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A Culture of Violence

Rogelio Vallejo

The first sentence in any story must function as a key, one opening a door to worlds which we will inhabit for as long as we hold the book in our hands; and of course the key itself must possess elements sufficiently enticing for us to wish to use it.

In Under the Dust award winning writer Jordi Coca’s first sentence is deceptively simple but full of resonance: “When I look at the old photographs from my childhood, my heartsinks.” I was hooked as soon as I read it; for who has looked at pictures from their childhood without at least some apprehension? The world Coca describes so well is a dreadful one in which nothing really happens, while at the same time people are continuously aware that they had best be prepared for the “worst”: “It’s always like that,” said Joanet, “when everything’s going well, that’s when I start to shudder...” The scene is set in just a few words, life is lived as if below a volcano with eruption an ever-present possibility. Nothing is certain, and anxiety and fear reign. And it is worse than that, for it is a world where children frequently say, “You know what, I don’t want to live...” and where children throw themselves on to railway tracks in front of goods trains. I found it easy to identify with Jordi Coca, surely himself his book’s central character? He is only a little younger than me, and his childhood and youth, like mine, were spent under a dictatorship, surrounded by a culture of violence and intimidation, where fear does not speak and ruthlessness has the final word. So I felt totally, if uneasily, at home in the world to which his first sentence introduced me. On reflection, though, I felt that this shared experience could do Coca a disservice as a writer, for it might seem that I had merely found a book with which I could easily identify be- cause of certain similarities between the author/protagonist’s experiences and my own.

In order to clarify my thoughts in this respect, I turned to younger readers, born much later than Coca and I, who had grown up under very different circumstances. What they told me was that they too identified with the protagonist and sympathised with his despair, his vacillation between a wish to die, and to survive and triumph. This confirmed, then, what I intuitively already knew, that the author of Under the Dust is one of those gifted writers who touches every nerve of our existence.

Childhood, no matter how pleasant its environment, is not free from tension and fear — though I know the disappointment of not having the latest Playstation cannot be compared with the horror experienced daily by millions of children. Growing up is never easy: Coca knows this very well and succeeds in bridging the gap between at least three generations of readers, making us all feel participants in the story. I can imagine many people feeling that this book is too depressing, that it is time we forgot and laid the sad ghosts to rest, undisturbed and undisturbing. But all over the world there are children living in fear, hungry, desperate, dreaming their daily nightmare, playing tough because there are no alternatives. This book is so relevant because, just like all great works of art, it reaches every recess of our humanity. It is translated from Catalan by Richard Thomson, and reflects superbly the original’s directness of language, complex meaning and relentless sadness.