Review: Time slips for a revolutionary
Carolyn Kellogg
Less than a decade before the start of the American Civil War, a foreign leader landed on America’s shores. It was a time of great chaos for him, with power shifting between forces back home, and him having escaped imprisonment. He was, essentially, in exile. He was supposed to be in Cuba, but instead he was in New Orleans.
As far as history is concerned, well, nobody really noticed.
Benito Juárez would go on to become the first Indigenous president of Mexico, serving from 1858 to 1872. He is remembered as a national hero, a liberal reformer who fought foreign intervention. Juárez wrote a memoir, and devotes only two lines to his time in Louisiana — and this is where inventive and thrilling writer Yuri Herrera picks up in his novel “Season of the Swamp.”
Hererra envisions Juárez in this interregnum as a man who is isolated by not understanding the languages around him — but not in a bad way. He doesn’t rush to catch up with his expatriate colleagues; with very little money, he and his buddy Pepe find themselves in the rough parts of town. He works a little, spends time in coffeeshops, and becomes swept up in the dancing, drinking and underground cultural life of New Orleans.
The first place he and Pepe stay is a hotel so sketchy that they witness a man’s head get cracked open. It’s an amusing anecdote, and fitting with the newspaper reports Juárez enjoys reading, about lowlife crimes and frequent fires and wild accusations.
“The city — first gradually, then vertiginously — stopped being a city of cons and wheeling and dealing and became a living creature,” Herrera writes. It is as if New Orleans has a particular enchantment, one that’s always been there.
Finding a new place to live, Juárez makes friends with his landlady Thisbee, who helps him understand class and commerce. An employer explains the complicated ways that the Creole people fit. In later lodgings, he winds up at the home of Madame Doubard, an older woman with a feisty dog, who says of New Orleans, “Could there be any place more interesting than where the chaff gets tossed?”
Time starts to slip. He’s swept up. He makes it to the swamp, he encounters corrupt policemen, stays out late going from one place, to the next, to the next.
A Cuban exile takes him to Gravier, a slave market, narrated in true horror. And then an expensive hotel, where slaves are also sold, different only in its posh veneer. “Why bring me here, he asked himself, why, why, why on earth did he bring me to these places. But then he immediately wondered: How did I not see it myself.” Juárez isn’t following what’s happening with American national politics, but he’s seeing the root cause up close, indelibly.
His fellow Mexican nationals, including Melchor Ocampo and Ponciano Arriga, seem to be more focused on the clash at home than he is. After they are accused of plotting by a Mexican newspaper, they rally together to prove they are not. They get the message out, and rejoice together! Then: “although they didn’t say so, it had suddenly dawned on them that the worst part was that it was true: they weren’t doing anything.”
This puts them on a slightly more focused track to get some money, maybe some guns, and make a plan to return home. Still, New Orleans is sliding from day to night in all its glory.
While this is historical and fiction, “Season of the Swamp” bears little resemblance to historical fiction. There is too little alignment of dates and facts, and too much play with language, with how the text moves on the page.
When Juárez is introduced to absinthe, the sentence is laid out in short bursts. When he’s talking with his colleagues about changes they want at home, some of the words appear in different fonts — I couldn’t explain entirely why, except for the one that looks like a broadsheet poster, like an advertisement for change.
Yuri Herrera, who currently teaches at Tulane, has imagined an interlude for Benito Juárez that is likely more fun than his actual experience in New Orleans. It’s also a vibrant novel that asks us to see how the soul of a revolutionary is made.
Carolyn Kellogg has an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is formerly books editor of the Los Angeles Times.