Paraguay - A journey to the heart of Latin America

I've never been to Latin America, so it's quite apt that my first trip there (to Cuba) coincides with the end of my 'virtual' journey to Paraguay.  In a weird way, I've learned so much about Paraguay in the past month that I feel prepped for a Paraguayan trip.  As we're actually going to Cuba, it's going to be like diving in at the deep end!

During this learning experience I've read (or tried to read) two books related to Paraguay.  Probably Paraguay's most famous book I, the Supreme (Yo, el Supremo) by dissident writer Augusto Roa Bastos is quite a heavy read, intrinsic in its detail, but strangely hypnotic in its wordplay - think James Joyce with quixotic Spanish phrases.  Needless to say I didn't finish it.  Unfortunately having a full-time job precludes the amount of time it would take to digest a mammoth creation like Bastos' book.  It's one for retirement, or a long train journey across Siberia!  Still, I'm glad I got through the 150 or so pages that I did and it gave me a flavour of Bastos' (and Paraguay's?) existential angst. 

The story is mostly based on the life of Paraguay's original dictator, Francia, and the craziness of his mind.  A political pamphlet (or pasquinade) is found, basically threatening the life of the President in a very violent way.  The President is, understandably, upset by this lampoon and engages in a torturous analysis of the situation, with his amenuensis, Patino, being his main audience.  El Supremo demands that Patino find the author of the pasquinade within an unreasonably short period of time.  As I was reading the novel, it occured to me that El Supremo had written the pamphlet himself, that his servent realises this and finds himself in the intolerable position of not being able to reveal the truth, as that would surely mean his death.  The logic of El Supremo is totally warped and the book is really all about living at the whims of a madman and how frightening that must be.

The other book I read, and an absolute must for anyone interested in the history of Paraguay, was At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig by John Gimlette.  Gimlette has a real passion for Paraguay and, although it's difficult not to reel in the absurdity of some of the situations he finds himself in and the eccentricity of the characters he meets, you can sense that he has a genuine love for a country that could easily have been so different, with better leadership and less challenging circurmstances.  Gimlette describes Paraguay as a kind of Cinderella, a beautiful young maiden with three bigger sisters, except she never really gets a chance to meet her prince and live happily ever after. 

From Gimlette's book I learned about the different regions of Paraguay, the various people that have tried, and more than often failed, to make Paraguay conform to their utopian dreams.  I read about the Irish courtesan, Eliza Lynch, a people's princess and a truly fascinating character, she reminded me of Lola Montez and the King of Bavaria.  I read about the primitive communism of the Jesuit missions, about the fact that El Supremo banned marriages that weren't interracial and strutted around like some kind of mini-Napoleon.  I read about fascist Paraguay of the 1930's and later the many Nazis, like Dr Mengele, who sought anonymity in the Paraguayan jungles.  I read about the cruelty of Stroessner's regime and his exile in neighbouring Brazil.  I read about the tropical waywardness of Asuncion, how the jungle lives on in this city of millions, about the 'peinetes de oro' or ladies of the night, about how the English of the Victorian Age romanticised Paraguay and made it out to be some kind of sensual paradise, how Joseph Conrad condemned it in his parody of a South American democracy Nostromo. 

I learned about the Korean and Chinese businessmen of Cuidad del Este, a city that Gimlette says 'hadn't been planned, but had just erupted'.  I learned about the Casado family of Buenos Aires who owned an estate in the Chaco which was three times the size of Switzerland.  I read about the Japanese colony of Paloma, about the Guarani word for television which means 'machine that imagines'.  I learned about lungfish that bury themselves in the soft  mud of the Chaco during the dry season, I learned about the once feared Lenguas tribe and the Ache, ghost people of the forests, with their cannibalism and infanticide. 

Most of all, I learned to be fascinated by Paraguay and the sheer number of interesting people and anarchic adventurers who have passed through there.  About a month ago, I started with a knowledge of where Paraguay is, the name of its capital and not much else.  It's amazing how much there is to learn about Paraguay, like a parallel universe, its history and stories have happened in the obscurity of tribal languages and the uncertain beating of South America's dark heart. 

For regular readers, I'm going to be in Cuba until the end of March - travelling for real this time, rather than through the eyes of others.  Don't worry, I'll be back soon enough, with a new place and some new learning experiences. 

Image credits

The rather vampirish image of El Supremo (Francia) is from Wikipedia and is copyright free.

The image of the cover of John Gimlette's book At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is from http://www.openlibrary.org/

Paraguay - Jesuits and Guarani

I'm doing my first South American country and I'm really excited about Paraguay because, being a big fan of travel magazines like Wanderlust and Lonely Planet Magazine, I've read a lot about Paraguay's neighbours: Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina.  Paraguay, on the other hand, is a country I know absolutely nothing about!

Looking at Paraguay on a map, it looks relatively small compared to either Brazil or Argentina. Finding out that it is only a little bit smaller than both California and Sweden, helps put things in perspective. It's quite a sparsely populated country and most people seem to live in the East, between the Paraguay and Parana rivers. The western Chaco is already intriguing me, with its remoteness and its history, bringing Paraguay into conflict with Bolivia in the 1930's and leading, ultimately, to 35 years of dictatorship under Stroessner, and Paraguay's self-imposed isolation from world affairs.

Apart from Stroessner's years in power, the two things that immediately jump out at me, in relation to Paraguay, are the influence of the Jesuits and the status of one of Paraguay's two official languages, Guarani (the other being Spanish).

I'm just beginning to realise how different Guarani is from other native languages of the Americas. I spent a lot of time last month researching the Native American cultures and languages in the US and I think any of these would love to have the status that Guarani has, with its estimated 5 million speakers and the support and resources of the Paraguayan government. Guarani is classified as a member of the Tupi-Guarani language family and is the only native American language that has also been adopted by non-native American speakers, namely the European ancestors of Paraguay's majority mestizo population.

It's also unusual in that it has a strict system of nasal harmony, not just in affixes, like many African languages but, in fact, the whole word will be nasalised, including all vowels and consonants. When Europeans came to South America, they decided that all native American languages were more or less the same and belonged to one big language family. This seems like academic apathy to me and I'm much more excited about hints that Guarani might be traced back to places in Central Asia. To Guarani we owe words like Jaguar, Tapir and Piranha. 

So why did Guarani thrive when other native languages were eclipsed by Spanish, Portuguese and English? The easiest answer is - the Jesuits! Founded by the Spanish-Basque, Ignatius of Loyola, the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits, became a sort of 'defenders of the faith' sect, within the Catholic church, stopping Protestantism from spreading to places like Poland and Lithuania, later spreading the Catholic faith as religious missionaries to Asia and the New World.

The Jesuits strongly believed in and promoted use of the vernacular (as opposed to Latin) and their universities became famous as centres of study for lawyers and civil servants. Also, when the Jesuits came to South America as missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries, they used Guarani to spread the word of God and established 'reductions', which were Christianised native communities, that gave the native people some protection from the excesses of colonisation that were so common elsewhere.

So great was the Jesuit influence, in Europe and the rest of the world, that they were eventually banned by most European countries, seeking refuge, ironically enough, in the only country that would tolerate them, Catherine the Great's Russia!

I've only hit the tip of the iceberg with these two themes and it's fascinating, but too much to blog about in one go. Reading about the Jesuits, in particular, has filled in another jigsaw piece for me, in the puzzle of world history.

I'm going to leave you with a short clip from Al-Jazeera, available through YouTube, so we can learn a little bit more about Guarani and (most exciting of all), hear the spoken language. Enjoy!



Image credits

The image of the man on the road is by flickruser Olmovich (Olmo Calvo Rodriguez) from Madrid, who is a part of a journalist co-operative that highlights the work of social movements and publishes an interesting (Spanish language) periodico called Diagonal.  To find out more, check out their website http://www.diagonalperiodico.net/

The image of Ignatius of Loyola is a reproduction of a painting by Rubens, from Wikimedia Commons, and is copyright free.