Cuba in the shadow of English. A Contrary review by Gregory Byala  Although it possesses a central character, Achy Obejas’ Ruins possesses no central plot. The events that it describes are instead arranged around the novel’s recurring preoccupation with rubble, water, glass, and light. From these elements, Obejas crafts a work of fiction that defines itself predominantly through its arrangement of symbols. Set in Havana, Ruins records episodes in the life of Usnavy as he struggles to come to terms with the collapse of both his idealized vision of Cuba and the material reality of its edifices. As his neighbors prepare to leave, Usnavy must decide if he will remain loyal to the idea of community that the Revolution embodies or avail himself of the machinery of the island’s underground economy. The most significant mark against the novel is that its language does not ring true. The following quotation demonstrates one of the linguistic problems that undermine the rendering of its subject: “‘Ah, c’mon, give me a break,’ Mayito protested, speaking unexpectedly. ‘No offense, Usnavy, you’re my brother but you’re salao, man. These days you lose every single time. The thing with the doubles the other day—that was the topper.’” Even if we concede to the premise of translation, to the fictional convention which supposes that what the novel reports to us in English was spoken originally in Spanish, we are still left with the unnerving sense of the novel’s tonal dissonance, a dissonance that is drawn into prominence by the fact that the word salao remains in its original form, suggesting not so much its own untranslatability but the unnatural and even improbable translation of what surrounds it. There are other instances in which the novel supports its claim to authenticity by refusing to translate certain words. But what is more pressing than these isolated moments is the fact that the novel often renders its characters’ thoughts in language that cannot properly belong to them: “His father—as Usnavy had been told, a Jamaican laborer (a poor schmuck, he had surmised)—had disappeared into the sea, leaving his mother a widow shortly after he was born, free to rearrange the past at will and dream about the future.” Here and elsewhere, the language is too American, which reveals the extent to which the consciousness of the novel is at odds with the available resources of its characters. It is difficult to imagine the conditions under which Usnavy (who does not speak English, let alone Yiddish) would surmise his absent father “a poor schmuck.” The implied process of translation hoists Usnavy clear of both his linguistic and cultural setting. What we receive in the process is not Usnavy’s thought but the thought that is being thought for him, a thought that might approximate his own but which nonetheless perceives the world in terms that would be unfamiliar to him. Obejas is more than qualified to undertake the implied process of translation that sustains the fiction. (Translations of Nicolás Guillén and Virgilio Piñera that appear in novel are her own.) Born in Cuba in 1965, Obejas immigrated to the United States when she was six. And yet, as it passes into the consciousness of characters, the narrative voice is barely distinguishable from the voice that regards everything outside of them. The emotions of the novel may be accurate, but to the extent that they are rendered almost always in American colloquialisms, and to the extent that all language embeds historical consciousness, the characters never seem precisely at home in the landscape they occupy. Even when they appear to spring from it, from the collapse of Havana’s buildings, for instance, the characters’ thoughts are always mediated in the moment before they are translated, are in fact translated before they are even thought. As a novel about Cuba, Ruins therefore fails to extract itself from what (in a slightly different context) it describes as the “implied intimacy with the colossus of the north.” Gregory Byala is a professor of English at Temple University. Index of Reviews...>Reviews.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0

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Ruins

Achy Obejas

2009, Akashic Books

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