"And why does it even occur to me that I can or should do art based on the suffering of others?" Asks the protagonist of the Sound Desert (Sixth Floor), a documentary filmmaker interested in rescuing the testimonies and voices of migrant children. that, after crossing the border, reaching - only a few achieve it - the Rio Grande and entering the deserts of the southern United States, disappear into detention centers. Massive returns, despite the fact that immigration law states that migrants from Central America have the right to a hearing, and the secrecy that surrounds detention centers makes it impossible to trace the whereabouts and history of these minors.
The protagonist of Valeria Luiselli's latest novel wants to document the history of these "lost children , " but, she wonders, "How can a radio documentary help more undocumented children get asylum?" And, above all, if she has the legitimacy of creating, "making art", from the experience and suffering of others. The question of the protagonist of Luiselli is the same one that the author herself is asked throughout the novel and that, in a certain way, can be formulated regarding her previous work, The Lost Children (Sixth Floor), a chronicle in around the helplessness of migrant children that Luiselli made from his experience as an interpreter in the immigration courts of New York.
Sound desert addresses from fiction the same reality that was denounced in The Lost Children , however here the Mexican writer delves, as she had not done before, on the place from where to write and, above all, on the legitimacy of writing around to those whose voices are not heard . As Juan Pablo Villalobos already pointed out in I had a dream (Anagram), it is not about giving voice to migrant children, because they already have it, they never stopped having it. It is more about making their testimonies audible and, consequently, their history, but how to do it? Is it legitimate to resort to an interposed voice? Is fiction the only possible interposed voice? Valeria Luiselli knows that literature is not to answer questions, hence the sound desert is itself a question about the place of the enunciation, but also about the language from which reality is named and constructed.
In this sense, the novel is an inquiry around that familiar lexicon that we assume without question. Valeria Luiselli, however, questions it and does it not only in relation to the way in which, from the press and power, the story about migrant children is elaborated, but also in relation to the story of the private sphere , the family environment and the relationship.
These two planes - the story of the private sphere and that of migrant children - overlap in the Sound Desert through the subgenre of the road book and through the story of a couple, the protagonist and her husband, also a documentary filmmaker, who travel from New York to Arizona in the company of his son of 10 years and her son of only five. He, also a documentary filmmaker, investigates the history of the Apache chiricahuas, the last free people "before surrendering to white eyes and being displaced to reserves." The history of the Apache chiricahuas connects directly with that of migrant children: both are not only subjects denied by history, but also displaced subjects, people who are denied their own territory.
"A refugee is someone who waits," explains the protagonist to the children, is someone "who has already arrived somewhere, to a foreign country, but must wait for an indefinite time before arriving at all," continues the narrator, the refugee is the one who waits “in detention centers, shelters or camps; in federal custody and often closely guarded by armed guards ». And so the last Chiricahuas apaches are defined, living in the apache, territory under control granted to them by the state , and thus migrant children are also defined in the centers where they are detained.
His camera "had erased the names of the Apache chiefs, just as the white eyes had erased them from history," says the boy, who not only becomes the narrator of the second part, but also that voice capable of narrating that The two adults can't count.
In this way, far from any kind of moralism, the child not only brings together the personal story - his story and his parents' story told to his sister, still small to be aware of her - with the alien - the story of the Apaches and of these «lost children» whose story tries to rebuild their mother-, but, without answering the questions raised, gives meaning to the novel, turning it into an artifact where documentary and fiction intermingle to «capture an ephemeral moment and stage an instant ».
Like the files that, through their recordings, the protagonist and her husband build, Sound Desert archives those stories - those names, those voices, those testimonies - that cannot be reproduced, but can be evoked. In the same way that the child's camera rescued those erased names , the novel rescues the voices of those children who, recorded through fiction, will never end up being completely lost.
Expert votes
ALOMA RODRÍGUEZ
1. Sound desert (Sixth Floor), by Valeria Luiselli.
2. The idiot (Random House Literature), by Elif Batuman.
3. The friend (Anagrama), of Sigrid Nunez.
4. The years (Cabaret Voltaire), by Annie Ernaux.
5. The flap (Anagrama), by Philippe Lançon.
LEANDRO PÉREZ MIGUEL
1. Claus and Lucas (Books of the Asteroid), by Agota Kristof.
2. The death of the commander (Tusquets). Case with books 1 and 2. Haruki Murakami (1 was published in 2018 and 2 in 2019).
3. Los errantes (Anagrama), by Olga Tokarczuk.
4. The testaments (Salamandra), by Margaret Atwood.
5. Metropolis (RBA), by Philip Kerr.
JORGE CARRIÓN
1. Sound desert (Sixth Floor), by Valeria Luiselli.
2. Fox (Impedimenta), from Dubravka Ugresic.
3. End (Anagram), by Karl Ove Nausgard.
4. The summer my mother had green eyes (Impedimenta), by Tatiana Tibuleac.
4. My husband is from another species (Alliance), from Yukiko Motoya.
LUCÍA LIJTMAER
1. The sermon on fire (Books of the Asteroid), by Jaime Quatro.
2. In the garden of the ogre (Cabaret Voltaire), by Leila Slimani.
3. The summer when my mother had green eyes (Impedimenta), by Tatiana Tibuleac.
4. Fearful Days (Alfaguara), from AM Homes.
5. Claus and Lucas (Books of the Asteoride), by Agota Kristoff.
LUIS ALEMANY
1. My mother is from Mariupol (Books of the Asteroid), from Natascha Wodin.
2. The Heart of England (Anagram), by Jonathan Coe.
3. His children later (ADN), by Nicolas Mathieu.
4. For Helga (Lumen), by Bergveinn Birgisson.
5. Love is blind (Alfaguara), by William Boyd.
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