‘Only people with debts to pay must fear that final encounter with death.’
Harrowing tales of violence, vengeance and fraught family histories creep ac‘Only people with debts to pay must fear that final encounter with death.’
Harrowing tales of violence, vengeance and fraught family histories creep across the pages of Giovanna Rivero’s Fresh Dirt from the Grave. A celebrated and successful writer in Bolivia, this new translation from Isabel Adey brings her powerful work to English-speaking readers and I am so thankful for the recent rise in interest for translations of modern Latin-American gothic literature as this is an excellent, unsettling and rather crisp collection of stories. Short in length with only six stories, each bruises the reader in a quick succession of pummeling stories that rise in intensity as they often slither towards a piece of previously undisclosed information that cracks open the horrors of being alive and centers us on the struggles to survive them. All but one story is set in Bolivia, but offers an insight into the multitudes of peoples who live there, such as the Mennonites from Canada who settled in Bolivia or a woman who grew up in a pocket of Japanese immigrants and now teaches origami at a women’s prison. Gritty yet told in gorgeous prose, Fresh Dirt From the Grave is a disquieting collection of tales that show how a sudden disruption can accumulate suffering with far-reaching tentacles of trauma.
‘Because it had all been just that: a disruption.’
While some of the stories can be fairly distressing with uncomfortable themes, Rivero’s writing is so luminously gorgeous. Even in the dreary descriptions, such as the ocean being ‘just watery vomit with nothing on the horizon, a giant emerald back full of evil and beauty. It was a miserable place,’ and the landscapes always ‘teeming with evil and beauty.’ We frequently see the two as inseparable, as ‘one and the same fold. Darkness and light,’ and for all the horrors inflicted we see the will to survive as a light shining in all the darkness. These stories are not unlike the ‘perfection of the coral snake created by that inmate’ we find in It Looks Human When it Rains which the origami instructor, Keiko, describes as ‘a baby dragon on the brink of stirring from its inanimate nature, and it looked as if it had been made with tweezers. But it had been born from those rough, criminal hand’: these stories are build out of the rough, gritty traumas of life but in Rivero’s hands they come out as beautiful and intricately detailed.
The characters in these stories are often fighting to not be washed away by the world. They are the regular person, the victims to those in power and capital, the lives that are trying to not be pushed off the edge of existence without anyone even noticing. They recall the unsettling voice a couple in Kindred Deer, now living in New York near the Finger Lakes, hear within the static of the Bolivian news station they turn on to hear about home:
‘Those voices, those beloved accents arrive muffled by the interference from the bad weather. ‘They’re killing us,’ someone sobs in an interview. I fidget in my seat. I want to know more about the desperate ‘us’ that reveals itself in that broken voice.’
These are quiet voices hoping to be heard in the static of it all. And several of these stories have inspiration in true events. The opening tale, Blessed are the Meek is a tale of revenge inspired by the horrific sexual assaults in a Bolivian-Mennonite community in Manitoba Colony (this same incident, women being gassed and then assaulted, inspired the novel Women Talking by Miriam Toews and the film adaptation of it). This story starts the collection with a real punch to the gut (but a darkly satisfying conclusion), showing how although the daughter had been assaulted and wronged, she and her family were forced to flee and feel the shame in order to protect the men in charge, to ‘cleanse the wound with silence.’ She is even gaslit to believe it was her fault for allowing the Devil in through her supposed weakness and is misremembering her attackers face because ‘the Devil plays these tricks in the imagination when the imagination rebels, and it also makes us submit,’ and is causing further harm to the community by ‘falsely’ accusing a man of something that was ‘clearly’ just the Devil she invited in.
The following tale, Fish, Turtle, Vulture was inspired by the survival story of José Salvador Alvarenga, who was lost at sea for 438 days, and, like in Rivero’s version that adds a potentially sinister twist near the end, conversed with with his deceased crewmate, Ezequiel Córdoba, for several days after he had passed. Many details in this story come from Salvador Alvarenga’s life, such as the crewmate's mother and her tortillas or asking the dead companion what death is like. But even the stories not directly tied to a notable event ring true in the ways we can be terrorized in life, such as the lengthy confession of life in Donkey Skin from a person who wants their story told before they forget it and have it lost due to their medical problems, or the aunt with serious mental health issues that assails a family (with plenty of skeletons in their closet) in Socorro.
Several times we see the devils deal of trading health and physical safety for frail financial stability, such as selling blood in Donkey Skin or the more extreme trade-off in Kindred Deer where the husband’s health is severely hindered in order to profit from experimental medical trials. In this same story, Rivero looks at how this can occur on a national level in times of conflict, with what are usually the poor sacrificing their lives for the prosperity of those in power.
‘I suppose as far as this culture of medals and nationalism is concerned, going to war is enough to turn you into a hero, and even more so if you return home ground to dust in a sealed casket decorated with the colours of the flag.’
In most of these, the true trauma creeps up like a twist, such as when Kieko’s garden work with her college-aged room renter dredges up painful memories of a surprise love-child from her husband they were forced to take in and the confrontation of accepting what happened to her.
Fresh Dirt from the Grave can test your nerves and take your mind to dark places, but it is ultimately a rather gorgeously written collection on the will to survive in all the darkness. While the narrative techniques don’t vary much and it can seem a bit repetitive by the end, it is still a hard hitting book. Short but lasting in its intensity, Rivero is an author I really hope to see be more widely translated so I can enjoy more of her work.
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