A Wandering Gringa in the Time of Plague
by John Kendall Hawkins
"I am moved by these swaggering bodies, dressed in their Checkpoint Zipolite finest, walking to houses that look only seven feet high. I envy the ardor in their gait, a lack of hurry, as if by walking they possess a piece of the earth" I want to be these men."
- Emmanuel Iduma, A Stranger's Pose (2018)
Last year I reviewed Bele'n Ferna'ndez's Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World, a travelogue that details her one-way flight from America in 2003 after being unable to cope with patriotic fervor and embracing of the national security state that overtook a traumatized America in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. She was sure Americans had been hoodwinked by neo-fascists. In Exile, she wrote,
Lest folks start to view the state itself as public enemy number one, however, more convenient menaces are regularly trotted out. In addition to the usual domestic suspects-blacks, poor people, immigrants, and so on-the wider world has proved fertile terrain for the manufacture of any number of freedom-imperiling demons.
After 8 years of self-exile, the contributing editor for Jacobin still feels the same way. Now moving toward the 20th anniversary of the near-freefall tumbling of Twin Towers and the nanny state well-and-truly keeping us "safe" with algorithms and keywords typed, Ferna'ndez (born in the USA) still feels the same way.
From 2003 to the present her travels have included Lebanon, Turkey, Italy, Asia, and Central America. She's a blogger, an editor and a journalist; and she has a finely tuned ironic sensitivity that picks up on the many quirks and foibles of humans at work or play wherever she goes. In Beirut, she's acerbically noted government incompetence and the simultaneous rise of the nouveau riche; in Turkey, she and Amelia, a friend from Poland, are chased around near the Black Sea by a drunken, frisky Turk looking for some 'tang; from a seaside cafe in Italy, she's seen refugees "allowed to drown" in the sea over her cafe au lait.
In her new book Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place, Ferna'ndez's ongoing quest to "find the world" brings her to Oaxaca and Playa Zipolite, Mexico's only legal nudist community. It's March 2020, things are looking up for her, when -- WHAM -- Covid-19 forces the community to go into a kind of quarantine and she can't leave for six months. Worse, the local police are chasing bathers off the beach and setting checkpoints. When you come to a place where you're supposed to let it all hang out, and you're forced to practice sana distancia and retreat indoors to introvert against your will, you soon become stir crazy and full of anxiety. Although it doesn't stop Bele'n from "traipsing" around her apartment nude, not that the reader found a reason to complain, reading is a performance after all.
Ferna'ndez had been in El Salvador prior to arriving in Mexico and early on she takes the time to remind the reader of "the Salvadoran civil war of 1980-92 killed upwards of seventy-five thousand people, with the vast majority of lethal violence committed by the U.S.-backed rightwing military and allied paramilitary outfits and death squads," summing it up with the macabre naming of the airport after the Salvadoran Archbishop Ã"scar Romero, whose "critiques of right-wing atrocities and the injustices of capitalism had gotten him assassinated." So they named an airport after him? Why not something more appropriate -- like, say, a soccer stadium? Imagine if they renamed every airport after someone done by a death squad. Flying from martyr to martyr. Better than a Che Tee.
Ferna'ndez is a jogger, having noteworthily jogged around "mortar shell scars" in Sarajevo in festive bunchy clothing in her previous book, but tells of hobbling around at the beginning of this journey, as the result of having been bitten by a dog. Ouch. In Zipolite she lives in a small flat not far from the famous beach. She hooks up there with Marwan, a Palestinian-Lebanese friend, who recalls her itinerant jack-of-all-trades lover, Hassan, from Exile. Marwan arrives on "the ides of March" just as the announcement of "an impending Jornada Nacional de la Sana Distancia" is coming out on the radio:
A coronavirus cumbia that would quickly come to inundate radio waves similarly endowed the pandemic with a semi-festive air, with its upbeat reminders to frequently wash hands and use disinfectant because "es muy efectivo." Festive, no masks, but not much nudity either. The two set up, fully clothed, on the beach with wine.
Ferna'ndez is up to her old tricks -- getting shitfaced by the sea.
The first quirky encounter of what will prove to be an endless string of poco loco ways occurs when a police officer
arrived on an all-terrain vehicle to inquire if Marwan was the person who had just drowned. Given Marwan's lack of Spanish, I had replied, as one does: 'But he's not even wet,' and the policeman ... moved on to interrogate the next person.
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