What is this image? “I know what you’re thinking. You heard the bridge of dreams breaking, somewhere.” Surely it is strange of me, your commentator for the interim, to ask a question about images respective of a statement related to auditory phenomena and even before that…maybe…telepathy (?). Well, no, not to the ardent pursuer of the greater rostrums, peacock or praying mantis, or anybody who think of the deal as first and foremost a matter of ‘poetic imagination.’ You do not need to know who Gaston Bachelard is in order to accept for the time being that it is perhaps ‘images’ of a sort that are produced by that IMAG-ination of ours! The words I have quoted appear more than once precisely as sequenced above—and the crucial ones a great many more times, separately or together—in the English translation of Pergentino José’s RED ANTS, a collection of stories by a young, ahem, "Latin American" writer that would be notable on any account, but is of course all the morse so because this is the first ever literary work to be translated into English from the Sierra Zapotec language. As this is an unambiguously indigenous author breaking, at least at the site of composition, with the intermediary of the “subaltern” and/or the instrumental support—or however sinister you wanna frame it—of the colonizer language (or tongue!).
From “Threads of Steam,” the third story in the collection: “Suddenly I see my mother before me, walking through the steam. Her face is contorted—as though in overwhelming pain. I feel myself begin to fall but manage to keep to my feet. I think of Itza, the one memory I can grasp on to. My mother walks toward an iron door at the far end of the room, it seems to be the way out.” Then a door that won’t close. Then: “I try to think of Itza, only for lights to explode inside my mind.” In the story “Departure,” where we also find “dusty sea-blue wall” and incomprehensibly impotent firearms, it is black and dark that explodes within the field of internal, immersive purview, not radiant light, its maybe twin.
You are looking deep into a well and things are starting to appear there because you are looking so hard. It is not novel or radical to insist that dreams are yelling at you in order to get your attention about something. Pergentino José is very much interested in doors that sometimes open and sometimes don’t…or thresholds that only cooperate fitfully...as well as the kinds of nebulous zones that go along with such doors and thresholds…avid readers know the kind…
From “Prayers”: “I have crossed half the city, felt impelled to do so in spite of the repeat calls expressly forbidding us from going outside after seven in the evening.” It is in this story that we come to detect in our author eerie similarities to de facto ‘outsider artist’ and New York-residing Spaniard Felipe Alfau, especially the collection LOCOS, whose small stock company of barroom denizens keeps somersaulting out of the world like hellacious flora. It’s how we dream, or often what dreaming looks like. There couldn't be nothin' more like Alfau, I shouldn’t imagine, than that bit near the end of “Prayers” where a cartwheeling consideration of criminal complicity terminates in a weighing of the perhaps MANY people “who are the man with the hammer.” It is also the panic that busts through a limit into fugue and starts hearing incomprehensible things from strange visitors. As in the cinema of David Lynch. Perception itself is something by which the characters in RED ANTS are routinely struck as one is by a violent blow. (“Above the confusion, I heard goldfinches and toucans singing out in alarm.”) If there is any doubt remaining that this indigenous voice pulls from a mythological bedrock touching on, it would quickly seem, all others, let us note of course the dreamtime and songlines of Australia’s aborigines and the title of Werner Herzog’s 1984 film WHERE THE GREEN ANTS DREAM.
We are meant to read and certainly end up having to read the stories collected in RED ANTS as voices within the buffeted container of a language on a lifeline, translated into Spanish and then into English, which sees its and other voices as conditioned by peril beyond the capabilities of any sort of proper processing. This post-colonial world is our world, and the prevalence of Latin-derivative given names evokes a legacy of subjection and forced assimilation that has a lot of trauma and terror in it. Still, this is not a collection steeped in arcana or tribal lore. We are often in towns and cities. There is even on the periphery of “Departure” a real smart-tootin’ mass-shootin’-type scenario, as I guess there would be, as these stories are steeped in fear, stress, and hallucinatory intercession. Now, the mass shooting in “Departure,” mind, probably evokes Jean-Paul Sarte’s 1939 shorty story “Erostratus” more than it does anything in your news cycle. Don’t experience disconsolation over this! That would be barbaric.
Of the red ants themselves. Well, yes, indeed, what of them? In “Priestess of the Mountain,” the twelfth of the collection’s seventeen stories, we come upon not only the ants but their outright Lovecraftian profusion, indicating, as the teeming tinies would seem to do, envoy or entry to “a path to the center of the earth.” (THE BRIDGE OF DREAMS HAS BROKEN. HOLD YOUR CENTRE.) Clearly, the subterranean terrain here is not dissimilar to the short story collection VERTICAL MOTION by lauded contemporary Chinese author Can Xue, except for the fact that Can Xue is not an author who explores panic and impotence the way Pergentino José is inclined to. For this fascinating and remarkable young writer from the Legal Fiction Known As Mexico, the hollow earth, or the space for its myth-time, is the body’s experimental-scientist helliocentrim and a canister you ought to know about that is in your gut and ready to set you free…or maybe just blow it all to hell and gone…