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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published January 24, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published January 24, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
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Literary Fiction
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A lush and lyrical debut novel about a Costa Rican family wrestling with a deadly secret, from rising literary star John Manuel Arias
Costa Rica, 1968. When a lethal fire erupts at the American Fruit Company's most lucrative banana plantation burning all evidence of a massive cover-up, the future of Teresa Cepeda Valverde's family is changed forever.
Now, twenty-seven years later, Teresa and her daughter Lyra are still picking up the pieces. Lyra wants nothing to do with Teresa, but is desperate to find out what happened to her family that fateful night. Teresa, haunted by a missing husband and the bitter ghost of her mother, Amarga, is unable to reconcile the past. What unfolds is a story of a mother and daughter trying to forgive what they do not yet understand, and the mystery at the heart of one family's rupture, steeped in machismo, jealousy, labor uprisings, and the havoc wreaked by banana plantations in Central America.
Brimming with ancestral spirits, omens, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature, John Manuel Arias weaves a brilliant tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption in Where There
Was Fire.
* * *
THE MOON WAS highest in the sky when Teresa startled from sleep, her face wet. Outside, Barrio Ávila slept peacefully. La Guaria Railroad sprawled out like a fat, tired snake, dividing Teresa's lonely house from the rest. The newly installed streetlamps stood sentinel, their heads swarmed by lazy gnats and tiny things that touched the lights and fell to the track below. Trees gossiped in the hush. Two hounds lapped up each other's urine. A cane toad's croaking haunted streets and shadowed corners.
Teresa rubbed her eyes of sleep and picked her ears of echoes. The humidity trapped in the bedroom lay atop her, thick as caramel. In a tender reflex, she felt gently for her grandmother's arm, but the sheets beside her were dry and undisturbed. A reflex she couldn't shake, even though it had been many years since her grandmother died.
Saints are just devils who cut off their tails, her grandmother's voice said in the darkness. She'd been a famous soothsayer and sage, an encyclopedia of proverbs and sayings. Again, the echo of those saints and devils. It had been her grandmother's greatest wisdom; she spoke of those who sanctified themselves by ridding their lives of vices and wickedness. But eventually she decided on a plain, simple addendum to her own adage: Men are the devils, and women the saints. And every woman is born with a sharp machete inside her heart. She must learn to wield it, to cut off men's tails.
Women far and wide subscribed to her grandmother's gospel, and she even advised Teresa to keep the tail locked away from the things she loved. If you were to open my drawer, the tails would scramble and jump out like vipers, her grandmother confessed. They would slither away and try to reattach themselves.
Teresa looked to her rattling nightstand, its varnished wood glimmering in the ...
Copyright © 2023 by John Manuel Arias
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Flatiron Books. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
"They say money doesn't grow on trees, but it does when one's talking about bananas." In a Costa Rican town called Barrio Ávila in 1968, a fire decimates the banana plantation run by the American Fruit Company. The same night the blaze is set, José María Sánchez murders his mother-in-law, Amarga Cepeda Valverde, and disappears, never to be seen again by his wife Teresa or their twin daughters, Lyra and Carmen. Almost thirty years later, Teresa and Lyra are estranged, Carmen is dead, and no one is any closer to understanding what made José María commit this unspeakable crime.
We learn in the first chapter of Where There Was Fire that Teresa's grandmother, believed to be a witch, passed down to her a particular piece of wisdom: "Men are the devils, and women the saints. And every woman is born with a sharp machete inside her heart. She must learn to wield it, to cut off men's tails." This assessment aligns with Teresa's experience; after all, her husband seemingly went mad one night and murdered her mother. But we come to learn that the situation is much more complicated. José María's act was not evidence of an evil within, it was the work of the evil specter of American imperialism that haunted the town.
The large-scale sociopolitical effects of American interference in Central and South America — dictatorships, war, economic instability — are widely discussed. Less so are the personal effects on individual families. In his debut novel, John Manuel Arias zooms in for a closer look at that particular brand of devastation. Through happenstance, a box of documents containing correspondence of American Fruit's management and affiliates comes into Lyra's possession, and she learns what role the company played in her father's crimes. These letters punctuate the middle of the novel, gradually revealing what happened in the days, months, and years leading up to that fateful night in 1968. This plot device is wielded well, because the letters are as wrenching as they are expository. The theme of imperialism is as entrenched in the book as it was and remains in the affected regions, an unbreakable shackle connecting one generation to the next. We learn, for instance, that Amarga is the daughter of a white coffee baron and "an Indigenous woman whom he cornered one night in the washroom," and Teresa's father was a lawyer for American Fruit who disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
Where There Was Fire is redolent with the gothic and supernatural, and may draw comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez. Aria's prose is florid:
"La Guaria Railroad sprawled out like a fat, tired snake, dividing Teresa's lonely house from the rest. The newly installed streetlamps stood sentinel, their heads swarmed by lazy gnats and tiny things that touched the lights and fell to the track below. Trees gossiped in the hush. Two hounds lapped up each other's urine. A cane toad's croaking haunted streets and shadowed corners."
However, it's effectively restrained, with such descriptions appearing just frequently enough to remain enchanting rather than tiresome.
Though a man lights the match that ignites the plot, the book succeeds on the strength, folly, desperation, and hope of the Cepeda Valverde women. Teresa's longing for a reconciliation with Lyra, a relationship with her grandson, and some way of making sense of her mother's murder are rendered with delicate and anguished precision. Lyra is perhaps the most stable member of the family, but her anger toward Teresa for her neglectful behavior after the events of 1968 and her grief for Carmen burn incandescent. There is only one chapter from Carmen's perspective, which may feel like a missed opportunity for some readers given that her gift of telepathy makes her a naturally compelling character. However, it makes sense in the world of the novel, where Carmen's absence, like her father's, is a central void around which the other characters attempt to orient themselves.
In the 1995 timeline, Barrio Ávila is a hollowed out shell of its former self, the abandoned train on the defunct railroad tracks a symbol of emptiness left behind after the destruction of the corporate leviathan that birthed it. Amarga's room in the guesthouse behind Teresa's is exactly as she left it on the night she was murdered, a hushed tomb. Time stopped in 1968, not just for this family, but for the entire town. Where There Was Fire picks through the pieces of this disaster for salvage, and there is so much. We see the black void at the center of American capitalism and empire and the cold pile of ash it leaves behind, but also the depth of humanity at the center of Teresa and Lyra (and others). And Lyra's resolute effort to raise justice like a phoenix from these ashes is a triumph.
Reviewed by Lisa Butts
In Where There Was Fire, the neighborhood that is the central setting in the 1968 timeline is home to a banana plantation run by a fictional corporation called American Fruit Company, based loosely on the real-life United Fruit Company (UFC). United Fruit (which has since become Chiquita) had plantations in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and elsewhere in Central America and the West Indies.
UFC was born in 1899 when the Boston Fruit Company merged with the Central American banana companies of businessman Minor C. Keith, who owned a railroad system in the region (in the novel, the American Fruit Company was founded by a "distant cousin" of Keith's). By 1930, UFC employed more people in Central America than any other company. Its influence in particular areas inspired the coining of the phrase "banana republic."
Central American employees of the UFC were exploited — they worked for long hours for low wages in dangerous conditions. The company was also responsible for outbreaks of violence and upheaval. In 1928, Colombian employees of UFC went on strike to demand improved working conditions and fair wages (employees were paid in credits that could only be spent in the company store). American diplomats were in regular conversation with UFC higher-ups about the strike, and the Colombian government feared U.S. military intervention if it continued. Colombian Gen. Carlos Cortés Vargas summoned the workers to the city of Ciénaga, where instead of engaging in ongoing negotiations as they were led to believe, they were fired upon by Cortés Vargas's soldiers. More than 1,000 were killed in what came to be known as the Banana Massacre. A fictionalized version of these events appears in Gabriel García Márquez's 100 Years of Solitude.
In Guatemala in 1935, the U.S. government launched a campaign to smear President Jacobo Arbenz over reform legislation that took land from UFC and returned it to local farmers, painting him as a communist dictator. With this seed planted, the CIA paid Honduran militants to go to war with Arbenz, ultimately leading to his resignation. A Honduran puppet president in UFC's pocket was elected, and he returned the redistributed land to United Fruit. (In 1975, the chairman of United Brands, formed after United Fruit merged with AMK Corporation, died by suicide amid rumors he tried to bribe Honduran authorities for lower taxes on bananas.)
UFC owned 9% of the land in Costa Rica, and when they finally left in 1984, they had significantly impacted both the land and population, partly due to the use of pesticides. In Where There Was Fire, a particular chemical used on the banana plantation results in infertility issues among the workers, and a major plot point revolves around the consequences of these health problems in the Cepeda Valverde family's lives.
The company's reign of terror in Central America continued into the 21st century. In 1984, UFC merged with another company under the United umbrella to become Chiquita. Chiquita paid a right-wing paramilitary group in Colombia over $1.7 million to carry out assassinations (of landowners who would not sell and dissidents, among others) on the company's behalf. Chiquita pleaded guilty to supporting terrorism in 2007 and paid a $25 million fine.
SS Abangarez, a United Fruit banana boat, in San Francisco Bay, circa 1945
U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph, via Wikimedia Commons
Filed under People, Eras & Events
By Lisa Butts
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