A literary triumph by one of Mexico's most promising young authors, Red Ants is the first ever literary translation into English from the Sierra Zapotec. This vibrant collection of short stories by Pergentino José updates magical realism for the 21st century. Red Ants paints a candid picture of indigenous Mexican life -- an essential counterpoint to cultural products of the colonial gaze. José's fantastical stories tackle themes of family, love, and independence in his signature style: unapologetically personal, coolly emotional, and always surprising.
"José is a rising star in Mexican literature, and this collection of short fiction, which examines indigenous life in the U.S.’s southern neighbor through the lens of a contemporary magic realism, should only further his acclaim. Veteran Spanish translator Bunstead... takes José’s clean, punchy lines and makes them sing―and stick with you." ―John Maher, Publishers Weekly
"Undoubted resonances of the stories of Kafka and Rulfo." ––Leonardo Videla
"A set of short stories in which the peculiarity and the fantasy of Zapotec popular legends are brought to life by the imaginative and powerful pen of a great author in the making – what is perhaps a true breath of fresh and original air that does our national literature much good." – Mónica Maristain, Sin Embargo
"These stories are situated within an imaginary (of Pergentino José's making) that is consistent from one story to the next… but it is an imaginary that is not reflected in the rest of Mexican literature. This collection is poised to become a new and encouraging contribution." – Alantl Molina, Marvin Magazine
In many ways, the term magical realism seems to be the literary equivalent of “here be dragons”—a catchall for an understanding of the universe and an experience with reality that North Americans and Europeans simply don’t have the cultural context for. I’ll admit that this collection of short stories was a challenge for me as someone who has always struggled with magical realism: not the genre itself, but the academic and critical discussions of it.
What I think magical realism requires, and what the stories in Red Ants encourage, is something far more mentally taxing than rationalization. It requires the reader to suspend disbelief, to take the author at his word and get utterly lost in a complex new world, held together by the poetic. This is not a book to approach with suspicion or attempts at interpretation; rather it requires a state of inquisitive wonder, and an acceptance that just because something doesn’t make sense, does not mean it isn’t real.
Magical realism represents a way of seeing the world in which the unexplainable and incomprehensible are embraced. Stone and moss and dirt and insects shape and fill the stories’ spaces, but even these physicalities are unreliable. Stone turns to dust and blows away; steam buries a man like earth. The very nature of things, like time, is questioned. The schizophrenic timeline and multitudinous existence of characters in some stories proved challenging to follow; in one, the narrator is searching desperately for a friend, but in the next sentence, the friend is speaking. Is this memory? Is this resolution? Is this the friend’s reality? In other instances, characters encounter duplicates of themselves, with seemingly no line or logic between the sacred and the mundane.
These stories are teeming with life and crawling with movement. They are, like magical realism itself, the articulation of a lived experience that is inexplicable without the fantastic. In the titular story, coffee pickers are like ants, trundling back and forth: “. . . the red ants go on working. So busy, nothing else registers with them.” A similar image is seen by the urban dweller looking through the sights of his rifle, aimed at the throng of early morning commuters in the story “Departure”: “I look at the clock on the wall. 7:09 a.m. People crowd along the sidewalk. So many lives out there, getting up, going out, hurrying down a street. A simple detail that, to me, seems magical.”
Thomas Bunstead’s translation is lyrical and poetic despite José’s short punchy sentences, and certain stories, like “Heart of Birds,” retain a King James biblical quality. The language is full of life, alliterations, patterns, rhythms.
The collection is held together by consistent themes and a nocturnal atmosphere. Most of the stories are dark and damp and claustrophobic; the images they conjure up are black and white, lit by moon or candle light, populated by silhouettes. A number of the stories take place in subterranean tunnels or foggy paths, but even in the ones featuring broad daylight there is a murkiness—as one character in “Heart of Birds” says, “I move forward as though inside a dark room, though the sun streams down still.”
Loss is one dominating theme. In many of these stories there is a search for someone missing: men waiting for women, women looking for children, kids whose parents have disappeared. Some seem to have been kidnapped, or are under the threat of it. In “Threads of Steam,” the protagonist is himself a professional kidnapper tragically contemplating the memory of his mother. These stories are inhabited by people who are lost in every sense of the word; sometimes, they don’t even seem real at all, at least not to the natural world. “The people here cast no shadows,” she says, “and their footsteps make no sound.” (“Red Ants”).
Another theme that appears in several of these stories is an unnamed sickness that, though it seems to be killing people in and around the characters’ communities, is talked about with a cool nonchalance. Despite this, and all the other occurrences of the uncanny, their realities do not faze the characters. As the stories unfold, it seems that these are not strange occurrences. They are normal, and the inhabitants’ responses are simply matter-of -fact.
There’s also a palpable sense of weariness in many of these characters—not resignation, mind you, they are still strong, still themselves, but worn and weathered. None of them have much in the way of physical characteristics (facial features go undescribed), but their words and conversations convey that they are hemmed in by their surroundings. Even their mental escapes are under siege. As a passage from “Room of Worms” describes:
You’re not free yet. You’re still a very fearful person, and those fears manifest in the people around you. All you can do is listen to that terrible sound of the machete and watch as they burn down the bamboo forest. They sense this when you approach, and they act accordingly. I know what you’re thinking. You heard the bridge of dreams breaking, somewhere.” She is quiet for a few moments. Then, in a steady voice, she says: “Nza nja mend tub do nit to? Can you hold back the sea? The bridge of dreams broke, but this world does not belong to you.”
About halfway through the collection, the stories shift in tone. There is more light, more fauna, and more urbanity. Violence and the imagery of blood begin to appear more regularly. The language shifts from recognizable dialogue, to biblical proclamations, to poetic narration, and back again.
I will fully admit that there were some stories in this collection that lost me completely, with language so prophetic that I, a heathen in this narrative world, simply couldn’t track. But isn’t that the real joy of reading translated literature? As the first literary translation into English from Sierra Zapotec, this effect is compounded. Not only are we, as English readers, getting a unique articulation of a lived experience from a world away, we are also sharing in the very first glimpse of how a language—unknown to the vast majority of us—builds and articulates a world inhabited by thousands of its speakers. It is moments like these when my reservations about elucidative readings and academic critiques feel most justified. With Red Ants, the best thing for the foreign reader to do is listen and take the author at his word.
Gabriel García Márquez, the godfather of magical realism, famously detested the moniker and the academics that were constantly reading all sorts of new meanings into his work, writing in El Pais in 1981 that “the interpretive mania eventually ends up being a new form of fiction that sometimes gets stranded on a foolish remark.” As if what he originally wrote wasn’t true to begin with, wasn’t sufficiently full of meaning, or wasn’t meant to be anything other than what it was.
Reading Red Ants is a visceral experience, at once exhausting and exhilarating, captivating and confounding. But I implore you, do not overanalyze this book. Check your suspicions and theories at the door. To open this book with those preconceptions would break the spell. Instead, look, listen, and feel the universe conjured by these stories—that’s where the real magic is. - Samuel Miller
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2020/11/16/whats-new-in-translation-november-2020/
Magical realism meets Greek mythology in this collection of short stories spun as folk tales by Mexican writer Pergentino José from Oaxaca. Red Ants, the first published English translation from the Sierra Zapotec language, came out in Spanish eight years ago in Mexico.
Legends come alive through the imaginative pen of José, one of the Mexico20 authors selected by the Hay Festival in a 2015 project at the London Book Fair to highlight new young voices in Mexican literature.
While Red Ants is arguably a book that resounds far beyond Mexico, Pergentino José grounded it there for good reason. By constructing these stories initially in the Zapotec tone language (which has a large number of dialects and is spoken by only 400,000 people out of a world population of 7.8 billion), he paid homage to this indigenous pre-Columbian civilization of Oaxaca that was invaded by the Aztecs and decimated by the Spanish conquistadors.
That he framed this concept from so many disparate angles is fascinating. Not only did he delve into antiquity for myths, but he also suggested modern evolutionary biology studies of red ant behavior, such as slavemaking tendencies by which a certain species might create a larger workforce by snatching recruits from another.
Here are seventeen tales varying in length from two to fifteen pages, narrated in first person as if being passed down through oral memory. The emotions underlying these restrained portraits of indigenous life echo loudly José’s tacit themes of colonialism, family connections, and freedom. The author’s leitmotif of nature employs biomimicry as he gives marching orders to different creatures in each story, conscripting red ants, worms, butterflies, squirrels, beetles, fireflies, white vultures, moths, crows, moles, crane flies, bulls, or cockroaches.
While at times in folklore some of these can be symbols of death, at others they may be good omens. In Pergentino José’s tales, they can be both—destructive and benevolent. He encapsulates three types of characters in Zapotec society: “commoners, priests, and nobility.”
People wait for others who are missing. Characters try to find a way out when there is no exit. Handles turn to dust in worm-eaten doors. Plantation owners interact with those of lesser importance cutting down bamboo to grow coffee. Soldiers come to take people away. Some are in mountainside prison cells. Water flows in many stories. There’s a river with rapids.
Widespread sickness keeps recurring and the pox is mentioned. An artist paints bamboo and also depicts the border, with a wall “still not completely built.” Mushrooms produce visions during ancient rituals. People walk across bamboo bridges. One character says in Zapotec “the bridge of dreams is broken.” Are these waking dreams? Pox-fevered dreams? Hallucinogenic dreams? There are feelings of being pursued and a need to “stay hidden while walking.”
When a priestess loses her powers of vision after giving birth, she cannot bond with her baby so she turns into a mountain lion. While this story, “The Priestess on the Mountain,” explores the mother/daughter connection, it also brings to mind worker matricide of a colony’s queen by various ant, wasp, and bee societies. Ants march single file following a leader’s scent until, well, they rise up and do away with the commander.
The idea of ants as humans goes all the way back to the race of the Myrmidons in Greek mythology, when a plague sent by jealous Hera wiped out the inhabitants of Aegina—until Zeus turned the ants into humans. The island, named after the daughter of a river god, had cliffs surrounding it for protection. In Book 16 of Homer’s Iliad, Patroclus “wept warm tears like a dark spring running down some desolate rock face, its shaded currents flowing,” as he begged Achilles: ““Let the whole Myrmidon army follow my command.” In fact, there’s an entire ant subfamily whose name echoes the mythical Myrmidons: Myrmicinae (named by Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau in 1835).
Pergentino José’s scenes in Red Ants resonate with such age-old settings. Ants have long been part of folktales around the world, from Japan (“The Dream of Akinosuke”) and China (“The Ant and the Grasshopper,” adapted into a fable by Aesop) to various native tribes such as the Salish along Puget Sound (“The Story of Ant and Bear”) and the Hopi of the American Southwest (whose creation myth expresses how the Ant People saved them from destruction).
Pergentino José develops his ant images so broadly with figurative language the symbols cross borders, flying around the globe in implicit comparisons. Certainly the color red can symbolize many things, from blood shed during war to iconic military designations. The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, later known by other names, began in both Russia and China.
Think, for example, of Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese poet unable to collect his Nobel Peace Prize because he was a political prisoner. He wrote about Tiananmen Square in June Fourth Elegies: Poems:
“Life is priceless
even to an ant”
The ant metaphor is also reminiscent of the children’s song “The Ants Go Marching,” which was set to an American Civil War melody “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” sung by both sides and based on old Irish folk tunes. The theme of ants trooping and people anxious for loved ones to return takes on poetic meaning in José’s stories, couched in such minimalistic sentences as: “Insects, protectors of the earth, shuffled along.”
Pergentino José himself perhaps summarizes his imaginative work the best when he writes: “The earth shakes when this many people are in pain.” The Zapotecs employed hieroglyphics to record their history, and José’s brief stories in a way resemble pictographs. At one point, he speaks of “the red ant and the way it frees the spirits of any person buried underground.”
In Red Ants, that’s just what Pergentino José has done—freed the spirits of his Zapotec ancestors.
- Lanie Tankard
https://www.thewoventalepress.net/2020/12/08/stories-zierra-zapotec/
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