by Tom Johnson
October 1, 2024
Thomas Johnson lives in Hoboken, New Jersey and writes in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at The New School, New York, New York. He is founder and editor-in-chief of Union Spring Literary Review and works as Reviews Editor for West Trade Review. He received a Master of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Johnson first graduated from the University of Texas at Austin before enlisting in the United States Army.
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera; Graywolf Press; 160 pages; $26.00.
Herrera’s Season of the Swamp is historical fiction and the book’s leaf provides the cliffnotes, but I googled the name before reading to get a little more correction. The bells start ringing. I match the book with Juarez’s time in exile in New Orleans and turn to the forward.
Herrera states plainly there that while the facts of the time are indisputable, the events of the title character cannot be corroborated. Because what exactly does an author set out to do with historical fiction? Every author a different reason, surely, but the piqued interest in writing about a known and important figure in world history provokes a different quandary within this reader, at least: what is the author trying to give to me with this story? Specifically, we should read this asking, what are we going to learn that we can’t get from somewhere else?
The answer proves to be Herrera’s triumph. In the slithery, slippery, law-averse world of New Orleans that we know to have existed in 1853, the author uses Benito Juarez not as an object of study, but as a lens of observation. He doesn’t even give Juarez his full name in the novel until the last page, instead dropping this real historical figure, the same man who’d later rise to the seat of President of Mexico, into a New Orleans police office, summoned as an exile, treated only with words in a language he couldn’t understand, knowing only where he stood in things by recognizing “the language of hate.” It’s the first sentence of the novel:
“The badges dragged the man from the ship, hurled him down the gangplank, and he fell in front of them and then attempted to stand, but the badges conquered him with clubs and he didn’t defend himself from their blows, because his hands were clasping a treasured object to his chest. One of the badges torturing him said Drop it. They didn’t speak the language, but that’s what the bade was saying. Drop it! shouted the one who seemed to be the boss, and then he insulted the man.”
Without punctuating the dialogue, because the protagonist can’t really understand the words, we’re left to read it and know that the character knows. Through the violence of the perpetrators, the police, their actions speak for their language. Herrera embodies this message in his prose by leaving it unflowered. It’s quite simple: when you see someone being beaten, you should feel sorrow. This is the author’s premise, and we work from here to see where things go.
Season of the Swamp’s five chapters move through the blocks of the reader’s perception of the events. First to establish the fictive situation and second to give glow to New Orleans, moving through the obvious blocks of jazz, Mardi Gras, the Creole language, and its hideous history of slave auctions. And it’s these two poles of opposition seen through a close third-person point of view by the later benevolent figure who deposes Santa Anna’s regime. We’re right along with Juarez witnessing things that disgust him and spur him toward the revelations that prop much of his ideology. We watch these things take shape in our native cities and our native histories, as much as part of the history of this country as it is the figure in the novel. Herrera closes this establishing shot by waking Juarez the next day, having just now “recognized the reek of shit in the morning” that permeates this town and its people. Juarez’s eyes, and ours with them, are fully open.
The next moves carry in a familiar fashion, as much as can be familiar with stories of exiles and escapes, plotting and planning, talking and whispering of revolution, change, hope. The author wisely avoids summary and analogy, which I think would incorrectly speak for this actual, real human who existed and made impactful change. And it’s on that razor’s edge that the best authors work, seemingly doing very little while handing something magnanimous over to their audience.
Because when it’s over, I don’t necessarily feel like I’ve been watching the real, lived history of Benito Juarez. What I feel instead, and what I hope every reader feels, is the change of passion that Juarez might’ve felt in the face of these absurd realities of the world. That people shouldn’t be bought and sold. That women and children are not here for exploitation. That a world of racialized color is no world at all.
Herrera’s used the real world to bring it about, too. There are mentions of the pirate Jean Lafitte, chess master Paul Morphy, Santa Anna and his wooden leg, and, of course, Melchor Ocampo playing the most critical role of all, ushering Juarez (and the reader) through these chronicles to the point of realization and, thereupon, the point of action. Some physical effects are used in the publication, too. Each discussion on social philosophy, writing about familiar terms like “the means of production” and “revolution to win the war,” is printed in a different typeset.
It’s easy to see, and Juarez doesn’t stand still. He commits early on to the acts of revolution that are required to change his home nation of Mexico and to reunite him with his family. But in this brief exile to the United States, he learns that some things never change. “There will always be pirates,” said Juarez’s mate, Arriaga. “They’re simply better-dressed these days. The ones around here are just starting to save up for suits. But before long they’ll turn up in the city with aristocratic titles.”
These are facts. Herrera brings them to us through the newspaper. Juarez is always reading the newspaper for news of home, but we’re given news of the world alongside. It comes in quick succession, the effect of preponderance working to show us that much hasn’t changed, and much never will.
If you want to really know how close Herrera brings us to the thick of things, Juarez survives the 1853 Yellow Fever epidemic of the Gulf Coast. It could seem like the author wants to give warning for our time and our own pandemics. This reader wouldn’t blame him for making the connection and issuing the call for change, but it’s just the way of history that these things repeat themselves. What Herrera seems to be asking through the invocation, then, is how to avoid to another disaster in the future.
So Juarez sits down to read from the newspaper in the penultimate paragraph. He’s finally on the ship back to Mexico. “The allies and the Russians were killing one other in Crimea.” This is 1853, remember. “High temperatures caused several people to collapse in the street: summer was back.” These things are happening, but New Orleans, like the past, is behind him. He “leaned over the railing, and began to look forward at the way home, illumined by the glow behind.”
What matters is that Juarez is going home. What matters is that he’s going to act on what he’s seen and learned. Juarez decides that his time in exile is done, and he accelerates his plan to return home. His family and the citizens of Mexico can’t wait any longer for things to improve.
If only we could jump into action, Herrera’s Season of the Swamp might just be the nudge we need in the right direction.
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Yuri Herrera Wants Us to Act in Season of the Swamp
FICTION REVIEW
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