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Review: Devil's Tango shakes readers to the core.

Michael Sedano

Cecile Pineda. Devil's Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step. San Antonio: Wings Press for Cecile Pineda, 2012.
ISBN 9780916727994

Last month as I was enjoying Robert Arellano’s Curse the Names, his doomsday novel informed by outlandishly consequential U.S. nuclear policies, I had simultaneously begun reading Nicole Pineda’s creative nonfiction thriller, Devil’s Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step.

Pineda’s doomsday take on global nuclear policies, the deception leading up to and growing out of the failure of GE’s nuclear design at Fukushima, Japan, cast a harsh emotional glare on what should have been a bright, fun read about nuclear disaster.

I had to stop. Not because I can’t dance, but I was terrified to step outside and breathe the air. It’s everywhere.

Pineda scared the living caca out of me. To get around that, I adopt a critical perspective derived from Chapter 104’s title, A Little Bit Goes a Long Way… Fear, like radiation, spreads. The main thing is, don't panic. That's a reading stance to adopt as one reads fact after fact Pineda’s massive research cobbles together to terrify you.

Just as Arellano’s character goes crazy thinking about a nightmare scenario, Pineda’s fact-driven scenarios spur a reader’s imagination to nightmarish personal fears involving one’s grandchildren and loved ones. A little bit of fear goes a long way toward coloring one’s reading. For Devil’s Tango, fear plays continuo behind the driving disharmonies of Pineda’s composition.

There’s the photographer’s story from Chernobyl. From the air, photos showed vast junkyards of radiation contaminated vehicles and other machinery. He couldn’t take a photo at ground level because all that junk, and more, had been swallowed up into the flea market economy. Don’t buy a desk or office chair within the million square miles of Belarus or Ukraine.

There are the soldiers whom Russian leaders sacrificed. Sent them to pick up nuclear waste with their hands, wearing their Army green fatigues and comfortable leather boots. Pineda doesn’t say if they spit-shined those boots.

Three hundred forty thousand soldiers--all of them--died. No record remains of their names, who they were, where they were born or died, or of their cause of death. Pineda denies the unspoken premise, if we don’t know their names, do they matter? QEPD, brothers and sisters. You did your duty. Russian army, U.S. Army, if you see a mushroom cloud on the horizon, you say “yes, sir!” put on your raincoat and march toward the smoke.

If Chernobyl is the boogeyman of nuclear safety, what shall the world consider Fukushima? In the first week after the earthquake, Fukushima has released more radioactive cesium than Chernobyl and all the bombs detonated during the years of atmospheric testing. One hundred tons of fuel…have melted through containment and fallen into the basement of the reactor buildings—something TEPCO admitted only much later. Thousands of tons of radioactive water have been released…contaminating the water and sea life for all eternity or 4.5 billion years, whichever comes first. (84) Scary stuff.

The scariest words Pineda writes are her allusions to all of us being wiped off the face of the earth. Relating a Siberian nuclear accident where years later, the ground still moves, the author observes,

Guest Columnists: Lucha Corpi and Nuria Brufau Alvira. Translation and Voice: A poet’s and writer’s views.

Michael Sedano

La Bloga is honored and excited to present this two-part series by Lucha Corpi and Nuria Brufau Alvira, Translation and Voice: A poet’s and writer’s views. The pair examines the process of Nuria's translating Lucha's Eulogy for a Brown Angel into the 2011 Spanish novel, Loa a un ángel de piel morena. 

In Eulogy, Corpi writes one of the best opening scenes in chicana chicano literature, a woman fleeing the police riot at Laguna Park, stumbles upon grisly infanticide. Corpi grabs the reader's attention and hurls the reader into a moral morass. The publisher notes:

Loa a un ángel de piel morena es una novela trepidante, de gran suspense, y llena de personajes diversos e interesantes. En el apogeo del movimiento chicano a favor de los derechos civiles en 1970, el cuerpo profanado de un niño pequeño yace inerte en una calle del Este de Los Ángeles, durante una de las manifestaciones socio-políticas más violentas en la historia de California. La activista política Gloria Damasco descubre el cuerpo del pequeño y, en ese instante, se enfrenta también el hecho de que su modo de percibir la realidad es un «don obscuro» que va más allá de la lógica «normal». En el transcurso de las siguientes cuarenta y ocho horas, dos personas más mueren asesinadas. Gloria no se permite sino el seguirle la pista a los asesinos hasta verlos entre rejas, así le lleve toda la vida. Cada paso en su investigación la conduce de Los Ángeles a la Bahía de San Francisco. Así mismo, la introduce en el camino de una conspiración internacional, una sangrienta venganza, y la violenta y trágica conclusión del caso en la pintoresca región vinícola de Napa, California.

In today's guest column, Lucha Corpi relates the writer’s experience in seeing her creation transformed in the hands of another, in understanding the uniquely creative writing process of translating chicanidad along with the words.

Next Tuesday, April 10, Nuria Brufau Alvira relates the translator’s experience negotiating the confluences of language, speech, cultural content, plot, and character, to fashion for Spanish language readers the same novel United States readers recognize as a classic of la literatura chicana.

La Bloga readers can order both novels via their local independent bookseller.