#sordidez

I went to see Flow with Runo and it was gorgeous.  It's a Latvian animated movie set in a world without humans.  A cat finds unexpected friendship with a capybara, a lemur, a dog, and a secretary bird after a flood inundates the world and they take refuge in an old boat travelling the new worldwide ocean as the waters continue to rise.  It was gorgeous, magical in a strange and lonely and wondrous way.  There's no dialogue.  It's carried by the animal body language and music and it was majestic and lovely.

And on the airplane I finished reading the novella Sordidez by E. G. Conde. It's a climate fiction novella, compelling and powerful, a worthwhile read I'm still mulling over, but some parts became a little too obviously black-and-white. The writing was beautiful. The depiction of a climate-change-ravaged future, where both the careless greed of the global powers and the vindictive and deliberate use of environmental devastation against political dissidents, was lyrical and heartbreaking and way too resonant. The struggles and triumphs of community-building from the rubble, Native people once again tending to their Native lands after the colonizing powers rise and fall and rise and fall again, was deeply moving. The timeskips, the span of time this short novella covered, could sometimes feel jumpy, but I think that mostly worked. I loved seeing Doña Margarita's survivors' community in the rural Yucatan. I really liked the perpetual low level conflict between the UN, the People's Government, and the local rural people. I liked Vero and his struggle to figure out what he was meant to do and who he was meant to be. I was... unsure how to feel about La Loba Roja. The explicit parallel drawn between her and the military dictator was weird, because she was also portrayed as right. I also. Well. I wasn't as enthused about her unilaterally declaring herself a goddess-queen of the new Yucatan as it felt like the book was. And appointing Vero the returning king of Puerto Rico. That felt like nothing good could come of unilateral declarations like that. I feel like the results of her movement were not adequately covered, they were just timeskipped over. I also thought one of the late-book reveals about the UN kind of cheapened the politics of it somewhat--made it a little too... obvious, a little too trite.  Which was unfortunate, because so much of it was so good and thoughtful!

Sordidez was a fascinating and incisive exploration of colonialism in a near-future Yucatán and Puerto Rico, as well as a push for collective resistance against it. Condé, who identifies as a queer diasporic Boricua writer, is one of the creators of a genre known as “Taínofuturism,” which “imagines a future of Indigenous renewal and decolonial liberation for Borikén (Puerto Rico) and the archipelagos of the Caribbean),” and this novella very much situates itself in the genre in the way it uplifts the identities, histories, and cultures of this region. Furthermore, Sordidez shows how issues are deeply interlocked as a result of colonialism, one of which is climate crises. Relatedly, there were some great critiques of countries and organizations (notably, the United Nations). Another thing I greatly enjoyed was the inclusion of a Deaf character and how sign language was incorporated into the dialogue.

With that said, as much as I really enjoyed the concepts and themes of this novella, I had a lot of trouble with the prose. This is absolutely a me problem and not a critique of Condé’s writing style by any means, and I couldn’t really tell you why it just didn’t work. In addition, I really wish this novella could have been an actual novel, especially considering how many incredible ideas there were that could have been explored more in-depth.

Ultimately, though, this novella was a great introduction to the Taínofuturism genre that I’d love to read more of. It’s also a great addition to the growing list of speculative fiction centering Indigenous voices.

goodreads

Vero has always felt at odds with his community. As a trans man in near-future Puerto Rico, he struggles to gain acceptance for his identity and his vision of an inclusive society. After a hurricane decimates the island and Puerto Rico is abandoned by the United States, Vero leaves his home to petition the centralized government for aid and seek the truth about new colonists arriving on the island. But in the Yucatan, Vero finds a landscape ravaged by an ecological disaster of humanity’s own making—the Hydrophage, a climate technology warped into a weapon of war and released onto the land by the dictator Caudillo. Amidst the destruction, Vero finds both desperation and hope for regrowth as he documents the lives of the survivors. Details about the colonists’ intentions emerge when Vero meets the Loba Roja, an anti-Caudillo revolutionary who imagines the renewed power of the Maya. Intrigued by her vision of the future and her unapologetic violence, Vero is faced with life-changing questions: can an Indigenous resurgence protect his beloved island? And what must he sacrifice to support it?