Reading Didion -- Salvador

Didion Salvador

I just finished reading Salvador, Joan Didion's 1982 account of time spent in El Salvador during it's nascent civil war, bound to continue for another ten years.  This is the third book by Didion I've read, working through her one volume collected fiction, offered by Everyman's Library publishing house.

As with Slouching Toward Bethlahem and The White Album, Didion's eye for detail is very strong, this impeccable sense for capturing specific details in pristine clarity, then extrapolating them to become symbols for these larger movements within the society in question.  What is different here is that Didion has left the U.S., perhaps burnt out on the cultural decline of the late 60's and 70's so meticulously described in her two earlier works.  She structures the book around a loose chronology of her visit, narrating and compliling her experiences and images to give a cumulative picture of what she herself learned as observer, and what we are meant to take from experience as the de facto picture of the economic and governmental chaos of El Salvador in the early 80's.

I found myself very affected by the book.  I was struck with the surreality of the political climate, presented by Didion as this whole paradigm shift of how bad things can be.  Her prevailing emotion seems to be a sort of stunned silence that only an American could have, being faced with a nation in tatters.  There is a sense of denial in her work, or this denial impulse, a sense of "this can't be happening, this isn't real, this isn't possible" as more dead bodies appear on the roadside, civilians killed by either government or rebel troops.

Her book unfolds this slow process of discovering that it is actually happening, and the numbing reality of both the internal dysfunction, and also the inefficiency of American intervention in El Salvador.  At the time the US, concerned about the spread of communism, was backing the military junta sending aid, while at the same time complaining about "human rights abuses", government funded death squads terrorizing the country.

There is a strong theme of cultural decay set against disjointed/sloppy/hamfisted American efforts to democratize the country leading to this vague sense of chaos.  I think Didion accurately conveys a sense of horror and sadness, the shock of encountering a political chaos so different from the US.  As a whole, her stories give the sense of El Salvador as this crazy surrealist play, made tragically real.

Big themes are the prevelance of violence, the role of information/disinformation, the difficulty in really understanding what is happening in country, general chaos and shock, and a sense of absurdity in the superficial presence of wealth and "civilization" while chaos and disorder run rampant in city and countryside.

As a reader, I'm left with a deep sense of indignation and helplessness.  I'm left with a sense of awakening similar to what Didion herself experiences.  Indignation at the rampant chaos and injustice, that people who have to live in such conditions, and helplessness at how deep the problem of violence and political unrest seems to go.  Furthermore, a sense of helplessness at how ineffectual existing American aid was at improving the situation.

Reading Salvador, my thoughts go to Africa and Middle East, the "War on Terror" and all the new ways American policy has sought to influence a post-USSR global theatre.  Seeing the ineffectiveness within Salvador calls to mind Sudanese genocide, failed Rwanden intervention, crisis in Haiti, and trouble in Iraq.  Didion's observations, now 25 years old, seem just as prescient and relevant of the disconnect between American statesmanship and the objects of their interest, and furthermore, the distance between the statehouse and the American household--these three seperate worlds, orbiting at extreme distances from one another, the needs and crisis of other nations hitting American ears like signals from outer space, utterly disconnected from a human sense of empathy and recognition.

A second reaction is a sense of being overwhelmed at the world's need, and the sense of America as this implicit empire: we don't want to rule nations, but we want to influence them toward our interests, and there is such an imbalance of power between the strongest and weakest, that our energy of influence outweights the literal GDP and the mental sovereignty of many nations, so that acting in American interest becomes the same as acting in one's own best interest for many small countries. 

I remember hearing about the "Coalition of the Willing" during the war in Iraq, and wondering "who are these nations?"  Tiny countries, sending symbolic forces to Iraq: "50 troops from Eritrea", etc.  Theoretically, not subjects, but economically very much so.  Which leads to thoughts of China and India as burgeoning economic powers.  The reason this freaks Americans out is not because they are prospering within themselves ("good for them") but because it changes the economic balance of power, and devalues the weight of American foreign policy.

In the end, Carter ends up looking like a pretty humane president, and Reagan's Administration as willfully blind pricks, intent only on smashing communism at any cost.

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The last thought I had was Didion's place in the annals of field reporting, the role of a field reporter, someone sent to "give a picture of life on the ground", popularized in Vietnam.  "Make it tangible, boil it down."  Didion really accomplishes that in Salvador by framing things in such human terms, by placing herself within the context in a human way, and showing it to us as readers in a way that bypasses the worlds of separation, and fosters that emotional understanding that makes something feel significant to us in a human scale, not just on the level of "information".