The Singer's Needle: An Undisciplined History of Panamá

By Ezer Vierba

The Singer’s Needle offers a bold new approach to the history of twentieth-century Panamá, one that illuminates the nature of power and politics in a small and complex nation. Using novelistic techniques, Vierba explores three crucial episodes in the shaping and erosion of contemporary Panamanian institutions: the establishment of a penal colony on the island of Coiba in 1919, the judicial drama following the murder of President José Antonio Remón Cantera in 1955, and the “disappearance” of a radical priest in 1971. Skillfully blending historical sociology with novelistic narrative and extensive empirical research, and drawing on the works of Michel Foucault among others, Vierba shows the links between power, interpretation, and representation. The result is a book that deftly reshapes conventional methods of historical writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226342597

Book preview

The Singer’s Needle

The Singer’s Needle

An Undisciplined History of Panamá

Ezer Vierba

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-34231-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-34245-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-34259-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226342597.001.0001

This book is a palimpsest of fiction, nonfiction, and other kinds of writing. Any resemblance of fictional characters to real people with similar names is coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vierba, Ezer, author.

Title: The singer’s needle : an undisciplined history of Panamá / Ezer Vierba.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020020733 | ISBN 9780226342313 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226342450 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226342597 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Panama—History. | Panama—Politics and government.

Classification: LCC F1566 .V54 2021 | DDC 972.87—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020733

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Editor’s Preface

Part I : Coiba

An Introduction to the Panamanian Subject

1. Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty:

Porras and the Liberal Reforms, 1912–1924

2. Punishment and Subject Formation

3. The Singer’s Report:

Text and Critique in Coiba, 1920–1935

Part II : Theaters of Authority

4. The Remonato, a Hybrid State: 1947–1955

5. Trials of Authority:

Legal Consciousness and Formal Struggles in the Postwar Era

Part III : On the Way to Chumumbito

6. Héctor’s Hermeneutics:

Radical Readings and Christian Liberation in Santa Fe de Veraguas, 1968–1971

Acknowledgments

Footnotes

Bibliography

Editor’s Preface

In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.

Walter Benjamin

La interpretación de nuestra realidad con esquemas ajenos sólo contribuye a hacernos cada vez más desconocidos, cada vez menos libres, cada vez más solitarios.

Gabriel García Márquez

I. In the Field Again

Three days before Carnival, a happy belly-sticking-out friend of a friend showed me a decaying stack of papers that looked like it had been left underground for half an eternity. It was at the time of year when the weather in Panamá is still tolerable, but the room was so warm and humid that it felt like we were floating in some liquid. Now, I am not one for nonsense. I like things to be neat and organized, and I had to resist the instinct to leave that warm amniotic chamber whose floor was covered with decaying shreds of paper. The pile reminded me of an image of an embalmed baby I had once seen in an old National Geographic, a being sealed before life and after it. An old clock of the type you presumably see in northern Europe hung on the wall, a bit tilted, making an odd sound. I imagined that someone had shot it during some coup, but I was later told it worked on occasion. Distracted, I tucked my wings in, put on a pair of latex gloves, and then took the stack of papers into my hands.

A few months later, having decided to translate and edit the work, I made an effort to locate its author. The trouble was that there were no clear marks of identity left in the text that did not clash, at the same time, with other signs that contradicted them. I quickly found out that the text deals with the historical past and is based on archival material, but the author never indicated where the material had come from. Whereas in most scholarly works, the narrator is a kind of ghostlike stand-in for the real, sentient author, I saw that here, each narrator was a fully formed character. At first glance, it seemed to me as though Tali Del Valle, who conducts the interviews in the text and is the voice behind the last chapter, was a kind of stand-in for the author. Then it became clear to me that she is a fictional character like the others, and that her voice, as well as her occasional edits and notes on other characters’ work, is simply another layer of this text. An odd experiment. Suddenly, I realized that my footnotes—and indeed, this preface—rather than clarifying everything, securing the meanings in this text, ended up adding yet another textual layer: one that the wise reader will approach with some caution. I had thought I would have the ultimate word here, if only as the translator and editor of the work, but now I realized I had been played. Then I recognized the negative image of my soul in the eccentric writer behind this text: a mystical spirit for my classificatory impulse, an elusive anonymity for my naming-craving footnoted anxiety. I speak clearly, with straight-shooting theses, and I begin to sense this author somewhere around me . . . the Panamanian language games, reversed words, severed phrases sworded by double, triple ironies, spreading angular arguments, refracting through the damp morning smog.

This was not the first time an author writing about Panamá had done so anonymously, and there were various examples in Panamá of texts that mixed history and fiction. (One journalist complained to me that people were citing fictional accounts as though they were real.)¹ Truly, in this country, they do not have a very good sense of organization. It is quite odd, really, because on the one hand Panamanians love formalities, honorary titles, signed declarations, and so forth. But on the other hand, the most important days of the year are Carnival; and one can perhaps even say that in many ways, the smell of firecrackers and beer lingers here throughout the year. Still, one expects more of an academic work, and academic texts in Panamá generally adhere to our Western standards. So this text stood out. It did not fill in where the historical record was inaccessible, as do some popular histories here, or provide counterfactuals, as in the case of some recent academic works. But I could not help feeling that its method of interpretation was sleazy, and that it was purposely going around in circles.

I have a warm place in my heart for eccentrics and eccentricities, and I imagined that the text’s shameless disregard for objectivity could be forgiven too, but I would not accept its opacity, its lack of rigor. While the Panamanian National Archives are disorganized, I quickly located most of the material on which the work is based, and I began to imagine that, with my help, the text could become more organized, and perhaps represent the past as it really was. But I noticed that the more I cleaned up the text, the more agitated I became.

In hindsight, I was going through a difficult time. My marriage had dissolved the year before, and our kids were starting and finishing college, respectively. Panamá came after a sullen year, and here I was, living alone in an apartment on Vía Argentina, with wide windows and no plants. The only things alive in this space were the breeze that flew right in, the smell of coffee coming from the industrial roster on the Transístmica, and the loud parrot calls before sunset. The bundle of papers stood on my cheap working table, taunting me with its cryptic demeanor. When it became hard to ignore the torments, I had to tell myself that there was some rational reason for my irritation. A text is just a text, an assortment of opinions, organized on a piece of paper . . . or was I playing some strange role I was unaware of, in someone else’s story? A voice inside me almost liked the fellow who wrote the damn thing, and I wanted to take the writer for a short walk, to get him to drop the nonsense. At other times, I began thinking that it was the other way around—I did not understand the deeper levels of his work, but he understood me quite well. This made me indignant, and I developed a subtle aversion to the text, a tightening of the forehead and eyes. As happens in such cases, feeling myself irrational—cornered, as it were—a kind of dissonance began to emerge. (Having had one drink too many on a friend’s balcony, I suddenly confessed that my entire relation with the text was vain, and then blushed deeply. I was talking loudly, and a line from a Russian novel got stuck in my head. I’m vain! I suddenly announced, just like the character, almost shouting, I’m vain! I’m vain!)

A month or so later, I got involved in an enigmatic relationship with an Argentinian psychologist, an ex-hippie who wore beautiful shawls and had a good eye for physical cues. She pointed out that my shoulders crouched inward as I was deciphering the text, that there might be tension in my upper back. I looked at her ironically when she suggested that some somatic technique would help me get along with the reading, but I eventually gave in. She had me sit on the couch, with my feet flat on the ground, and then her voice slowed down, becoming gentle and warm. A breeze ran through the apartment, and as she began speaking, I stopped thinking, and I could feel the wind touching my skin. Her voice was now calm and very soft. You are seeing me now, she said. Are you aware that seeing is happening? Make a mental note of it: seeing. Experiment with it, she said, just try it out. Are you thinking something? Instead of thinking the thought, try to observe it from the outside, saying to yourself silently, thinking. As you become aware of these words, feel the muscles in the head, the flesh and skin around them, and make a mental note: calming. We did this for a while, and then she said, if it’s possible, notice what the awareness itself feels like. Is there tightness there, a kind of resistance? Or maybe a more spacious feeling . . . see if you can notice how the awareness encounters these very words . . . does it leap out of the mind to encounter them, wherever they are? Or are the words touching the awareness like shooting stars in the sky of the mind? Is it the same awareness that it was three minutes ago, or is the awareness a bit different now, in this moment?

I practiced for a while before I could loosen the tension in my shoulders, and then I noticed that the reading changed slightly. What was really there had not changed, but a strange sensation settled in, as though a different part of my mind was reading the text. I tried to go back to the old reader, but this reader was now aware that a second kind of reader was also there, and the mutual knowledge made each reader a little different. You see the point—if one is to give a simple account of the text below, one must be perfectly honest and admit that what is there is a bit unstable. And if I told you I were sure precisely what the text holds, you would be right to ask, well, which you?

This is a problem with immediate consequences for historians, some of which I will deal with shortly. The standing order of prefaces, introductions, and prolegomena of every sort is that the author cuts down the body of the work to manageable pieces, hanging the main arguments for all to see. You are right if you demand that I summarily execute this order, but the text calls into question the unity of authorship and the unity of readership that provide the basis for such textual operations. Thus, we should keep in mind that the scaffold and gallery here are made of letters, and that spectators and actors alike float in a fragile theater of words.

II. Historical Problems

When it won its independence in November 1903, Panamá did not gain full sovereignty. The rebellion that separated the province from the rest of Colombia could not be carried out only by the coalition of elite and middle-class citizens of the Liberals and Conservatives. The organizers had to rely on US backing if they were to have any chance against the Colombian Army; and as the dust settled and the new country became a political fact in 1904, the consequences of the deal with the Northern Colossus became clear. First, the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty was forced on the Panamanians. It sanctioned a ten-mile-wide US Canal Zone, a virtual state within the state, right at the heart of the new country, operating its most important asset. This asset, the Panama Canal, would be built between 1904 and 1914, and would connect the Pacific and Atlantic seas. For the new state, the treaty would also mean that significant parts of its largest and most important cities, Panama City and Colón, would be under the direct control of the United States. To add insult to injury, Panamá was forced to write into its new constitution an article that would allow the US to deploy its forces in any part of the new country if it felt that the canal was in some way threatened, or, even more broadly, if it wanted to restore public order.²

Starting in 1912, Dr. Belisario Porras and the Liberals energetically promoted a plan to regain the country’s full independence. They thought that confronting the US was impossible, however, before Panamanians became more productive, educated, and disciplined. And so the Liberals used funds from the new canal for an ambitious state-building project, building roads and railways to connect the savage rural areas to the terminal cities, Panama City and Colón, and undertaking projects to civilize the urban masses. Within a decade, they increased the student population threefold and constructed the basis of the Panamanian public education system. At the same time, they rewrote the legal code, established archives and hospitals, promoted programs to attract European settlers to the interior, and constructed agricultural schools for peasants. As part of this larger effort, a penal colony and an urban penitentiary were constructed, and local jails were reformed. To build a nation, in other words, a strong state had to be established in the national territory. To achieve independence and modernity, the Liberal government had to replace a foreign colonialism with a national colonial project.

In opening with a discussion of the establishment of the penal colony, in part I, the work focuses on the project that symbolized the connection between discipline, civilization, and sovereignty. While this is the first serious scholarly work on this penal colony (and on the Panamanian penal system generally), the historical intervention here has larger stakes. The implied author shifts from a critique of the Liberal state-building project, its discourse, and its projects (chapter 1) to an analysis of its main goal, the transformation of the Panamanian subject, in the historical reality of the penal colony (chapter 2). In order to analyze the struggles that inmates carry on against the institutional subject machine, the work suggests a different theory of subjectivity. This theory is further developed within the discussion of the possibility of critique—of a specific institution like Coiba, but also of larger political programs (chapter 3). The result is an account not only of the state-building project during the protectorate (1904–31), but also of the possibility—historical and theoretical—of its critique.

By the postwar era, most Panamanians felt that the democratic dream was giving way to a thoroughly corrupt, dependent regime. In the political stalemate of 1947–51, the chief of police, José Antonio Remón, gradually took hold of the political system. Since Panamá did not have an army, and since the political class, thoroughly unpopular and petty, could not resolve its own disputes, he became a kind of kingmaker. Remón began nominating presidents from his barracks; then he was emboldened to run for president in 1952, utilizing his institution and the profits he had made from illegal activities to launch a successful populist campaign. As president, Remón was no more popular than most other politicians. The discussion of his regime in chapter 4 shows that by maintaining firm control of both the bureaucracy and the newly named National Guard, Remón managed to stabilize the state. He personally arrived in the morning to ensure that ministries were open on time; he intimidated rivals and censored the press, reformed the tax system and cut political deals.

In January 1955, Remón was assassinated. It was the first murder of a Panamanian president, and although Remón had not been especially popular, the judicial-political drama that followed the event mesmerized the nation. Almost as soon as the trial began, the public started to voice its discomfort—not with any protagonist in the drama or with the content of any specific claim, but with the entire procedure. The US embassy commented: Panamanian Justice is itself, in a sense, on trial.³ When, after three years of judicial proceedings, appeals, conspiracies, killings of witnesses, and sensational revelations in the press, all the accused were set free, the masses went out to dance in the streets. Chapter 5 argues that, as odd as it may sound, the masses did not care for any specific character in the drama. Rather, as the public perceived it, the system failed yet again to provide the rights and the due process that it promised. What mattered was not content but form.

Indeed, the crisis that followed the trial (1958–60)—perhaps the longest the country had ever seen—was not animated by one set of themes. Riots broke out on several occasions, for different reasons; a rebellion erupted in the countryside; strikes and worker protests followed. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the stakes were now high, and the text suggests that the crisis of the oligarchic regime would eventually lead to its fall, in 1968. The struggles of the regime’s last decade, which were waged by different actors and for different reasons, nevertheless had a new and radical common denominator: they all denied the basic legitimacy of the oligarchic regime. But it was the regime itself that had enabled this radicalization by enacting the long, public display of its own injustice. Indeed, a central notion in this work, which the implied author arrives at only by a long, indirect path, is that a crisis of hegemony is also an aesthetic crisis, a crisis of and in form.

This in no way implies that a radical challenge, and the crisis it brings about, necessarily lead to a more just or free society. Partly because the oligarchic pseudolegality had gradually dissolved starting in the late 1950s, the military regime, consolidated by the populist General Omar Torrijos in 1968–69, could dispense with legality altogether. While in later years the Torrijos regime would come to be associated with its center-left economic policies and its successful renegotiation of the Canal Treaty, in its early years it struggled to define itself. It had no obvious base of support, no clear agenda, and very little by way of an official discourse. In its first year in power, the National Guard nominated bureaucrats and ministers, quickly repressed the armed and unarmed groups that resisted it, and disregarded the law openly.

At the time, a young priest was working in the mountainous region of Santa Fe in the province of Veraguas. Heavily influenced by the radical forerunners of what would become liberation theology, Father Héctor Gallego created a popular movement that challenged the firm rule of the local families. The peasants—poor, often illiterate, and disempowered—were not organized. Gallego encouraged them to take leadership roles in their hamlets, establish Bible-reading circles, and form a multiservice cooperative. The cooperative began undermining the monopoly of the ruling families, while the reading circles created a new hermeneutic—the present and the recent past were now read within the framework of the Bible.

The regional elite, with direct family relations to Torrijos, attempted to intimidate and coopt this popular movement, at the same time as it pressured the government to intervene. After the disappearance of Gallego in 1971, the church no longer commanded a leading role in the Santa Fe movement. But the new interpretative framework, which posited Jesús fighting alongside the poor, could not be undone. The movement—with its peasant leadership, emerging knowledge, praxes, and institutions—destroyed the rule of the wealthy families and transformed the political economy of the Santa Fe region. The implied author closes the work (chap. 6) with the parable of the liberationist movement, suggesting that a challenge to a regime may very well be especially radical if it is not only political, economic, and social, but also aesthetic. That is, if the challengers, aside from making material and political demands, also call for a new subject and new subjectivities; if they articulate a different framework of interpretation of the past and present, and propose alternative notions of what is seen, valued, and fought for.

III. The Power/Knowledge Problem

Michel Foucault opens Discipline and Punish by opposing two distinct forms of punishment, which, he claims, spelled a larger transformation in Europe. A ritual of public torture is juxtaposed with the rules drawn up for a juvenile prison in Paris some eighty years later: a tedious list of minute instructions outlining when prisoners should wake up in the morning, how they should study, work, and pray. Foucault’s point is not about any of the details—the two texts he cites deal with different kinds of punishment—but that "they each define a certain penal style."⁴ According to Foucault, the European system of power in its totality changed dramatically between about 1750 and 1830. A new economy of power was formulated—with a new form of punishment.

The penitentiary, according to Foucault, epitomized a shift from grand spectacles of torture to quotidian corrective measures, a new micro-physics of power. These subtle interventions Foucault considers under the title of discipline—a political anatomy of detail.⁵ As part of discipline, Foucault analyzes a variety of techniques and procedures to control people in prisons, barracks, schools, and hospitals: ways of determining how people would be organized spatially, how their work would be coordinated and supervised.⁶ New methods were developed to organize training—no longer an isolated, personal relationship between master and apprentice, but rather a rationalized plan of successive stages of development, which could be subject to scrutiny, examination, and correction. As discipline was to be precise, new methods of observation and evaluation needed to be developed. Thus, hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and modern forms of the exam were created in the developing institutions (workshops, boarding schools), and often borrowed and transformed in others. And while these new methods of systematic observation could be harsh, they were not, in Foucault’s view, only oppressive. Rather, they indicated that power more broadly produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.⁷ In sum, whereas in both the liberal and Marxist traditions power was something that could be taken, held, or used, in Foucault’s view, power—a relation—is exercised everywhere and at all times; it operates in techniques and fields of knowledge; and it is not exercised on subjects that are already there autonomously and irrespective of its effects. Rather, power produces subjects and subjectivity.

Foucault’s emphasis on the penitentiary generally, and his detailed discussion of the panopticon specifically, draw attention to the increased shrewdness of European institutions in their control of their urban masses, and to their increasingly sophisticated and fine-tuned corrective techniques.⁸ However, we would be wise to keep in mind that, according to one estimate, 1.3 million people were punished by transportation in the nineteenth century alone.⁹ Transportation was used in the British colonies in America, in the Andaman Islands, in Mauritius, in New Caledonia, and in New Guinea. Convicts were shipped off to Australia too, and hundreds of thousands were sent to Russian Asia, as well as to islands off the coasts of Chile, Perú, Costa Rica, México, and Brazil. Penal colonies were likewise established in Patagonia, Venezuela, and Colombia.¹⁰ Everywhere, it was its colonial aspect that made transportation of convicts so attractive to European and Latin American elites. The same elites who applied subtle coercive techniques in the urban centers sent marginal social agents to the far corners of their territories, extending the reach of their power. The two tendencies were part of the same conception, as the cases of the Cárcel Modelo in Panama City and of the Penal Colony of Coiba show.¹¹

Speaking about colonial punishment allows the implied author to connect the discussion of punishment with the debate about national projects after colonialism. Is it true, as Partha Chatterjee has it, that nationalism, a derived discourse, far from enabling colonized nations to liberate themselves, would ultimately guarantee their continual subjugation? In the context of India, Chatterjee’s argument is damning: it is the very nationalist discourse, developed in Europe, that ensures the subjugation of the colonialized world after it has won its independence. And neither conservatives nor liberals can pose the problem in a form in which the question can be asked: why is it that non-European colonial countries have no historical alternative but to try to approximate the given attributes of modernity when that very process of approximation means their continued subjection under a world order which only sets their tasks for them and over which they have no control?¹²

Here, the question is not brought up directly. The Liberal Party’s nationalist state-building project is discussed with a postcolonial framework, and many of its contradictions will be apparent to the student of nation-states in comparable circumstances, in Latin America and elsewhere. But in other ways, the structure of the text seems to suggest that Chatterjee should answer the same questions he asks the nationalists. Do you "pose the problem in a form in which the question can be asked? Or do you, like others who wish to provincialize Europe, in one way or another still adopt the Enlightenment view of rationality and progress, and the historical values enshrined in that view"?¹³ In what ways do you go beyond a recognition (and resigned affirmation) of the Enlightenment’s discursive rules? Do you not join the Euro-American debate on its terms? Do you not, developing the cutting edge of its epistemic knife, guarantee the continued subjection of those whose voice you wish to rescue? In what form, ultimately, do you pose the question?¹⁴

To appreciate how the two problems are connected, keep in mind the larger framework of Foucault’s critique of the Enlightenment and its idea of knowledge:

Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without a correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.¹⁵

The Enlightenment promised liberation through rational thought. Foucault argues that the fields of knowledge that the reformers thought of as liberating were the blocks that held its new institutions of social control: criminology and penology, psychology, the science of man more broadly, and all those fields of administrative knowledge that made control of populations, governmentality, and biopolitics possible.¹⁶ But perhaps Foucault’s view of the Enlightenment is too grim. Can we not reform our institutions, after all, by looking at them critically? Foucault was not optimistic. He did not think it likely that an academic intervention would finally criticize the prison into oblivion, for example. Quite the contrary, he insisted that we keep in mind

that the movement for reforming the prisons, for controlling their functioning is not a recent phenomenon. It does not even seem to have originated in a recognition of failure. Prison reform is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were, its programme. From the outset, the prison was caught up in a series of accompanying mechanisms, whose purpose was apparently to correct it, but which seem to form part of its very functioning, so closely have they been bound up with its existence throughout its long history.¹⁷

One needs to appreciate the audacity of this view, coming from a professional intellectual, and recognize the sheer novelty and genius of this critique. But we must also ask Foucault: how is your criticism different from the criticisms that have, as you say, followed the prison from its beginning? Is it even possible to critique an institution like the prison without contributing to the field of knowledge that constitutes, as it were, its programme?

The influence of Foucault’s work in the last decades is owed in part to the recognition that there is no simple workaround to resolve this tension. And in fact, since the Frankfurt School, many of the writers who have critiqued the Enlightenment and its Reason have struggled with this same set of questions. Critique itself, after all, was what the Enlightenment prescribed for every malady. But when critiquing the Enlightenment and its power-knowledge matrices, how is it possible not to use its very tool kit, reinforcing the very relationships we are trying to change?

IV. Omniscient, Confessional, and Polyphonic History

As I became immersed in the text I was editing, I began to think more deeply about narrative structure; and it was then I noticed that in most history books the reader encounters one of two possible modes of narration. First, in most histories, the voice of either an omniscient or a limited third-person narrator is employed. This voice tells the reader what really happened in the past in a no-nonsense tone. Very little is said about who the historian is, how the written account of the past has been at all conditioned by this mysterious observer, how the interaction between observer and observed took place, and so forth. Often, some representative of the author makes a quick appearance in the acknowledgments, after which he leaves his initials and vanishes. This omniscient narrator is presumably the voice of the real-world historian. And truly, even a brief reading of reviews of monographs in the field will show that works of history are read and interpreted in this way too. But whereas most living historians have doubts, anger, desires, and fears, the omniscient narrator is usually a rather secure and unmoved character. Often, the narrator imagines himself to be addressing a crowd—of students or colleagues, perhaps. Phrases like as we have seen in our earlier discussion or as we shall see are common.

As a historian, I have often written with the voice of an omniscient narrator. I did not think too much about it, and of course I find no inherent fault in this narrative device. Nor do I think that historians who use an omniscient narrator are necessarily unaware of the question of narrative structure. It is true that in some of the books written in this way, there is a good dose of realism (naive or sophisticated), and there are many positivists too. But there are also many theoretically conscious historians who use the omniscient narrator for clarity or convenience. Moreover, almost all the historians whose work was once classified under the title of the new narrative history employ omniscient narrators in at least some of their works.¹⁸

In the other option, which is perhaps a little less common, the reader encounters a narrator who speaks in the first person singular. The historian goes to the archives, encounters certain people in the field, and returns with conclusions, which are communicated to the reader sotto voce, in a kind of confession. There are, perhaps, examples of bad confessional writing, but in our field of Latin American history there are quite a few that are extraordinarily good, and it is to them that we should pay attention. Courage Tastes of Blood, for example, combines archival and oral sources to describe the lives and struggles of a Mapuche community in Chile, in what its author, Florencia Mallon, calls a dialogic method.¹⁹ The historian does not skip traditional research—Mallon shows a spectacular knowledge of secondary and primary material on the community, its struggles, the larger questions of Mapuche–state relations, national issues, and so forth. She does not treat the people of the community as sources—depositories of raw data to be extracted. Rather, she engages in dialogue with subjects who have their own interpretation of the past, and who are quite ready to defend their version, to teach her and to learn from her, and to generally change the orientation of her research. Mallon builds on traditions of representation developed in the testimonial literature of the left, as well as research methods of oral historians and ethnographers.²⁰ Furthermore, she follows the practice common in anthropology today, in which the scholar brings the community her early draft for discussion and people comment on her version, add to it, or criticize her mistakes. In this way, Mallon can rightly assert that the final product is not hers alone, but that it also belongs to the community.

When researching the community of Santa Fe de Veraguas to prepare the footnotes for this work, I learned from works such as Mallon’s. I lived in Santa Fe for a few months, volunteering in communal projects and immersing myself in the village. Apart from the recorded interviews, I also spent long hours in conversation with people of the community, and I was obviously influenced by their interpretation of history. In the case of Santa Fe, moreover, people’s memory of details are especially important, since the US still holds the vast majority of secret Panamanian state documents about the Popular Christian Movement, and is not allowing public access to them.²¹ In short, I find engagement with a community a fascinating method for researching the recent past; and while I was well aware of the difficulties involved, I came out of Santa Fe thinking that without this part of the research, I would have known very little about the history of the region.

The problem is not with oral history or with deep dialogues with the community, but with writing. No doubt, the confessional style allows the researcher to discuss subject positions in the field, and to interrogate the power relations that exist between writer and subject. But is the confessional narrator a reliable textual representation of the historian? As I was editing this work, I realized that the narrators I had been deploying in my confessional writings had little to do with the gray zones of my life; that they, who were supposed to be my public faces, were not quite me. Have I ever let a reader into my apartment to see the clothes piling up on my armchair? Have I ever made a narrator confess fears about my son’s career choice, or talk about the feeling of alienation I had in departmental meetings? Little wonder, then, that when I read the text below I felt exposed, as though the narrators I had been deploying were a cover for something.

It had been twelve years since I had written anything original, and yet I was extraordinarily attached to my own methods. All that theory, please, enough with all the Foucaults and the Bakhtins! And if I see one more Walter Benjamin epigraph I’m going to cho—I admit, in retrospect, I felt so threatened that I took the work’s textual games as an attack on my authenticity. Were there no facts anymore? Latin America has a troubled past, a lot of disinformation, censorship, lies . . . facts are what we had on our side. Sometimes, the only thing left was truth. And in the end of the day, one has to take a side. Was the writer hiding his real opinions? And yet for some reason I felt so exposed by his trick that a strange anger arose in me. No wonder I came close to throwing the entire project out—it threatened my methods, my way of making sense of the world, the core of my identity.

Well, although most professional historians do not consider them works of history, there are texts that need to be kept in mind when thinking of the field’s current status quo. I do not know of any examples of historians using unreliable narrators, but many nonacademic works use a broader spectrum of narrative devices. In Maus, Art Spiegelman tells the story of his father’s survival of the Holocaust in cartoon form, depicting the Germans as cats and the Jews as mice. (Later it becomes clear that the characters, while human, are wearing masks that they cannot take off.)²² After Spiegelman won international acclaim, more writers began experimenting with the graphic novel, and in recent years, many personal narratives and journalistic accounts of historical events have been written in this form.²³ Of course, works of fiction that deal seriously with the past and that are even based on archival or oral research are nothing new.²⁴ Quite the contrary: it is well known that the novel was characterized by its presentation of a historical setting, rather than a mythical past (as in the epic).²⁵

Curiously, the corpus of theoretical writing that has critiqued academic history since Hayden White’s Metahistory has stimulated only a small number of adventurous experiments in historical writing.²⁶ By the end of the 1990s, it was no longer subversive to claim that historians enlist the same narrative conventions as fiction writers [. . .]: inventively imposing the time frame of beginning, middle and end, organizing sequence to convey the sense of consequence, characterizing, scene-setting, emplotting, crafting the ‘reality effect’—all in the voice of the omniscient narrator speaking from a single unified point of view.²⁷ Few historians, however, have seen such claims as a license to undertake anything like Spiegelman’s formal experiments. Already in the 1960s and ’70s, Cuban films like Memorias del subdesarrollo and De cierta manera experimented with the juxtaposition of documentary and fictional material, attempting to find new forms to represent postcolonial reality.²⁸ These experiments passed censorship even as Cubans were increasingly called to correct their views on everything.²⁹ Decades later, the historians of the free and tenured world proved much less daring. If anyone expected Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties to open the creative floodgates of history departments, the book seems to have been shrugged off as a kind of anecdote or cautionary tale—a signal that the linguistic turn had gone too far.³⁰ Dead Certainties is indeed experimental: the narrative is not ordered chronologically, and it contains recreations of historical events in the tradition of the documentary. But even Schama’s narrative makes no attempt to characterize the narrator within the work; the use of metaphoric devices is timid indeed; and there is only cautious stylistic experimentation. And in the end, Schama disqualifies his work from the field altogether, when he writes that the different parts of his narrative are works of the imagination, not scholarship.³¹ As the work below suggests, however, the imagination plays a central role in every discourse about the past—academic, bureaucratic, popular, oral, written, or performed.

The text below can be called a polyphonic history. The term is derived from the work of M. M. Bakhtin on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and from the notion of a polyphonic novel more broadly. Bakhtin argues that "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event. Dostoyevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse."³² Of course, every character in every novel, play, or short story has opinions, and to achieve dramatic effect those opinions are commonly put in conflict with one another. But in polyphony, the richness of the characters’ interpretative schemes is entirely meshed with their respective ideological, social, psychological, and discursive worlds, giving them as much, or nearly as much, power as the implied author in the text.³³

Obviously, polyphonic history is quite different from the polyphonic novel. The goal of polyphonic history is to shed light on the historical past; what it juxtaposes are various interpretations of the past. Conceptions of the past, however, are not dead logical structures, but living sets of beliefs, arranged in characters’ consciousnesses, within their living social worlds. In history, as in the novel, characters’ discourse—their peculiar ways of expressing themselves—is neither coincidental nor anecdotal. It represents their social world, itself a product of historical forces. This is why Bakhtin insists: Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon—social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning.³⁴

Narratives of the past carry enormous meaning for people, and, as the text below shows, have huge political importance. But polyphonic history denies the notion that the infinity of past experiences on which historical narratives are based has an essence; the monologic truth which tries to capture that essence of the past is therefore doomed in advance. Moreover, polyphonic history questions the notion that a human being is a coherent, stable entity, which is wholly knowable to itself. For that reason, the engagement between the historian and the people in the field—if it is to be truly called dialogic—cannot make do with exchanges of information. This is not to deny that dialogue is absolutely necessary if one is dealing with the recent past. Rather, dialogism assumes that much of people’s subjectivity will remain hidden from view, and that people’s understandings of themselves, as well as their ideas of their role in the historical process, may remain opaque, or be revealed in unexpected moments.

In a different way, this is a central theme of polyphonic fiction as well. To recall, several of Dostoyevsky’s characters rebel against the notion that someone will pass a finalizing judgment on them, or will understand them fully, as it were, from the outside. This is a rebellion against the disciplinary power that Foucault speaks of, which uses observation and normalizing judgment to understand the character and fit him into a larger economy of power. Dostoyevsky’s characters carry on long polemics with representatives