III Reimagining Ecuador Transnationally

At the same time, by shedding light on contemporary fiction, it is also possible to fill a gap left by the majority of the academic readings on the cultural responses to the economic crisis, which have overwhelmingly focused on the figure of the migrant. In the introduction to his compilation of ‘narrativas, autorías y lecturas teorizadas de las migraciones ecuatorianas’, Diego Falconí Trávez argues that the numerous displacements caused by the 1998 economic crisis triggered the emergence of a series of discourses centred on the evaluation of the ‘cuerpos de origen ecuatoriano que han ido llegando (y regresando) durante varios años a diferentes destinos’.1 Diego Falconí Trávez, ‘Estudio introductorio’, in Me fui a volver: narrativas, autorías y lecturas teorizadas de las migraciones ecuatorianas, ed. by Diego Falconí Trávez (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 2014), pp. 7–27 (p. 10). These discourses, he says, have taken the form of scholarly studies, documentaries, films and TV shows that give form to a body of work that frames the understanding of the Ecuadorian migrant as a particular type of subjectivity. Although Falconí Trávez’s intention is clearly far from making an exhaustive list, it is still surprising that he fails to mention literature among the cultural responses to the migration phenomenon. This is especially the case if we are to consider that there is a substantial number of novels focused on the issue.2 In his 2015 study of the novelistic genre in Ecuadorian literature, Yovany Salazar Estrada argues that ‘dentro de la novela contemporánea, una mención especial amerita la novela que representa el fenómeno sociológico de la emigración internacional de los ecuatorianos’. Salazar argues that, in the category of novels specifically portraying migration experiences after the Feriado Bancario, some of the most popular titles include El Inmigrante (2004), by Gonzalo Merino Pérez; El sudaca mojado, by Mauricio Carrión Márquez; Los hijos de Daisy (2009), by Gonzalo Ortiz Crespo; Camas calientes (2005), by Jorge Becerra; La memoria y los adioses (2006), by Juan Valdano Morejón; Trashumantes en busca de otra vida (2012), by Stalin Alvear; La seducción de los sudacas (2010), La utopía de Madrid (2013) and La mantis religiosa (2014), all by Carlos Carrión Figueroa. See Yovany Salazar Estrada, ‘El género novelístico en la literatura ecuatoriana’, Universitas, 23 (2015), pp. 183–203 (p. 197). Nonetheless, even more surprising than such omission is the almost undivided attention that the study of migrant subjectivities has received among the manifold consequences of the Feriado Bancario. While the figure of the migrant is a critical component of Ecuadorian society in the present, it is not the only legacy of the banking collapse. Hence, focusing exclusively on migration and migrant subjectivities would be both limited and limiting.

The approach I propose here takes into account the figure of the migrant but also broadens the scope of analysis by building on the central argument of the previous chapter of this book. I advocate for adopting a transnational perspective to see that, after the Feriado Bancario, Ecuador is a nation that is interconnected with the rest of the world more than ever before. Migration is undoubtedly a vital aspect through which this state of interconnectedness manifests itself. Not only because there are hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians living abroad but also because of the multiple everyday links that, partly motivated by these migrants, take place between Ecuador and other countries through communication technologies. But in the same fashion, the dollarisation of the economy and the intense development of global financial relations also play an essential role in the making of Ecuadorian society today. Put together, these aspects manifest constant interactions, reciprocal dependencies and cultural networks with the rest of the world shaping contemporary Ecuador. A comprehensive discourse about the nation necessarily needs to factor them in. That is, to imagine contemporary Ecuador, one must bring to light the full range of interactions and exchanges with the world in which it engages.

My proposal for this section rests on the idea that contemporary Ecuadorian fiction is doing exactly that. I argue that the daily interactions and exchanges among Ecuador and the world beyond its frontiers are being laid bare, explored, embodied and played out in fiction. In this chapter, I propose to analyse three novels published in the 2000s by three different authors – Leonardo Valencia’s Kazbek (2008), Carlos Arcos’ Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga (2013) and Gabriela Alemán’s Humo (2017) – to show that contemporary Ecuadorian writing reflects an individually and collectively experienced transnational reality that, for Ecuador, became central after the economic crisis of 1998. Although these are all novels traversed by migration, they offer much more than migration stories. They respond to the need of reimagining Ecuador for the twenty-first century as a nation that – as I explain in the previous chapter through my reading of Eliécer Cárdenas’ El oscuro final del Porvenir – is coming to terms with being created both from ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ its borders. As such, I argue that the work of Arcos, Valencia and Alemán help us to see and understand Ecuador in a contemporary setting via two shared strategies. The first one relies on the questioning of national boundaries, that I refer to as fiction capable of ‘navigating borders’. The second one is based on countering purity with mixture, that is, on acknowledging that hybridity is at the heart of today’s Ecuador.

In discussing these strategies, and in saying that contemporary Ecuadorian literature reflects an individually and collectively experienced transnational reality, I propose that the post-Feriado Bancario work of Ecuadorian authors of fiction creates a body of work that resists insertion into a strictly ‘national’ genealogy. That is to say, contemporary Ecuadorian narrative, as in the novels I study here, challenges the Ecuadorian canon – embodied by Huasipungo, Jorge Icaza and the Generación del 30 – by refusing to play into the national model based on land and history that Icaza and his peers established. Instead, I argue, their work needs to be considered under a framework that resonates with what Jahan Ramazani defines as ‘transnational poetics’, a notion that counters the ideological, disciplinary and pedagogical functions of national labels by considering how writers and their work often frustrate the national and regional limitations in which critics tend to pigeonhole them.

Refuting the single-nation approach that, in Ramazani’s view, remains entrenched in studies of modern and contemporary poetry in English, he suggests seeing literature beyond mononational paradigms by taking into account that ‘poets, novelists, playwrights, and readers also confound the boundaries of national and regional community, forging alliances of style and sensibility across vast distances of geography, history, and culture’.3 Jahan Razamani, ‘A Transnational Poetics’, American Literary History, 18.2 (2006), pp. 335–359 (p. 333). Ramazani argues against what he terms ‘culture-of-birth determinism’, that is, the assumption that no amount of geographic, cultural or linguistic displacement can alter the fundamentals given by the place where the poet was born. Rather, he urges us to see authors and their work in the light of the global-traversing influences, energies and resistances that might shape them.

Poetic transnationalism, as proposed by Ramazani, ‘can help us both understand and imagine a world in which cultural boundaries are fluid, transient, and permeable’.4 Razamani, p. 355. To understand and imagine such a world is critical for the reading I propose in this research. This type of understanding allows us to ‘read ourselves as imaginative citizens not of one or another hermetically sealed national or civilizational bloc, but of intercultural worlds that ceaselessly overlap, intersect, and converge’.5 Razamani, p. 355. Abandoning the view of the nation as a hermetically sealed cultural space to favour a grasp that considers encounters and exchanges primary rather than incidental is key to understand Ecuador after the Feriado Bancario. Approaching contemporary Ecuadorian literature from a transnational perspective facilitates this process: it allows us to see that fiction narrates a nation in which associations between territory and identity are being frustrated.

Although Razamani’s theory is useful to frame the issues at hand in this project, his approach is mostly informed by the experience of English poetry. But Latin American literature in Spanish, with its own particularities, is also undergoing similar questionings regarding the limitations of single nation-based paradigms of reading and writing. Francisco Brignole is among those who have described the emergence of a ‘postnational sensibility’ in contemporary Latin American Literature. Although he terms postnational what I broadly refer to as transnational, his arguments point towards related issues, departing from the fact that Latin American writing has a long relationship with cross-cultural experiences. Brignole reminds us that the dictatorships that plagued the region in the second half of the twentieth century triggered the exile of thousands of people not only in the Southern Cone, but also in Central American and the Hispanic Caribbean. These forced migrations included writers, who – from their host countries – created a myriad of literary works populated by political outcasts inhabiting the space of exile unwillingly and longing for a return to their homelands. In the desire for return of their characters, Brignole notes, these writers fed a type of traditional exile discourse that ‘has generally been associated with nationalistic or ethnic movements, and with the recuperation of essential, primordial identities’.6 Francisco Brignole, ‘Voluntary Exiles, New Identities, and the Emergence of a Postnational Sensibility in Contemporary Latin American Literature’, in Postnational Perspectives on Contemporary Hispanic Literature, ed. by Heike Scharm and Natalia Matta-Jara (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2017), pp. 128–149 (p. 130). That is to say, the works of these displaced authors favoured nation-based approaches even when the authors themselves had to confront experiences that took them beyond the borders of their homelands.

The ‘postnational sensibility’ that Brignole discusses distances itself from the nostalgic exiles of the Latin American dictatorships. It is a type of sensibility to be found in fictions whose protagonists, instead of assigning unwarranted importance to this nation or that, draw attention to the futility of borders.7 Brignole, p. 130. Their stays away from their homelands are no longer accounts of victimisations and desires to go back to essential territories of birth, but rather attempts to forge complex networks and engage in cultural negotiations with the others they find abroad. For Brignole, national themes and the recuperation of primordial identities are themes that, in the work of these authors, lose their currency. Instead, they choose to write their stories from deterritorialised points of enunciation, ‘a fact that makes it nearly impossible to pigeonhole them in essentially obsolete national literary canons’.8 Brignole, p. 132. At the forefront of this group, Brignole mentions mostly writers who started their writing careers in the 1990s and early 2000s but continue until today actively publishing their fictions. In a non-exhaustive list, he mentions the likes of the Mexicans Xavier Velasco (1964) and Jorge Volpi (1968), the Cuban Karla Suárez (1969), the Peruvians Jaime Bayly (1965) and Daniel Alarcón (1977), the Argentines Andrés Neuman (1977) and Rodrigo Fresán (1963), among others, including the Puerto Rican Mayra Santos-Febres (1966), the Chilean Alberto Fuguet (1964) as well as the Ecuadorian Leonardo Valencia (1969), whose work I examine in this section.

Having lived abroad for extended periods of time without being coerced to do so, Brignole observes, these authors engage in what Sylvia Molloy has called ‘una escritura desde afuera’. This expression – writing from outside – belongs to a collection of essays Molloy coedited on the experience of Argentinean writers who, like herself, live abroad and share a common desire for exploring the poetics of distance in their literature, while setting up dialogues with the abstract body of work that is Argentinean literature. In the introduction to that volume, Molloy, who has long resided in the US, explains that cultural and linguistic displacements underpin the reflections on and the writing of Argentinean literature from abroad. She argues this is because the place of enunciation is different and fictions are marked by the place – both geographically and psychically speaking – in which they are created: ‘lo cotidiano siempre deja su marca, también cuando se está “afuera”: establece costumbres, condiciona la memoria, se entreteje con el recuerdo, permite […] inventar lo familiar desconfiando de las raíces’.9 Sylvia Molloy, ‘A modo de introducción. Back home: un posible comienzo’, in Poéticas de la distancia: adentro y afuera de la literatura argentina, ed. by Sylvia Molloy and Mariano Siskind (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2006), pp. 15–23 (p. 20). The implication here, the one that Brignole seems to be pointing to in Molloy’s argument, is that Latin American authors are engaging with and challenging the cultural frontiers of their nations by writing from displacement, which entails a particular way to see and to reflect on national spaces.

The contemporary Ecuadorian literature I analyse in this chapter relates to this discussion but also expands its scope. Molloy’s expression – ‘escribir desde afuera’ – heavily implies the notion of movement: to write from the outside, one needs to be outside. That is to say, those who experience displacement are better equipped to see and question the borders they traversed when they left. However, I believe that, while physical movement from one’s place of origin is certainly an important factor, it is not the only channel to disrupt the paradigm of hermetically sealed nations. It is also possible to contest cultural and national borders by directing the gaze towards the everyday aspects of a society that is interconnected with others. As such, literature can reflect on the exhaustion of the national model both from the inside and the outside of the nation’s territory. Cultural encounters and exchanges happen when people travel across the frontiers of their nations, but importantly they also take place inside those borders. With both the migration and the dollarisation phenomena, the effects of the Feriado Bancario in Ecuador rendered visible that national life can take place abroad, but also that external influences shape national life. Contemporary literature aids us to see and understand that.

It is true that, marked by their experiences away, geographically displaced writers play a critical role in the reimagining of Ecuador after the crisis, but they are not the only ones engaged in such process.10 There is a number of Ecuadorian writers living and publishing their work abroad. My intention here is not to make a list, but to give some examples: in this group one could name Esteban Mayorga (1977) and Ernesto Quiñónez (1969), who live in the US; María Fernanda Ampuero (1976), who resides in Spain; and Elsye Suquilanda (1979), who settled in Berlin. Ecuadorian authors whose names are not usually associated with travels or migrations too have created fictions about travellers, as it is the case with Javier Vásconez (1946) or Eliécer Cárdenas (1950), among others. Ecuadorian writers whose names are not usually associated with travels or migrations also play a role. After all, as Stephen Clingman reminds us, transnational themes in fiction ‘can be undertaken by a writer who never leaves home’.11 Stephen Clingman, The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 10. In his work on major writers including Joseph Conrad, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, Clingman argues that what makes fiction transnational is not necessarily being written by writers who travel. Instead, he proposes, what makes fiction transnational are formal characteristics that serve to inform the reader of a set of concerns ranging from the nature of boundaries to understanding navigation as a modality of existence.12 Clingman, p. 11. In the cases I study here, borders are traversed and unsettled by writers who live in Ecuador as much as by writers who live – or have lived – abroad. I highlight this differentiation between displaced and non-displaced writers because I do not focus my study on the ‘poetics of distance’ mentioned by Molloy nor on migrant authors or migrant aesthetics exclusively. As I say at the beginning of this chapter, these are fields already extensively studied. Providing a perspective that acknowledges the impacts of the migrant experience but also sees beyond migration, my attention here is directed to the many ways in which contemporary Ecuadorian literature gives traces of, imagines and constructs Ecuador as a transnational space.