Así voy leyendo otro Chocó, así descubro una nueva historia. Releo a Velia y descubro algunos rasgos de su carácter que parecen nuevos.
[So I keep reading another Chocó; so I find a new history. I reread Velia and find some of her character traits that seem new.]
Afro-Colombian writer Velia Vidal’s autofictional novel Aguas de estuario (available in English as Tidal Waters, tr. Annie McDermott) is a collection of lighthearted but thoughtful musings on the life of Vel (or Veliamar) Vidal, who, after living in Medellín for more than a decade, has decided with her husband to return home to the Afro-Colombian community she grew up in in the Chocó region. structured as a series of short letters, the book follows Vel from early 2015 to late 2018 as she figures out how to build the life she wants, as (like Vidal in reality) a writer and a literacy advocate.
when I say the book is “structured as a series of short letters” I mean letters from Vel, directed to an unnamed close (male) friend (I’m actually not entirely sure there’s only one recipient). few of the letters are especially close in time to each other — mostly they’re spaced between two weeks and a month apart, though a handful are as close as two days — so the novel is in effect a collection of epistolary glimpses of Vel’s life. these glimpses vary widely in tone and scope: thanking a friend for helping her plan a trip to Medellín for another friend’s daughter; looking back on the origins of a professional acquaintanceship that has developed into genuine friendship; recounting an unexpected sexual encounter with a past lover (initially she and her husband are, while not open as such, not strictly monogamous, although by the end of the novel Vel is embracing monogamy, at least for now); talking about her writing process and the self-discovery she finds in it; and more as the novel continues.
many of the letters explore Vel’s feelings about the Black (and occasionally Indigenous) communities she lives in and visits, as she travels around the Pacific coast of Colombia: her eagerness to visit Brazil for the 2016 Olympics and see what kinds of children’s books for Black kids are available there; her respect for a group of women who are revitalizing traditional gardening and cooking practices; histories of community resistance, though these are sketched in fairly broad terms, and she also moves away from a political “resistance”:
Si tuviera que elegir una palabra para describir lo vivido en Guapi durante estos dos días, seguro sería resistencia. Lo fácil es pensar que está relacionado con que se trate de un pueblo negro; eso de resistir parece de mujeres, homosexuales y negros, pero aquí lo he sentido de otro modo.
[If I had to choose one word to describe what I experienced in Guapi during these last two days, it would have to be resistance. It’s easy to think that this is related to the fact that it’s a Black town; “resistance” seems to be a thing for women, homosexuals, and Black people, but here I felt it in another way.]
this “otro modo” is the ways the community in Guapi is embedded in its natural environment, and in particular the waters of the estuary, the push and pull of the ocean and the river, each resisting the other. this relationship with the environment is, in turn, connected with the gardening project, and speaks to a broader theme running through the novel, namely Vel’s own relationship to the ocean and to the Pacific coast. in one early letter she describes a kind of malaise the experiences when she’s too far from the ocean:
Hay algo que llamo Ausencia de mar. Es una sensación particular, una secuencia de emociones únicas que me llegan cuando ha pasado mucho tiempo sin encontrarme con el mar. Tiene algo de ansiedad, y es tan corporal –lo percibo en la piel– que podría también hablar de escalofríos. Me hace sentir una nostalgia que me pone al borde de la tristeza aunque sean días alegres. Entonces cada poro mío me reclama, y puedo saber a ciencia cierta que lo que me hace falta es el mar. Vernos, tocarnos, el mar y yo. Así que cada vez que tengo esa sensación debo salir corriendo al sitio más cercano donde por fin nos toquemos.
[There is something I call the Absence of Sea. It’s a peculiar feeling, a sequence of unique emotions that come to me when a lot of time has passed without me visiting the sea. It’s got something of anxiety to it, and it’s so physical — I feel it in my skin — that I could also talk about it as shivering. It makes me feel a nostalgia that brings me to the brink of sadness even in happy days. Then every one of my pores complains, and I can tell with absolute certainty that what I need is the sea. For us to see each other, touch each other, the sea and I. So every time I have that feeling I have to go running off to the closest place where we can finally touch.]
this is not to say that the novel is without politics — it has some bitter criticisms of the Colombian publishing industry’s relationship with Black writers and the exploitation of Black stories, as just one small example — but that it is concerned first and foremost with capturing a vibe, the combination of relief and joy that Vel feels when reunited with both the literal ocean and the figurative ocean of the Black (but also multiracial and multicultural, as the novel emphasizes) community of Chocó. this vibe underlines its politics: that not only is genuine social transformation (only) possible in community but also that life in a community we care about is better for each of us individually. the book begins with her farewell letter to her friend, who lives in Medellín, where she says that while she and her husband have had a consciously developed joint “proyecto de vida” (life plan) — one of the things that keeps them united even when they sometimes enjoy other sexual company — for several years, they realized recently that they were dissatisfied with its pace. what if, they thought, they moved to Chocó now instead of waiting years for the “right moment”? and so they do.
in the context of this leap of faith, Vel’s dedication to her community is what keeps her grounded — even as she struggles to resituate herself, to navigate renewed proximity to her somewhat estranged father, to deal with the gastrointestinal consequences of adjusting to local food and water after so many years living within city infrastructure, to deal with the stress of setting up and trying to secure continuous funding for a literacy nonprofit — and opens up the future that she has both hoped and worked for:
Esta tarde, mientras miraba caer el sol detrás de la selva que está al otro lado del Atrato, pensé que todo esto se trata de sembrar esperanza. Lo que tú haces, lo que yo hago, se trata de leerle a otros en voz alta el cuento que nos alienta cada día, ese que dice que ahí no más, a la vuelta de una decisión o de un poco de esfuerzo, escrito en la página de un libro, en el aroma de unas plantas sembradas o en el sabor de un plato servido está la vida que siempre hemos anhelado.
[This evening, as I watched the sun set behind the jungle that is on the other side of the Atrato, I thought that all of this is about sowing hope. What you do, what I do, is about reading aloud to others the story that drives us every day, the one that says that just there, with one decision or a little bit of effort, written on a page in a book, in the smell of a few plants or in the taste of a dish served, is the life that we have always longed for.]
a lot of this has sounded / felt a bit vague — I’m conscious that I am describing more than analyzing. this is partly because I found the novel a bit diffuse. Vel’s letters meander. this isn’t to say that it isn’t engaging — it is! — but that there no single element of its narrative gets quite enough focus to feel like a throughline. if Vel is grounded by her work in Chocó, the reader has to be content to be grounded by Vel. I really enjoyed her voice — direct (sometimes apparently more direct than the recipient of her letters is comfortable with!) but approachable — but I also wanted something more to hold onto, I think. it didn’t help that the novel ends with Vel finding herself drawn to more conventional monogamy (she tells her interlocutor she no longer feels any desire for men other than her husband) and planning to adopt a child.
nonetheless, there’s something appealing here. if the novel didn’t blow me away, it nonetheless gripped me for the whole time I was reading it — in basically one sitting, with a break to make and eat dinner. I wanted more from it not because it was bad, but because it was good and felt like it could have been even better.
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