Literary Populism Is Here

Tony Christini on Tamara Pearson's Radical Work

Dear Republic,

As Forrest Gumps’s mother told him when he was trying to found a crowd-sourced literary magazine, “Life is like a box of chocolates, Forrest, you never know what you’re going to get.” And, so far, I’ve found that to be true. Every piece here — stylistically, politically — is different from every other piece, and probably none more so than Tony Christini’s maximalist, at-the-top-of-one’s-lungs, impassioned essay, part of the “Best Thing You Read This Year” series, on a ferocious novel unlikely to show up in The New York Times Review of Books.

-ROL

LITERARY POPULISM IS HERE

I

Oh, shit — perhaps the finest word in the language, according to Victor Hugo — Tamara Pearson is going to take you where she has worked most of her adult life, into the streets of Latin America and where “the other half” live, in her second novel in a decade, The Eyes of the Earth (Tehom Center, November 2024). Pearson's focus, her supra-Earthy hero, is La Tortuga, an old soul, homeless refugee from Honduras, who walks to Mexico in her eighth decade. The novel opens:

People could see Clementina Cardoza Olmedo, but they didn’t register that she was there. Known as La Tortuga, she was seventy-three years old, four foot ten, with two thin, white and grey plaits that descended calmly down her back. She was wearing dark grey pants with one leg folded up more than the other, and a white shirt. Her belt buckle was off-centre, and one of her draw-string backpack straps had scrunched up the top of one sleeve. She had no frills. She wasn’t a show.

She's like the novel. La Tortuga cuts her feet to shreds walking from Honduras to Puebla, Mexico. She then travels by bus to nearby Mexico City looking for a decent place to sleep, to survive, to be free from abuse and misery and terror, and who knows if she might start a revolution, maybe kill for revolution in the killer systems of Empire. It's complex. She's complex — the novel is complex — La Tortuga is so very much of the human condition, all in one. She carries the essence of the novel in her character, her experiences, her travels, her possessions. Her goal — to find secure sleep — is the heart of the story — a bed, a room of her own. And where she might ultimately find that room and bed to sleep, so be it, so she must go.

La Tortuga’s bag dug into her shoulders, as she remained still. The drawstring backpack had kicked at her lower back like a child wanting to be put down as she had walked to Mexico. It was a freebie bag, black, with a Nike logo in the centre. In it was an empty plastic water bottle, a pillow cover, a multi-screwdriver, a pair of pliers, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a blue pen, a plastic comb, one spare pair of underpants, needle and thread, a half-used bar of soap in a plastic bag and a card wallet with Honduran ID, 125 Mexican pesos, and photos of her children and grandchildren. Nothing for hurting people.

Clementina Cardoza Olmedo, a skilled survivor, strong to her core, a fixer, not a breaker, would be the last person on earth to hurt people, though who could blame her — given the right catalyst — kicked about her whole life — her whole life kicked about — by those whom she might call to account, if she could, all four foot ten of her 73 years.

Each sentence-breath by which the story is told is more lively than elegant, more raw of intent than gleaming of end, though not infrequently transported and transporting.

La Tortuga got on with it. She took her broken feet up the stairs of Pino Suárez station and entered into the broken city. Or really, it fell over her. Flooded her with the force of twenty-three million people and all their chatter and chores. The full, almost-midday light shocked her, and she was instantly engulfed by the city’s traffic stress, high-pitched routine, metallic horn notes. Straight away, she took on the Mexico City face of worry and defensiveness, but with warmth just below the surface — saved for those moments when one was off the street and laughing with friends or family. She wanted to get to the Zócalo; the square-shaped heart of the city and focal point of protests and celebrations.

It's not the most polished prose you will ever read — it's La Tortuga-like. The prose births through its cracked shells new meaning into its raw world like fledglings scrambling out of the egg to where they might be killed at any moment or survive and thrive in the harsh and glorious wonder that is creation. Pearson centers the invisibles among us as the visibles in the novel. For the people and moments the Empire would disappear, distort, or deny, this is their book, their world, their time — the people of the South, so to speak, as contrasted with the people of the North, but also of the people of the South in the North. Meanwhile, Pearson fillets a young American tourist, Henry Devin, who demonstrates the massive brain fog of those conditioned by Empire in his problematic interactions with Clementina Cardoza Olemedo and the South.

La Tortuga worries and wanders her way through the endless city into a “Humanity Parade” in the Zócalo — the ancient Aztec ceremonial center full of brilliant floats of the annual parade and throngs of people enchanted by creaturely manifestations of their own essence, their alebrije. The magical realism of the novel both livens and deepens the weft, waft, warp of the story.

Almost every person had an alebrije, though few knew it. Alebrijes were the colours and shapes of each person’s unique soul; their struggles, ideas, hopes, learnings, intentions, creations, and mistakes. An alebrije was the changing body of a person’s inner magic.

A few people didn’t have alebrijes. They were the people who destroyed. They broke worlds. They had sold their humanity to the highest bidder, dismantling forests, undoing people, handing out fear in slick, affordable packages, stealing seeds, and shattering care systems and communities. They weren’t easy to spot though, except by their empty eyes.

They were the beasts that made up the System of Monsters. The Monsters of plutocracy who spawn like never before.

And what is the alebrije essence of La Tortuga?:

...a butterfly-turtle. It was pebble size. Easy to lose and easy to step on.

Poor wondrous La Tortuga. As a reader, if you want your heart broken and swelled beyond imagining, that's what you get when your writer is an empath.

II

One could pull back at any moment and clinically assess the novel from the seemingly distant lands of literary traditions, trends, and fashion, also publishing opportunities and constraints, along with social and formalist perspectives, but that this novel is worth conveying more or less direct, via block quote, is its own form of revealing assessment. You want to talk magical realism, high Victorian manner, modernist and postmodernist flourishes, you can talk that and more — as it all leads to the literary populism of this novel. Or you can see the thing itself laid out here as a feast of pastiche, a banquet of the novel's own words, where all are invited to eat everything, the whole table of goods, the entire overflowing appeal of and to the human condition, all genres and literary eras manifest direct to the senses.

This is a descriptive novel. And as a descriptive novel, what better in a review than to let it describe and thereby reveal itself? Contemporary fiction — imaginative writing or storytelling — in its most popular long forms now, as feature movies and especially TV series, is typically driven by story engines — such as intensifying conflict, dramatic questions, deepest fears and desires, and stimulating paradox — and lives in the two-eye nature of story as the hero pursues their goal while the author pursues their themes. These basic compelling story forces are typically run on paths of compelling causal (rather than episodic) plot — very Aristotelian, very powerful. It seems many literary authors do not know to employ these central storytelling techniques or do not especially care to do so. Fair enough — to each their own — though the popular is eschewed at a cost.

On the other hand, especially in this age of the instantaneous story of handheld interactive computer, camera, and video screens, it may be that the academic institutions, the MFA creative writing programs and, curiously, even film studies programs would do well to imbibe more of the precise powerful craft tools from the writing mavens of the longstanding epicenter of professional storytelling — the place where the biggest bucks have been poured into figuring shit out — “Hollywood.” A little of that can go a long way, for both better and worse. A lot of storytelling knowledge can move every which way between native, classic, and the contemporary professional types of story creation. Pearson deploys a little of everything to good effect, including more of the classic/contemporary techniques in The Eyes of The Earth than in her even more descriptive catalogue of a first novel, The Butterfly Prison. As La Tortuga holds fast to her story goal, Pearson latches on to her thematic goals of elevating the least among us while critiquing and eviscerating Empire. In so doing, The Eyes of the Earth remains a descriptive novel first and foremost, if much less so than The Butterfly Prison. It’s realism and romance and magical realism mixed with little dynamic dialogue, minimal story engine suspense or rush, and not much more than a skeleton but a strong skeleton of causal plot — not an unfamiliar literary type but unusually lively and profoundly rendered here. Description is the mode — of history, moments, things — of evaluations of the social and the sensory, of the imagination and the intellect, of emotions and flesh and blood rippling through life-and death actions and events.

Plot and dialogue as expressive dynamos take a back seat in The Eyes of the Earth — just as the title might indicate. And yet the story, all stories, must move, and this one is always moving as if in the activity of a forest floor, the oft-invisible constituents breathing, gasping, thriving with the full breath of a keen and caring observer. The fascination of feeling and thought and the author's empathy is with the floor of society, as against the Monsters of the high trees. And so the novel expresses itself in a bustling, if quiet, lively if grave, light. This is a literary novel that is worth the care of considering for those who care about the plight of all people, plants, and beings especially where life is life-or-death. This is our day and our age, our times, from what is called the “below.”

Different books are suited to different types of reviews. This novel is suited to extensive quotation, partly because of the style, explanatory and descriptive, but mainly because of the content which is dire and yearning and societally marginalized, distorted, or worse. Tamara Pearson writes novels from the revolutionary edge of civilization and from the trampled realms of the populace. So back to collage review, soon, after first a bit of lit history.

The Eyes of the Earth is a literary “secretion of civilization” against the ravages of that ostensible “civilization” — a combination and extraction of what might be considered a thread of liberatory lit, for example that runs through Victor Hugo's The Last Day of a Condemned Man and Les Misérables, Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murad, Claude McKay's Banjo, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and “Yellow Woman,” Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow, and André Vltchek's Aurora. The Eyes of the Earth also harkens to the deft novel of aspiration The End Of My Career by Tamara Pearson's renowned countrywoman of origin, Stella “Miles” Franklin. The Eyes of the Earth is the most recent example of a type of liberatory tendency in what might be called literary populism. Its tendency is flexible — allowing more than a few especially "liberal" and "multicultural" writers to weigh into it in both obvious and non-obvious ways stretching explicitly back to the Enlightenment and from there forward and back to the beginnings of literary and artistic time.

III

And so: on with the story. Very early in The Eyes of the Earth, Clementina Cardoza Olmedo, in her scramble to survive and to find a place to sleep, meets the camera lens of a startled young hostel-bunked American anglo tourist, Harry Devin, all 22 milquetoast years of him. He speaks to her through a translator app on his smartphone. At which point you begin to feel how things might go between the two of them, that is, to fall apart — things not remotely wholly put together in the first place.

Harry has good shoes, La Tortuga thinks of his “unusual” white hiking boots. Harry is a walker, a hiker, like her. He knows places to sleep, all the hostels. He has an app for that! The app, the hostels, Harry's knowledge, it turns out to be entirely useless to La Tortuga, though she's always willing to learn. She tries his way, briefly, but no place to sleep is accessible for only a few pesos.

Fortunately, our hero has plenty of DIY skills hard-earned in Tegucigalpa. She can fix things to survive. So, American tourist Harry having failed her, for 58 of her 125 pesos she buys materials and makes a sign: “Can fix anything. 10-50 pesos.” If she can save up enough money, she can sleep in a bed. Clueless Harry pays her with a loaf of bread for a first item fix, instead of money, at which point Tortuga sets him straight.

In the evening and morning the walls and furnishings of Harry's hostel talk to him and try to get him to hear and then listen to a people's critique of his life philosophy:

‘Your brand of freedom means being unrestrained by the impact of your actions. You happen to the world, but things happen to us,' murmured the walls. And Harry heard them this time, because he had wanted to. His first reaction was that it was not his problem. But that did not make him feel right. The holes in him yawned. Bile stewed in his throat.

And the walls shivered. The bed sheets writhed. And the bricks shrugged knowingly.

What kind of authorial, human sensibility is Pearson's that centers the desperate plight and resourcefulness of an elderly woman refugee, and particular other migrants and refugees from the "South," in contrast to the relative cluelessness of a young anglo from the "North," and the "Monsters" of society who rule? It's the empathic sentience of someone who knows intimately all the terrains and has lived for decades in multiple worlds, who works with a migrant shelter, and as an investigative journalist, and who has otherwise lived and worked on the floor with the people for many years.

Tamara Pearson wrote a novel against the Monsters and of the People, and if you want to learn something about the world and the human condition, the place to begin, as well as the place for advanced studies, is in a close and sun-dappled look at the forest floor as seen through the eyes of the people, amid the rending actions and the cohering incoherent events. Tamara Pearson and the novel she wrought from the extraordinary and basic materials and energies of our deadly and lively world help us become more fully human. This is the stuff, the promise, the potential, and the fact-of-the-matter quality of liberatory lit and literary populism for our all-too terminal times, and for all time.

Could this review end here? It could, not even having traversed much into the full story of the novel. But then you would get too little of the feast of love and too little of the scald of outrage that is The Eyes of the Earth. You would be cast out too quickly from the vital world. So the thing that is to be done is see Clementina Cardozo Olmedo further through to getting a bed, and thereby a chance to sleep, to revolutionize and renew herself for these days of our lives, of which this novel is far more revealing than a novel might seem it could be — far more contemporary and timeless than the vast majority of contemporary novels come close to — constrained as they are by the ideology of the owners of Empire, and the publishers and producers of the capitalist order.

IV

What makes such a story important, apart from the obvious? Tamara Pearson notes at ZNet’s seminar “Resisting Empire And Injustice With Fiction And Stories,” in an intense talk on the value of imaginative story:

Our heads and our hearts need to understand what we are going through. And we need new symbols and narratives and words and heroes to counter those that are used by the destructive system of capitalism and empire, racism, sexism, deliberately manufactured poverty, climate destruction. We need the inspiration that fiction provides as it manages to imagine what we sometimes cannot when we're inundated by consumerism, misinformation, violence, and stress, and exhaustion....

Crises and suffering and deliberate billionaire-made catastrophes can turn us inward. People are more prone to self-absorption in times of misery or hardship, but books, novels, and stories can take us and our imagination beyond all that, remind us of the big world that we are part of. Fiction develops imagination which strengthens our critical thought and the nurturing of possibilities. Stories can disturb the false harmonies of violent economies, rock with soft persistence the punctuated arc of rigged elitism and celebrated plunder.

The way a new and gentle world is born will be ... through intricate construction and imagination ... fiction has the unique power to crumble certainties of the apparent infallible nature of empire and invasions, where economic systems revolve around ridiculous and harmful levels of consumerism. It's hard work to go beyond all that but fiction can. And we need to be in that state of mind to embrace the task of creating a better future.... Read bold fearless writing that stands up to the status quo and that the capitalist publishing industry overlooks. Read excluded people because they really get it, and their perspective is vital and their insights intelligent and real. And strike, speak up, organize because that's how you go on and where you get hope.

Tamara Pearson

Or go on and vote again for a new Con Don Trump or a Genocide Joe Biden rather than for popular progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who actually put human rights, including democracy, as their focus for the most part, at least far beyond the establishment figures whom they so often fight. This is their literature and their world, and ours, it should be. The other world is the world of the Monsters. And that's the reality when you cut the crap and actually say something, as Tamara Pearson does in every form.

This tattered novel is a wealth. This is a searing literary novel that like any good novel will stop you and make you think — see and feel, unknow and know and liberate your mind, your heart. This is a wonderful great novel. Anyone who tries to judge this story as a realist novel is a fool. Anyone who doesn't see the massive amount of realism in this novel is a fool. In a sane, fair, and honest world, Tamara Pearson would be nominated for and win the Nobel Prize in Literature on the basis of this single novel alone. Unfortunately we live in a world so preposterous that the great liberatory author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has not yet won the Nobel.

Let's say the most outrageous things about this novel that may actually be true. The greatest novel since Les Misérables. A serious contender at the least. The greatest novel likely not to be reviewed by legacy media. Or, if upon exceptional occurrence to be reviewed by it — probably badly. The novel captures, expresses, and reveals the contemporary world better than any other novel. It’s the Les Misérables of Mexico City. And Empire. And Earth. The ultimate novel of witness.

Tamara Pearson has lived the life, and her writing shows the effects of much of it. Some clunky jarring sentences and phrases combine with astoundingly spectacular ones. Acres of description. Seemingly 50 percent adjectives. Hyper empathy.

The land rapists had claws for hands, for their indelicate robbery. An excess of smugness oozed from their pores as pungent sweat, and they had two eyes that didn’t work, then a third eye on the tip of their tongue that did work, so that they could see what they devoured, but not the people and land around them.

The land rapists held special and secret video calls with the pain exploiters. They met in conference rooms of upscale museums and exchanged tips and ideas over tables with flower centrepieces and ornamental plates of sashimi and miniature tarts. They brainstormed ways to take away people essence and land essence. The land rapists refined ways to level jungles and mountains and leave behind landbones. They eliminated shade and eradicated refuge from the bare burning sun. They let the land sink into fever, nausea, vomiting, and a chronic migraine. The land choked and someone named the degenerative illness ‘climate change.’

Through this world, La Tortuga must fight for a bed to sleep in, safe from the predation of the pillagers who meet to plan their profiteering and horrors, to prey:

The time had come for the beasts of the System of Monsters to hold their exclusive meeting. The people squashers, wing pluckers, blood suckers, Ophicordyceps beasts, rubbish ranters, pain exploiters, and land rapists arrived at Davos in private jets. They were joined by the racketeer kings that ran the banks, the soul stealers who trafficked in humans, the producers of efficient death machines who induced wars in order to sell arms, and the slow poisoners who sold junk food and junk drinks. The fossil fuel and oil beasts were the second last ones to arrive. Their tyre bodies slushed about with petroleum, obscuring their suits, and noxious gases billowed from their mouths when they spoke.

La Tortuga presses on:

Heroism percolated slowly. It gained momentum over decades. In La Tortuga, with each act of integrity, each hard decision and moment of generosity, neuronal changes occurred within her, and she gradually metamorphosed into someone very strong and capable. But on the outside, her eyelids were thin and falling, her legs were swollen, and her bones were losing calcium and becoming more and more brittle.

Her every step, every decision, every action seems heroic — maybe because in no small way it is:

Her long life had taught her not to try to achieve everything at once. And that there was no pause to the problems. Expect them, solve the most urgent one, deal with the next. She had developed a stubbornness and perseverance that were part of surviving. She called it Grit Mode. Emotions off, focused ahead like the car that had passed, its headlights strong in the darkness. She summoned Grit Mode and her alebrije acknowledged the call and dulled its colours and perked up its ear-wings, flooding their pink veins with a strict radiance. It activated selective listening and sight, where only the most necessary things were observed, then fed off its tall shell of things understood. La Tortuga would mobilise her learnings from all the horrid experiences over the course of her life, in order to find a way out of the cold.

As it turns out Clementina Cardoza Olmedo is not going where she thinks she is but exactly where her will takes her, and where it might take us all if we had heart and sense more than a fraction as great as that of La Tortuga and Tamara Pearson in her novel world, too much our own, The Eyes of the Earth. This is no novel of mere grinding, vision-less complaint so hopeless that the establishment and the lapdogs of Empire and suit-and-tied potted plants can comfortably embrace. It’s a novel of condemnation and revolution and wonder as found and imagined in the brilliance and despair of our mind-bending and heart-rending day. And the world should know it.

It's all populism now — the fake and right-wing populism of the Trumpists and the Republicans and the establishment Democrats, and the nearly victorious progressive populism of Bernie and the “Squad,” the chaotic populism of Luigi Mangione and Thomas Crooks. Socialist, anarchist, and revolutionary populists are rising as well. And so now we should expect, and we have here in this novel in great progressive and revolutionary content and form, literary populism, leading its age and its time when so much else is not. A concerted push currently could renew history and remake the world. The only limits are the bounds of consciousness, the conditions of society, and the unbounded nature of the imagination from where the human novel arises — to live and work, to play and fight, to seek and make a good home — and at night a good place to sleep.

We could all do worse than to read and write and live toward that — toward a better bed than the one humanity has now.

Tony Christini is the author of multiple novels: Empire All In, Homefront, Loop Day, Most Revolutionary, Ganoga, Canocanayesatetlo, Youthtopia; and criticism: Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel; and co-editor of the Liberation Lit anthology. Liberation Lit Substack.