to the King of Spain in person.

In 1550, Bartolomé participated in the Valladolid debate, in which Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (the noted Spanish Renaissance “humanist”, philosopher, theologian, and… er… proponent of colonial slavery) argued that the Indians were less than human and required Spanish masters in order to become civilized. Las Casas maintained that the Indians were fully human and that forcefully subjugating them was morally, legally, and theologically, unjustifiable. Las Casas is a hero (not a perfect hero, but by the standards of his own time a d brave and determined protector of the people.)

Bartolomé de las Casas Wikipedia article

Williamson gives a long and detailed account of the numerous legal initiatives launched by the Crown to try and protect the Indians from exploitation, but in the end they all failed. No amount of legal or theological argumentation could avoid the fact that the Spanish remained the ruling caste with one law for them, while the Indians remained a separate caste, subject to completely different laws. Williamson calls them the Republic of the Spaniards and the Republic of the Indians.

And nothing could alter the simple fact that, on the ground, most of the laws designed to protect the Indians were ignored by the settlers, who looked after each other’s interests.

Theories of conquest and bureaucratic structures

I could have done with more about where the silver was discovered in the New World, and the technology of how it is mined and purified. We are told that mercury was vital to the purification process, but not really how or why. I had to google it to find out. He does eventually have three pages on the silver mines (two on gold-mining), but in general Williamson is light on that kind of thing, on technology, and on the diverse resources of the region.

Instead, as the book settles into its stride, you realise that Williamson is going to devote most of his energy to the legal and theological justifications of Spanish rule along with detailed descriptions of the bureaucratic structures the Spanish set up.

Thus there is a long passage explaining how the theory of monarchy evolved in Spain from its late-medieval form to the theory which underpinned the role of Philip II as head of an empire which stretched from California to Sicily. He explains the role of the Catholic Church as a vital prop to royal authority, and gives long explanations of the laws and the administrative structures set up to run the colonies.

He explains the main theories by which the Spanish justified their conquests, both to themselves and to the rest of the world (especially to their critical opponents in the Protestant world). There were two main ones:

The well-established Law of Conquest, by which one ruler conquers another and is allowed to seize his land and titles, which had been worked out over long centuries of theological and legal debate during the Middle Ages.
The more modern notion that the Crown of Spain had a ‘right’ to rule the Indians because the Europeans would convert the natives to Christianity and so save their souls. This was accompanied by a kind of sub-argument, which many missionaries put forward: that the New World represented an opportunity for Christianity – which had, by the early 1500s become widely associated with corruption and worldly ambition – to start again. Here, in the Garden of Eden, were a new kind of Adam and Eve, a First People uncorrupted by the Old World, and one thread of early colonisation is the devout wishes of the early missionaries to create a Christian Paradise on earth. Of course it was not to turn out that way; the secular settlers – and the terrible European diseases – made sure of that.

How the silver was squandered

Williamson does, however, clarify something which has always puzzled me, which is – if the Spanish monarchy began receiving ever-increasing amounts of silver from the New World (as the result of great silver strikes in North Mexico and Peru in the 1540s), how come Spain steadily declined in power and influence in the century and a half after the conquest?

Indeed, Williamson points out that by the death of Philip II in 1598, Spain was technically bankrupt and had experienced state bankruptcies (i.e been unable to repay its debts) in 1557, 1560, 1569, 1575, and 1596!

Where did the Spanish silver go? The answer turns out to be simple: Paying for Spain’s wars.

Even though it never accounted for more than 20 per cent of imperial revenues, silver was the fuel that drove the Spanish war machine. (p.106)

Philip II’s father had been Holy Roman Emperor and when Philip came to the throne in 1556, he inherited responsibility for territory in every continent known to Europeans – from the extensive empire in Central and South America to the newly conquered territory of the Phillippines, from the kingdom of Naples and Sicily in Italy, to the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands which began a protracted war of independence against Spanish rule in 1568. Not only this, but Philip saw himself as the defender of all Christendom in its wars against the Ottoman Turks in the East. He it was who organised ‘the Holy League’, bringing together ships from Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Papal States, the Duchy of Savoy and the Knights of Malta, to inflict a decisive defeat on the Ottomans at the naval Battle of Lepanto in 1567.

Philip also saw himself as the defender of Catholic orthodoxy against the shocking new Protestant heresy. Thus Philip gave large financial support to the Catholic League fighting the Protestants in France, and then went directly to war with the French King Henry IV, an intervention which secured the future of France as a Catholic country.

Last but not least, as we Brits know, Philip II built, armed, provisioned and manned an enormous armada which was designed, with the blessing of the pope, to conquer England, overthrow the Tudor dynasty and the Church of England, and impose Philip as the Catholic ruler of a Catholic Britain.

So that’s where the silver, hacked out of dangerous and unhealthy mines in the New World by Indian slaves and serfs, ended up being spent. Funding the impossible ambitions of the over-extended Spanish monarchy.

Spain went into decline because of proliferating military commitments for which it could not pay. (p.116)

Related Latin American reviews (mainly about Mexico)

Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up @ the Victoria and Albert Museum (September 2018)

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by Simon on August 9, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, History, Latin America

Tagged 20th century, adelantado, Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America, Argentina, Arizona, Aztecs, Bartolomé de las Casas, California, Castile, Catholic church, Christopher Columbus, Cortez, disease, Edwin Williamson, encomenderos, encomienda, Ferdinand and Isabella, Florida, France, Francisco Pizarro, garden of Eden, Guns Germs and Steel, Hispaniola, history, Holy Roman Emperor, immunity, Incas, Jared Diamond, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, King Henry IV, Latin America, Laws of the Indies, Lima, Machu Picchu, Mexico, Mexico City, New Mexico, New World, North America, Ottoman Turks, Peru, Philip II, Philippines, population collapse, pre-Colombian America, Protector of the Indians, Protestantism, Reconquista, Sicily, Silver, Spanish Armada, Spanish Renaissance, Tenochtitlan, The Age of Empire, the Andes, the Battle of Lepanto, The Challenge of the Modern World, the Holy League, The Penguin History of Latin America, the pope, the Republic of the Indians, the Republic of the Spaniards, The Twentieth Century, the Valladolid debate

Posted by Simon on August 9, 2019

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Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Photopoetry @ the Photographers’ Gallery

There are three main exhibition spaces at the Photographers Gallery, on the 2nd, 4th and 5th floors. The second and fourth floors are often used to hold two parts of the same show – they are currently hosting the exhibition of Latin American photography, Urban Impulses, which is split into two parts, while the fifth floor is currently hosting the TPG New Talent 19 show – both of which I’ve reviewed.

After taking in the wealth of images on these three floors it’s easy to miss the other, small, exhibition space in the building, down in the basement, next to the bookshop. This is the Print Sales room and here you can examine or order prints from a variety of photographers who licence their works to be sold via the gallery. But it is also where the gallery hosts temporary exhibitions of original prints by classic and contemporary photographers. The distinctive feature of the small displays in the Print Sales room is that all the work is for sale.

The Print Sales room is currently hosting a selection of rare platinum and silver gelatin prints by the great modernist Mexican photographer, Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902 to 2002).

Forbidden fruit by Manuel Alvarez Bravo © Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo SC

According to the curators:

Initially self-taught, Álvarez Bravo first picked up a camera as a teenager while working at a government job. His early style was influenced by studying international photographic journals particularly looking at the work of European artists such as Edward Weston and Tina Modotti both of whom he later met.

Through them, he was introduced to Mexico’s avant-garde scene, including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. His work increasingly began to reflect the influence of homegrown movements such as the Mexican Muralists as well as an interest in identity politics. By the mid 1930s, Álvarez Bravo was being exhibited alongside contemporaries Henri-Cartier Bresson and Walker Evans and shown in such seminal group exhibitions as Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1940), and the worldwide tour of Edward Steichen’s Family of Man in 1955.

Note the compulsory reference to ‘identity politics’. That or gender or race had to come into it somewhere. They always do. In Bravo’s case gender and sexuality are most obviously present in several strikingly erotic nude studies (like the one above), which often feature the teasing reveal of a breast or a woman’s loins, while other parts of her body are obscured (by a large parasol, in one case).

But there are at least two other strands in his work. One is his discovery of pattern and significance in the everyday. Lots of the photos capture everyday moments in busy Mexico City, but in a way which isolates the motif and makes it feel full of meaning, creating a kind of latent symbolism.

La hija de los danzantes | The daughter of the dancers (1933) by Manuel Álvarez Bravo © Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo SC

This strand of his work is never quite abstract, but often hints at abstraction. The works take a scene from everyday life but capture it in such a way as to reveal a kind of hidden geometry, hinting at the modernist and constructivist sensibility behind his work.

The other pole of Álvarez Bravo’s work is a conscious social realism. The Mexican Revolution (which I’ve read and written about elsewhere) lasted from roughly 1910 to 1930, and brought about some social change to this backward, peasant country, but not nearly enough, and the 1930s was, of course, the decade of the global depression. Bravo didn’t have to look far to see signs of poverty, and the hard lives of the urban poor – street sellers, performers, vagrants.

Los agachados / The crouched ones (1934) © Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo SC

I think the curators hit the nail on the head when they describe Álvarez Bravo’s

sublimely lyrical, yet unsentimentalised images of his beloved Mexico and its people, and his exceptional ability to transform the rituals of everyday life into something fantastical and monumental.

It’s that monumentality which comes over in these photos. They feel epic. They feel as if they are saying something really profound about the human condition. There are only 15 prints on display but all of them seem more than just photos, but doorways into some deeper truth about the world.

All fifteen photos are extremely rare platinum and silver gelatin prints, some of them printed by Álvarez Bravo himself and signed by him. It has, apparently, taken years to get his estate to agree to this exhibition and to their sale, and their rarity explains the stunning cost. Prices vary a little, but all the ones I liked cost £6,500 plus VAT. But then – they are original, hand-printed masterpieces.

Muchacha viendo pájaros (1931) by Manuel Álvarez Bravo © Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo SC

The book

Also at the exhibition you can buy the comprehensive and huge hardback collection of Álvarez Bravo’s photography, Photopoetry, from which this little display draws its title. In this you can find out more about his role in Mexican and Latin American photography, his membership of Mexico City’s avant-garde, and enjoy his photos of close friends Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo – not least a set taken during the strange period when they hosted the world’s most famous revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, at their Mexico City home, with the godfather of Surrealism, André Beton, tagging along.

Álvarez Bravo took photos not only of street people and street scenes, but of Mexico’s leading artists and writers until well into the 1990s, so the book offers not only the biography of a great photographer, and over 360 of his best photos printed on beautiful quality paper – but insight into the intellectual life of the great giant of Central America.

Contact the Photographers’ Gallery Print Sales

printsales@tpg.org.uk

Reviews of other books and exhibitions about Mexico

Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up @ the Victoria and Albert Museum (September 2018)

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by Simon on July 26, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Photography

Posted by Simon on July 26, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/26/manuel-alvarez-bravo-photopoetry-photographers-gallery/

Urban Impulses: Latin American Photography 1959 to 2016 @ the Photographers’ Gallery

The history of Latin America has fascinated observers as much as it has mystified them. There is something apparently alien about the continent, an exoticism that derives perhaps from it having once been perceived as a ‘new world’, although there survive monuments and relics of ancient societies whose cultures remain poorly understood by us even today. This elusiveness – hinting simultaneously at a former state of grace and some original corruption – has rendered interpretation of Latin American history peculiarly vulnerable to speculation and myth-making.
(Edwin Williamson in the introduction to his Penguin History of Latin America, 1990 revised 2009)

Urban Impulses

This is an epic exhibition, if not quite in scale, then certainly in scope. Across four rooms and two floors, the Photographers’ Gallery is showcasing some 200 works by 73 photographers from all across Latin America.

They use a wide range of techniques and approaches to chronicle every aspect of the continent’s violent politics and conflicts, its transition from a predominantly rural to a mostly urban population, its music and fiestas and cultures and traditions, its signs and streetlife, its nightclubs and dancehalls.

Most of the photographers are represented by only one or two images and so as you move from photo to photo, you are presented with a blizzard of names and biographies, not to mention a bewildering variety of countries and decades, which I found it quite challenging to get a handle on.

Cuba in the 1950s was very different from Nicaragua in the 1980s, and different again from Mexico now.

(N.B. In this review the texts in italics are copied from the thorough and very useful free handout which accompanies the exhibition.)

The history of Chilean photography over the past thirty years is above all that of a rupture, or a ‘tectonic shift’ caused by the military coup of 1973. Until that time, democracy had allowed the history of the medium to evolve without major disruption, but what happened in September 1973 created a generation of photographers committed to documenting the urban tragedy that subsequently emerged on the streets of Santiago during the 1970s and 80s.

As I wandered among this cornucopia of images and histories and countries and events, it struck me that there are many ways to group and arrange it – by subject matter, grouping together themes such as politics, street activism, street scenes, commercialisation, religion and, of course, every curators’ favourite topics, gender and identity.

Or you could divide them up by technique – grouping together black-and-white photos (most of them are, in fact, in black and white), colour photos, montages, collages, photojournalism, photocopies, and art works made of photos chopped up and attached to canvases. The curators back up the visitor’s sense of an impressive diversity of medium and approach:

Here a hybrid iconography emerges where photography exists in tandem with other media of mass circulation such as graphics, photo-copying and print media, often involving the marking, cutting and defacement of images where the notion of appearance and disappearance exist in tandem.

Take this striking artwork which features a collage of commercial adverts cut with urgent news photos, and then treated and painted over.

Rodriguez denounces the injustices suffered by the populations of the Andean and Amazonian regions, dominated by a process of gradual urbanisation, and, more generally, the exploitation of one part of Peruvian society by another. The approach is experimental, the materials – often salvaged from public spaces – are banal, and the collage technique allows them to be gathered together and reordered in different ways.

Another approach would be to zero in on a handful of the most famous photographers who won international reputations during the period and seek them out first – such greats as Alberto Korda from Cuba who created the iconic images of Che Guevara, or Graciela Iturbide (b.1942) from Mexico, or Sergio Larrain from Chile.

Again you could group the photographers by country because many of the photos are political, in the broadest sense, and require a knowledge of the political history of the country in question, for example the military dictatorships in Chile or Argentina.

In fact I realised I needed to stop and remind myself just what countries actually make up ‘Latin America’. Upon looking into it I discovered there’s a surprising amount of ambiguity about defining and framing the geography.

The term ‘Latin America’ can be taken to refer solely to ‘South America’, or to also include the many nations of Central America and the Caribbean. (Cuba always gets included, despite not being in South or Central America.)

Nations of South America by population

Brazil
Colombia
Argentina
Peru
Venezuela
Chile
Ecuador
Bolivia
Paraguay
Uruguay
Guyana

We know these nations all have one big thing in common which is that they were colonised by Spain or Portugal in the 16th century, and administered for centuries as key parts of their empires. So they speak the ‘Latin’ languages of Spanish and Portuguese, and hence the umbrella term ‘Latin’ America – as opposed to ‘Anglo’ America, settled by English speakers in the later 17th and 18th centuries.

Mexico is a post-apocalyptic city. It has refused to accept the many declarations of its death. it survived the devastating earthquake of 1985, and has withstood overpopulation and pollution beyond the assumed threshold of human tolerance. The country has attempted to enter the twenty-first century without yet having solved the problems of the sixteenth. – Mexican poet, essayist, novelist and short story writer José Emilio Pacheco Berny

To my surprise there’s debate about whether Mexico should be included in Central America, with lots of people, including many Mexicans, considering themselves part of North America. Incorrectly, I have included Mexico in this list of Central American nations.

Nations of Central America by population

(Mexico)
Guatemala
Honduras
El Salvador
Nicaragua
Costa Rica
Panama
Belize

Maybe the curators should have included a map, a big map, to help remind us of the precise location of all these places. (But then I’m biased. I love maps.)

Most of these nations gained their independence in stormy conflicts against the colonial powers in the early 19th century only to find themselves saddled with legacies of huge inequality and grinding rural poverty.

It was the enduring legacy of these inequalities which led to the revolutions, counter-revolutions, and military coups of the twentieth century. I well remember the era of military dictatorships in Argentina (1976 to 1983), Brazil (1964 to 1985), Chile (1973 to 1990), and Paraguay (1954 t o1989). Back in the 1970s we associated Latin America (and Greece and Spain and Portugal) with semi-fascist military dictatorships such as the notorious rule of General Pinochet of Chile. In one sense, then, many of these images from the 1970s felt nostalgic to me.

Fernano Bedoya is a key figure in the artistic activism of Peru and Argentina, involved notably in the latter country in the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a group formed by mothers of young men who went missing during the military dictatorship. An irreverent artist, he plays with mass production – photography, screen printing, photocopying – and employs a hybrid iconography strongly influenced by pop culture. Committed to the democratisation of art, he has worked with several artists’ collective on participative projects with a distinctly political focus.

The nations of Latin America all have ethnically diverse societies, beginning with the fact that the native peoples of most of the colonised countries lived on, working as serfs or slaves for their European overlords, sometimes interbreeding with them, a racial mix which was then added to by large-scale importation of African slaves from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and then by migration from other, non-Iberian European countries – mostly in the 19th century.

This much most of them have in common. But each of the countries has its own geography and history and ethnic mix and traditions, which are hard to capture in such a variegated display. That’s the problem talking about this ‘region’, it’s so big and encompasses such a confusing diversity of peoples and places that it’s too easy to fall back on casual stereotypes – machismo, military dictatorships, Che Guevara guerillas, remote villages up the Amazon, the destruction of the rainforest, oh and a collection of cheesy dances that your grandparents used to like – the foxtrot, the tango, the cha-cha-cha.

In fact three or four of the photographers here are represented by pics they’ve taken of more or less the same scene, namely unglamorous, middle-aged couples from back in the day, dancing in (presumably hot and sweaty) dance halls. It’s a recurring topic.

‘The tango image of Paz Errázuriz, without words, music or movement, frozen at one of those key moments when the dance danced by the dancers comes into its own, affirming the authenticity of the representation of a representation.’ – Chilean poet, playwright, and novelist Enrique Lihn

In fact all this pondering and wondering how to make sense of the profusion of countries and images and artists which I spent some time trying to group or arrange, has already been partly done by the curators themselves. They have divided the exhibition up into just two big parts (one on each of the two floors across which the show is presented), and titled them Shouts and Pop-ular.

1. Shouts

To quote the curators:

Shouts considers photography’s role not only in documenting identities and presences, but also to explore absences: in the face of kidnappings and forced disappearances carried out by authoritarian regimes, photography has been a weapon against silence. Public spaces and the city walls have also played an important role: when pen and paper, laws and rights, courts and judges have failed to obtain justice, the walls of the cities have taken on a life of their own. And photographers have portrayed these walls, covered with the slogans and cries of protest of those demanding political, social, and economic recognition, and reflecting the anger and cynicism, the hopes and frustrations of the cities’ residents.

Thus a raft of images depicting street protests, street fighting, street riots, protesters fighting cops. This is one of the rare colour photos in the show.

The Battle of the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, 20 December 2001 by Eduardo Longoni © Eduardo Longoni. Courtesy of the artist

Longoni documented in colour the disturbances that took place in 2001 in response to the economic crisis and the measures taken by the government of Fernando de la Rúa, which limited cash withdrawals from the banks to 250 pesos a week. The Argentinians, with humour and irony, soon found a name for the policy: the corralito (the diminutive form of the Spanish word for ‘corraling’, which also designates, in popular Argentine Spanish, a tollders’ playground.) On 19 December 2001 a state of emergency was announced. On 20 december, early in the evening, President Fernando de la Rúa resigned. The suppression of the disturbances had taken a toll of thirty-eight deaths all over the country, including seven in Buenos Aires.

2. Pop-ular

To quote the curators:

In Pop-ular, artists’ mine the tropes of mass media and their manifestation in public spaces. Since the 1960s, as Latin America has undergone rapid development, advertising images have diversified and multiplied, marked by the rapid transition to a consumer society. The first widespread use of colour photography was in advertising, and the richness of pop culture imagery, often associated with commerce and advertising, marks the visual identity of the Latin American metropolis. Signs, patterns and typographies, often created by self-taught hands, confer on the display windows an almost innocent beauty.

Thus there are quite a few photos depicting the most obvious aspect of a consumer society, shop windows, featuring shop window mannequins, or surreal subversions of them like the shapely, naked, young woman posing amid mannequins by Jorge Vall.

This all feels very retro since, as we know, the era of physical shops is on the decline.

Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski

This is the place to point out that the selection hasn’t been made from all the photographs taken by all 73 of these photographers from their entire careers. That would be an epic, maybe impossible, task.

No, this selection has been made from the large, but finite, collection of Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski, who collected original prints throughout the period in question.

Maybe this explains why, when I tried to link to some of these images, I couldn’t find any of them on the internet. Maybe they are very tightly controlled – although I did find plenty of other images by many of these photographers. As usual an exhibition like this makes a good starting point to go off on explorations of your own. But the fact that this is a selection from a selection explains some things.

Fifteenth Birthday Party in Ciudad Neza, Mexico City, Mixtecos Norte/Sur series (1989) by Eniac Martínez © Eniac Martínez. Courtesy of the artist

Produced for the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, the series Mixtecos Norte/Sur consists of photographs taken in Oaxaca and along the US-Mexico border. ‘It is the story of Mixtec indigenous people who leave their increasingly unproductive lands in the state of Oaxaca to enter the industrialised world of the United States.’ A girl’s fifteenth birthday party is a cultural milestone, not only in Mexico but all over Latin America. It involves a highly codified celebration, often accompanied by a religious ceremony, at which friends and relatives are given a lavish demonstration of the host’s generosity.

Alongside the street scenes and riots and cops and sex workers there was also a stream of images various different photographers had taken of the eerie beauty of details of Latino urban architecture – the pattern of cobbles in the street, or stripped posters on peeling walls.

Several photographers had captured the distinctive patters of tiles or brickwork to be found in local buildings, some of which harked back, maybe, to ancient Mayan or pre-Colombian sensibilities. For example, the attractive suite of photos by Pablo López Luz entitled Neo Inca.

In the localities near Andean tourist destinations, Pablo López Luz photographs the doorways and facades of buildings and houses, adorned with the stucco relief work of Inca walls. The visual repertory drawn up in this way reflects the local taste for Inca motifs and shows how these have been grafted onto the urban context and brought up to date.

The photographers

So who exactly are the 73 photographers represented here? I’m glad you asked:

Carlos Aguirre (b.1948, Mexico)
Luiz Alphonsus (b.1948, Brazil)
Édgar Álvarez (b.1947, Colombia)
Yolanda Andrade (b.1950, Mexico)
Jaime Ardila (b.1942, Colombia)
Ever Astudillo (1948 to 192015, Colombia)
Álvaro Barrios (b. 1945, Colombia)
Juan Enrique Bedoya (b.1966, Peru)
Fernando Bedoya (1952, Peru)
Enrique Bostelmann (1939 to 2003, Mexico)
Bill Caro (b.1949, Peru)
Anselmo Carrera (1950 to 2016, Peru)
Jesús Reyes Cordero (b.1956, Mexico)
Armando Cristeto (b.1957, Mexico)
François Dolmetsch (b.1940, UK/Colombia)
Felipe Ehrenberg (1943 to 2017, Mexico)
Virginia Errázuriz (b.1941, Chile)
Paz Errázuriz (b.1944, Chile)
María Elvira Escallón (b.1954, Colombia)
José Alberto Figueroa (b.1946, Cuba)
Fernell Franco (1942 to 2006, Colombia)
RenéFreire (b.1952, Mexico)
Carlos Gallardo (b.1954, Chile)
Héctor García (1923 to 2012, Mexico)
Paolo Gasparini (b.1934, Venezuela)
Lourdes Grobet (b.1940, Mexico)
Billy Hare (b.1946, Peru)
Alejandro Hoppe (b.1961, Chile)
Alvaro Hoppe (b.1956, Chile)
Helen Hughes (b.1948, USA/Chile)
Graciela Iturbide (b.1942, Mexico)
Beatriz Jaramillo (b.1955, Colombia)
Mario García Joya (nee Mayito, b.1938, Cuba)
Alberto Korda (1928 to 2001, Cuba)
Sergio Larrain (1931 to 2012, Chile)
Adriana Lestido (b.1955, Argentina)
Diego Levy (b.1973, Argentina)
Eduardo Longoni (b.1959, Argentina)
Marcos López (b.1958, Argentina)
Héctor López (b.1955, Chile)
Pablo López Luz (b.1979, Mexico)
Ayrton de Magalhães (1954 to 2017, Brazil)
Eniac Martínez (b.1959, Mexico)
Agustín Martínez Castro (1950 to 1992, Mexico)
Sebastián Mejía (b.1982, Colombia)
Ernesto Molina (b.1952, Mexico)
Luis Molina-Pantin (b.1969, Venezuela)
Pablo Ortiz Monasterio (b.1952, Mexico)
Mario Cravo Neto (1947 to 2009, Brazil)
Viki Ospina (b.1948, Colombia)
Adolfo Patiño (1954 to 2005, Mexico)
Claudio Pérez (b.1957, Chile)
Ataúlfo Pérez Aznar (b.1955, Argentina)
Jaime Razuri (b.1956, Peru)
Santiago Rebolledo (b.1951, Colombia)
Miguel Rio Branco (b.1946, Brazil)
Herbert Rodríguez (b.1959, Peru)
Miguel Ángel Rojas (b.1946, Colombia)
Jesús Ruiz Durand (b.1940, Peru)
Osvaldo Salerno (b.1952, Paraguay)
Francisco Smythe (1952 to 1998, Chile)
Carlos Somonte (b.1956, Mexico)
Milagros de la Torre (b.1965, Peru)
Nicolás Torres (b.1957, Peru)
Juan Travnik (b.1950, Argentina)
Sergio Trujillo (b.1947, Colombia)
Jorge Vall (b.1949, Venezuela)
Pedro Valtierra (b.1955, Mexico)
JoséLuis Venegas (b.1944, Mexico)
Leonora Vicuña (b.1952, Chile)
Jaime Villaseca (b.1949, Chile)
Enrique Zamudio (b.1955, Chile)
Helen Zout (b.1957, Argentina)
Facundo de Zuviría (b.1954, Argentina)

And where would any exhibition of modern photography be without images of transvestites and transgender sex workers?

From 10 to 11 p.m., Mexico City (1985) by Agustín Martínez Castro © Agustín Martínez Castro Estate. Courtesy of the artist’s estate

In the photographs of Agustín Martínez Castro, the city is embodied in the anonymous inhabitants of its nights. The photographer is one o the most sensitive and profound chroniclers of the world of transvestism. Far removed from all sense of visual pathos, Martínez Castro offers an dmirable photo essay on private life, understood as a realm of intimacy, which is celebrated here, and on the stripping away of that intimacy, which is denounced. – Art historian, curator, and editor Roberto Tejada

Summary

If I’m honest, I didn’t like many of the photos in this exhibition. There are lots of them, and I suppose there’s lots of variety, but somehow I found the sheer number, and the hopping from one country to another, and from one decade to another, diluted and lessened their impact.

Hardly any of them have the standout lyricism and compositional genius of the thirteen prints by Manuel Álvarez Bravo which are currently on display down in the basement of the same building. Each one of those took my breath away.

And after reading and rereading the handout which includes almost every photo in the show, I realised that I was bored. There’s certainly an impressive range of technical diversity – many collages and montages and artistic treatments of photographic images, incorporating them into multi-media artworks. And ten or fifteen of the images did really stand out.

But almost all of these photos are images taken on the street. They almost all have a scrappy, hand-held quality. There isn’t a single one composed in a studio, and not a single one of a landscape, to give two types of photo which are completely absent. It’s shabby, urban sprawl everywhere you look.

Rough street people in rundown looking slums and dodgy neighbourhoods. Scary street punks, one or two convicts in prison. And plenty of scenes of cops and soldiers policing the street, and riots, and people getting beaten up. Grim-faced soldiers. Grim-faced dictators. Grim-faced revolutionaries. Grim-faced prostitutes. Grim-faced hoodlums, tearful mothers protesting against the disappearance of their sons, photomontages commemorating people killed in riots, tattooed gang members.

Untitled (Aquileo Valtierra González), Prisoners series, Mexico (1997) by Carlos Somonte © Carlos Somonte. Courtesy of the artist

Again I was reminded that the whole exhibition is taken from the private collection of Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski. In other words – far from being a representative survey of all Latin American photography, this is a selection from a selection. A personal selection. A personal view of the politics and history of this continent and this era.

After a while it dawned on me that what was oppressing me was there was no joy or happiness in any of the photos. Surely someone, somewhere, in all these 20 or so countries, in the long period between 1959 and 2016, surely someone, somewhere, smiled. Maybe even laughed. Looked at the blue sky, the river, the trees and the exotic flowers in the botanical garden, and was happy? Is Copacabana beach not in Latin America? And hundreds of sun-kissed Caribbean beaches? Have there been no tourists in Latin America, no beaches and parties?

Not in these photos. Not in this exhibition. Glum and grim and earnest and embattled everywhere you look.

Curators

The exhibition is curated by María Wills and Alexis Fabry.

Demographics

The exhibition is divided between two rooms on floor 3 of the Photographers’ Gallery, and two rooms on the floor below. I visited about noon on a Wednesday. On one floor there were four teenage girl visitors. On the floor below there was just one middle-aged woman. That was it.

Shame. This exhibition deserves more visitors than that.

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by Simon on July 24, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Photography

Tagged Agustín Martínez Castro, Álvaro Hoppe, Alberto Korda, Alexis Fabry, Aquileo Valtierra González, Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Caribbean, Carlos Somonte, Central America, Che Guevara, Chile, Colombia, colonialism, commercialisation, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Eduardo Longoni, Edwin Williamson, El Salvador, Eniac Martínez, Enrique Lihn, exhibition, Fernando Bedoya, General Pinochet, Graciela Iturbide, Guatemala, Guyana, Herbert Rodríguez, Honduras, iconography, imperialism, Jorge Vall, José Emilio Pacheco Berny, Latin America, Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski, Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, María Wills, Mexico, military coup, Nicaragua, Pablo López Luz, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Panama, Paraguay, Paz Errázuriz, Peru, photocopying, Photographers' Gallery, photography, Politics, Portugal, President Fernando de la Rúa, Prints, Roberto Tejada, screen-printing, Sergio Larrain, Shouts, Slavery, South America, Spain, Transgender sex workers, transvestites, Urban Impulses, Urban Impulses: Latin American Photography 1959-2016, Uruguay, Venezuela

Posted by Simon on July 24, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/24/urban-impulses-latin-american-photography-1959-2016-photographers-gallery/

The Art of Mesoamerica: From Olmec to Aztec by Mary Ellen Miller (1996)

Two things about this book:

It is very academic and scholarly. I imagine its main audience is university students. It spends more time explaining the academic debates surrounding dates and discoveries and conflicting interpretations of the archaeological evidence than in presenting a clear narrative.
Which makes you realise that this is a fast-moving field, with new discoveries being made all the time, and that these discoveries sometimes significantly alter our understanding of timeframes and influences. I picked up the second (1996) edition in a charity shop, but realise now I should have bought the fifth edition, from 2012, because knowledge about the subject is changing all the time.

Chronology

The book opens with a daunting chronological table which has six columns, one each for Central Mexico, Oaxaca, Gulf Coast, Maya Highlands, and Lowland Maya – and 10 rows indicating time periods from 1,500 BC onwards.

Chronology of Mesoamerica by Mary Ellen Miller

Apparently, early archaeologists named artefacts from around 600 AD ‘classic’ and the name, or periodisation, stuck, despite not really fitting with later discoveries, so that successive archaeologists and historians have had to elaborate the schema, to create periods named ‘Proto Classic’, and then, going back before that, ‘Formative’ – which itself then turned out to need to be broken down into Early, Middle and Late Formative. At the other end of the scale they suggested a ‘Post-classic phase’, but over time this also had to be fine-tuned to include Early Postclassic and Late Postclassic.

I found it a big challenge to remember all the dates. Roughly speaking 600 AD seems to be the height of Classic and the period 300-900 includes Early, Mid and Late Classic.

Geography

When you look at a map of all the Americas, Central America quite obviously links the United States and South America. But it’s not quite the simple north-south corridor you casually think of. When you really come to consider the area in detail you realise it is more of a horseshoe shape, with the Yucatan peninsula forming the second upturn of the shoe. So the spread of influences, architecture, language and other artefacts wasn’t north to south but more along a west-east axis.

Map of Mesoamerica

The book takes you slowly and carefully through the art and archaeology of Mesoamerica in nine chapters:

Introduction
The Olmecs
The Late Formative
Teotihuacan
Classic Monte Alban, Veracruz and Cotzumalhuapa
The Early Classic Maya
The Late Classic Maya
Mesoamerica after the fall of the Classic cities
The Aztecs

On the face of it the book is a history of the peoples and cultures which inhabited the region of central Mexico stretching across to the Yucatan Peninsula and down into modern-day Guatemala and Belize, with most of the focus on the architecture, sculpture, friezes, pottery and (rare) painting which they produced…

But in fact, alongside what you could call the main historical narrative, runs the story of the discoveries upon which all our knowledge is based, a sequence of archaeological finds and decodings of lost languages which have a disconcerting tendency to overthrow and revolutionise previous thinking on lots of key areas.

The Olmec people carved massive stone heads

The Olmec people, the first really definable culture in Mesoamerica, carved massive stone heads

What I learned

There’s no point trying to recap the massive amount of information in the book. The key points I learned are:

Mesoamerica refers to the diverse civilizations that shared similar cultural characteristics in the region comprising the modern-day countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The area was in continual occupation from 1500 BC to 1519 AD when the conquistadors arrived, but with a continual flux of peoples, tribes or nations in each region, marked by the rise and fall of cities and entire cultures.

The geography of Mesoamerica is surprisingly diverse, encompassing humid tropical areas, dry deserts, high mountainous terrain and low coastal plains.

Many cultural traits were present in the earliest, archaic peoples, then continued right through all successive cultures, including:

a bewildering pantheon of deities, often with multiple identities – two which appear in almost every culture are the storm/rain god and a feathered serpent deity; the Mexica called the rain god Tlaloc, and the feathered serpent deity Quetzalcoatl
similar architectural features, especially the importance of stepped pyramids, often with nine levels
a ballgame which had special ‘courts’ built for it in all the major cities of all the different cultures
a 260-day calendar
clothes which were elaborate and featured huge head-dresses often of feathers, alongside body painting

The key peoples or cultures are the Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Toltec, Mixtec, and Mexica (or Aztec).

But there is still a lot which is unknown. For example, Miler devotes a chapter to the spectacular remains at the city of Teotihuacan (see below) but explains that we don’t know, to this day, the name of the people who built it!

Teotihuacan

The Aztecs didn’t call themselves Aztecs, they called themselves Mexica. They spoke a language called Nahuatl, which is still spoken to this day by some Indian groups. There were as many as 125 languages spoken in this region over this period. Some cultures developed rebus writing, i.e. writing which used images of the thing described rather than collections of letters. These images went on to have multiple meanings, and are also called pictographic, ideographic, or picture writing.

The ballgame

Peoples across Mesoamerica, beginning with the Olmecs, played a ritual sport known as the ballgame. Ballcourts were often located in a city’s sacred precinct, emphasizing the importance of the game. Solid rubber balls were passed between players with the goal of hitting them through markers.

But it wasn’t what we think of as a sport. The game had multiple meanings, including powerful religious and cult purposes. It appears, from a number of carved stone reliefs, that war captives were somehow made to play the game before being ritually beheaded or tortured.

Carved panel, South Ballcourt, El Tajin. A loser at the ballgame is being sacrificed by two victors while a third man looks on. A death god descends from the skyband above to accept the offering. Late Classic.

Carved panel, South Ballcourt, El Tajin. A loser at the ballgame is being sacrificed by two victors (at bottom right) while a third man looks on (far right). A death god descends from the skyband above to accept the offering. Late Classic.

Two calendars

The calendar and numbering systems were complex and elaborate, although based around astronomical events and periods. There’s much evidence that key buildings, including many pyramids, were built in line with astronomical events such as equinoxes. They developed two parallel calendars: a 260-day one and a 365-day one. The 260-day calendar was a ritual calendar, with 20 months of 13 days. It is first recorded in the sixth century BC, and is still used in some parts of Guatemala today for ritual divining.

Based on the sun, the 365-day calendar had 18 months of 20 days, with five nameless days at the end. It was the count of time used for agriculture. Every 52 years the two calendars completed a full cycle, and during this time special rituals commemorated the cycle.

Blood sacrifice

Blood seems to have played a central role in numerous cultures and cities. We know that the Aztecs prized prisoners taken during battle because they could tear out their beating hearts from their bodies to sacrifice to the gods. But there are also plentiful wall art, carvings and frescos showing people who aren’t captives drawing their own blood using a panoply of utensils: sometimes, apparently, in order to have religious visions.

Another theme is piercing the tongue, or even penis, with a needle, thread or rope, apparently for cult or religious reasons.

A carved lintel from a building at Yaxchilan depicts a bloodletting ritual. The king of Yaxchilan, Shield Jaguar II, is holding a flaming torch over his wife, Lady K’ab’al Xook, who is pulling a thorny rope through her tongue. Scrolls of blood can be seen around her mouth. (British Museum)

Visual complexity

But the single biggest thing I took from the book is the extraordinary visual complexity of many of the images from these varied cultures.

The big stone Olmec heads, and many examples of pottery, are simple and easy enough to grasp visually. But there are also thousands of frieze carvings, free-standing stelae, even a few painted frescos have survived, and just a handful of manuscripts written in pictogram style – and almost all of these display a bewildering visual complexity. Clutter. Their images are immensely busy.

This is a drawing of the carved decoration found on a stela (i.e. an upright freestanding carved stone) at the city of Seibal.

Drawing of Seibal stela 10

Most of the friezes and stela and many of the manuscripts show a similar concern to cover every inch of the space with very characteristic style that’s hard to put into words, apart from clutter. The figures are so highly embellished and the space so packed with ornate curvilinear decorations (as well as rows of rectangular glyphs, a form of pictogram) that I had to read Miller’s descriptions of what was going on quite a few times and work really hard to decipher the imagery.

In this and scores of other examples, it takes quite a bit of referring back and forth between text and illustration to decipher what Miller is describing. For example I would only know that a death god is descending in the Ball park frieze [above] because Miller tells me so.

In many of these Mesoamerican carvings, it is impossible to distinguish human figures from the jungles of intertwining decoration which obscure them.

So I was struck that, for most of the peoples of the region, their public art was so complex and difficult to read.

By contrast, pottery by its nature generally has to be simpler, and I found myself very drawn to the monumental quality of early Olmec pottery.

Olmec fish vessel (12th–9th century BC)

Many fully carved sculptures from later eras manage to combine the decorative complexity of the friezes with a stunningly powerful, monumental presence.

There is a class of objects known as hachas, named after the Spanish term for ‘axe’. Hachas are representations of gear worn in the ballgame and are a distinctive form associated with art from the Classic Veracruz culture, which flourished along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico between 300 and 900 AD.

A Hacha in the Classic Veracruz style. It would have had inlays of precious materials, such as jade, turquoise, obsidian or shell. Middle to Late Classic (500-900 AD)

In three-dimensional sculpture the addiction of interlocking curlicues works, but in almost flat carvings or reliefs it can be impenetrable.

Can you make out a human figure in the complex concatenation of interlocking shapes on this stela? (Clue: His right hand is gripping a circle about two-thirds up on the far left of the stone. Even with clues, it’s not easy, is it?)

Stela 31 from Tikal depicting the ruler Stormy Sky, Mayan, AD 445

Places

Bonampak – Late Classic period (AD 580 to 800) Maya archaeological site with Mayan murals
Cacaxtla – small city of the Olmeca-Xicalanca people 650-900 AD, colourful murals
Cerros – small Eastern Lowland Maya archaeological site in northern Belize, Late Preclassic to Postclassic period
Cópan – capital city of a major Classic period Mayan kingdom from 5th to 9th centuries AD
Chichen Itzá – city of the Toltecs tenth century, site of the biggest ball park in Mesoamerica
Cotzumalhuapa – Late Classic major city that extended more than 10 square kilometres which produced hundreds of sculptures in a notably realistic style
*El Tajín – one of the largest and most important cities of the Classic era of Mesoamerica, part of the Classic Veracruz culture, flourished 600 to 1200 CE. World Heritage site.
Iximché – capital of the Late Postclassic Kaqchikel Maya kingdom from 1470 until its abandonment in 1524, located in present-day Guatemala
Izapa – large archaeological site in the Mexican state of Chiapas, occupied from 1500 BCE to 1200 AD
Kaminaljuyú – big Mayan site now mostly buried under modern Guatemala City
Mitla – the most important site of the Zapotec culture, reaching apex 750-1500 AD
*Monte Alban – one of the earliest cities of Mesoamerica, the pre-eminent Zapotec socio-political and economic centre for a thousand years, 250 BC – . Founded toward the end of the Middle Formative period at around 500 BC to Late Classic (ca. AD 500-750)
Oxtotitlan – a rock shelter housing rock paintings, the ‘earliest sophisticated painted art known in Mesoamerica’
*Palenque – Maya city state in southern Mexico, date from c. 226 BC to c. AD 799, contains some of the finest Mayan architecture, sculpture, roof comb and bas-relief carvings
Piedras Negras – largest of the Usumacinta ancient Maya urban centres, known for its large sculptural output
Seibal – Classic Period archaeological site in Guatemala, fl., 400 BC – 200 AD
Tenochtitlan – capital city of the Aztecs, founded 1325, destroyed by the conquistadors 1520, now buried beneath Mexico City
*Teotihuacan – vast city site in the Valley of Mexico 25 miles north-east of Mexico City, at its height 0-500 AD, the largest city in Mesoamerica population 125,000. A World Heritage Site, and the most visited archaeological site in Mexico.
Tikal – one of the largest archaeological sites and urban centres of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization, located in northern Guatemala. World Heritage Site.
Tlatilco – one of the first chiefdom centres to arise in the Valley of Mexico during the Middle Pre-Classic period, 1200 BCE and 200 BCE, gives its name to distinctive ‘Tlatilco culture’.
Tula – capital of the Toltec Empire between the fall of Teotihuacan and the rise of Tenochtitlan. Though conquered in 1150, Tula had significant influence on the Aztec Empire. Associated with the cult of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl.
Tulum – Mayan walled city built on tall cliffs along the east coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, one of the last cities built and inhabited by the Maya, at its height between the 13th and 15th centuries.
Uaxactún – an ancient sacred place of the Maya civilization, flourished up till its sack in 378 AD
*Uxmal – ne of the most important archaeological sites of Maya culture, founded 500 AD, capital of a Late Classic Maya state around 850-925, taken over by Toltecs around 1000 AD. World Heritage Site.
Yaxchilán – Mayan city, important throughout the Classic era, known for its well-preserved sculptured stone lintels and stelae bearing hieroglyphic texts describing the dynastic history of the city.

Another map, with pictures

Map of Mesoamerica showing the most important cities and historical sites. Red shading shows area of Aztec influence, green shading for the Maya region

Map of Mesoamerica showing the most important cities and historical sites. Red shading shows the area of Aztec influence, green shading for the Maya region

PBS Documentary

The sense of a double narrative – the way we not only learn the history of the Mesoamericans, but also the history of how we found out about the Mesoamericans – is well captured in this American documentary.

The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene (1973)

‘Contrary to common belief the truth is nearly always funny. It’s only tragedy which people bother to imagine or invent.’ (p.21)

Greene in the 1970s

Greene was 69 when this novel was published, entering his fifth decade of astonishing productivity – an output which included prize-winning novels, short stories, Oscar-winning film scripts and plays – and was widely seen as the greatest living English writer of the day.

He had done this in part by mining a narrow vein of themes with obsessive repetitiveness until they were completely identified with him and the phrase ‘Greeneland’ had been coined to describe the imaginary landscape where they met:

a gloomy despairing Roman Catholic faith which tortures its believers more than it consoles or uplifts
a nihilistic view of human life which leads the protagonists in his most famous novels to kill themselves or seek out death
adultery, ideally of the kind that makes the lovers miserable as sin
an unerring eye for the seedy or squalid or shabby details of failed lives and disappointed souls
a fondness for poverty-stricken war-torn foreign locations such as Mexico, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, Cuba, Congo and – in this novel – Argentina run by a military dictatorship

Therefore, part of the pleasure of reading Greene is not only for the prose and story, but in greeting all the familiar tropes which dominate his narratives: it is like saying hello to a gang of old lags: hello to the comfortably familiar pessimism, hello to the reassuringly predictable focus on the seedy side of life, a negativity so relentless that it risks becoming comic despite itself, a bit like Fraser’s cry, ‘We’re doomed, we’re doomed,’ in Dad’s Army.

Hope creaked in his throat like a piece of rusty machinery. (p.23)

The Honorary Consul part 1

The Honorary Consul does not disappoint in its heartless depiction of disappointment. It is set in a remote city in northern Argentina, near the river border with Paraguay (still under the military rule of General Stroessner). The Latin American location immediately is painted vividly: from the horribleness of the military government – one of the characters has three fingers missing, cut off by his torturers under the eye of CIA ‘supervisors’, and the narrator casually mentions the bodies of political murderees washed up on the Argentine side of the river – to the heat which makes everyone sweaty and weary, the ubiquitous atmosphere of Latino slackness and corruption.

‘Assassinations, kidnapping, the torture of prisoners – these things belong to our decade.’ (p.57)

It opens with middle-aged Dr Plarr looking across the wide river at sunset and remembering how he was abandoned by his English father, who shipped him and his mother off to Buenos Aires while staying on in Paraguay to fight the junta. Failure disappointment disillusion. His mother has, of course, not worn well, instead becoming a querulous old lady fussing about her lost estates –

He felt the same sense of wasted time as when he visited his mother and she complained of headaches and loneliness while she sat before a plate heaped up with éclairs in the best teashop of Buenos Aires. (p.51)

– and it was partly to escape her that he chose to take up the medical appointment here at this remote outpost near the border. (How 1930s it sounds.)

Dr Plarr goes to meet the only other Brit in town, Humphries, at the local hotel where, of course, the food is disgusting, produced by a depressed Hungarian chef, the restaurant is empty, the solitary waiter can barely summon up the life to serve them. Plarr, inevitably, notices that the nicotine stains in Humphries’ thin white hair are the same colour as the goulash stains on his napkin. The entire sequence is a showroom display of Greene’s eagle eye for the seedy, shabby, dispiriting and defeated in human existence.

Almost the only institution the narrator mentions with enthusiasm is the brothel, whose madam, we are assured (twice) and with heavy irony, is the wealthiest woman in town.

Señora Sanchez was a very stout lady with a dimpled face and a welcoming smile from which kindliness was oddly lacking, as though it had been mislaid accidentally a moment before like a pair of spectacles. (p.55)

‘like a pair of spectacles’ – it is a characteristically crisp and effective simile, but also characteristically detached and with the note of slightly lofty Edwardian gentility which is the tone of the whole book.

The general air of incompetence, failure and collapse is racked up as the plot is now disclosed to us: the American ambassador has been visiting the city and a gang of ‘rebels’ and ‘freedom fighters’ has used information which Dr Plarr provided them with to ambush his car. Except that, through a sequence of mistakes, they pull over the wrong car and stop the one carrying Dr Plarr’s friend, the ageing, fat British alcoholic Charley Fortnum. Some while ago Fortnum was made Britain’s ‘honorary consul’ in the city and he had been roped in at the last minute to translate from the local Spanish for the US ambassador – and now finds himself ambushed, kidnapped, drugged and carried off to a mud hut in one of the city’s poorest barrios. Plarr is rung up by the rebels in the middle of the night to be informed of this disastrous mistake.

Adultery 1 It wouldn’t be a Greene novel without adultery, his favourite subject and one he was an enthusiastic practitioner of in real life (see the numerous biographies). Dr Plarr is, inevitably, having an affair with ‘his friend’ Charley Fortnum’s wife, Clara. As Plarr tells the police inspector:

‘Charley Fortnum is a friend of mine.’
‘Oh, a friend… It is usually a friend one betrays, isn’t it, in these cases?’ (p.89)

In fact, he was first attracted to her when he saw her working in Señora Sanchez’ brothel – she is a prostitute who Fortnum, with his own kind of ageing white male condescension, fancies he has ‘rescued’. Some time after the marriage, Plarr meets Clara at a chemists shop where she’s buying fancy sunglasses, one thing leads to another and she goes back to his apartment to sleep with him. He’s not very enthusiastic about the situation but keeps on seeing and sleeping with her until he eventually gets her pregnant – she claims she knows for certain, since Fortnum rarely has sex with her – thus creating numerous ‘ironic’ situations where Plarr has to congratulate Fortnum on the old chap’s good fortune ha ha.

Betrayal And not only has Plarr betrayed Fortnum by impregnating his wife, but now – albeit inadvertently – he finds himself instrumental in the absurd mistake of kidnapping him. It all came about because Plarr was approached one day at his surgery by the rebel leader, who he was at school with decades ago, and who persuades Plarr to pass on the timetable of the ambassador’s trip. The plan is to kidnap the American ambassador and hold him hostage until the General, ruler of Paraguay, releases 10 political prisoners there, including Plarr’s own long-separated father – that’s Plarr’s motivation for agreeing. But nobody knew Fortnum would be going along to interpret for the ambassador, and so the rebels intercept the first car driving the agreed route and it turns out to be the one Fortnum is travelling in, since the ambassador’s one was full and following a little way behind.

The plot 2

In the first half the plot is meandering and leisurely with loads of flashbacks to earlier encounters and conversations, which makes it occasionally confusing. From about page 180 the pace picks up as Plarr finds himself agreeing to go out to the mud hut where the rebels are hiding to treat Fortnum, who they injured when he made an escape attempt.

Once he is there, however, they refuse to let him leave. And for the remaining 50 pages of the novel the rebel leader-cum-failed priest and his common law wife Marta, loverboy Plarr, injured drunk Fortnum, and three other rebels, are all trapped in the two rooms of the mud hut, a setting which quickly becomes a kind of pressure cooker or incubator for a whole stream of increasingly programmatic discussions about Greene’s favourite things: adultery, sex, God, sin, despair, the meaning of life.

Presumably these final 50 pages are meant to be nerve-racking – a small cast of characters trapped in a static and hermetic setting, they read as if cannibalised from a particularly claustrophobic play – all with the looming threat of an army attack closing in even as the victims squabble among themselves.

I suppose in 1973 it was new territory to describe what it’s like to be kidnapped by revolutionary terrorists, and it is immensely to Greene’s credit that he escaped the parochial Aga sagas of middle class English fiction to set his novels in such a wide variety of exotic settings.

It is unfortunate, then, that what the squabbling and discussions feel so sixth-formish, like sessions at a theological college, a rather lurid rehash of the usual Greene themes. Maybe if this was the first Greene novel you ever read it would hit you like a thunderbolt, the dramatic setting, the life and death debates. But if you’ve read more than three or four, the effect is more like a rather weary sense of déjà lu.

Meandering

The first 180 pages or so have a very slow leisurely meandering pace. After the revelation in the first 20 pages or so that the rebels have got the wrong man, the text switches to a long series of flashbacks describing Plarr’s first encounter with Fortnum, companionable trips to the brothel, dinners with the tiresome local novelist, visits to his mother in Buenos Aires. Each scene has a point in illuminating the characters, but they are described in a languid easygoing manner which, more than the meaning of the words, convey a certain Latin American laziness to the whole text.

Greene’s novels generally have complex time schemes which allow for plenty of hindsight and memory: The End of The Affair in particular has a cunning interweaving of scenes from multiple moments in the past, and this – for me – is the most impressive aspect of many of his novels, the construction of narratives which work at multiple moments, simultaneously.

But this one feels significantly slower than the others, more leisurely, the interweaving more of a meandering, most of the action having the quality almost of a dream.

There is no feeling that Dr Plarr – supposedly in his thirties – actually does any work. He wanders around the town, reading novels and chatting with the small group of characters in a supremely relaxed easygoing way. These first two-thirds of the novel have a pleasantly soporific effect.

Middle-aged male fantasy

This is not unconnected to the way it is tempting to read the whole novel as a kind of middle-aged male fantasy: you don’t do any work; you lie around all day reading; meet up with friends in the evening to enjoy a meal and a drink and a chat; nobody minds if you stroll round to the whorehouse which is full of attractive and compliant women; which one tonight, you wonder, as you puff on your cigar; or you may prefer to dally with one of your three or four mistresses. And all the time you can be mulling over your own sinfulness, tutting at the way you manipulate your women, elegantly toying with the psychology of sex and adultery and relationships and more sex.

Plarr looks at his devout secretary and wonders why he hasn’t slept with her yet. On the plane back from Buenos Aires he is buttonholed by one of his mistresses, a patient, which leads him to remember having sex with her at her home while her husband was in the room, though drunkenly asleep. He remembers bumping into this woman’s husband at the brothel where the husband was entertaining no fewer than four prostitutes. He remembers a number of other patients who became lovers. He wanders along to the brothel and has a girl and sizes up several others, including the future Mrs Fortnum. It’s in the same lazy inconsequential way that he starts the affair with Fortnum’s wife. After Fortnum is kidnapped he drives out to his house to comfort her, and again they have sex. When he chats to the chief of police they laugh and joke about the women they have both had affairs with. Ha ha ha. Everyone appears to be having sex with everyone else…

Apart from the descriptions of sex (on the whole mercifully brief) these many sexual situations allow Greene to write a lot about the psychology of sex in a man-of-the-world tone which many a modern woman might find offensive and I find rather complacent, but which appears to have appealed to lots of his male reviewers back in the 1970s. All his books contain these quotable quotes, sub-Wildean aphorisms, without the wit or the heart.

Secrecy, he thought, is part of the attraction in a sexual affair. An open affair has always a touch of absurdity. (p.90)

In a real love affair, he thought, you are interested in a woman because she is someone distinct from yourself; then bit by bit she adapts herself to you, she picks up your habits, your ideas, even your turns of phrase, she becomes part of you, and then what interest remains? One cannot love oneself, one cannot live for long close to oneself – everyone has need of a stranger in the bed, and a whore remains a stranger. Her body has been scrawled over by so many men that you can never decipher your own signature there. (p.90)

He began to comfort her with his hand as he would have comforted a frightened dog, and gently, without intention, they came together. He felt no lust, and when she moaned and tightened, he felt no sense of triumph. He wondered with sadness, why did I ever want this to happen? Why did I think it would be a victory? There seemed to be no point in playing the game since now he knew what moves he had to make to win. (p.97)

‘A husband is of great importance in a love affair. He is a way of escape when an affair begins to get boring.’ (p.174)

‘I’ve often noticed,’ Dr Plarr said, ‘when a man leaves a woman he begins to hate her. Or is it that he hates his own failures? Perhaps we want to destroy the only witness who knows exactly what we are like when we drop the comedy.’ (p.216)

And much, much more in the same worldly-wise, one man-of-the-world to another, vein. Maybe this depiction of characters with a very un-English, unashamed and liberal attitude to sex explains his popularity in the 1960s and 70s.

Catholicism In a move which should surprise nobody it turns out the alcoholic honorary consul is a lapsed Catholic, much given to maudlin, drunken, religiose self-pity. Just, in fact, like scores of other Greene characters. To double the dose, the leader of the ‘rebels’ is a lapsed Catholic priest, too. And Plarr was of course raised a Catholic: a trinity of religion-obsessed characters! Which enables them, in the final 50 pages of the book, to have numerous discussions of Catholic ‘issues’ ie for Greene to drop into the text numerous Catholic one liners or paragraphs of bumf, of which he seems able to spin a literally endless amount.

Plarr said, ‘I doubt if her Confession will take very long.’
‘Those who have nothing to confess always take the longest,’ Léon Rivas said. ‘They want to please the priest and give him something to do.’ (p.102)

They always treated him with great courtesy, he noticed… Or was it perhaps the habitual courtesy which a prison warder is said to show even the most brutal murderer before his execution? People have the same awed respect for death as they have for a distinguished stranger, however unwelcome he may be, who visits their town. (p.119)

‘People have the same respect for death as they have for a distinguished stranger… who visits their town.’ That’s gibberish, isn’t it?

‘It is one of the duties of a father to provide.’
‘And God the Father, Léon? He doesn’t seem to provide much. I asked last night if you still believed in him. To me he has always seemed a bit of a swine. I would rather believe in Apollo. At least he was beautiful.’
‘The trouble is we have lost the power to believe in Apollo, Father Rivas said. ‘We have Jehovah in our blood. We can’t help it. After all these centuries Jehovah lives in our darkness like a worm in the intestines.’ (p.216)

It seems to me that Greene has the same attitude of amused complacency towards the Catholic faith as he does to sex, prostitution and infidelity: there is nothing genuinely threatening or disruptive in his description of either: you get the impression he could write hundreds and hundreds of pages of smoothly expressed truisms and bromides about sex or about religion, none of which are really true, none of which ever really making the reader sit up and think. They’re a sort of rhetorical accompaniment, pseudo-philosophical tinsel hung on the melodrama of the plot.

By the end the rebels, after much arguing, convince themselves they need to kill Fortnum if their demands are not met by the deadline they’ve set, otherwise this kind of kidnap will never be taken seriously, the revolution will never happen, justice will never be secured. Specifically, this leads to a series of debates between Plarr and the priest-turned-rebel, Father Rivas, which easily segue into colourful conversations about the character of God, which casually go off in all kinds of wild and imaginative directions.

‘When you shoot Fortnum in the back of the head, are you sure you won’t have a moment’s fear of old Jehovah and his anger? “Thou shalt not commit murder.”‘
‘If I kill it will be God’s fault as much as mine’
‘God’s fault.’
‘He made me what I am now. He will have loaded the gun and steadied my hand.’
‘I thought the Church teaches that he’s love.’
‘Was it love which sent six million Jews to the gas ovens? You are a doctor, you must often have seen intolerable pain – a child dying of meningitis – is that love? It was not love which cut off Aquino’s fingers. The police station where such things happen… He created them.’
‘I have never heard a priest blame God for things like that before.’
‘I don’t blame Him. I pity Him,’ Father Rivas said. (p.219)

Rubbing it in

In case anyone hadn’t realised Greene’s ultimately despairing view of the world, he rubs it in at the climax of the novel by having Dr Plarr killed as he tries to parley a truce with the surrounding military.

Fortnum is returned to his wife in one piece but, having discovered during his ordeal that the child she is carrying is really Plarr’s, his love, his happiness, is destroyed.

And, in a final bitter twist, the British ambassador in Buenos Aires, in a hurry to get Fortnum off the payroll but keen to ensure his acquiescence, tells him they’re relieving him of the position of honorary consul but will be offering compensation in the form of a medal for services rendered to Queen and country, in fact the Order of the British Empire.

Ha, the futility. Oh the humanity.

The movie

The Honorary Consul was made into a British movie, released in 1983, directed by John Mackenzie and starring Michael Caine in sweaty, middle-aged alcoholic mode, along with Richard Gere, Bob Hoskins and Elpidia Carrillo.

Greene’s books

The Man Within (1929) One of the worst books I’ve ever read, a wretchedly immature farrago set in a vaguely described 18th century about a cowardly smuggler who betrays his fellows to the Excise men then flees to the cottage of a pure and innocent young woman who he falls in love with before his pathetic inaction leads to her death. Drivel.
~~The Name of Action (1930) (repudiated by author, never republished)~~
~~Rumour at Nightfall (1931) (repudiated by author, never republished)~~
Stamboul Train (1932) A motley cast of characters find out each others’ secrets and exploit each other on the famous Orient Express rattling across Europe, climaxing in the execution of one of the passengers, a political exile, in an obscure rail junction, and all wound up with a cynical business deal in Istanbul.
It’s a Battlefield (1934) London: a working class man awaits his death sentence for murder while a cast of seedy characters, including a lecherous HG Wells figure, betray each other and agonise about their pointless lives.
England Made Me (1935) Stockholm: financier and industrialist Krogh hires a pretty Englishwoman Kate Farrant to be his PA/lover. She gets him to employ her shiftless brother Anthony who, after only a few days, starts spilling secrets to the seedy journalist Minty, and so is bumped off by Krogh’s henchman, Hall.
A Gun for Sale (1936) England: After assassinating a European politician and sparking mobilisation for war, hitman Raven pursues the lecherous middle man who paid him with hot money to a Midlands town, where he gets embroiled with copper’s girl, Anne, before killing the middle man and the wicked arms merchant who was behind the whole deal, and being shot dead himself.
Brighton Rock (1938) After Kite is murdered, 17 year-old Pinkie Brown takes over leadership of one of Brighton’s gangs, a razor-happy psychopath who is also an unthinking Catholic tormented by frustrated sexuality. He marries a 16 year-old waitress (who he secretly despises) to stop her squealing on the gang, before being harried to a grisly death.
The Confidential Agent (1939) D. the agent for a foreign power embroiled in a civil war, tries and fails to secure a contract for British coal to be sent to his side. He flees the police and unfounded accusations of murder, has an excursion to a Midlands mining district where he fails to persuade the miners to go on strike out of solidarity for his (presumably communist) side, is caught by the police, put on trial, then helped to escape across country to a waiting ship, accompanied by the woman half his age who has fallen in love with him.
The Lawless Roads (1939) Greene travels round Mexico and hates it, hates its people and its culture, the poverty, the food, the violence and despair, just about managing to admire the idealised Catholicism which is largely a product of his own insistent mind, and a few heroic priests-on-the-run from the revolutionary authorities.
The Power and the Glory (1940) Mexico: An unnamed whisky priest, the only survivor of the revolutionary communists’ pogrom against the Catholic hierarchy, blunders from village to village feeling very sorry for himself and jeopardising lots of innocent peasants while bringing them hardly any help until he is caught and shot.
The Ministry of Fear (1943) Hallucinatory psychological fantasia masquerading as an absurdist thriller set in London during the Blitz when a man still reeling from mercy-killing his terminally ill wife gets caught up with a wildly improbable Nazi spy ring.
The Heart of The Matter (1948) Through a series of unfortunate events, Henry Scobie, the ageing colonial Assistant Commissioner of Police in Freetown, Sierra Leone, finds himself torn between love of his wife and of his mistress, spied on by colleagues and slowly corrupted by a local Syrian merchant, until life becomes intolerable and – as a devout Catholic – he knowingly damns himself for eternity by committing suicide. Whether you agree with its Catholic premises or not, this feels like a genuinely ‘great’ novel for the completeness of its conception and the thoroughness of its execution.
The Third Man (1949) The novella which formed the basis for the screenplay of the famous film starring Orson Welles. Given its purely preparatory nature, this is a gripping and wonderfully-written tale, strong on atmosphere and intrigue and mercifully light on Greene’s Catholic preachiness.
The End of The Affair (1951) Snobbish writer Maurice Bendrix has an affair with Sarah, the wife of his neighbour on Clapham Common, the dull civil servant, Henry Miles. After a V1 bomb lands on the house where they are illicitly meeting, half burying Bendrix, Sarah breaks off the affair and refuses to see him. Only after setting a detective on her, does Bendrix discover Sarah thought he had been killed in the bombing and prayed to God, promising to end their affair and be ‘good’ if only he was allowed to live – only to see him stumbling in through the wrecked doorway, from which point she feels duty bound to God to keep her word. She sickens and dies of pneumonia like many a 19th century heroine, but not before the evidence begins to mount up that she was, in fact, a genuine saint. Preposterous for most of its length, it becomes genuinely spooky at the end.
Twenty-One Stories (1954) Generally very short stories, uneven in quality and mostly focused on wringing as much despair about the human condition as possible using thin characters who come to implausibly violent endings – except for three short funny tales.
The Unquiet American (1955) Set in Vietnam as the French are losing their grip on the country, jaded English foreign correspondent, Thomas Fowler, reacts very badly to fresh-faced, all-American agent Alden Pyle, who both steals his Vietnamese girlfriend and is naively helping a rebel general and his private army in the vain hope they can form a non-communist post-colonial government. So Fowler arranges for Pyle to be assassinated. The adultery and anti-Americanism are tiresome, but the descriptions of his visits to the front line are gripping.
Loser Takes All (1955) Charming comic novella recounting the mishaps of accountant Bertram who is encouraged to get married at a swanky hotel in Monte Carlo by his wealthy boss who then doesn’t arrive to pick up the bill, as he’d promised to – forcing Bertram to dabble in gambling at the famous Casino and becoming so obsessed with winning that he almost loses his wife before the marriage has even begun.
Our Man In Havana (1958) Comedy about an unassuming vacuum cleaner salesman, Jim Wormold, living in Havana, who is improbably recruited for British intelligence and, when he starts to be paid, feels compelled to manufacture ‘information’ from made-up ‘agents’. All very farcical until the local security services and then ‘the other side’ start taking an interest, bugging his phone, burgling his flat and then trying to bump him off.
A Burnt-Out Case (1960) Tragedy. Famous architect Querry travels to the depths of the Congo, running away from his European fame and mistress, and begins to find peace working with the local priests and leprosy doctor, when the unhappy young wife of a local factory owner accuses him of seducing her and fathering her child, prompting her husband to shoot Querry dead.
The Comedians (1966) Tragedy. Brown returns to run his hotel in Port-au-Prince, in a Haiti writhing under the brutal regime of Papa Doc Duvalier, and to resume his affair with the ambassador’s wife, Martha. A minister commits suicide in the hotel pool; Brown is beaten up by the Tontons Macoute; he tries to help a sweet old American couple convert the country to vegetarianism. In the final, absurd sequence he persuades the obvious con-man ‘major’ Jones to join the pathetic ‘resistance’ (12 men with three rusty guns), motivated solely by the jealous (and false) conviction that Jones is having an affair with his mistress. They are caught, escape, and Brown is forced to flee to the neighbouring Dominican Republic where the kindly Americans get him a job as assistant to the funeral director he had first met on the ferry to Haiti.
Travels With My Aunt (1969) Comedy. Unmarried, middle-aged, retired bank manager Henry Pullman meets his aunt Augusta at the funeral of his mother, and is rapidly drawn into her unconventional world, accompanying her on the Orient Express to Istanbul and then on a fateful trip to south America, caught up in her colourful stories of foreign adventures and exotic lovers till he finds himself right in the middle of an uncomfortably dangerous situation.
The Honorary Consul (1973) Tragedy. Dr Eduardo Plarr accidentally assists in the kidnapping of his friend, the alcoholic, bumbling ‘honorary consul’ to a remote city on the border of Argentina, Charley Fortnum, with whose ex-prostitute wife he happens to be having an affair. When he is asked to go and treat Fortnum, who’s been injured, Plarr finds himself also taken prisoner by the rebels and dragged into lengthy Greeneish discussions about love and religion and sin and redemption etc, while they wait for the authorities to either pay the ransom the rebels have demanded or storm their hideout. It doesn’t end well.
The Human Factor (1978) Maurice Castle lives a quiet, suburban life with his African wife, Sarah, commuting daily to his dull office job in a branch of British Security except that, we learn half way through the book, he is a double agent passing secrets to the Russians. Official checks on a leak from his sector lead to the improbable ‘liquidation’ of an entirely innocent colleague which prompts Castle to make a panic-stricken plea to his Soviet controllers to be spirited out of the country. And so he is, arriving safely in Moscow. But to the permanent separation with the only person he holds dear in the world and who he was, all along, working on behalf of – his beloved Sarah. Bleak and heart-breaking.
Monsignor Quixote (1982) Father Quixote is unwillingly promoted monsignor and kicked out of his cosy parish, taking to the roads of Spain with communist ex-mayor friend, Enrique ‘Sancho’ Zancas, in an old jalopy they jokingly nickname Rocinante, to experience numerous adventures loosely based on his fictional forebear, Don Quixote, all the while debating Greene’s great Victorian theme, the possibility of a doubting – an almost despairing – Catholic faith.
The Captain and The Enemy (1988) 12-year-old Victor Baxter is taken out of his boarding school by a ‘friend’ of his father’s, the so-called Captain, who carries him off to London to live with his girlfriend, Liza. Many years later Victor, a grown man, comes across his youthful account of life in this strange household when Liza dies in a road accident, and he sets off on an adult pilgrimage to find the Captain in Central America, a quest which – when he tells him of Liza’s death – prompts the old man to one last – futile and uncharacteristic – suicidal gesture.

1 Comment

by Simon on April 19, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel

Tagged 1973, adultery, Argentina, Charley Fortnum, Eduardo Plarr, Graham Greene, Latin America, The Honorary Consul

Posted by Simon on April 19, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/the-honorary-consul-graham-greene/

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All posts tagged Latin America

Historical context – the War on Terror

Ignatieff’s approach

Contents

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

The Arab future

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

2. The threshold of repugnance

3. The world is watching

Notes and thoughts

Seven days later

Credit

New world disorder reviews

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Historical scope

The Hispanic Society

Room 1. The Iberian Peninsula in the Ancient World

Room 2. Al-Andalus

Locks and knockers

The Reconquista

Slavery

Room 3. Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Spanish wars of repression

Room 4. Colonial Latin America I: People and place

Race rules – apartheid

Room 5. Colonial Latin America II: Decorative Arts

Room 6. Colonial Latin America III: Religious Art

Room 7. Goya

Room 8. Sorolla, Zuloaga and the Hispanic Society

Room 9. Vision of Spain

In-depth video

Thoughts

Related links

Related reviews

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By sea to South America

Quick summary

To Kurupukari

To Kurupukari and beyond

Boa Vista

Three things

1. Waugh is easily Bored

2. Music

3. Waugh is no naturalist

The turning point

Highlights of the return journey

Calling the travel bluff, myths of travel (pages 114 to 116)

You feel free

You are untrammeled by convention

You have a hearty appetite and sleep the sleep of the blessed

River baths

Karasabai

Tipuru

Mikrapuru

Journey to the river

The Dickens connection

Credit

Evelyn Waugh reviews

Other travel books

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OSPAAAL

The Mike Stanfield Collection

Posters

Cuba

Africa

Apartheid

Asia

Anti-America

Using native cultural heritage

Magazine covers

Anti-America