Hidden Mirror: Bessie Flores Zaldívar’s ‘Libertad’
Photo courtesy of Dial Books.
By the time this is live, we will be in the aftermath of the 2024 election that has pushed us beyond the limit. Many of us know what it is to live the tumult of the everyday in a country exposed and raw. My family’s country of origin, Honduras, has always had that reputation of chaos. Growing up in the United States saying my family is from there meant getting responses of ignorance or fear. To this day, it can feel like I have to answer for it and I still don’t know what to say. Today, anyone in the United States might feel a similar loss for explanation.
Bessie Flores Zaldívar, a young writer from Honduras based in the U.S., finds words where many can’t. She has given us a timely book marketed to adolescents as a YA but quite grown in its understanding of politics and relationships. Libertad is a story of a teenager coming of age and coming out in the middle of controversial elections in Honduras in 2017. It can be very familiar, very American. She writes of our forgotten, misread, unread homeland all in English with some Spanish throughout.
“She writes of our forgotten, misread, unread homeland all in English with some Spanish throughout. ”
Honduras is majority Spanish-speaking but the author seems to have been educated in English in the way some of my cousins there have been, in the schools and through the dominance of American pop culture. When I visit, I don’t have to stay totally in Spanish; it helps, but with some cousins, I am fully in English. I imagine the author and I like cousins. This cousin is informing me about what it was to live through elections that should not have been, echoes of its infamous coup in 2009. This book is a response to the silence that the coup attempted to create.
Immersed in Honduran history, Libertad is a solid, affecting story with beautifully developed characters whose personal lives mirror the unrest in the country. Zaldívar’s storytelling is complex yet plain, prescient as clear observation can be, deliberate and well-paced. She takes her time setting the story up leading to the drama of rebellion on an Independence Day. It is also an election year in which a president who can only serve for one term, Juan Orlando Hernández, a.k.a. JOH (pronounced Ho), accused of drug trafficking and stealing funds from the health care system, makes an unconstitutional move trying to reelect himself. The lead character, Libertad, a high school girl in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, is worried about her broken cell phone and a kiss with her best friend, Camila.
The book juggles politics, corruption, dictatorship, poetry, adolescence, and queerness, providing an intimate experience of a precarious historical moment. Libertad Morazán shares a last name with a famous unifier in Central America, Francisco Morazán, and has a birthday on Independence Day, September 15, the day of celebration for so many Latin American countries. She was born just before the 21st century, a child of the phones and the social media that revolutionized us, that made all the atrocities visible.
The character is an Instagram poet and sister to a budding revolutionary. She is a witness and an artist, a hidden activist who has to hide her queerness as well. She watches her brother Maynor become an activist fighting the corruption of the government. All these activities, being an activist and/or openly queer, are very deadly in a place like Honduras, Spanish Mississippi as I call it, a Latin American red state, a de facto American colony. It’s a place of experimentation for corporations and outside interests, a hidden mirror of the U.S. It seems only very recently progressive as perhaps indicated by the election of the current leftist woman president. But how progressive can it really be in the face of a long, mainly conservative political history, marked by U.S. intervention and multinational domination?
“All these activities, being an activist and/or openly queer, are very deadly in a place like Honduras, Spanish Mississippi as I call it, a Latin American red state, a de facto American colony.”
To discuss Honduras often means a slip into policy language that drives me mad. What a relief it is to read literature that humanizes the experience of the notorious policies that have made Central America such a difficult place. Zaldívar excels at both; she can explain the particular complexities of Honduran politics and connect them to her narrator, “Honduras doesn’t feel like an independent nation. I mean sure—we’re our own country but even from a young age I understood we were always at the mercy of bigger more powerful nations. What does that even mean really to be independent? And from whom?”
To be a teenager is to live in the question of independence and what it takes to achieve it. About to be 18, voting age, Libi, as her friends and family call her, has been talking to her military grandfather and her revolutionary brother and is trying to write a college application essay. In the end, she winds up writing a poem: “Te sentís independiente / Pues, a vos la historia te miente.” Do you feel independent? / Then history is lying to you. It’s the poems she posts on Instagram anonymously that seem to make Libi a revolutionary herself. That expression exposes her to a world of progressive people who connect with her words. Her IG name is InsureccionPoeticaHN, and there is an actual page with a similar name. I did learn of and meet Zaldívar through IG as I have quite a few of the Central American artists and writers that I know of lately. The Central American diaspora has found itself in the socials for whatever that is worth.
“To be a teenager is to live in the question of independence and what it takes to achieve it.”
I first read her small book of short stories, Rain Revolutions. Set in three different historical periods in Honduras, it jumps from a flood and the workers’ strike in 1954 against the U.S. fruit companies that controlled the North Coast and lent the slur “banana republic” to Honduras, to 1988 when young people burned down the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa upon the extradition of a Honduran dealer and leader, and lastly to a water shortage in 2019 in the capital. As I read, I thought of Ramón Amaya Amador, a prolific socialist writer in Honduras known for a famously banned book, Prisión verde, that has never been translated into English. It is the fictional account of a strike at the banana plantations that preceded the strike and might have precipitated it. Libertad is aware of its place in this tradition of resistance literature, a resistance not often associated with Honduras.
Some of the most remarkable moments in Libertad are the discussions of unknown, certainly to me, resistance history. Libi’s brother Maynor takes her to the public university he attends, UNAH, for her to meet a new friend, Dani, a follower of her poetry IG. While there, he shows Libi walls painted with hundreds of faces of people the military police disappeared starting in the ’80s and into the present day. Her friend Dani tells her of an organization COFADEH, Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared, that has existed since the ’80s and maintains pressure on the government for answers about what happened to the desaparecidos. Honduras has long been a model of repression, bolstered by U.S. training and support. It has been home to several U.S. bases that have secured the U.S.’s control in the region for decades, a strategic ally, especially noteworthy and baldfaced during President Ronald Reagan’s Contra War against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
There goes the policy talk again, the language of the state. It makes me want to run to the poetry of this book, the language of the people, the path it opens. The book begins with quotes from poets like Ocean Vuong of Vietnam and the U.S., another who found words beyond policy for what happens to lives, and the late Juana Pavón, a much lesser-known poet from Tegucigalpa. She was a kind of spoken word poet, known as Juana la Loca, famous there for her urgent performances all over the capital. The narrator saw her read her poems in the street, inspiring Libi to start writing poetry.
Moments of Libi’s writing process appear throughout. For example, she sees news about the caravans leaving for the U.S., prompting Dani to text that maybe leaving the country is the only way to survive. Libi considers going away as well for college. It is 2017, meaning Libi has spent almost half her life in the repercussions of the 2009 coup, an illegitimate history, a corrupt government. She recently learned of her aunt who was “killed by the state” during the coup protesting after LGBTQ+ activists were killed. She starts to write a poem about the caravan using the words of Christopher Columbus who named Honduras on his fourth voyage after rough waters as he approached the northeast coast of the land, “Gracias a Dios hemos salido de esas honduras.” Thank God we have left those deep waves. She is not quite satisfied with what she’s written, “As excited as I am, there’s a distance between me and the poem. A lack of self-implication. Am I leaving? Will I feel like thanking God if I do? It’s too removed from myself, like I’m people watching and not participating.” She lets us in to this intimate poem-making moment, reveals an awareness of herself that makes the reader trust her.
Libi is not her activist aunt or brother or her military grandfather. Her mother and grandmother seem more conservative because of the aunt’s death in the coup. When texts on her phone out her, Libi’s mother is not supportive because she fears the grandmother’s reaction. They provide for and love the children in their matriarchal household, an abusive father and a philandering grandfather gone, but there is a divide, politically and personally. This conflict is the center of the book and the part I hold onto most. I am an adult in this time that threatens to revert to a repressive past, with a family similarly divided, and I looked to this book by a much younger person for some way to proceed.
The writer narrator puts all the perspectives down as best she can. Maynor, her influential brother, the most present and thoughtful male character, tries to ride a line at times, “I know that things aren’t left or right. I know that stopping that asshole from reelecting himself won’t fix everything. The things that abuela fears, they’re real and valid and true.” But he burns hottest in this already very hot place. He cannot observe as Libi does; he has to be involved. He is who she admires most. He is most supportive as she finds love with her new openly gay friend. She lives to write the histories he carries.
As I am writing, Puerto Rico is holding a rally for a pro-independence governor supported by Bad Bunny, who Zaldívar namechecks throughout Libertad. She also begins her first book with a quote from him, another post-colonial poet she is talking back to, who provided the grimy soundtrack of revolt. 2017, the year of the Honduran elections in which the book takes place, was also the year Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico. Bad Bunny and the rest of the island were perreando through calamity into consciousness, grinding and protesting, the insurrection in the body. All that angsty autotuned desire led the way, love in the time of trapeton. The revolutions sparked by unstable weather, natural and political. Honduras was in the streets like I had never seen in those years, with torches, chanting “Fuera JOH.” Puerto Rico would take to the streets to get their governor Roselló out the next year.
“It is the politics mixed with Libi’s awakening desire that holds this book together so well. It is the liberty to love who she wants and how she wants that is the true revolution, a simple, powerful idea, well known, here, well delivered. ”
Zaldívar leads with queerness, with desire, with what was forbidden in Honduras but natural to the character and the world of her novel. Libi is figuring it out before us, knowing what she doesn’t know, writing it out. She knows the feelings she has for her friend are part of all the change, they have to do with creation and possibility even in the most difficult place. As another trap leader, Popola Presidente Tokischa has put it, “La libertad nace del amor.”
To implicate myself, I will say I did not lead with queerness in the discussion of this book. I began with political history because it is what I have been asked about my whole life. I know it in bits and pieces, amazed I know any at all because I am born and raised in the U.S. where Honduras is invisible or maligned. But it is the politics mixed with Libi’s awakening desire that holds this book together so well. It is the liberty to love who she wants and how she wants that is the true revolution, a simple, powerful idea, well known, here, well delivered.
I read this novel at times taking on the shame an older generation projects on the youth tossing themselves headlong into their desire. I read this with the shame I have been made to feel for my desire, as an older generation would. I read this with a feeling I rarely have when it comes to my homelands: hope. Hope in these absurd times. Not hope that there will be great change but that there will be movements in understanding, there will be people who carry ideas and feelings of liberation that insist on living. It is what happens when you read a lot of young queer love in a hopeless place.
It took me a long time to understand I was part of what is a diaspora, people displaced all over the world from this sliver of land barely holding on between the Americas. Longer still to understand that there are other Central Americans, much less Hondurans, who make art and have progressive ideas. It’s been a stunning virtual surprise to meet them late in life. Good to meet Bessie Flores Zaldívar and all the rest of you.