THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 25FOR NEARLY TWO DECADES,the spiraling
number of disappearances and murders in
Mexico have been summed up as casu-
alties of a “drug war,” an overly simplistic
and unsatisfying explanation — a “mis-
named war,” as the Mexican author
Cristina Rivera Garza calls it in her lucid,
poignant collection of essays and poetry,
“Grieving: Dispatches From a Wounded
Country.”
“It has been called and, still is, the drug
war, the war on drugs,” she explains in her
introduction. “But we know other, more
truthful names: the war against the Mexi-
can people, the war against women. The
war against the rest of us.”
The horror of countless public displays
of mutilated, tortured bodies has rendered
a terrified population into silence, their
trauma too painful to articulate. But in this
slim book, Rivera Garza tries to do just
that, functioning as both a physician diag-
nosing the source of her country’s pain,
and an archaeologist unearthing its layers
and then artfully transforming the grief
into words.
Rivera Garza is perhaps best known for
her award-winning 1999 novel “Nadie Me
Verá Llorar” (“No One Will See Me Cry”),
and her career spans both sides of the
United States-Mexico border. A professor
of Hispanic studies at the University of
Houston, where she directs the program in
creative writing in Spanish, she often de-
fies genre boundaries as well, delving into
poetry, personal essays, short stories and
even opera.
“Grieving,” originally published in Span-
ish in 2011, is considered one of contempo-
rary Mexico’s first literary reckonings
with its epidemic of violence. It has been
expertly translated by Sarah Booker and
covers an impressive array of topics, in-cluding environmental degradation, femi-
cide, neoliberalism and migration.
Throughout, Rivera Garza’s focus never
waivers from her overriding concern: the
violence and impunity plaguing Mexico.
In an essay called “The Viscer-
aless State” she dissects a coun-
try in thrall to leaders who have
reduced the government to lit-
tle more than a vessel for per-
sonal enrichment — a system
without “hearts or bones or in-
nards” and with the drug traf-
ficker as its inevitable byprod-
uct. “Government corruption
along with the narco’s signature ex-
ecutions demonstrate what
was once easy to deny,” she
tells us. “Drug lords are businessmen pre-
pared to go as far as necessary — which
frequently means that space where the hu-
man condition ends — in order to ensure
and, above all, increase their profits.”
Rivera Garza is compelled to document
her country’s trauma, she writes in an-
other essay, “Writing Against War,” be-
cause not to catalog, speak or write about it
means that it will eventually be forgotten.
“Without a record of testimonials... with-
out a large community archive that pro-tects victims’ voices, we will not only for-
get the massacres and the pain in years to
come but also, and perhaps above all, the
labor taken on by entire generations —
that amorous and routine, dialogic and
constant labor — to form the com-
munity that we call a neighbor-
hood.”
Without this public ac-
counting, she contends,
there can be no grieving, and
Mexican society can never
heal. “Grieving connects us
in ways that are subtly and
candidly material,” she writes.
“Grieving breaks us apart, indeed,
and keeps us together.”
Such weighty subject
matter might sound like a heavy lift. But
Rivera Garza’s essays leave the opposite
impression. They are deeply hopeful, ulti-
mately love letters to writing itself, and to
the power of language to overcome the si-
lence that impunity imposes. “Writing
gives us the tools to articulate the mute dis-
articulation we face on a daily basis,” she
reminds us. “As we write, as we work with
language — the most humbling and power-
ful force available to us — we activate the
potency of words, phrases, sentences.” 0War Against the People
A Mexican writer’s searing meditation on her country’s epidemic of violence.
By MELISSA DEL BOSQUE
GRIEVING
Dispatches From a Wounded Country
By Cristina Rivera Garza
Translated by Sarah Booker
182 pp. The Feminist Press. Paper, $16.95.
MELISSA DEL BOSQUEis a freelance investigative
reporter based in Mexico City. Her most
recent book is “Bloodlines: The True Story of
a Drug Cartel, the F.B.I. and the Battle for a
Horse-Racing Dynasty.”
Cristina Rivera GarzaPHOTOGRAPH BY LEIGH THELMADATTER