I really, really wanted to be blown away by Álvaro Enrigue’s Tu sueño imperios han sido (translated into English as You Dreamed of Empires, a significantly less elegant and striking title). the novel is a psychedelic — both figuratively and literally, in that Moctezuma is high and often mildly hallucinating for basically the entire book — version of November 8th, 1519 in Tenochtitlan, from Hernán Cortés and his troops’ arrival in the city in the morning until Cortés’s formal audience with Moctezuma in the evening. as the narration moves rapidly from character to character we also get glimpses of what came before and what might come after this encounter.
many things about it are very cool. the narration is very compellingly structured; the lack of quotation marks means that characters feel blurred around the edges, lending the novel a dreamlike (or hallucinatory) quality that matches its content and its core theme: the dream of empires and what happens when radically different conceptions of history, power, and cosmology collide. the handling of Jazmín Caldera and the last few sections (more or less the entirety of part IV, “El sueño de Cortés”), in particular, were exhilarating and almost enough to make up for the beginning.
unfortunately, the book begins with a profoundly condescending preface addressed to Enrigue’s editor where he explains some of his use of language, which is to say, his decision to use some Nahuatl words and spellings in the text. the first problem with this is that half of them are wrong. he uses “Tenoxtitlan”, for example, but the Nahuatl name of the city was Tenochtitlan. perplexingly, he does consistently refer to its residents as “tenochcas” (i.e., Nahuatl Tenochcah). at several points he names the area as “Mehxico”, but the saltillo is actually after the -i- (Mēxihco). genuinely this is something that thirty seconds on Wikipedia could have corrected, but either neither Enrigue nor his editors could be bothered or someone tried to correct him and he doubled down. either way, it rather belies his list of recent scholarship on Mexica history in the acknowledgments at the end.
this may seem like simple pedantry, but it’s one reflection of a larger problem, which is that while the “Aztec Empire”/Ēxcān Tlahtōlōyān/Triple Alliance no longer exists, Nahua people and the Nahuatl language very much still do. you wouldn’t know this from Enrigue’s preface, though, which includes the following:
No se trata de darle lecciones de nahua –que ni hablo ni leo– a nadie, solo de recuperar en algunos sitios los sonidos de esa lengua. No es nostalgia, no me mueven motores ideológicos. Todas las grafías y todos los términos en nahua están abiertos a discusión. Entiendo que si suelo decir «Londres» y no «London», no tengo por qué decir «Tenoxtitlan» en lugar de «Tenochtitlán», pero soy escritor, las palabras me importan. Me parece que, además de significar y señalar, invocan.
[It is not a matter of giving Nahua [sic] — which I neither speak nor read — lessons to anyone, just of recovering in some places the sounds of that language. It is not nostalgia; I am not driven by ideological motives. All the spellings and all the terms in Nahua are open for discussion. I understand that if I usually say «Londres» and not «London», I have no reason to say «Tenoxtitlan» instead of «Tenochtitlán”, but I’m a writer; words matter to me. It seems to me that, in addition signifying and marking, they invoke.]
what’s that, dominant-language writer? you don’t actually care about having the words in a denied language right? it doesn’t really matter what they mean as long as they “invoke” the vibe you’re looking for? how novel! no-one has ever treated a denied language in this way before!
when I was first reading the preface, I tried to be generous: it seemed to me that he really intended to be positioning himself against the kind of Mexican nationalism that adopts symbols of Indigeneity as symbols of the state and of a common “Mexican” identity (while continuing to systemically marginalize living Indigenous people and communities). even from this reading I was still dubious, insofar as he proceeds to do exactly the same thing, adopting Nahuatl purely for the aesthetic or vibe. unfortunately, having come to the end of the novel, as much as on some levels it undeniably governed, it’s hard to see the preface as meaning anything other than: “don’t confuse my use of Nahuatl for an actual investment in Nahua communities or their languages. I don’t care about them; it’s just for the vibe.” I still gave it 3.5 stars on Storygraph, but that’s a full star down from where it would be if it felt like it was actually trying to recenter real Nahua people and their language and culture within what has come to be seen as a unitary “Mexican history”. (the other half-star off is for some other historical stuff I’m dubious of, mainly the cannibalism references and the fact that, again, Moctezuma is high for basically the entire book.)
which is a shame, because the fundamental premise here is so interesting. while the Ēxcān Tlahtōlōyān functioned significantly differently from European empires, it was an imperial power, and this encounter between empires should be really compelling. instead, it turns out to be, at the end of the day, an all-too-familiar story: a non-Indigenous writer adopting an Indigenous culture as a national symbol, really, saying anything about Indigenous people. it just left a sour taste in mouth.
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