Monday, February 18, 2019

Dana Frank's The Long Honduran Night

It is most useful to think of Dana Frank's The Long Honduran Night as a memoir. Frank is Professor Emeritus of History at UC Santa Cruz and both a scholar of and activist in Honduras. The book is about her experiences with labor organizers and many others in Honduras as they dealt with the 2009 coup and all its after-effects. It is a highly personal account, with her opinions and her own life laid bare--how she celebrated, traveled, got sick, was afraid, danced, and cried.

It may sound odd given the often grim circumstances, but the underlying theme of the book is joy. She is so glad to see the energy and dedication of Honduran activists, how they persevere and overcome seemingly overwhelming obstacles. The government is trying to kill them on a constant basis but they don't stop.

She hates Juan Orlando Hernández with a passion and shows frustration for how the U.S. media gives him favorable coverage (she took to using the term "axe murderer" for what he was doing in the country*). More specifically, she asks that we stop seeing immigrant flows as stemming from "gang violence" because it inaccurately suggests that the state is trying to stop it, as opposed to being deep in it as well. Giving aid to JOH is just increasing the violence.

I like the fact that she is ideologically nuanced. She apologetically is on the left, to be sure, but she show some skepticism of Manuel Zelaya and how his personality dominated the resistance so much. She is deeply critical of U.S. policy, but has a detailed understanding (based on her own hard legwork) of how the U.S. government is no monolith and how there are lots of sympathetic ears if you know how to find them. You can use those to make positive changes, even if small. She offers no simple answers, understanding there aren't any.

As an accessible book in English, you can't beat it for an informed overview of what's going on in Honduras. We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of the coup and it just keeps affecting (and infecting) everything.

*This generates memorable sentences like "At a commencement ceremony at my university, I sat next to the provost, Alison Galloway, and casually mentioned my axe murderers fixation" (p. 208).

0 comments:

  © Blogger templates The Professional Template by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008

Back to TOP