Een indrukwekkend en aangrijpend portret van een land in de greep van politieke onderdrukking en terreur.

“The place brings everything into question.” In Joan Didion’s non-fiction account, Salvador, the nature of places and terror are explored side-by-side, resulting in a mosaic of inexpressibility: either you have been to the place, experienced its singular awfulness, or you haven’t. The place itself is, of course, the municipality of Salvador, though that phrase, “the place”, recurs, and so its unique strangeness could be transposed throughout geography and history. “Terror is the given of the place.” Something that recurs is a sense of rumour and voice defining the place + its precariousness: “nothing came of the day but overheard rumors, indefinite observations, fragments of information that might or might not fit into a pattern we did not perceive.” The dichotomy between the journalistic endeavour and how “the texture of life in such a situation is essentially untranslatable” is ever-palpable, as Didion captures the contradictions of the place and “its ambiguous tension, its overcast, its mood of wary somnambulism” in apposition to her sense of self within the place: “I did not forget the sensation of having been in a single instant demoralized, undone, humiliated by fear, which is what I meant when I said that I came to understand in El Salvador the mechanism of terror.” In the recent introduction, Tim Adams elucidates the nervousness of El Salvador, and diagnoses Didion with “a sort of helplessness of looking”. Didion is at her journalistic peak in this short, claustrophobic, riveting book.

Finished this book on the train the other day - decent read, Didion wrote well on the diplomats and politicians involved in American interventionism which I appreciated but otherwise it didn’t go much further.

Terror is the given of the place. Joan Didion writes non fiction in such a way, I forget that the people and events she speaks of are real. Put her in such an unbelievable situation as El Salvador in the early 80s and this feeling only grows. Gave me the cold hard facts but kept me entertained. She writes with regionality, and yet she has the ability to carry it to each place she travels.

Long quote below because this is a library book and I feel this summarizes the whole thing in case I forget what I’ve read.


“That we had been drawn, both by a misapprehension of the local rhetoric and by the manipulation of our own rhetorical weaknesses, into a game we did not understand, a play of power in a political tropic alien to us, seemed apparent, and yet there we remained. In this light all arguments tended to trail off. Pros and cons seemed equally off the point. At the heart of the American effort there was something of the familiar ineffable, as if it were taking place not in El Salvador but in a mirage of El Salvador, the mirage of a society not unlike our own but “sick,” a temporarily fevered republic in which the antibodies of democracy needed only to be encouraged, in which words had stable meanings north and south and in which there existed, waiting to be tapped by our support, some latent good will.”

Didion is at her best. Fascinating and terrifying.

I have never read any of Didion's books (I know, I know) and this was probably not the right place to start. I chose this book because (1) I have been to El Salvador, but very briefly, and (2) I am interested in Latin American literature, culture and history generally, having lived in Brazil in the 1980s. Unfortunately, reading this doesn't exactly make me eager to read anything else she has written.

If these essays were published in the New Yorker or the Atlantic, as a sort of "Letter from San Salvador", and her assignment was to give the editor 15,000 words on what the hell is going on in El Salvador in summer 1982, then she fulfilled that purpose. The genesis of the book was a two-week trip to a war zone with her husband and other North American journalists, and her exposure to the country and its people and culture was accordingly very circumscribed. She obviously followed the reporting on US involvement in the country. She definitely interviewed extensively at the US embassy and in the US State Department. But she doesn't really seem to have much background on, or personal knowledge or appreciation of the country and its culture. She does mention that she employs a Salvadoran woman (most of whose family was brutally murdered), which seems (at least from the vantage point of 2021) to say more about Didion's privilege than anything else.

Most of the book is endless description of dead bodies, political violence, casual indifference to suffering, and general squalor. I'm sure El Salvador in 1982 was utter chaos. But she is unable to find anything redeeming or worthy of empathy at all. For example, this is what she has to say about the country's culture:

"In fact, El Salvador had always been a frontier, even before the Spaniards arrived. The great Mesoamerican cultures penetrated this far south only shallowly. The great South American cultures thrust this far north only sporadically. There is a sense in which the place remains marked by the meanness and discontinuity of all frontier history, by a certain frontier proximity to the cultural zero."

This seems like an audacious statement from a North American whose entire experience of the country is a two-week stay at the Hotel Camino Real surrounded by other members of the foreign press. And while the sentences are well-written, the tone sounds like a coastal intellectual from another era's sniffing disdain for "flyover country."

And here, her description of a handcrafts exhibition and fair in a small town:

"I had begun before long to despise the day, the dirt, the blazing sun, the pervasive smell of rotting meat, the absence of even the most rudimentary skill in the handicrafts on exhibit (there were sewn items, for example, but they were sewn by machine of sleazy fabric, and the simplest seams were crooked), the brutalizing music from the sound truck, the tedium; had begun most of all to despise the fair itself, which seemed contrived, pernicious, a kind of official opiate, an attempt to recreate or perpetuate a way of life neither economically nor socially viable."

Eloquent it is, but what it largely articulates to me is her own crankiness and general lack of compassion. Here she is, in a place filled with people who are experiencing this war in a daily, intimate, and tragic way--in a way wholly unlike the diplomats and journalists and Salvadoran elites she cites at length--and what she does is complain that she is hot and bored.

Perhaps I'm being unfair. Maybe she had a heart. But the only thing I know for sure after reading this book is that she was smart, well-connected, and condescending. She clearly was opposed to US involvement in the country, but you get the feeling it was more because she thought the place wasn't worth it, than it was borne of a desire to alleviate the considerable suffering of Salvadorans. And that is not the point of view I was hoping for from this book.

This book doesn't try to explain what can't seemingly be put into words or even processed internally -- the awful "situation" (one of many odd labels used for the inexplicable) in El Salvador in the 1980s. Unlike many other political tracts and journalistic treatises and horrifying survival tales, of whose importance I am in no way discounting!!, which try their damndest to get some sort of handle on the travesties that occurred in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America but either wind up deadening our sense of horror or narrowing our vision so much that we lose perception, Joan Didion almost bows out, overwhelmed by death and loss. After reading Salvador, I felt a boulder in my gut, and yet, here I am still, trying to get a grasp of something far beyond my reach.

Joan Didion's nonfiction/reportage can be tough to read; "Salvador" is no exception. My difficulty isn't with her subject matter, although it can be grim as it is here or simply excruciating as in her two most recent books covering the deaths of her husband and then her daughter. It is because she produces such beautiful, fully formed and precisely balanced sentences that one (at least this one) can get bogged down in marveling at their perfection. She portrays the sense of anomie, fear and dread that accompanied one everywhere in El Salvador in the 1980s so well it could cause post traumatic stress in anyone who was there.

Extraordinary book from a great American author.

“Among Americans in El Salvador there is an endemic apprehension of danger in the apparently benign.” Didion’s insight often manages to point to the future, with an eerie and surreal twist. Salvador proves the opacity of what’s already hidden, and somehow what’s to come.

4 stars
*** I have a YouTube channel now! Check it out here. ***

Incredible.

A quick lesson from Central America, now that we've apparently reached this stage in American autocracy. Should this continue, expect many more headlines in the coming weeks/months concerning people who have been 'disappeared.' Absolutely disgusting.

...I recalled that the Miss Universe contest itself had been held in San Salvador in 1975, and had ended in what might have been considered a predictable way, with student protests about the money the government was spending on the contest, and the government's predictable response, which was to shoot some of the students on the street and disappear others. (Desaparecer, or "disappear," is in Spanish both an intransitive and a transitive verb, and this flexibility has been adopted by those speaking English in El Salvador, as in John Sullivan was disappeared from the Sheraton; the government disappeared the students, there being no equivalent situation, and so no equivalent word, in English-speaking cultures.)

* * *

n  "Roberto D'Aubuisson is a chain smoker, as were many of the people I met in El Salvador, perhaps because it is a country in which the possibility of achieving a death related to smoking remains remote."n

El Salvador in the early 1980s was a place of death. and disappearances. Joan Didion and her husband spent two weeks there in 1982 and this book, a nonfiction counterpart to A Book of Common Prayer, is the result. In its brevity it reminded me Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, but where Kincaid strives for lyricism and writes from a place of deep personal experience, Didion flies in and flies out and records an impression, which sounds much more dismissive than I intend for it to be.

Didion—unsurprisingly—is highly critical of the United States's highly problematic involvement, but she is also strangely dismissive of El Salvador as a country worthy of a place on a map or in a history book. Neither one position nor the other quite satisfies her. Her sentences are the usual razor blades and death, sometimes the deaths of thousands, quickly comes to mean very little. Dead bodies—those that are discovered and identifiable—are disfigured, decapitated, and dismembered, to be scattered as carrion for the vultures. For a much warmer take on Central America, try Graham Greene's Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement.

I've always been in love with Joan Didion's reportage, with the dry, affectless, distanced language that suddenly, powerfully, yields razor-sharp insights. "Salvador" is the finest of her post-1960s writing---- a picture of a ghostly, fear-haunted country at the beginning of the 1980s. Didion catches the emptiness of official language and press releases, the utter and all-consuming cynicism of a society where conspiracy is assumed and random death a fact of daily life, the empty streets and villages haunted by jeeps full of killers and where certain corners and vacant fields are known body dumps. If you read this, listen to Bruce Cockburn sing "If I Had A Rocket Launcher" in the background: it's the only song that catches a trace of Central America in the nightmare years of the early and mid-1980s. "Salvador"'s politics are clear, but not designed to be a polemic or an expose. Didion leaves you with something much more disturbing.