Having traveled last month to El Salvador, and later finding, at my local bookstore Bridge Street Books, a reprint of a long reported essay called Salvador, by Joan Didion, I took in both the place and the writing with enthusiasm. I didn’t even know the piece existed.
The latter helped me make sense of the week-long visit, for which I was unprepared, exhausted even before leaving, with postscript clarity that comes with rest after passing through a confusing and unfamiliar place. I don’t speak Spanish. I don’t surf. A week of clouds, real and metaphorical, obscured the country’s famous volcanos. My destination, mostly in the remote El Oriente region, promised little in the way of respite. Travel need not be like this; but somehow, I seek out just this kind of trip, in the word’s every sense, every time.
Nevermind that Didion published her essay in the New York Review of Books in November 1982, or that I can never hope to compete with her wildly original observations. She flew in to the country in June of that year, for a two-week stint to report on what she saw, heard, felt, and feared. El Salvador was then in a civil war, which, as Didion could not have known, would last nearly another 10 years.
That war is the reason so many Salvadorans live in the United States, especially in the Washington, DC area today; why the griddlecakes known as pupusas are a popular food here; and why Avianca, the Latin airline, flies three and four flights between the U.S. and Salvadoran capitals every day.
My footsteps traced Didion’s. Her path and mine bore an uncanny run of points in common. She took interest in the country’s strongman politics. She toured the place’s rural east. She stayed in San Benito, San Salvador’s tony western neighborhood. She noted San Benito’s surfeit of armed guards, as I did, apparently unchanged in more than 40 years.
“June was wet,” she remarks laconically, which is one, word-starved way to describe the Central American rainy season: how it drubs everything under it, soaks the populace as they wait for the bus, washes out roads and plans, and generally makes small countries much larger ones. Locals told me this year’s rainfall was particularly heavy, and I found myself pining for the tropical, maddening, wet-blanket-humid, and hot (but at least dry) early summer that is typical of my home city.
Didion notes early on about El Salvador that “Terror is the given of the place.” She watches shadows, thinking she sees gunmen, writing that she “did not forget the sensation of having been in a single instant demoralized, undone, humiliated by fear...” and needs hardly to elaborate, because she has already conveyed something of the grip of chaos and pain in which El Salvador then lived, on all sides.
Elsewhere, Didion serves the reader great heaps of intellectual nourishment, like a historical-political steak and baked potato, when she delves into the country’s post-colonial past, and not least the bilateral history between El Salvador and the United States. She writes that the Latin country has “a national history peculiarly resistant to heroic interpretation. There is no libertador to particularly remember”—an obvious nod to Simón Bolívar, whom millions call the ‘George Washington of South America.’
Her masterstroke comes when describing El Salvador’s search for itself in the Manifest Destiny era of American expansion, and its shelter-seekers. In the wake of the declaration of independence by Guatemala, El Salvador’s more historically dominant northwestern neighbor, the smaller country, straining for its own sovereignty, sought to join in America’s expansion.
“So attenuated was El Salvador’s sense of itself in its moment of independence that it petitioned the United States for admission to the union as a state,” Didion writes.
“The United States declined.”
Here the writer shows her trademark declarative voice, her sure-as-death-and-taxes confidence. Salvadoran history becomes fluid, erased as if with rubber, which Didion moves almost immediately thereafter to the eighties-era present, and thus bookended by narrative lines where the writer chooses to draw them.
And given, or despite, the fact that the timing of Didion’s visit would preclude a fuller knowledge of the Salvadoran war from the ensuing decade of future violence, she somehow still manages to get it right. She shares great skepticism, while stopping short of condemnation, that the politics of the Reagan administration had effected any positive change amid the bareknuckle statesmanship of a Cold War struggle—communists versus anti-communists—so close to home.
“In the week that I am completing this report, at the end of October 1982,” Didion writes, to conclude Salvador, “... the Reagan administration believed that it had “turned the corner” in its campaign for political stability in Central America.”
Didion, as so often, sticks the landing. Her witness of one Salvadoran experience—la problema, it was called then—helped me better understand my own trip there.
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