They're Cows, We're Pigs

by Carmen Boullosa, Leland H. Chambers (Translator)

The emerging societies of the Caribbean in the seventeenth century were a riotous assembly of pirates, aristocrats, revolutionaries, and rogues -- outcasts and fortune seekers all. In They're Cows, We're Pigs, acclaimed Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa animates this world of bloody chaos and uncertain possibility through the eyes of the young Jean Smeeks, kidnapped in Flanders at age thirteen and sold into indentured servitude on Tortuga, the mythical Treasure Island. Trained in the magic of medicine by le Negre Miel, an African slave healer, and Pineau, a French-born surgeon, Smeeks signs on as a medical officer with the pirate band the Brethren of the Coast. Transformed by the looting and violence of pirate life, Smeeks finds himself both healer and despoiler, servant and mercenary, suspended between the worlds of the law-abiding, tradition-bound "cows" and the freely roaming and raiding "pigs."

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical

192 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1997

About the author

Carmen Boullosa (b. September 4, 1954 in Mexico City, Mexico) is a leading Mexican poet, novelist and playwright. Her work is eclectic and difficult to categorize, but it generally focuses on the issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context. Her work has been praised by a number of prominent writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Alma Guillermoprieto and Elena Poniatowska, as well as publications such as Publishers Weekly. She has won a number of awards for her works, and has taught at universities such as Georgetown University, Columbia University and New York University (NYU), as well as at universities in nearly a dozen other countries. She is currently Distinguished Lecturer at the City College of New York. She has two children -- Maria Aura and Juan Aura -- with her former partner, Alejandro Aura --and is now married to Mike Wallace, the Pulitzer Prize–winning co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[your neighborhood friendly book python :D]

part 1, the storyline was great
part 2, the vulgarity truly started to show *very nauseating*
do not recommend to anyone who cannot stomach severe vulgarity, it felt like reading p**n, but worse

[Eve Tushnet]

A pirate tale that's as philosophical as it is violent (which is a lot... it's a lot violent). It's an adventure tale and a metafictional story-about-the-story. It can be tender, as in the relationship between the narrator and the fellow slave who teaches him the craft of medicine, and it can be callous and brutal--in part it's about the desire to be callous and brutal, it's about wanting to like the brutality of your life and finding that you don't like it really. Hard thoughts about women, and men without women, about what John Paul II called the "original loneliness" of the body and the utopianism that rests on violence--all wrapped in a galloping narrative style and doused in blood.

[Becky]

This book was recommended to me by a well-read clerk at my local bookstore, a fever dream of 17th century piracy on the Caribbean. But I never quite got into it. The protagonist, who goes by various different names, has loving mentor relationships with two older men who teach him everything he knows, and much of the book comes back to avenging their deaths. There are vivid hallucinatory scenes of pirate raids and hurricanes and on occasion the language is just breathtaking. But often, it's hard to cut through. The sentences are so long I would forget what it was about at the beginning by the time it ended. And it's hard to develop too much sympathy for a main character who is spending so much time raping and pillaging. The voice of the book is unusual -- the protagonist starts by insisting he is the eyes and ears of Smeeks and talks about Smeeks in the third person. The scene with his first mentor, Le Negre Miel, is brief -- and in his memories of it is very different than its original description. Suddenly there is a sexual element to the relationship that makes you wonder if you missed something in its first reading. No he just didn't tell you until after the fact. Then there is a whole unnumbered chapter that tells you several points of the previous chapters were lies. What is truth? Who can say? And indeed, this is a work of fiction based on varying accounts of 17th century piracy, so it makes sense to have the point of view get confusing. But I can never tell with books like this if it is Art I'm not sophisticated enough to appreciate, or just using fancy mechanisms to no real end.

[Javier Ponce]

Me encanta la voz de El trepanador. Creo que Boullosa es una de las mejores novelistas de piratas que puedes encontrar. Sin embargo, algo le falta todavía de lograr en esta novela y que sí consigue después en El médico de los piratas. No es más que encontrar la magia de una realidad que supera la ficción, y que encuentra su lugar de vuelta en esta. El final termina por ser muy insípido y anticlimático, considerando el material de origen.

[Sandra Huerta]

Wow. ¡Podría jurar que leí una crónica escrita en el siglo XVII!

Tal vez se trate de la vieja historia de piratería, conocida, repetida mil veces, pero chapeau para la autora por hacerla corta y entretenida, pero además por reproducir con fidelidad la narrativa y las formas del periodo que retrata.

Merece algo más de celebridad.

[Carl Palmateer]

This came highly recommended and I don't know why. The story seemed even more clueless and lost than the main character. You could pull this and that out for discussion or to support/score points in a political/sociological debate. Other than that there is little to squeeze out of it.

[Mike Lockwood]

Boullosa’s text is a lot to take in. For many, as evidenced by the reviews, it is just downright off-putting. While the back cover and title may suggest a playful pirate narrative, They’re Cows, We’re Pigs is anything but.

On its surface, TCWP is a semi-parody/revamping of a famous pirate narrative called The Buccaneers of America by Alexander Exquemelin (1678). The semi-fictional, mostly fictitious (probably) memoir details the life and experiences of Exquemelin (most likely a made up name) during his travels around North America with the infamous pirate captain, Henry Morgan. Like TCWP, Buccaneers is filled with gruesome stories of pillaging, raping, and stealing; however, very much unlike TCWP, Buccaneers doesn’t take any time to process the whys behind the pirates’ ways of living. Exquemelin recounts his and his fellow crew’s actions with indifference. It seems to me that Boullosa tries to take this seminal text and imbue it with modern philosophical issues and queries. Essentially, what would a pirate narrative look like if the pirate was morally and philosophically open to the reader about the crimes he commits and the debauchery he embraces? To open the text up for this perspective-focused approach, Boullosa grants Smeeks’ eyes and ears the ability to dislocate themselves from the character’s physical body, thus giving us and his senses a sort of bird’s eye view over Smeeks the pirate. Doing this allows for Smeeks to bear witness to his own actions from a critical perspective, very much like how we, the readers do.

Side note: Though gender also begins to form as a thematic lens in the first half of the text as a way of envisioning the intersectionality of femininity and piracy, it very much feels like an afterthought and so I won’t go any further on trying to expand on its significance.

Writ large, TCWP tells the story of a pirate who is self-reflexive and who questions WHY he and his brothers commit atrocities upon the world. There are moments where Smeeks openly disagrees with the actions and beliefs of those around him. While sometimes quite rational in his musings of pirate life, Smeeks is still just that, a pirate. His beliefs align with the age old saying about stealing bread from the store to feed the poor. As far as 17th century geopolitics go, it means that the pirates efforts fall somewhere along the lines of taking from and dismantling the European establishment (the colonial Spaniards) and replacing it with a sort of absolute socialistic world that is strewn throughout the Central American isles (Tortuga).

Now, as fine and dandy as that may be, it is my opinion that the book does not establish a robust enough philosophical debate surrounding the pirate code so as to offset the graphic and often times disturbing nature of the novel. The raping and murdering that takes place throughout TCWP is not accompanied by some extensive musing or open rejection by Smeeks, and so it just leaves a sour taste in the reader’s mouth. Moreover, despite Smeeks’ complicated relationship to sex, there are still several moments where he is present during the raping of victims. His inaction and complicity invalidates him as a critical presence and thus implicates him in the atrocities. The enslavement of humans is also presented as matter-of-fact and is not expanded upon or vehemently denounced, and so it too comes off jarring to the reader.

Without delving too much into it, the trouble with pirate philosophy is that it rejects colonialism and capitalism, but exercises those rejections by indirectly engaging within the parameters of capitalism and colonialism. What better way to say no to capitalism than to steal material things like jewelry, artwork, weapons, ships, etc., just to turn around and sell them for…you guessed it…money, sex, ships, booze, and all things capitalism? How about the possessing of humans and the pillaging/seizing of land without just cause? Sounds an awful lot like colonialism, with the only discernible difference being that the pirates do it under the guise of protest. Essentially, the pirate way is to steal from the established world in order to spread the wealth amongst themselves. While Smeeks has moments of apprehension and introspection, he is still a pirate at every turn and he never strays too far from the brotherhood.

The downfall of the pirate narrative and why their literature is often unsatisfying or unappealing is that while the pirate may skulk the open waters and adhere to no laws other than his own, be is still bound to the larger world in which he seeks to escape by his mortal desires for greed, lust, and bloodshed. While TCWP is no doubt a well written novel with several memorable moments within, it unfortunately does not escape the hard-to-justify mindset needed to tolerate pirate literature. Let me be clear, the book is not bad. The story is fine and the characters are distinct. It is just that you must overcome a whole lot of unfavorable material for a less than satisfying payoff about why and how the pirate exists in opposition to the ever-expanding world.

[BOOK BOOKS]

I CAN NEVER FIND BOOKS I WANT TO READ :/ SUGGEST SUGGESTIONS

[Aer]

0 — disgusting, I’m not finishing ts

[Auntie]

I'll read anything but I couldn't get through this one

[Melissa]

A disgustingly violent and crude rendition of the lives of pirates. However crude, it gives one a sensitive perspective an male sexuality, with both women and men.

[Kate]

Had to read for class. Very strange story structure. The author relies on cheap shock value. I would like the hours I spent reading this book back...