Book Review
The Rebellion of the Hanged
I’ve read B. Traven’s Wikipedia page many times. Even Elena Ferrante didn’t try to keep her native language secret:
B. Traven … was the pen name of a presumably German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. …The author always claimed that the English [books] were the original ones and that the German versions were only their translations. This claim is not taken seriously.
Many years ago, I read Traven’s “The Bridge in the Jungle.” It’s a book entirely about the logistical details of planning a funeral for a Mexican Indian boy: recovering the body, choosing the music, finding someone to give the eulogy. It uses event planning to paint a picture of Mexican Indian culture in flux in the 20s, changing awkwardly in response to the new government and American media.
It’s the main reason I’m reading this book. “The Rebellion of the Hanged” is also about Mexican Indians in the early 20th century, but it wants you to know it’s not quiet observation. This book wants to be more like “Breaking Bad” or “Django Unchained,” a revenge fantasy about people pushed too far.
In the first third, we meet a native Mexican farmer. His wife is sick. The town doctor says that he must pay an exorbitant sum, in cash, within hours, or she will die. He sells himself into indentured servitude in a mahogany lumber camp. The wife dies anyway. He meets corrupt police and sadistic Spanish landowners. When workers don’t meet their lumber quota, they are hung upside-down in the jungle overnight while the insects feed on their skin.
In the back two-thirds, the Indians reach the limit of what they can stand. Communist revolutionaries in the lumber camp explain to them that this is Capitalism oppressing them. They must fight for liberty and take back their land. And fight back they do:
Blood began to gush from the sockets of [his] eyes. He bent his head back so that the blood should not run into his mouth, muttering: “Most Holy Mother! Mother of our Lord!”
This is a bloody, violent book. I spent a lot of time trying to tease out how Traven feels about that violence.
One worker kills a foreman, than kills himself in grief and despair. Violence begets more violence. Workers are assigned roles in a ad hoc revolutionary army. The commanding officers shout insults at their infantry, driving them on a grueling march through the jungle. The book ends with no conceivable ending where the farmers will be able to return home, only a future of more fighting.
My interpretation is that Traven doesn’t have good solutions, and is uninterested in exploring them. He only wants to observe how political systems fail his characters. He’s a humanist and political fatalist: both Capitalism and Communism ultimately become tools for exploiting the powerless. Government doesn’t work out well for anyone.
