Damnificados

Jj Amaworo Wilson

Description

Damnificados is loosely based on the real-life occupation of a half-completed skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, the Tower of David. In this fictional version, six hundred “damnificados”—vagabonds and misfits—take over an abandoned urban tower and set up a community complete with schools, stores, beauty salons, bakeries, and a rag-tag defensive militia. Their always heroic (and often hilarious) struggle for survival and dignity pits them against corrupt police, the brutal military, and the tyrannical “owners.”

Taking place in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, the novel has elements of magical realism: avenging wolves, biblical floods, massacres involving multilingual ghosts, arrow showers falling to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth, and a trash truck acting as a Trojan horse. The ghosts and miracles woven into the narrative are part of a richly imagined world in which the laws of nature are constantly stretched and the past is always present.

Sujets

• Urban fiction
• True Love
• Didacticism
• Surreal
• Magic realism
• Vision Quest

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629631752
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Damnificados
" Damnificados is a rich fictional creation inspired by legends of the past and visions of the future. The true magic of the novel is that it conjures a teeming, vigorous world that feels like an urgent version of now. Go on, live a little with the damned."
Richard Beard, author of X20
"JJ Amaworo Wilson is a terrific writer with a story that grabs you by the throat and never lets you go. Two-headed beasts, biblical floods, dragonflies to the rescue magical realism threads through this authentic and compelling struggle of men and women the damnificados to make a home for themselves against all odds. As the crippled Nacho says, the refuge he helps create is ‘always on the brink of chaos.’ Yet into this modern, urban, politically familiar landscape of the ‘have-nots’ versus the ‘haves,’ Amaworo Wilson introduces archetypes of hope and redemption that are also deeply familiar true love, vision quests, the hero’s journey, even the remote possibility of a happy ending. These characters, this place, this dream will stay with you long after you’ve put this book down."
Sharman Apt Russell, author of Hunger
"Amaworo Wilson takes Nabokov’s advice: In crisp sentences he fondles details. They close us in on a world we didn’t know, and now won’t forget."
A.C.H. Smith, author of The Dark Crystal
"A great novel. Amaworo Wilson’s new Tower of Babel and its population really gripped me. An extraordinary story with unforgettable characters and fantastic scenes … a parable and memorial of the fate of the damnificados of this earth."
Ruth Weibel, Liepman AG literary agency
"JJ Amaworo Wilson writes with deep human sympathy and memorable descriptive powers. Damnificados is a story that needs to be heard."
Diran Adebayo, author of Some Kind of Black
"Moses meets the desperados. This is a modern-day retelling of an ageold story, about a man who leads his people away from poverty and oppression. Engaging, heartwarming, and honest."
Bart van der Steen, editor of The City Is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the 1970s to the Present
"Only a rare and special talent can take contemporary realities sad, joyful, infuriating, inspiring and spin them into legend. In a narrative rich in danger, adventure, humor, romance, and risk, JJ Amaworo Wilson raises essential questions without succumbing to earnestness or didacticism."
Diane Lefer, author of Confessions of a Carnivore
"It is not often that one reads a work of fiction that accomplishes the complicated task of depicting marginality, silence, abandonment, and other forms of sociocultural exclusion. But this novel offers so much more than informed entertainment: this is truly beautiful literature that helps us shape a new understanding of the complex relation between peoples, cultures of resistance, and the urban environment."
Andrej Gruba i , coauthor of Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History
" Damnificados is a modern-day David and Goliath of epic proportions. Amaworo Wilson speaks eloquently and matter-of-factly for the forgotten. The unnamed. The underfoot. The lost. The damned. It’s a whirlwind of war and scrappiness and ire. A tale begging to be told. And Amaworo Wilson drags every uncomfortable detail into the light to force us to examine it. This is a debut certain to usher in an amazing and long-lived career."
Aaron Michael Morales, author of Drowning Tucson
" Damnificados by JJ Amaworo Wilson is a fascinating story of struggle, passion, and justice, told in crackling prose. Mythic, beautiful, wise, and strange, it yields pleasures on every page."
Joy Castro, author of Island of Bones

Damnificados
JJ Amaworo Wilson © 2016
This edition © 2016 PM Press
ISBN: 978-1-62963-117-2
LCCN: 2015930894
PM Press
P.O. Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
pmpress.org
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cover: John Yates/Stealworks.com
Layout: Jonathan Rowland
Printed by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com
For David Henry Wilson and in memory of Elizabeth Ayo Wilson
You’d better get a home in that rock, don’t you see.
You’d better get a home in that rock, don’t you see.
Between the earth and sky, thought I heard my savior cry,
You’d better get a home in that rock, don’t you see.
God gave Noah the rainbow sign, don’t you see.
God gave Noah the rainbow sign, don’t you see.
God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time.
You’d better get a home in that rock, don’t you see.
Poor man Lazarus, poor as I, don’t you see.
Poor man Lazarus, poor as I, don’t you see.
Poor man Lazarus, poor as I, when he died he had a home on high.
You’d better get a home in that rock, don’t you see.
Rich man Dives lived so well, don’t you see.
Rich man Dives lived so well, don’t you see.
Rich man Dives lived so well, when he died he had a home in Hell.
You’d better get a home in that rock, don’t you see.
Negro spiritual
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Matthew 5:5
CHAPTER 1
The tower Damnificados The invasion Cerberus Night fires Dogmeat The beasts take a nap
T HE SKYSCRAPER WAS THE THIRD-TALLEST BUILDING IN THE CITY AND FROM THE HIGHEST floor you could look down on the backs of birds gliding on air. One muggy August afternoon Rolo Torres tried to parachute from the fiftieth floor. The chute stayed shut and he landed face first in a refuse pile.
"At least we don’t have to dig a hole to bury the dumb shit," said the mayor.
The building had stood empty for a decade, pockmarked by bullet holes, paint peeling in the sun, flaking away like a layer of skin, and a posse of graffiti artists had looped their messages in cartoon writing on the back of the building: libertad, torre de mierda, cojones, viva la revolución, and a fresco of soldiers in silhouette marching to Hell.
Surrounded as it was by low-rises, the monolith took on the aura of a bully. With its six hundred eyes it watched the world, and its shadow moved like the hands of a clock, blotting out the surrounding bodegas and wastelands and cinder block houses for minutes at a time. Over that decade the glass had fallen out the windows or been smashed by stray birds and bats till the building’s eyes were hollows. And with the glass gone, the wind lassoed its ghost-whistles around and through the skyscraper’s neck, shooting in and out of its arteries and whooshing down its lungs.
Some winter days the building would sway like a dancer. And when it did, the mayor, perched on a balcony sixty floors up, would cry, "It’s gonna fall!" and his wife would tell him to shut the hell up because he was the mayor and he was supposed to be a leader but he was yellow as a streak of lemon and he knew it and his wife knew it and his kids knew it and when he died it was with the whimper of a wounded dog and he soiled his pants in front of his enemies, which by the end was everyone including his wife.

And it is these same damnificados, twenty years on, who crawl out of the darkness one balmy midnight, a raggedy army of beards and grime, heading for the tower. They come from Agua Suja and Minhas and Fellahin and Bordello. They come from Sanguinosa and Blutig and Oameni Morti, cardboard cities and shantytowns on the hills, where the rain makes rivers of mud, where houses slide away. And they drag fraying baskets and polythene bags, soot-stained blankets, coats of crinoline and fake fur. A woman in her fifties pushes a wheelbarrow which carries a three-legged dog. And from out of a nook comes a cripple named Nacho, heaving his wasted body on bandaged crutches, his quick eyes scanning the streets for trouble. Krunk! Trouble! A four-hundred-pound Chinaman emerges foot first from a hole in a wall, kicking down the bricks. Another damnificado. He looks both ways and slings a scarred wooden club over his shoulder.
Some of the damnificados have wrapped their faces in cloths, like lepers, only eyes visible, and their steps are padded as a panther’s because many have no shoes to walk in, just rags binding their feet. And others move barefoot, hunched and furtive, two by two, shifting in the shadows for safety.
Slowly and silently they converge on the tower block. And a cat spies them from its roof of corrugated iron and narrows its eyes and purrs its approval. There’s nothing like a midnight rumpus to stir a cat. The distant music of sirens droops further and further into oblivion, and then there is no sound save the scampering of mice on stone.
The silence is broken by the roar of a bus as it swings its rump around a corner. A great gouge of smoke bursts out of its exhaust and then the bus convulses to a stop and two filthy, lanky teenagers exit, blond, wiry, carbon copies each of the other, each jumping the final step. Twin damnificados, men of the scarecrow army.
"Wo ist der Grosse? Where is that big bastard?" says the one.
"The tower or the Chinaman?" asks the other.
"Der Turm. Who’s the Chinaman?"
"You’ll know him when you see him. He’s massive. He once killed an ox."
"Who hasn’t killed an ox?"
"He strangled it with his bare hands."
Nacho the cripple turns a corner, sees the monolith and stops, thinking this is just as it was foretold all those years ago in Zerbera. He feels the damnificados around him, hears their breathing, recognizes the smells a musky anthology of old food, sweat, piss, trash. Re-cognizes. Knows again,