SNOW JOBS

Sniffing for the Truth in the Home of Magic Realism

In a 2003 briefing to the Senate Drug Caucus, a State Department
official described Colombia as a "vibrant democracy" four times the
size of California. This is wildly inaccurate: Unless California has
secretly been shrinking, Colombia is just over twice its size; it is
much more nearly four times the size of Wyoming. The mistake not only
calls into question the other things this official asserts (how
vibrant is this democracy?), but makes you wonder if the U.S. has been
pouring money into Colombia ($2.5 billion in military and police aid
since 1997) based on mistaken information about how big the country
is. The comparison to California suggests that for the U.S., the facts
of geography simply don't matter--perhaps because Colombia, like
California, and unlike Wyoming, is a place where far-out things happen.

Magical things, even: Readers know Colombia through its most famous
storyteller, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose accounts of lovers and
generals, magicians and ghosts are, according to him, not fantastic at
all, only a depiction of Colombia as it really is.

What's an anthropologist to do in a country where life is magic?

This question shapes Columbia professor Michael Taussig's My Cocaine
Museum. Taussig has spent much of the last three decades in Colombia,
where he has been everywhere and, it seems, met everyone, from the
descendants of African slaves who pan for gold on the coast to the
ministers in Bogota, digging in their cabinets for missing files.

My Cocaine Museum is a report from the field, but it is hardly
traditional fieldwork.

Taussig begins with a description of the Gold Museum in Bogota, a
collection of golden artifacts plundered from the inhabitants of
pre-Columbian Colombia. What follows is a kind of anti-museum, made of
meditations on the uncollectible phenomena he has encountered on the
country's remote Pacific coast: rain, stone, lightning, boredom, moonshine.

My Cocaine Museum tells the story that the Gold Museum hides, about
the difficulty of life in the place gold (and now cocaine) comes from,
a swamp where it rains three feet a month and the heat never goes away.

This story remained untold, Taussig suggests, because gold and cocaine
have tricked human beings into putting it out of their minds. "Through
their enchantment, their danger and their beauty, they usher in a
world of force and substantiality felt from within, a world that
escapes from the time-based cause-and-effect reality we most of the
time like to think we observe." Gold and cocaine lead people to forget
time and place, cause and effect, maybe even to make basic
geographical mistakes. You might think that a dose of the good old
cause and effect would be the best antidote to this befuddlement, but
Taussig disagrees.

He constructs his Museum in accordance with the spellbound logic of
gold and coke; each chapter mixes natural and human history, fiction
and reportage, with the manic associativeness of, well, a coke fiend.

This is so because--brace yourself--Taussig wants the book to have
magical powers of its own. My Cocaine Museum is intended as a
counter-enchantment, to free the reader, if not all Colombia, from the
magic of two commodities that have had a profound and malign effect on
the nation's history.

It's an ambitious task, but Taussig invokes some powerful spirits to
help him, notably Walter Benjamin, who believed (or maybe believed:
Benjamin is tricky) that words have a magical connection to the world,
even if this connection is also historically and politically
determined, i.e., not magic at all (tricky, tricky).

Benjamin got away with this kind of mysticism in large part because
his prose is so careful that you're willing to believe it can do
anything. But Taussig is no Benjamin. Too often, his associations seem
less like sorcery than mere virtuosity, as when he flits in a single
sentence from Great Expectations to the 17th-century pirate William
Dampier to the prison island of Gorgona, 10 miles off the Colombian
coast.

Occasionally even virtuosity lets him down, as when he mentions for
the third time that the cocaine cartels offered to pay off the
Colombian national debt in return for a guarantee that they wouldn't
be extradited, or when his pursuit of the inner logic of his subject
leads him to clunkers like "Writing is sixth sense, what dogs are
supposed to have, same as what fills the space between the words."
Still, failing to come off like Walter Benjamin isn't the worst a
writer can do, and if My Cocaine Museum doesn't quite enchant (or
disenchant), it is a daring immersion in a Colombian mode of thought.

Alfredo Molano's Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom takes a
different form, but covers some of the same ground.

Molano is a journalist and sociologist whose writing about the FARC, a
left-wing guerrilla organization, got him exiled from Colombia in
2000. Loyal Soldiers is a collection of oral histories in the mode of
Studs Terkel; his subjects are ordinary Colombians, driven by need or
greed to enter the cocaine trade. No one is innocent in Molano's
stories, except perhaps the "loyal soldiers" themselves, the mules who
are regularly betrayed by their handlers to the police, who are as
often as not complicit in the smuggling operations. An indictment of
U.S. drug policy lurks: What's the use of giving the Colombian
government billions of dollars in aid when the officials who receive
it are themselves cocaine traffickers, and not a penny reaches the
people who are driven by poverty to swallow 40 "cookies" (condoms full
of cocaine) and get on a flight to Spain? Molano's narratives are
powerful arguments for a policy that addresses the poverty--and
aspirations--of Colombia's citizens.

Too powerful, really: The stories are so good, you have to wonder if
they're entirely true. Molano's soldiers are gifted raconteurs; even
their accounts of violence and betrayal have a romance that's more
Scarface than Working. When you come to the one about the nun moved by
piety to transport a mysterious suitcase, the gears of plausibility
grind.

Loyal Soldiers has a lot of magic in it, but--Garcia Marquez said it
first--maybe that's how Colombian reality looks from a distance.