Tubab by Beltrán Mena

Abstract

develops a lesbian relationship with one of the members, but the group soon disbands, and they disperse, finding their own places elsewhere. Kazumi, supposedly sexually more mature now, settles down with her fianc?, who has suddenly regained his eyesight. This is an ambitious work intended to provoke and enlighten the reader. But as Japanese critics point out, this is a static work, filled almost exclusively with the images of sexual experiments and lengthy discussions about them taking place in the confinement of small, private spaces. This story, which basically deals with the age-old theme of self versus society, regrettably overlooks the side of society. The translation is for the most part faithful, but not without frequent omissions and occasional additions. Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel Wesleyan University Beltr?n Mena. Tubab. Santiago, Chile. Alfaguara. 2009.429 pages. ch$ 15,700. isbn 978-956-239-631-8 The novel Tubab begins with a medical student, Beltr?n Mena, who spends his free time reading books and studying old maps of Africa. The basic plot of the book revolves around a trip a Chilean man takes to Africa in search of the mythical city of Timbuktu. The main character is a "tubab"?a white man, or foreigner, in some parts of Africa. "Maps fill our heads with names, names full of connotations and resonances, names that come to us through the air as notes cascad ing from the orchestra of paradise, they compel us to take a bus, wait for a ferry, fly on a plane," writes Mena. The trip will have no pur pose other than to advance from one city to another, to travel those maps crowded with unknown cities. The traveler senses that in Timbuktu heTl find nothing. No matter?it's only a pretext to start moving. Even though Mena begins his journey as a Chilean, he soon dis covers that in Africa he is a tubab. In traveling, one becomes a foreigner, another person, a stranger to oneself and to others. "What is important is not to travel, but rather, to cross borders," Mena affirms. And it is true that, by the end of his journey, the protagonist has crossed his own internal border. It is an indescrib able experience that edges toward silence and which the author him self finds difficult to define. First, he tells us, "I feel that I have crossed the most important border." Then he goes on to say, "I have no idea who the Tuareg are, but I will walk through the city like a Tuareg. I feel also that as I leave behind the line that I crossed, to my back, between the huts and the bowls of rice, radios and batteries, that it is a line which cannot be seen but which must look like the line that separates the teeth of those fantastic women, a line that tells us happiness is a whistle, a bit of good news that scratches the air." Just for a moment, Mena stops being a tubab, a foreigner. A changed man, he feels like any other per son in that wild and chaotic place, which has nothing to do with his own background. Tubab is also a meditation about movement and the need to start moving once again in order to awak en from the daily routine that makes us drowsy and keeps us from seeing life as it truly is. For Mena, the true journey is one the traveler carries out alone. Solitude obliges us to be more attentive, makes us fragile. It is precisely this fragility that allows us 1^1 "SELECTED L?TEftAR? NONFICTION VX/C. ?K I .1 ) ROBERT DAY Author of The Last Cax?Q Drive ^ M Save the World ^;:.': :? Day, ill.; These nineteen I ively essays by former ; ;.;.:.; - Washington Post contri.butor Day have v bee n t? I l ed "so me s pace to breathe i n" : J:, ;:-^-'::;an d "some, room to. h ear.the central pi ai h s : :attheirwi hdy a nd a wakebest" by .And cei jggS?odies? jf|8i^ ; ; :CiHoug^ y \. ',. .Hafied.\by:- theFrankfurter Ruhdschauas "? .. ; : infanta stic ah d poetic story" a bout ''a society . : disfigured by dictatorship," this )s the...