Award-winning author Roxane Gay hosts this book club, where we read books by underrepresented American writers, talk about those books, and, when we’re lucky, talk to the writers of those books.
Violence: My Family's Colombian War - Hardcover by Adriana E Ramírez
Early in her first book, the novella-length work of nonfiction called Dead Boys: A Memoir, Adriana E. Ramirez talks about watching a pirated news feed from Mexico and seeing nine bodies hanging from a pedestrian bridge. Ramirez writes that she is familiar with the bridge; she has driven across it many times. As she listens to a news anchor list the names of the dead, Ramirez realizes that while she does not know these particular people, she is familiar with this story:
Nuevo Laredo is a Mexican border town like the one I grew up near, Reynosa. The details that characterize these bodies feel irrelevant in the face of geography and luck. There were bodies yesterday; there are bodies today; there will be bodies tomorrow. Everyone knows the border is dangerous now, at least the Mexican side. Laminated signs along the bridges: "Proceed with Caution."
The bodies linger in Ramirez's mind as she goes about her day. They follow her in part because she is ruminating on her own loss: the death of her brother, who died in a horseback riding accident when she was a child. But they also stay with her because they are the work of one of the cartels wreaking violence on Mexico, and the horrific outcome is a gruesome reminder of how few options are available to the country's children. Boys like the ones who ended up hanging from the bridge, says Ramirez, are born into poverty and are often enlisted by the cartels, and they end up being used by them. They become, she notes, "casualties, collateral, expendable fodder."
It is this legacy of expendability and death and the unsettling way it weaves through Ramirez's own family that haunts Ramirez's third book, The Violence: My Family's Columbian War. Perhaps, however, it is more apt to say that the violence from the period Ramirez chronicles here haunts the chronology of her first book; The Violence charts her family's story in the wake of the 1948 civil war in Columbia, and Dead Boys charts more contemporary iterations of Columbia's violence.
The Violence is a historical biography of the post-1948 era in Columbia following the assassination of the Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Bogata. Gaitán's assassination lead to El Bogotazo, a ten-hour period of rioting that nearly destroyed Bogata and killed thousands, and ultimately to La Violencia, a ten-year civil war in Columbia between the paramilitary and guerilla groups supporting the Conservative and Liberal parties. The war resulted in the deaths of around 200,000 Columbians and the displacement of millions more; it also contributed to the escalations between guerilla forces and drug cartels and fueled conflict in the country for the remainder of the 20th century.
This volatile period in Columbian history has been chronicled by a number of scholars and historians. What makes Ramirez's telling particularly powerful and distinct is that it intertwined with and perhaps even primarily the story of Esther Angarita Sarmiento, Ramirez's grandmother, who was only 20 when the Violence began. Both the country and her grandmother, Ramirez notes, feel like myths, and their fates feel intertwined: she follows the trajectories of both as they weather death, volatility, and thwarted dreams. Other prominent Columbian figures who were shaped by the Violence—such as drug lord Pablo Escobar and Pedro Marin, founder of the FARC—also are given narrative space, but for Ramirez, the story's primary lens is Esther: "like her country, she endures—through deceptions, woundings, and tremendous loss."
The Violence is an astute and disturbing book, a deft analysis of the intricate relationships between the personal and the political, a book that refuses many of the pat resolutions and fawning memorializations of those who came before us. I'm looking forward to discussing it with all of you throughout the month of May. We will be in conversation with Adriana on May 27 at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET. You can register here.
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity and once had a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.
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