The Adventures of China Iron
by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
tr. Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre
(Charco Press, Nov. 2019)
Reviewed by Sam Carter
In a famous 1943 ink drawing, the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García portrayed South America through the perspective that had been used to depict North America. He called it América invertida—“Inverted America”—and, true to its title, placed the equator at the bottom of the image and the southern continent at the top. The point is simple yet powerful: there is no reason for Latin Americans to look elsewhere for aesthetic inspiration. Compass needles might be pulled inexorably toward magnetic north, but Torres-García indicates art need not orient itself in the same way. Cartography’s conventions are revealed to be contingent and even detrimental; the status quo, in his work, proves to be imbalanced—and ripe for upheaval.
It feels like a direct reply to Torres-García when the narrator of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron remarks, “I found it hard to reconcile myself to the idea that we were on the bottom half of a globe when we seemed to be on the top.” This narrator, China Iron, is a fourteen-year-old mother of two who escapes these circumstances to travel through rural nineteenth-century Argentina alongside Liz, a Scottish woman who insists that it’s Great Britain that belongs at the top of the map. Although personal experience and principles of empire collide in this minor moment, such seeming binaries will largely collapse throughout the novel’s own inversions, not of cartography but of canons. China’s journey departs from characters and episodes found in José Hernández’s Martín Fierro, the epic poem that saw its first part published in 1872 and its second in 1879. Martín Fierro has become an inescapable reference for conversations about the intersections of literature and nation in Argentina, and it puts into verse the many exploits of its eponymous outlaw gaucho, a figure who resembles the cowboy because of a shared emphasis on horsemanship and self-sufficiency but in other respects (like some indigenous ancestry) is entirely sui generis.
Where Hernández’s poem dedicates only a few lines to the china, or woman, who is the mother of Martín Fierro’s children, Cabezón Cámara hands her the reins for the entire narrative. Her name is equal parts translation and concretization: at the urging of her Scottish consort, she takes the general word china as her first name, and “Iron”—the English rendering of Fierro—as her surname. This amalgamation and alteration reflects Cabezón Cámara’s approach, for although the novel depends on the poem for some of its framing, it also leaves Hernández’s text behind to bolt off in new directions. The relationship between the two works almost recalls a payada, or meeting, of two gaucho singers (known as payadores) who trade stanzas. But the form of such a contest would constrain Cabezón Cámara’s tremendous ingenuity and be entirely at odds with her justified suspicion of the limits and limiting effects of this structure and so many others.
Strictly delimited modernity, oppressive masculinity, and stifling heteronormativity all undergird the national narrative shaped in part by Hernández’s poem; The Adventures of China Iron seems determined to lay bare the corrosive effects of this combination by upending each component. Queering the past in order to question the many missed opportunities to live in other ways is one focus, but the novel also suggests alternative futures that might yet be possible to construct. And even though Cabezón Cámara has turned to a well-worn tale not widely known outside Argentina, her inspiring iconoclasm resonates far beyond that country’s borders—most visible, perhaps, in The Adventures of China Iron, which has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. At the heart of this success is a willingness to disassemble a text and then reassemble it for new audiences, a quality that emerges in the efforts of translators Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre, who convey the sheer exuberance of the original while making its particularity legible to readers unversed in gaucho literature and the history of its reverberations. By keeping the subversiveness of Cabezón Cámara’s inversion very much alive, they have allowed it to travel perhaps even more widely than the novel’s protagonists.
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One could label The Adventures of China Iron a road novel, but doing so would risk undermining many important settings in this restlessly inventive novel. Understood more broadly, it is a profound meditation on the imbrications of movement and metamorphosis that drifts from the pampas, or the seemingly endless grassy plains, to the Paraná, the second longest river in South America. Accompanying these spatial shifts is an ever-expanding cast of characters far greater than the number of travelers typically found in conventional road narratives. In the first section, China and her dog join up with Liz, and the three are later joined by the gaucho Rosario; then, at a frontier fort, they add more members to a group headed toward the land Liz expects to claim. Finally, in the novel’s third section, this collective merges with others. Amid these increasing numbers, there is a corresponding sense of personal growth, but not one that frames such developments as linear or vertical. Instead, much like the expansive pampa stretching out all around them, this process is a horizontal, even rhizomatic one that embraces plurality: you need not become someone new; you just need to embrace the multitude of possible selves you could already be.
For China, the road is less a destination than a refuge. When Fierro is conscripted into the army’s efforts to expand the nation, she leaves behind her two children with a couple of farmhands and pretends to look for him. In reality, she sets out searching for something new, only feeling “tethered by my lack of ideas, by my ignorance.” She approaches Liz’s wagon simply because she is white—China believes that, because of her pale skin, they might be related—yet the likelihood of kinship seems as small as any chance of communicating it. In this first instance of engaging with difference, one of many that the novel portrays as more constructive than those of the past, barriers emerge but hold little sway:
We were a chorus in different languages that were the same and different, just like what we said, the same and yet unfathomable until we said them together. We parroted back and forth in our own way, each repeating what the other said until nothing was left of the words but the sound, good sign, buen augurio, good augurio, buen sign, guen signurio, guen signurio, guen signurio. We always ended up laughing, and then what we said seemed like chanting that would end up who knows where: the pampa is also a world fashioned so that sound can travel in all directions, little more than silence reigns there.
No new language is created, but the differences between the two women are emptied of any greater significance. The potential for divisiveness is drained away. In the novel, encounters with the unfamiliar lead not to anger or misunderstanding but to laughter, to openness, to recognition of the possibilities posed by such encounters.
These linguistic exchanges find parallels as China and Liz progress across the pampa. “From Liz’s story and my care for each of our possessions, a space was emerging,” China explains. “One that was ours, with the wagon which went steadily forward, with that empty land which was becoming as flat as it seems to those who have known hills and mountains.” What had once been identified as exclusively Liz’s is now considered a shared space, and while she often shares her understanding of the world outside Argentina with China (and introduces her to luxuries such as lace and whisky) she also learns to enjoy her new surroundings.
China is not merely a catalyst to this process. She craves the changes that Liz can offer, whether sartorial, sexual, or otherwise. A haircut and a new set of clothes leave China looking like a young man, and the resulting kiss from Liz stokes a long-simmering, mutual desire. Gender, Cabezón Cámara demonstrates, can manifest through actions rather than essence—these characters experience it as a choice rather than an immutable consequence—and this notion is reinforced when they meet Rosario, a fellow traveler toward what is only referred to as “Indian Territory.” He hopes to find a place there to settle with his cattle, just as Liz hopes to reach the estancia, or estate, that she will oversee with her husband and a herd of their own. China will almost always call him Rosa, a feminine name that anticipates later developments in the novel but that also echoes his quick acceptance of her masculine appearance. “He laughed at my men’s clothing but he understood,” she remembers. “He said that he thought it was a good thing me dressing like a man, it was like carrying a knife, all women should carry them the way all men do.” Like China, Rosario has fled a distressing situation—a vicious stepfather—but now joins a group governed by a plain yet powerful principle: “He stayed with us, looked after us and we looked after him.”
This initial section might leave readers with the impression of a utopic vision. Only the third and final section, however, truly warrants such a label. What does appear in the first section is more of an idyll: it is grounded in the pastoral and in scenes of contentment. The group faces few challenges to the new conditions of coexistence they create, and finds little cause for conflict in their isolation. As China recalls, “I wanted to live in the wagon forever, in this suspended interval of time.” The wagon, she also observes, was “my first island, the island that took shape for me as we made our journey, a rectangle of wood and canvas that we kept dark and cool to discourage the flies that seemed to come from nowhere and multiply effortlessly.” But before she and her fellow travelers settle on other islands in the novel’s final section they must first overcome obstacles far more obnoxious and obstinate than billows of buzzing insects.
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At Las Hortensias, the last military installation before the frontier with the “Indian territory,” China, Liz, and Rosa meet a lightly fictionalized version of José Hernández, a colonel at the fort. Yet Cabezón Cámara is not interested in wry metafictional reflections or ruses but concerned instead with questions of self-presentation. The three travelers don clothes stashed in the wagon: Liz dresses as a British lady; Rosario puts on a servant’s uniform; and China pulls on a frock coat to pose as Liz’s younger brother. If they were free to experiment with different roles on the road, now they each focus on pretending to be someone else. (At night, beyond watchful eyes, they still do what they wish, for it is here that Liz and China consummate their relationship.) Their efforts to pass as other people mirror the attempts of Hernández himself to pass off the verses of the gaucho Martin Fierro as his own and to frame his violent project as a benevolent and beneficial one.
Hernández explains to Liz that his purpose is to bring trains—“the engines of progress”—to Argentina. Although he cannot build those machines, he can train gauchos who will help ensure that the technology coincides with a broader transformation: “Argentina needs that land in order to progress. And as for the gauchos, they need an enemy to turn them into patriotic Argentines. We all need the Indians. I am creating a nation on land, in combat, and on paper, do you see?” For Hernández, the agricultural, the tactical, and the textual all intertwine, and a phrase of his that China clearly remembers distills this approach: “We can’t be us without others.” Little binds the inhabitants of a nation besides a barely understood sense of opposition, according to Hernández, and this is why his project depends on the constant production and reproduction of binaries and of difference.
Cabezón Cámara’s novel inverts such an approach. She does not deny that differences exist but celebrates them and examines how they are almost always attributed too much power or assigned too much meaning. She wants to reach across those divides rather than relentlessly and endlessly re-inscribe them. In the novel, Hernández says of his poem’s eponymous gaucho that “I took his voice, the voice of the voiceless, to the whole country.” But this attitude simply reaffirms that his voice matters more than the gaucho’s without ever questioning why that might be the case. Cabezón Cámara, by contrast, insists that we not affix any such values to voices.
For the three travelers, Hernández’s approach to being this voice of the voiceless is symptomatic of his objectionable efforts to fashion gauchos into suitable national subjects. They, in contrast, hope to establish a settlement of their own—one clearly distinguishable from Hernández’s—on the estate Liz still seeks to steward alongside her husband. But to make that land work, they will need more people, and they decide to leave with the twenty best gauchos at the fort. A night of debauchery creates a distraction that allows the chosen gauchos to escape unnoticed. Hernández, however, later informs Liz that the land she wants to claim remains under the control of indigenous groups. Still, he provides them with supplies since he believes their efforts to move into “Indian territory” will advance the cause of “civilization” he so ardently supports.
China, Liz, and Rosario set off from the fort thinking that what they acquired there—a diamond, some horses, some wine, and more—will ingratiate them to the indigenous groups. They believe, in other words, they can wield what Hernández gave them in ways the colonel never would, as if just a slight shift in perspective could bring about vastly different results. The possibilities introduced by the indigenous groups unconstrained by colonialist customs, however, present the travelers with entirely new prospects.
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It is not insignificant that Cabezón Cámara was born in 1968, a year of global protest, and that she began writing The Adventures of China Iron in Berkeley, a center of countercultural activity, while teaching a short course on gaucho poetry as a writer-in-residence there. Her engagement with activism, indeed, is far from incidental: she has helped to lead the #Niunamenos movement, which fights against femicide and other forms of gender-based violence in Argentina and elsewhere. Given that settler colonialism irrevocably shaped Argentina and so much of the Americas, Cabezón Cámara uses the novel’s final section to offer a stirring portrait of how such differences could have been encountered and engaged both more positively and more productively. By shifting into a speculative mode and outlining a process of indigenous communalism that creates a better future for all involved, Cabezón Cámara urges us to consider alternatives for the future we face.
China, Liz, and Rosa do not set the terms of this encounter, which proves to be the best course of action. Indigenous experience guides them, and they face a tremendous efflorescence of engagement that combines psychedelic mushrooms with an insistence on generosity and acceptance. In so doing, they rediscover and they reconcile: Liz reunites with her Scottish husband while China meets a new Fierro, who asks for her forgiveness in an impressive string of stanzas. Their children are also there, and centered within a broader collective in which childcare is a communal effort. In this new realm, roles are fluid, not fixed, regularly changing as everyone works only one month every season in order to leave plenty of time for other pursuits. Such openness is not limited to labor: China spends her nights in different places and with both men and women; Fierro, in addition to sleeping with men, later comes to consider himself female.
Appearing alongside these proliferating personal possibilities is a newly prominent alternative vocabulary. Indigenous languages now blossom throughout Cabezón Cámara’s prose, with flora and fauna referred to by their names in Guaraní. (The translators rightly maintain much of this new lexicon in order to preserve the “sense of going beyond one’s own linguistic comfort zone and embracing new ways of conceptualizing and naming the world” that is so central to the novel.) Such an insistence on incorporation even extends to the characters’ own names. In addition to Josefina, Star (the name she shares with her dog), and Iron, China acquires another—Tararira—and Fierro adds the feminine Kurusu. The name they use to refer to themselves as a collective is no exception: after joining up with the first group, they call themselves the “Iñchiñ,” which means “we” in the language of the Mapuche people. Later, as an expanding Argentine state threatens to encroach upon their realm, they shift to a roaming, riverine life and negotiate a peaceful coexistence with the Guaraní, who call them the “Ñande,” which also means “we.”
By the novel’s close, the island imagined by China on the wagon amid waves of grasses has become actual and surrounded by the waters of the Paraná. And unlike the isolation of that earlier journey, she and her companions have now found something far more workable, livable, and sustainable among the indigenous groups. But it is not necessarily attainable. “I wish you could see us,” she says on the novel’s last page, “but no one will. We know how to leave as if vanishing into thin air: imagine a people that disappears, a people whose colors, houses, dogs, clothes, cows and horses all gradually dissolve like a specter.” Yet rather than haunt, this specter points to a horizon we might strive toward, even if we know that the horrors of the past have made the realization of such a utopic arrangement incredibly difficult, if not impossible.
Just as the novel drifts away from the pampa, so too does it leave Martín Fierro behind. In the end, Hernández’s poem is not so much a pretext for counterfactual conjectures as it is the premise of a larger argument that Cabezón Cámara ultimately finds wanting. The Adventures of China Iron brings to light some of the many possible (and far more positive) outcomes that national poems and narratives had obscured or even occluded outright. And so, even as the novel seems to avoid all contact with the current moment, it actually speaks to us and to the constantly shifting world in which we live, shaking loose new possibilities for how we might reshape the present precisely by unsettling something seemingly so settled as the past.
Sam Carter is an editor at Asymptote whose work has appeared online at Public Books, Full Stop, and The New Republic.
Banner image: “América Invertida” (1943, pen and ink) by Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García.