Season of the Swamp, Yuri Herrera
Yuri Herrera’s Season of the Swamp is a fierce piece of speculative history about an undocumented period in the life of Mexico’s first indigenous president, Benito Juarez (1806-1872).
For eighteen months between December 1853 and June 1855, Juarez lived in exile in New Orleans. Although this period is mentioned in every biography about Juarez, what his life was like during his time there remains a mystery. Herrera has employed his brilliant imagination to fill in the gaps and build a world that is richly creative and yet firmly grounded in archival reports of the vibrant melting-pot that was nineteenth-century New Orleans.
Of Mexican nationality and Zapotec Indian blood, Juarez offers an anti-colonial perspective that scrutinises the barbarities of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the treatment of Haitian refugees and the corruption of a racist legal system. The narrative shifts and starts in the spirit of New Orleans’ restless and dynamic energy, mimicking a city that, in Herrera’s words, was ‘built on top of a swamp filled with alligators and snakes, on top of a floor that is always moving.’[1]
It has its hallucinatory moments too, punctuated with fever-dreams of socialist victory and a general tone of dissociation as Juarez attempts to survive deadly heatwaves and bouts of yellow fever as he wanders from street to square to swamp, surrounded by the beat of drums and the feral smell of the bayou. As Juarez drunkenly navigates this urban landscape of crime and cruelty, sweat and open sewers, where coffee shops serve as meeting spots for revolutionaries and brothels as secret schools for black people denied an education, he befriends a young woman arrested for hiding an escaped slave.
Through the trippy haze of music and dancing, cigars and ships and cotton, the violence of slavery stands out starkly, inescapably real, and undeniable in its concrete horror. Herrera has written a brave and open-eyed love letter to a city he himself has lived in for many years, refusing to ignore its troubled past, while honouring the rebels who formed its cultural legacy.
[1] “The Place Where Hope Makes Sense”: A Conversation with Yuri Herrera on “Season of the Swamp” - Chicago Review of Books
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