Alienated in Panama

The Great Divide

“a group of labourers—Jamaicans, Barbadians, Trinidadians, Panamanians—encounter a gaggle of tourists who have come to gawp at the building site. ‘Don’t seem they seeing us,’ one of them says. ‘We part of the scenery,’ another replies”

“in this moving novel, which fiercely questions the canal’s timeworn narrative of unalloyed progress, Henríquez’s eye is often drawn to the micro-dramas of ordinary people swept along in the changes”

“an arresting image of a society marked by inequality, in which generosity and solidarity stand out as acts of resistance”

“Panama’s very existence as a nation is inextricably tied to the canal’s construction, which was finally completed in 1914. At the turn of the 20th century, the US attempted to lease from Colombia a narrow sliver of land between the Atlantic and the Pacific, where the French had tried (and failed) to build a waterway. When the Colombians refused to play ball, the US began to support separatist rebels fighting for independence. The new Panamanian government promptly signed a treaty with the US. It was only a kind of independence, Henríquez writes: ‘Panama, detaching itself from Colombia, had merely done an about-face and attached itself to the United States instead’”

“One of the characters in The Great Divide describes what became known as the Canal Zone as ‘a sort of miniature reproduction of the United States, like they had come there to put on a play’”

“Police officers and train ticket sellers only speak English; newspapers are uninterested in covering ‘local disputes’. When the market trader returns to Panama City, he finds that the very street names have been changed to suit US conventions, ‘disconnected entirely from the history of what this area had for so long been’”

“Gatun, the village they’re trying to save, now gives its name to Panama’s largest artificial lake”