Season of the Swamp – Yuri Herrera

[Graywolf Press; 2024]

Tr. from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman

It’s 1853, winter. We arrive in New Orleans. It’s “beautiful here, and it [isn’t].” It’s a “swamp utopia.” It’s a place where “there [is] no simple, coherent, communicable tale to tell.” Here, a compass is the most treasured object a person can find—if they can hold onto it. Here, a mosquito bite is a death sentence, and corpses lay rotting alongside the living. Here, music is alive and renews itself each time it’s played. Homes are built out of abandoned ships. Conspiracy is a form of friendship. Captured humans are bought and sold, and just as many find new ways to escape.  

This is Yuri Herrera’s novel Season of the Swamp, a speculative history born out of a brief note in Benito Juárez’s autobiography about his exile and subsequent travel to New Orleans. Juárez, the twenty-sixth president of Mexico and the first democratically elected Indigenous president in the postcolonial Americas, has been an often mythologized figure. While historians have noted the time Juárez spent in New Orleans while living in exile, there is little information in the archives about how the politician’s ideas might have been shaped during this period or how he was personally transformed by the experience. Season of the Swamp imagines Juárez’s nearly eighteen months as a migrant. Through his eyes, the novel conjures up a city of contradictions—a place where antipodes become allies.

Patience is key to the fictional Juárez’s stay in New Orleans. His recollections at the outset become the basis of the novel’s narrative: “His reception on disembarking from the packet boat had been a foretaste of all that was to come: waiting and waiting and not knowing words and not being seen and learning the secret names of things.” This is a novel about patience; this is a patiently told story, and this is a patient narrator who will wait for the exact right time to reveal what he knows. As Herrera has said before, “style is a form of knowledge” and “writing is about underscoring certain aspects of the world that appear to be new.” Herrera’s fiction illustrates a historically imaginative form of knowledge that reveals the details we would not otherwise see without his careful sifting.

Brief diversions from the primary narrative threads are a major driving force in Juárez’s story. When he disembarks in New Orleans, he fails to remember the name of the hotel where he is supposed to meet his fellow exiles. Instead, he finds himself at one of the many other seedy lodgings for itinerant workers. Unexpected encounters land him a job in a printshop where he learns that some people feel no moral qualms in printing and distributing notices for rewards upon the capture of enslaved people. The printer tells him that he is only following the law, and that anyway, an enslaved person can only be truly free after a series of bureaucratic tasks and their departure from Louisiana entirely. Juárez wonders to himself, “Are the ones who are in fact freer not those who ask no permission?” Taking matters into his own hands propels him to find the other exiles and plot their return and revolt. It’s from this radical philosophy that Juárez creates a space for himself within this teeming city and realizes that he must return home—not to the new comforts he has carved out for himself in exile, but to his family and to the project of a new system of governance for Mexico.

I can’t help but feel something cataclysmic taking place as I read Herrera’s writing. This concise novel produces a lingering sensation like an echo after an unexpected shout. It’s like hearing someone call out to me, and I am always there in the place with them from where they have called out to me. It’s not just that this novel feels familiar, it’s that the miracles and decay that it fashions—seemingly out of thin air, or the words left unwritten in Juárez’s account—arrive in an eternally present form. There is nothing to assure us of the truth in what we read, but together we can find the words that express the way we are continually transformed by its absence.

Herrera’s novel was originally published in 2022 and comes to us now through a translation from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman, who has translated the author’s previous novels and stories as well. Dillman’s translation amplifies Juárez’s internal dialogue in a novel where the city of New Orleans has its own prominent voice alongside the voices of the other characters. The many historical events taking place and the city’s own multicultural atmosphere initially erupt into a cacophony, but soon form a rich chorus in prose that refuses to flatten New Orleans into a mere setting. The city speaks loudly through this novel and via multiple channels, but it does not overwhelm the narrative or prevent it from maintaining the momentum necessary to make its claims.

At times, the novel risks slipping into sentimental metaphorization. Instead of characterizing the specificity of gestures exchanged between characters, Herrera ironically describes them as “universal signs.” Towards the end, Juárez begins to “look forward” from a departing ship. These moments may be emphatic, but they are momentarily too vague in a setting that is otherwise richly detailed by Herrera’s imagination. What the novel loses in these moments, Herrera’s speculative history gains back with carefully positioned pauses. Rather than produce confusion, emphatic lines of dialogue and series of fragmented interactions between Juárez and the people and animals he meets throughout New Orleans produce valuable moments of clarity. 

Herrera, a political scientist turned fiction writer, has long been concerned with the political potential of literature and the cultural topography of Ciudad Juárez. He spent years living in Texas on the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso border, whose constantly evolving blend of languages, political views, identities, and everyday behaviors now reflects itself in the cultural shapeshifting of his fiction. After all, Herrera’s background in political science has attuned him to questions of governance. In Season of the Swamp, characters are described as speaking in French, “but kind of bettered somehow, as if it had been unhitched from the dictionary and gone out for a stroll.” This new kind of French—mixed with words and phrases from both the African diaspora and indigenous American cultures as well as Spanish and English illustrates the way that language, like the people who wield it, must change in order to survive. This linguistic progress is not restricted to the shape of the words but also their political implications. A person’s choice of words names their commitments. Herrera’s writing illustrates how a kind of ethical orientation grows out of his characters’ everyday encounters with systems of power, culminating in a story about the responsibilities that individuals maintain toward each other. 

At the same time as it generates an original perspective on missing knowledge, Season of the Swamp extends the long tradition of exile literature written by refugees forced out of their homelands. Literature of exile expresses the catastrophe of self-imposed or state-inflicted displacement and the peripheral observations of a person not quite immersed in any one place at a time. This combination of in-betweenness and fictional experimentation allows Herrera’s novel to do something that perhaps other exile literature cannot, or will not: It does not seek to corroborate historical truth with documentary evidence. Instead, this novel illustrates the slippery quality of historical truth, exposing the fact that official records do not have an inherent capacity to reveal knowledge; rather, it’s we as readers of this material that endow it with the power to provide a magic window into the past.

Season of the Swamp asks a more straightforward set of questions than whether or not we can access the past through documentation—and for this reason, an almost entirely unanswerable set of questions: How did Benito Juárez experience his exile? How did the things that he saw, and the events he took part in, make him feel? What did he think about in the months that he was away from his family and the people he governed? How did the experience of exile affect him personally and, in turn, as a politician? Herrera’s novel conjures the past from its hiding spot in plain sight. What appears absent is in fact there, somewhere—only it requires the work of a skilled author to coax it to life.

Lora Maslenitsyna is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD in Film and Media Studies and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University.