Notice: your host got a press copy of this book from Archipelago earlier this year.
Hebe Uhart: A Question of Belonging, translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner, Introduced by Mariana Enriquez. Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2024 [2020].
It's time for a short notice on a translated collection from Archipelago that's now in the bookstores: a selection of crónicas by Hebe Uhart, translated by Anna Vilner.
Born in Moreno, Argentina, in 1936, and having published novels, stories, and crónicas since the early 1960s, Hebe Uhart did not receive wide recognition for her work till the last decade of her life. Archipelago also has a collection of her short stories on their list, published in 2019, the year after her death.
We've spent a letter on the crónica format before. We said there that these short texts — newspaper column-length — can be more ephemeral in their content. Uhart’s own work takes the form in the direction of travelogue and light social comment.
Uhart’s crónicas have a compelling voice that would serve well in a short story. The speaker isn’t concerned with coming off as naive, or judgmental. Take for instance this matter-of-fact line from the opening piece, a reminiscence of an alcoholic boyfriend. “I didn't think that alcoholism was a sickness — I believed he would be able to stop drinking once he decided to.”
A later piece on psychoanalysis, called “My Time on the Divan,” has another blunt passage.
One woman said that I seemed "God forsaken" to her. Later on I mentioned this to a friend who looked at me with intense sympathy. But the phrase hadn't left much of an impression on me — maybe because I thought God hadn't helped her out either. She was a secretary and pined after her boss, who would come and go as he pleased while she wondered whether he was really in love with her. I've never been fond of women who fall in love with their bosses.
Uhart was a primary and secondary school teacher for some time. She discloses the details through a comparison with a Bolivian teacher she meets while travelling in that country with a friend, in a piece called “A Trip to La Paz.” These lines partially reveal her own social background.
Both us were teachers (I was just starting out), but while she lived off her poor salary, I spent mine on travel and buying whatever bullshit caught my eye. I didn't plan on being a teacher for the rest of my life, and, what's more, I taught at a school that had everything paid for by the government. I didn't want to improve anything at my school; I'd rather have burned it to the ground because the principal had it in for me. The way she hounded me was unbearable: she'd scolded me twice already for putting my briefcase on the desk. This woman, on the other hand, requested that the authorities send her maps, books, benches, and milk for her students.
One crónica, called “Good Manners,” was as simple as an encounter with an older woman on the bus, who doesn’t reciprocate a small remark by the author about “good manners”:
Her silence made me feel like I was six or seven years old again, playing with a nutty girl I knew: every time I went to do something — swing in the hammock or take off running — the girl would stomp her foot angrily and say "No!". It made me feel like I was perpetually in the wrong. I no longer felt thrashed, like a wind-beaten plant, by that uncomfortable feeling. I had built up my defenses.
A Question of Belonging wouldn't be a bad recommendation for readers who want something philosophical without being overtly a book of 'ideas.' Uhart has an effortless way of pulling certain implications out of a simple digression, like the transfer of property among families with different ideologies (given Argentina's political history). From a crónica called “Inheritance”:
In houses full of folders from bygone days, the ancestors are present: they talk to each other, folder to folder, handkerchief to the doll on the bed. Certain ideologies are inherited as well. Some families are radicals, Peronists, others are communists. As much as they might deny the ideologies of their ancestors, many will inherit their customs and tastes.
Those customs and tastes, for the descendants of Communist families, includes keeping a lot of old books around.
Most of the crónicas contain travels through Latin America, but especially the rural areas of Argentina and its Buenos Aires province. She visits villages and small towns, sketches the locals, takes quotations. A digression can lead seamlessly to reflections on the town and country divide, for example, like in the piece “Not Meant to Be”:
For someone who's got a lot of excuses, needs, and demands, you use the refrain: "He's got a lot of fine print." Referring to the fine print that appears at the end of contracts, the saying shows how the city permeates the country and vice versa. This fluid interplay between city and country can be found in Fray Mocho's writings. A typical character of his is the rancher who, after becoming rich, moves to the nearest city — to Buenos Aires, if he has the chance — without losing his criollo speech, mannerisms, and metaphors, which tend to be clever and accurate.
Uhart did indeed study philosophy, and one classical reference comes in an unexpected context: a description of a bathroom in a bar in Almagro, Spain.
The bathroom itself is a subhuman bachelor pad. It reminds me of what Empedocles once said: “Fish live in a monad where not a ray of intelligence shines in.”
Speaking of monads, she writes elsewhere of locating the center of whatever city she visits, since the native urban dwellers invariably make centers of themselves. There’s a lot of interesting thoughts in these crónicas, though the whole collection did not end up resonating so much.