Wednesday 17 April 2019

Lost Children Archive


Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them “the lost children.” I suppose the word “refugee” is more difficult to remember. And even if the term “lost” is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as “the lost children.” And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.

Lost Children Archive started with a bang for me – I was immediately entranced by its inventive, creative narrative and structure – but the more I got into it, the more frustrated I became with its lack of emotional pull; it ultimately felt heavy handed and without heart. And I don't know if it makes it better or worse to learn that the basic plotline – a blended family starts to break apart on a cross-country road trip on which the father/husband is researching “Apacheria” and Geronimo's last stand, and the mother/wife is researching the plight of refugee children held at America's southern border – is based on an actual trip taken by author Valeria Luiselli, her former husband Álvaro Enrigue (who used the material from that trip in his own novel Ahora me rindo y eso es todo), and their children: it makes the concept feel less inventive, and the anonymous/archetypal nature of the unnamed family members off-puttingly ironic. The plight of modern day refugee children in detention camps is too important to conflate them with the Clearing of the Plains – which as an overarching novelistic concept, ends up not doing justice to either issue (and really only makes sense once you realise that, like with Luiselli and Enrigue, the two issues are only linked by the time and opportunity afforded by the road trip, which isn't novelistically satisfying). In many ways, I really admired the writing in this book, but I don't think it was really a success.
Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?
So, the man and woman – he, a documentarist (like “a chemist” of sound), and she, a documentarian (like “a librarian” of sounds, but more like a radio journalist) – met when they were paired for a four-year-long project to document every sound in New York City (from its eight hundred spoken languages, to the subway system, Broadway, Wall Street, etc.). They fell in love along the way, married, and made a family with his (now) ten-year-old son and her (now) five-year-old daughter. Now that the project has ended, they realise that they have different visions for their future careers and they decide to take a road trip to the land of the Apache – where he can record the echoes of the past (with the idea that capturing the ambient environmental sounds of the lands of the Apache will preserve something inherent to Geronimo and Chief Cochise, “the last people on the entire continent to surrender to the white-eyes”) and where she can record the stories of children smuggled over the southern border by coyotes, and in particular, search for the two daughters of a Mexican woman she had met in NYC – and most of the story takes place in their car with the two kids in the back seat. In the very back of the Volvo are seven bankers boxes – the man has four, filled with research material and notebooks; the woman has one, filled with research material; and the kids each have one, empty for now – and the novel itself feels archival as the contents of the boxes are listed, songs and audiobooks played in the car are dissected, and as the son learns to use his new Polaroid and attempts to make his own record of the trip. These are people who read broadly and play Lord of the Flies for their children's edutainment, and initially, I was totally enchanted by how smart the whole thing felt; just like the woman character in the book:
When I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures – little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue – that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else’s words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone’s words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.
But, as the story went along and the family encountered town after town of ugly Americans, the political became more overt and instructive:
The daily federal quota for undocumented people, he said, was 34,000, and was steadily growing. That meant that at least 34,000 people had to be occupying a bed each day in any one of the detention centers, a center just like this one, across the country. People were taken away, he continued, locked up in detention buildings for an indefinite amount of time. Some were later deported back to their home countries. Many were pipelined to federal prisons, which profited from them, subjecting them to sixteen-hour workdays for which they earned less than three dollars. And many of them were simply – disappeared.
I'm happy to be informed by anything I read, but there's a later scene in which the family witnesses some children being put on a small plane at a remote airport (and as there is an included Polaroid of such a plane taken through a chainlink fence, perhaps that experience was a part of Luiselli's own family's roadtrip), and that scene was much more affecting than someone spouting numbers. 
For the next twenty minutes or so, we're all silent inside the car, listening to the songs that shuffle and play, looking out our windows at a landscape scarred by decades or maybe centuries of systemic agricultural aggression: fields sectioned into quadrangular grids, gang-raped by heavy machinery, bloated with modified seeds and injected with pesticides, where meager fruit trees bear robust, insipid fruit for export; fields corseted into a circumscription of grassy crop layers, in patterns resembling Dantesque hells, watered by central-pivot irrigation systems; and fields turned into non-fields, bearing the weight of cement, solar panels, tanks, and enormous windmills.
One of the books that was brought along in a bankers box is Elegies for Lost Children, and as the novel goes on, the woman reads this book (of a group of refugee children's dangerous crossing into America) into the record – sometimes to herself, sometimes to her son, and sometimes into her voice recorder. As Luiselli explains of this fictional work in an afterword, “The Elegies are composed by means of a series of allusions to literary works that are about voyages, journeying, migrating, etc. The allusions need not be evident. I’m not interested in intertextuality as an outward, performative gesture but as a method or procedure of composition.” And so, as she explains, she borrows words and concepts from famous voyage stories (The Waste Land or Heart of Darkness) to put into her own narrative, and it's this kind of high concept, elevated overthinking that felt apparent on the page – the story gets lost in the writing. In later passages, some sections are told from the son's point-of-view (and I never believed this POV: he both spoke too old for his age and acted too young), and in one of the last passages, the son's story gets intertwined with the lost children from The Elegies, and in a single chapter-length sentence, everything swirls and merges (swirling in unrelated characters who are doing their own things, too; including an office worker listening to an audiobook of Lynne Cheney's “rotundly moralistic lesbian romance novel”), and I got so bored and annoyed that I nearly stopped reading this book with only twenty or so pages of text left to go. 

And yet: this is smart and erudite and attempts to expose a really important social issue (meaning the refugee children; the plight of Geronimo and the Apache comes off more as an adolescent obsession on the husband's part). I liked the archival aspects, the idea of capturing of soundscapes – including family conversations – as the preservation of history, and the connections made to art and literature. But the plot didn't work, the characters didn't work, and the potential for pathos was dulled by overwriting. As a novel, this simply didn't work for me.


Man Booker Longlist 2019:




Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.
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