Let's write about human migration and how fiction can better frame the tragic impact it has on the human condition

‘No Place to Bury the Dead’ is a moving meditation on migration, displacement and loss, an essay and review by Ilana Masad published in the Los Angeles Times: 

Fiction can often better define the history about the human condition than investigative reporting.  Consider Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the epic of Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell and Roots, by Alex Haley, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and other classics....

In a fictional town not far from the border of an unnamed Latin American country, a woman named Visitación Salazar has made it her mission to provide a resting place for the unlucky dead — those who have been abandoned or whose families can’t afford to bury them elsewhere. The Third Country, as her unofficial, unsanctioned cemetery is called, should be a place of mercy where the ritual of burial provides comfort. But despite Visitación’s best efforts, it is also a place of violence; the land is owned by a powerful businessman, Abundio, and sought after by the irregulars, a guerrilla army sowing terror and selling heroin to fund its fight against the state.

Into this tense situation comes Angustias Romero, the protagonist of the second novel by the Venezuelan journalist Karina Sainz Borgo, “No Place to Bury the Dead,” translated from Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer. Like the author’s first novel, “It Would Be Night in Caracas,” it revolves around grief and motherhood, only this time from the perspective of mother rather than daughter.

Angustias wasn’t supposed to end up at the Third Country. She and her husband left their home in a place described as the eastern mountains to escape a plague of amnesia sweeping their region — echoing a similar epidemic in Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” — and leaving the population disoriented and despairing.

“Men went out into the street to wait,” Angustias narrates. “For what? I never found out. We women did whatever we could to keep despair at bay: We gathered food, opened and closed windows, climbed up to the rooftops, swept the patios. We gave birth heaving and shouting like those madwomen whom no one offers even a sip of water. Life concentrated in us, in what we, until then, had been capable of holding on to, or pushing out.”

Women’s strength — terrible, tragic and, in the most dire circumstances, necessary — is emphasized throughout the book. Indeed, it takes much strength for Angustias to leave the plague-ridden place she knows. But she’s concerned about her twin baby boys, born very prematurely and with a heart defect, and hopes that going west will keep them safe.

Instead, the babies die soon after they cross the mountains, which is how Angustias winds up searching for Visitación. Once she’s buried the boys at the cemetery, she insists on staying there to be close to them. She earns her keep by mixing cement for the vaults Visitación builds for the dead and, over time, also learns to clean and prepare the bodies for the graves.

The novel’s plot follows the growing existential threat to the Third Country and its caretakers as the cruel, grasping Abundio sends his lackeys after them and the irregulars increasingly make their presence known through threats and violence. The powers converging to get Visitación and her dead off the land are immense. Yet both women stand strong — Visitación out of stubbornness and a sense of divine purpose, Angustias from the grief tying her to her sons’ grave.

Yet the plot isn’t really the point of “No Place to Bury the Dead,” which often dwells on quiet moments of pain, showcasing the small ways a migration crisis robs people of their dignity.

In Mezquite, the town closest to the cemetery, hundreds of migrants wait at city hall to be relocated. In Cucaña, some 40 miles closer to the border, all the women have terribly shorn heads — which Angustias notices because she was a hairdresser with her own salon in her former life — having sold their hair for a pittance. 

With few other options for raising money, the town’s women turn to sex work, while the girls handle child care and scavenge for things to sell. As for the men and boys, they rarely seem to be of much use.

Sainz Borgo’s depictions have some unsettling dimensions. Visitación, a 60-year-old, evangelical Black woman who drinks, smokes, has several boyfriends and enjoys showing off her body, may read as a caricature to some. Críspulo, an Indigenous farmhand who works for Abundio, is horribly abused but cartoonishly villainous as a result.

At the same time, Angustias’ development is moving, her delicate, quiet steeliness contrasting wonderfully with Visitación’s big, loud, insistent personality. Late in the book, Angustias addresses Visitación’s strangely proprietary relationship with the cemetery inhabitants she refers to as “My dead”:

“There was one and only one truth, and nothing could change it: all these men and women were dead, and they were never coming back. That was the only sure thing, and there was nothing Visitación or anyone could do to change it. The dead were not hers. They did not belong to those who cursed them or longed for them. Not even my sons were entirely mine, even if they were the reason I had remained here.”

This novel ultimately serves as a deeply felt meditation on migration, mourning and the simultaneous entanglement and estrangement of the living and the dead.

Ilana Masad is a books and culture critic and the author of “All My Mother’s Lovers.”

Let's Write about "The Night Before Christmas" back in the days before copyright!

 a copy of “A Visit From St. Nicholas” that only recently turned up

A Famous Christmas Poem Could Sell for $500,000

Report published in The New York Times by James Barron.

“There it is, the beginning of the modern Christmas,” Peter Klarnet said, as I picked up a faded handwritten copy of a poem and squinted at the lines most of us know, starting with “’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house.”

Klarnet is a senior specialist in Americana, books and manuscripts at Christie’s, which was preparing to sell the paper I was holding — for around $500,000. No wonder he was concerned about what else was in my hand. “Let’s watch that pen,” he said as his eyes locked on my ballpoint.

I put it down and went back to the ornate little loops and curls that formed Clement Clarke Moore’s familiar words.

The main character was “a right jolly old elf.” The R and the E start as far below the rest of the line as the J.

St. Nicholas’s supporting cast, the “eight tiny reindeer,” was introduced three lines from the bottom of the first page. Their names, all underlined, appeared on the second page. The last line — “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!” — was also underlined.

“A Visit From St. Nicholas,” as Moore titled the poem, clinched the transformation of a Dutch saint into an American icon. Washington Irving, who created Rip Van Winkle and the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, wrote a satire poking fun at the Dutch who originally controlled New York. One of his characters, Peter the Headstrong, was a fairly obvious caricature of the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant, who had to hand over New Amsterdam to the British — who, in turn, renamed the city New York.

Moore’s readers might not have recognized Irving’s St. Nicholas: He had a broad-brimmed hat. Moore made him more likable and more relatable. And, still later in the 19th century, the cartoonist Thomas Nast drew the portly image that stuck in people’s minds.

Klarnet said he had found the copy of “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” the fifth in Moore’s handwriting, among manuscripts that belonged to relatives of Adrian Van Sinderen, a prominent collector who died in 1963. It’s probably not surprising that Moore’s poem would have appealed to Van Sinderen: He wrote 25 books that had to do with Christmas, according to his obituary in The New York Times.

There is no known original manuscript of “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” Perhaps that is because Moore did not want his reputation as a serious academic brought down by something so frivolous. He taught Hebrew and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea.  (Maine Writer- Ahhhh, 💕💕😍 , back in the days before copyright and royalties....so, in the history of publishing, this adorable story is truly a Christmas gift to the world.)

The original may have been what was sent to a friend in Troy, N.Y., who passed along the poem to a local newspaper that published it — anonymously — in 1823. Moore finally acknowledged authorship when he published a book of poems in 1844. (The family of Henry Livingston Jr. later claimed that Livingston had written it. Klarnet said the evidence pointed to Moore, because the editor of the Troy paper described the author of the poem as a resident of New York City. Livingston lived upstate.)

No one seems to know how Van Sinderen obtained the copy now at Christie’s, which has a discoloration on the first page, probably from where it had been pressed against a smaller piece of paper, Klarnet said.

The copy first showed up in a magazine called St. Nicholas in the early 1870s. Someone had apparently photographed the first page of the copy, and the magazine made an engraving from the photo, Klarnet said. 

That tripped him up. At first, he suspected that the copy was merely a facsimile engraving. Only later, when he took a closer look and noticed changes in the tone of the ink from word to word, did he conclude that it was an actual handwritten copy.

“You see how much darker the exclamation point is?” he asked, pointing to the one after Vixen’s name. In an engraving, he said, the punctuation would not have looked like that.