The Singer's Needle: An Undisciplined History of Panamá

Abstract

The Singer's Needle is a bold and experimental book, a sort of academic version of Julio Cortázar's novel Rayuela (Hopscotch). It is commendable for a scholar to take risks; the profession benefits from such risks and should encourage them by accepting and welcoming them. That said, this book might be the most incisive history of twentieth-century Panama.Ezer Vierba seeks to do two things. First, he examines the history of Panama through three significant events: the creation of Coiba, Panama's penitentiary island, which President Belisario Porras inaugurated in 1919; the assassination of President José Antonio Remón Cantera in 1955; and the assassination of liberation theology priest Héctor Gallego in 1971. Second, Vierba critiques the historical profession and its methods.What do the three events that Vierba examines have in common, and what do they, together, tell us about the history of Panama? The author chooses to insinuate the answer rather than saying it explicitly. He suggests that they are all moments of profound contradictions between state visions and everyday realities. The author begins with the history of the penal island of Coiba and asks why President Porras would dedicate a great amount of energy and interest in the creation of a distant penal colony. Vierba examines how Coiba was part of a national program that sought to civilize the country through internal colonization. Significantly, Ricardo J. Alfaro compared Coiba to Australia and New Zealand. Vierba highlights how Porras's liberal creed of universal rights of freedom and equality contradicted a colonizing project that considered peasants and Indigenous peoples as savages in need of civilizing through internal colonialism.Vierba examines the assassination of President Remón Cantera and the trials surrounding it as a window into the political contradictions of mid-twentieth-century Panama. On the one hand, it was a moment of enormous political activism against US presence in Panama. This activism—which was the force behind Remón Cantera's famous slogan “Neither millions nor alms, we demand justice” (Ni millones ni limosnas, queremos justicia)—faced, at the same time, great repression under Remón Cantera. The same Remón Cantera who renegotiated United States–Panama relations created the Guardia Nacional in 1953, curtailed freedom of the press, and was an adamant cold warrior against communists. Thus, The Singer's Needle suggests, Panamanian obsession with Remón Cantera's murder trials might be explained, along with the turmoil of the postwar era, as reflecting “the struggles of [the] . . . middle class to force the oligarchy to accept its national program, and with it, the supremacy of the rule of law” (p. 173). Vierba seems to suggest that the aftermath of World War II was a turning point in Panamanian history, when sovereignty, a middle-class dream, was achieved by crushing another middle-class dream, the rule of law.The last event examined by The Singer's Needle is the murder of Héctor Gallego, a priest who propounded liberation theology, during the 1970s military dictatorship. Vierba beautifully narrates how Gallego won peasants' trust and how, through Bible readings and discussion, peasants began to gain new confidence in their ability to work together as a community and to confront the rule of local merchants and landowners. In response, local elites sought military help against Gallego. Here again, Vierba signals the contradictions of twentieth-century Panamanian history. The same regime that successfully signed the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which returned the Panama Canal to Panama, was responsible for the death of Gallego. After reading Vierba's account of these three episodes of Panamanian history, the reader is left with the question of whether every conquest of sovereignty against the United States was paid for with the suppression of other aspirations for legal and social justice and for lower- and middle-class political autonomy.The second objective of The Singer's Needle is to discuss the subjectivity of historical writing. To make this point, Vierba chooses the strategy of telling his story through the words of fictional prisoners and of mixing fiction with traditional archival research. The problem for the reader is that the book becomes confusing. It is not clear what is fiction and what is not (and this lack of clarity is intentional). However, I am not sure who the intended public is for this argument. Professional historians have been aware of these debates for a couple of decades now, and nonhistorians might reject the book because of its confusing structure. And that would be a pity, because this is a very important book about twentieth-century Panama that brings a novel perspective to the contradictions and burdens caused by living next to an enclave. The Singer's Needle is required reading for anybody interested in the history of Panama and the role that places like Panama have played in the history of Latin America and the world.