A review of B.Traven’s TROZAS
by Mike Ballard
B. Traven puts a lot of Spanish and Indian words in his novels. He always translates these words right after using them and that is certainly a pleasant thing about reading his work. However, he doesn’t explain what this book title means until page 183:
“A troza, what’s that? You must tell me that, if I’ve got to look for one.”
“It’s the trunk of a felled caoba, a ton of mahogany. Cut into the right lengths, stripped of bark, and hewn square, so that the trunk has a diameter of about a foot.” Andres, tells his twelve year old boy helper, Vincente.
Another, perhaps the most pleasant and refreshing thing about reading B. Traven’s novels is encountering his class conscious sense of humour. Mocking the bosses can be fun and in TROZAS much amusement is had at the bosses’ expense. Overseeing wage-slaves in the mahogany forests of Mexico, “Don Remigio had asked each one of the line of monteria workers, mostly Indians, with a few mestizos, what their names were, compared them with the names on the lists the agents had sent him, and then begun to divide the young men into the working groups in which they would be most useful for his contract, according to their bodily strength and fitness or their experience in particular kinds of work. “When he got to the end of that uncommonly heavy and responsible task, he had a good time complaining about his fate and bemoaning his miserable existence. Since no one else in the world ever felt sorry for him, there was no other way to arouse pity in the circumstances than to pity himself.”
The monteria (mahogany camps) are where the workers, who the doleful Don Remgio is inspecting, will be force-marched. They are indentured servants being herded into the hellish wage-slavery of the timber industry in early 20th Century Mexico. After all, someone must harvest the caoba (the mahogany). “The people in New York and London want mahogany furniture for the dining tables” and it may as well be these men and boys who do that work. It is their own sin that their older, sicker fathers had too many debts or had died in their forties on the fincas, (the plantations) the great farming tracts of the landlord class. Yes, it’s the sons’ fault that these men whose fathers art now in heaven, had to be buried at an expense exceeding the meagre savings their mothers had been left with. They are held responsible for accumulated debts of their parents. Oh yes, to be sure, there are others being marched to the moneria, mostly those who have stupidly accumulated a fine or two because a piece of governmental paper had not been stamped correctly or they had gotten into a fight with a muchacho in the cantina. What are the good people to do? They must recover the money owed to them and officials must enforce the laws of the State. So, they sell the muchachos (the men/boys) by contract to the recruiters of the monterias. Why? Well of course, so they might work off those debts and fines.
Their debt/work contracts are then sold to the owners of a fine enterprise like The Caoba Exploitation Company. Here’s how Traven has one of the bosses who transports workers to the monteria rationalizing the situation:
The Indian workers, “are not used to anything else anyway and do nothing but fool around. If they have no work to do, they just get pissed. Instead of thinking of something else, most of all how they can pay off their debts and escape from enslavement, they waste their good strength on nothing but bringing a crowd of kids into the world.”
TROZAS is the fourth in Traven’s series of six novels examining the circumstances which gave birth to the Mexican Revolution of Zapata’s and Villa’s time. I reckon the novel is set around the year 1909. That was the last year before the uprising against the old dictator of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz. By then, Zapata himself had developed his strong sense of political consciousness by feeding a voracious appetite for stories about older members of his family and their campaigns against the Reactionaries and the Imperialists. As it happened, Zapata was also a man of integrity, as Celso and Andres are in TROZAS. Knowing that Emiliano would never sell them out, the people of his home town of Anenecuilco elected Zapata president of a council to defend their interests in that fate filled year of 1909. The next year Zapata would enthusiastically join what Traven titled his fifth novel, “the rebellion of the hanged”. Although, one cannot say that Zapata could be called ,“the general from the jungle”(the final book in the series), the enthusiastic reception to Traven’s jungle novels amongst Mexican readers suggests that he was adept at depicting the root causes of their political revolution. I daresay, B. Traven’ jungle novels have also managed to plant many seeds in the international imagination along history’s way. I remember seeing the film “Viva Zapata” as a young lad--how impressed I was with Steinbeck’s screenplay and Kazan’s apt direction. To think that they had not read and been influenced by Traven, would be like presuming John Huston hadn’t read Traven’s “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” before conceiving the layout of his film by the same name. Would that the jungle novels could be taken up in an honest, non-Hollywoodized way by a decent director with an adequate budget today. Ah, but I digress into proletarian pipe-dreaming here.
Traven begins TROZAS by introducing his main protagonists: Nature, the workers and their exploiters. Nature is a giant of a character. She is all pervasive. You feel her colossal presence in the jungles of Chiapis as she both smothers and engenders life under the skirt of her thick jungle canopy. Her ever present atmosphere is hot, heavy, oppressively damp, seeping through every pore, nook and cranny of the monteria. The animals, the insects, the mould, the rot, are everywhere in the novel and most especially where the workers and the bosses swelter--the cutting fields of the mahogany jungle.
The bosses are drawn as the puny things they are by comparison. To be sure, they have a constancy about them, but it is a constancy located in tragi-comic authoritarian character structure. Traven satirically pries them apart, meticulously exposing the petty, corrupt, selfish, usually mean spirited beings that they have become, ensconcing them in their hierarchical nook and animating the cheapness of their petty lives.
A prime example is the depiction of a chief administrator of the monteria. He is shown to be a man whose fondest wish is to have his office building painted. He daydreams about it all the time, always balking at the price. Yes, this is the mental map of ‘the hollow men, the stuffed men’ of the nowadays mythically proportioned free market. The chief administrator is a man obsessed with triviality and sussing out ways to squeeze ever more pennies from his personal fiefdom. Corruption points in this direction and he follows in his capacity as appointed governmental representative, turning a blind eye to the enforcement of bar licensing laws. As Traven wryly comments, “Often the reasons for his tolerance were to be found less in his generosity than in the fact that the bars either paid him a toleration tax or that the bills which he made out for himself in the bar were never submitted for payment.”
The last of Traven’s three subjects are the workers, who, as mentioned above, are sold into debt-slavery to The Caoba Exploitation Company. “Without men they can’t get anything going on the monteria. They need men just as much as they need caoba. Without caoba no profit, without men no caoba.” For their work, the men are paid wages. To be sure, that’s bad enough, but it gets worse. The wages the workers are paid do not cover the costs of living within the abnormal conditions of the monteria, even when they go without clothes and work naked harvesting the caoba for The Company’s owners to sell. With his best black humour, Traven calculates thickness and length of the fetishized chains this particular kind of wage-slavery for his readers. It will take most of the men 10,000 years to pay off their debts.
However, this arrangement is all perfectly legal in the eyes of the State for, “a cash advance had been paid to every man recruited by the agents, the better to tempt the men to confirm their contracts before the municipal president and thus, in the eyes of the civilized world, give the impression that it was a simple labour contract such as can be concluded anywhere on earth. The old cacique (most probably Porfirio Diaz, the dictator of Mexico) knew far better than the newly fledged dictators how to conceal the true conditions in his country from the suspicions of the other nations, helped by a gagged and self-corrupting press that grovelled before him. What the workers themselves said or spread abroad was nothing but lies and slander. Truth was only what was written in the labour contracts, acknowledged by the workers, and stamped by an official authority. That the Indian workers could neither read nor write the dictator did not regard as his fault. Why didn’t they learn to read and write? They were too stupid for it and just didn’t want to learn.”
Among the workers, there is one who can read. Andres is already known to those readers who have pored over Traven’s CARRETA, second of the Jungle Novel series. He and Celso, a Chamula Indian worker who has had previous work experience in the mahogany camps and who is a proven fighter, are acknowledged by their fellow debt ridden wage-slaves as leaders in the day to day struggle for survival and against the bosses of The Company. When they first meet, Celso asks Andres if he will teach him to read. Andres agrees and Celso gives him the sage advice of the experienced monteria wage-slave in return, “Never get out in front! Make that one of your most important rules here. No one should ever push to the front anywhere in life. Only when it’s a matter of your own pot. You don’t get anything out of it. Only twice the work and a kick up the arse when it’s over.”
Some may be taken aback by Traven’s depiction of racism toward the Chinese in TROZAS. The Chinese, who appear in this novel, are on contract as camp cooks. They are freer than the Indian proles though. They are in the jungle of their own volition and not being forced to work off debts. Traven paints the two of them with a brush similar to the one he uses to portray the owners of the monteria. But unlike the owners of The Company, these Chinese represent want-to-bes. To use an old Wobbly term, they are cockroach capitalists. They are, by force of circumstance, even more concerned with cutting corners with cheapness than the big bosses, otherwise they will not survive as small businessmen–businessmen who cook for a living. Of course, their cost cutting proclivities result in their serving chintzy food thus providing a near constant bone of contention between themselves and their voraciously hungry customers. Partly because of this and because they maintain a life, a set of customs and culture separate from the Indian workers and their whiter bosses, the non-assimilating Chinese are subject to constant racist comment. While they do manage to maintain some dignity by controlling what wealth they produce for their labour, Traven does not play the politically correct game of excising epithets or for that matter sexist comments toward the women who have attached themselves to the mahogany camps. This is the kind of speech which would have been made by real people at that time. To be sure, a close reading of TROZAS and other Traven novels will show that the author is quite sensitive to the corrosive realties of the oppressed/oppressor dynamic both within the working class and without it. It’s all part of the old game of divide and rule through a verbal abuse which leads towards psychological demoralization.
Being divided from heaven and thus power, most people in Traven’s novels become acculturated to living life patiently, resigned to waiting for their pie in the sky. As such, God concepts get no quarter from the revolutionary writer. In this passage from TROZAS, Traven demonstrates a sympathy for working oxen while showing, with biting humour, the capricious cruelty of the controlling power, if indeed, such a being really exists outside the human mind.
“How easily could a sympathetic and loving God have lessened, even eliminated, the agonies of the innocent, hard-working beasts if it had pleased him to create no biting flies, no mosquitoes, no worms that bored into every hurt place on a living animal and bred there, to create no morasses too deep to be of use to any creature and simply acting as breeding places for all sorts of parasitic insects. “Swarms of tiny flies crawled into the ears and eyes of the animals and of the people working with them. Ticks waited in the leaves of the bushes, dropped onto the animals and the men as soon as the bush was touched, and ate into the skin, digging in their heads and clinging so firmly that it was painful to pull them off, and the skin became inflamed, even more painful if the head broke off and stuck in the flesh when they were pulled off.”
Of course, the attitude of the controlling power’s representative on Earth is not spared either. Vincente, the twelve year old who asked Andres what trozas were, had a father once. But his father had been kicked by a “refractory mule and died” while working on his employer’s finca. Vincente’s mother, not wanting her husband interred like a dog, asks the priest for help with her burial duties. But as Traven writes, even though the Father knows that the woman has little or no money, “The priest could not do that for nothing, for since God had presumably endowed him with intelligence but also with a healthy stomach which had to be filled every day so as not to let the intelligence get rusty, and a body that must be clothed in order not to cause offense, there was nothing left for the cura but to let himself be paid for God’s blessing in the coin of the realm when he administered it. That is not a sin in itself, and it is just as respectable a business as cutting shafts for wagons or forging horseshoes. The sin in this holy career appears only in that the curas persuade people that bodies must unconditionally be laid in the earth in the Christian manner; and the Christian manner of course means with the help of a cura, with the tolling of bells and the sprinkling of water, and if bodies are buried without that special blessing, which only an anointed cura can give, then it all goes wrong with the poor souls, for they are burnt and can know only weeping and gnashing of teeth instead of the singing of holy songs and the playing of harps. Thus the people whether poor or rich, are convinced that God’s blessing is essential and that they must take the trouble to acquire, or, to put it plainly, to buy that blessing for themselves or for the souls of their departed.”
And thus, is young Vincente sold to into his 10,000 years of purgatorial style wage-slavery in order to pay off the debt of having his father properly enshrined.
Trozas TRAVEN, B. Ivan R Dee pb ISBN: 1 56663 219 6 $14.95
Can be purchased online from A.K. Press: http://www.akpress.org/
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