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March 10, 2020
Andrew Altschul's Playlist for His Novel "The Gringa"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Andrew Altschul's The Gringa is a poignant, provocative, and necessary novel for our times.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"Altschul’s ambitious and culturally aware novel is a captivating depiction of passion, disenchantment, and hope gone violently awry."
In his own words, here is Andrew Altschul's Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Gringa:
The Gringa tells the story of Leonora Gelb, an American activist who joins a group of violent revolutionaries in Peru, in the 1990s. She gets arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to life in a military prison, reviled as a terrorist by the very people she’d wanted to help. It’s also the story of Andres, a failed novelist who thinks he can shed his American identity by disappearing into another country. And he succeeds, for a time – his life in Peru is privileged and carefree, nothing at stake – until he’s hired to write Leonora’s story and comes face to face with Peru’s tragic history, which forces him to look more closely at his own country’s racism and inequality, and the ways the U.S. has exported terror throughout Latin America and the world.
It’s a split-screen novel, then, or maybe a split-personality: contrasting the grimness of violence and oppression with the hedonistic pursuits of a young man who thinks he can escape such things. When I lived in Peru in the 1990s, I often felt this way – whiplashed between pleasure and horror, confused by the way they live, necessarily, side by side. Later, when I started writing The Gringa, I found that I couldn’t write the one without slipping over into the other.
That’s why this playlist feels so torn. While I worked on the novel, I listened to music I thought Leonora would have taken inspiration from: protest songs, songs of social justice, clear-eyed examinations of the pain life inflicts on so many. But then, overwhelmed, I would turn for relief to the raucous, joyful music I used to listen to in Peru, music that insists on the pleasure and beauty of the world, even in the face of all the evidence. That’s life in Latin America, sometimes: dancing as a refusal to succumb to grief, a refusal to be defeated. “Life is a carnival,” Celia Cruz sang. “Es mas bello vivir cantando.”
Eva Ayllón, “Estoy Enamorada de Mi País”
On my first trip to Lima, I asked someone in my hostel where I should go to hear good music. They suggested La Estación de Barranco, a legendary peña – a venue for música folklórica – in what was then a grungy neighborhood half an hour to the south. I wandered in and found a seat near the stage – and for the next few hours I was mesmerized by the rhythm and energy of Afro-Peruvian music, and by the singer, whose wild mane of curly black hair was almost as distinctive as her powerful, charismatic voice. At one point, she pulled me out of my seat to dance – and rather than laugh at the clumsy gringo, the crowd cheered me on, a dozen others jumping up to join me. What I didn’t know, and wouldn’t realize until a year or two later, was that the singer that night was Eva Ayllón, the godmother of Afro-Peruvian music and more or less a national hero. (In 2018, she was awarded a Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.) It was the best welcome to Peru anyone could ever ask for. From that night, I was in love – enamorado del país, as Ayllón sings on one of her signature tracks, and her opening number that night.
Peter Gabriel, “Biko”
Growing up in a leafy New Jersey suburb, Leonora Gelb, like me, wasn’t encouraged to think about the outside world, the desperation and violence endured by millions of less fortunate people, or the ways the United States has so often supported cruelty and oppression in other countries. At a 1986 benefit concert for Amnesty International, she gets an earful – including this gut-wrenching anthem by Peter Gabriel, commemorating the death of Stephen Biko, an activist who was tortured to death by the South African government in 1977. Biko’s murder became a rallying cry for the international anti-apartheid movement; for me, hearing the song for the first time was a window into not only the disgusting, U.S.-supported crime of apartheid, but into my own sickening privilege and ignorance. These things were being done in my name. How did I not know?
“Flor de Retama”
In June, 1969, students in the Peruvian city of Huanta demonstrated against a decree by the military government that would have imposed fees on high school and university students. The government responded with force, and twenty students were massacred. The following year, Ricardo Dolorier wrote this song, a traditional Andean huayno, to commemorate the protests and the murders. Also that year, a group of students and professors at San Cristóbal de Huamanga University, in nearby Ayacucho, split with the Communist Party of Peru to form a secretive, militant sect that would eventually declare war against the government. They called themselves Sendero Luminoso: the Shining Path. Some of the founders had first been radicalized during the Huanta protests, and they would claim “Flor de Retama” as an anthem and rallying cry, a provocation aimed at both government supporters and other leftists they felt were too moderate. To this day, if you hear “Flor de Retama” in public, there’s trouble in the air.
Nina Simone, “Strange Fruit”
No song of protest ever got right to the point the way “Strange Fruit” does – Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze – and that’s probably why Billie Holiday’s producer and her record label refused to record it. Holiday made the song famous, but for sheer gut-punch listen to Nina Simone’s version, which replaces melodrama with a nerve-fraying suspense and silence. Another reason I’m drawn to this song: it was written by a Jewish schoolteacher named Abel Meeropol, who later adopted the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after their 1953 execution. Imagine having made two such meaningful contributions in one lifetime. He’s an unsung American hero.
Shakira, “Ojos Así”
Before she was a pop diva, before she was doing the “tongue thing” at the Super Bowl, before she was blond, Shakira was a Colombian waif, making music that sounded dark and complex, even if it always had a thumping dance beat. I listened to her first two albums, Pies Descalzos and ¿Donde Están los Ladrones?, a lot when I lived in Peru – I bought the CDs in a smuggler’s market for a dollar apiece and played them in my tiny, unheated room, but they sounded much better blasting from the speakers of the discotecas every night. This song, the final track on Ladrones, blends her Latin, Caribbean, and Lebanese influences into something hypnotic and dangerous, almost mythic in its evocation of a vast, empty landscape and the dark eyes of the “imprisoned saint” the singer is doomed to pursue from Bahrain to Beirut to the ends of the earth.
Bob Dylan, “Hurricane”
Shameful confession: I’ve never been a die-hard Dylan fan or dug much deeper into the catalog than his “greatest hits.” Somehow, though, in high school, I wound up with a copy of Desire, and the opening track – about the 1967 murder conviction of black boxer Ruben “Hurricane” Carter – pulled me in immediately. It’s a tricky thing when artists get up on a soapbox – Dylan took a lot of flak, and ran into some legal trouble, for the song – and the results don’t often make for great art. But the truth is I, like many others, might never have heard of Ruben Carter and his travesty of a trial were it not for Bob Dylan. And few would deny that the continued public interest in the case, and the eventual overturning of Carter’s conviction, in 1985, owed something to Dylan’s impassioned advocacy. As someone who hopes my own art can contribute something, however small, to social justice, I take inspiration from this song.
Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
There’s just never been anything that comes close to Gil Scott-Heron’s wild, proto-rap romp through American pop culture, racism, and social complacency. Hilarious, pissed off, brilliantly allusive, surreal – I can’t listen to it without feeling riled up and awed by how perfectly he nails the whitebread early-70s zeitgeist. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox… There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay… The revolution will not go better with Coke… It also points to something I explore in The Gringa: the question of whether good intentions are ever enough, or whether true change only ever comes when people get off their asses and go down into the street. I don’t know that I’ve ever really risked anything for my beliefs, but my protagonist does, and like many passionate and committed people, she pays the price.
Manu Chao, “Me Gustas Tú”
Manu Chao’s 2001 album Próxima Estación: Esperanza is lightning in a bottle – 46 minutes of upbeat musical anarchy, from the gleeful stoner jam, “Merry Blues,” through the eerie sound collage of the final track, “Infinita Tristeza.” But it was the willfully cheesy singalong, “Me Gustas Tú,” that was all the rage when I returned to Peru in 2001, a year after moving back to the U.S. – the song seems to have been diabolically engineered to put a smile on the face of everyone who hears it. As he does in all his work, the Paris-born Chao sings in multiple languages – English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic – and works an astounding variety of sounds and rhythms into this ultra-cosmopolitan record. Play it all the way through: it’s impossible to be in a bad mood while Manu Chao’s in the house.
R.E.M., “Welcome to the Occupation”
It’s a truism about R.E.M. that nobody ever really knew what the fuck half of their lyrics meant. But with 1987’s Document, the music took on a new sharpness and punch, and the first two tracks – “Finest Worksong” and “Welcome to the Occupation” – signaled the band’s transition from muttering Southern eccentrics to hard-hitting rock outfit. There’s little in the lyrics of “Occupation” that explicitly ties it to U.S. malfeasance in Latin America (just as there’s nothing in “Flowers of Guatemala,” from Life’s Rich Pageant, that refers directly to the C.I.A.-directed coup of 1954), but the phrase “primitive but loyal” captures perfectly the arrogance and cynicism of U.S. officials who supported sadists like Fulgencio Batista, Anastasio Somoza, and Augusto Pinochet, and the acid in Michael Stipe’s vocals has always sounded to me like an anguished protest. Fire on the hemisphere below. Indeed.
Sinéad O’Connor, “Black Boys on Mopeds”
It wasn’t the first time Sinéad O’Connor broke my heart, but it may have been the most painful. Something about those plaintive first lines – Margaret Thatcher on TV / shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing – really crystallized my understanding of propaganda, and of how easy it is to condemn in others the things we overlook or excuse in ourselves. There’s no filter in this song, no relief from the undistilled sorrow of a mother who understands she can’t protect her child from the racism and violence that plague England, as they plague the United States. Thirty years later, as the father of a biracial child, I find it almost impossible to listen to this song without wanting to hide my son away, to take him somewhere he’ll never have to feel different, where he’ll never be a target. These are dangerous days. Why do we live in a world in which parents fear for their children’s lives? Why is it “childish” to ask? Why is there no fucking answer?
Simple Minds, “Mandela Day”
As songwriting goes, “Mandela Day” isn’t very memorable, and not one of Simple Minds’ better tracks. But here’s the thing: On February 11, 1990, I was working the overnight shift at WBRU, in Providence, RI, where I was a DJ. When you worked the overnight, you checked the newswires every hour or so to see if anything urgent had broken, and if it had, you read it on the air. When the dispatch came in from South Africa around 4am, I was paralyzed. I spent a good five minutes reading it over and over again, to make sure I had it right. Then, when the current song ended, I opened the mike and told the world – or one small sliver of it – that Nelson Mandela had been set free after 27 years in prison. Then I put on “Mandela Day” and sat and sobbed, overwhelmed by the news, and by the privilege of having been the one to announce it. Once in a great while, an injustice gets corrected.
Soda Stereo, “De Música Ligera”
When I lived in Peru, there were few songs that could get as many people to leap off their bar stools and run to the dance floor as this crowd-pleaser by the argentino rock band, Soda Stereo. Which isn’t to say it’s a good song – the air-guitar-ready opening riff sounds a lot like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (though it was recorded before the Nirvana song), but the lyrics are a tribute to “easy listening” music that I’m not even sure we’re supposed to take seriously (Nada más queda…). Still, I’d often find myself wandering the streets of Cuzco with the music clanging in my head, and whenever I hear it now it brings back every multisensory detail of that important time in my life.
Radiohead, “How to Disappear Completely”
The existentially terrifying verb “disappear” becomes something even more horrible when it’s made transitive: to disappear someone is to erase their existence, to exclude them from humanity forever. It invokes the fearsome power of brutal authoritarian states, who consider their citizens’ lives expendable, pawns to be sacrificed for the sake of total control. As far as I know, this song, from Kid A, isn’t political, but when I was writing the sections of The Gringa in which the protagonist is enduring solitary confinement in a military prison in the middle of nowhere, I listened to it over and over again – and it gave me chills every time. I’m not here… this isn’t happening…
U2, “Mothers of the Disappeared”
The word “haunting” gets overused, but I can’t think of a better adjective for this oft-overlooked track, tucked at the very end of The Joshua Tree. Bono probably had the Troubles in Northern Ireland in mind, but this dirge fits all too well with every war in which the innocent get swept up indiscriminately with the guilty, and mothers have to live without knowing if they’ll see their children again – which is to say, every war. U2 have always had a political streak, but unlike the bloody-shirt anthem “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” this song is quiet and meditative, the singer surveying the wreckage in mourning and disbelief. In the trees, our sons stand naked; through the walls, our daughters cry – this last image is almost post-apocalyptic, but the shock of this song is its reminder that atrocity is all too real, that even in our modern, “enlightened” world, it’s commonplace.
Celia Cruz, “La Vida es una Carnaval”
And then we would dance. When the Cuban legend Celia Cruz died in 2003, nearly a hundred thousand fans turned out for her funeral procession through the streets of Miami. She was the Queen of Salsa, and no song exemplified her insistence on joy like this one, which explodes with horns and builds to a kind of exorcism: Para aquellos que solo critican – bua! Para aquellos que hacen la guerra – bua! Para aquellos que nos maltratan – bua! I’m a terrible salsa dancer – my Peruvian friends mockingly called me El Rey de la Salsa – but when this song came on it didn’t matter, nor did it matter what frustration or fear or sadness you were carrying around. You got up and you danced, and for a few minutes forgot about those things. What choice did you have?
Andrew Altschul is the author of the novels Lady Lazarus and Deus Ex Machina. His work has appeared in Esquire, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and O. Henry Prize Stories. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he was the founding books editor at The Rumpus and is a Contributing Editor at Zyzzyva. He teaches at Colorado State University.
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