Since November I’ve taken a bit of a pause from the news. But I had a problem: years of daily politics coverage on podcasts and newspaper replaced with: what? Surely not my own thoughts. And stipulated that music has its time and place, I’ve always been a talk radio person (for the Canadians in the room think of CBC radio one just quietly droning in the background) So. I turned to non-fiction audiobooks.
Any guys, while my first picked knocked it out of the park in terms of an excellent book, it was – far from – the reprieve from our political moment that I’d half-hoped the exercise might be (though I bear some blame as the title does suggest it may not be the lightest of content). Enter Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Snuggling.
A cultural anthropologist, De León’s Soldiers and Kings, covers the years De León spent living with and learning from a group of Honduran human smugglers. Over the chapters the book brings the complexity of their lives and choices alongside the crushing structural impossibilities that make their lives what they are.
As the book follows many years we also see how changes to immigration policies, climate catastrophe, and demands on/for labour change – and worsen – the experience of those trying to find safety and to stay there. Which makes it a particularly hard book to read right now and to be reminded – albeit from the privileged distance from which I read – of the concrete lived suffering and death that recent political changes in the US – and the likely changes within Canada – wreak.
It’s beautifully written – with the men De León meets and works alongside full in their complexity and their dreams. While sharing with the reader the contradictions of their livelihood, De León’s manages to at once also describe and analyze the broader social and political context in a way that never reads as pedantic, only as illuminating.
So while it will not be a cheerful read, it is – I think – an important one.
Literary Vice 