“The Great Divide: A Novel“ by Cristina Henriquez
Driving smoothly along a paved four-lane highway, crossing over a lofty bridge that spans a grand riverway, gazing onto a spectacular vista from the top of a towering skyscraper, riding in a powerful train across the unreachable regions of a desert landscape: those experiences have been made possible only because of the grueling toil of thousands upon thousands of men and women who committed their bodies and, in some cases, their lives, to the efficient and complicated construction of such marvels of modern industrial technology.
It is actually difficult to imagine the modern world without its plethora of roadways, skyscrapers, railways, bridges, canals, electrical grids, and urban transportation systems, all immense structures that have defied or reconfigured the natural contours of the terrestrial plain and have transformed the paths of commerce, cultural exchanges, systems of communication, and social movements across the world. Yet, even though such feats of industrial engineering and design would never have existed were it not for the people who actually labored on those structures, rarely have the workers been remembered or celebrated. They remain anonymous men and women, often from impoverished, marginalized or immigrant communities, who did the hard work that awarded the early 20th century the title of the era of “the Second Industrial Revolution,” but who now exist only as out-of-focus figures in faded sepia photographs, or as faceless cyphers in the tallies of clerical accounts.
American author Cristina Henriquez (“The World in Half,” “The Book of Unknown Americans”) has addressed that familiar omission of those anonymous workers with her latest book, “The Great Divide,” a poignant and gracefully written novel that explores the experiences of some of the people who labored for or were connected to the construction of the legendary Panama Canal. The scale of the project shadows every character in the novel. The Panama Canal was one of the most complicated engineering projects of the modern age: a 51-mile, assembled waterway in the Isthmus of Panama that made possible an efficient and less time-consuming passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The United States assumed the responsibility for the canal in 1904 after the French effort (1881-1899) had failed, and was able to finish most of the construction by 1914. That successful completion of the canal was nothing short of a miracle because so much of the earthwork, especially in the initial stages, was actually done by human hands in the dense and noxious jungle-scape. Throughout the building of the canal, workers had to endure all kinds of significant tribulations: stultifying tropical weather; horrendous working conditions; epidemics of malaria, yellow fever and dysentery, and the persistent likelihood of a climatic or an engineering catastrophe. The monetary cost of the canal was outrageous for its time, about $500 million (today, about $15.2 billion) but the human cost was even more dreadful: estimates have calculated the number of the dead (from a range of causes) at close to 30,000 lives, making the Panama Canal one of the deadliest engineering projects in modern history.
However, rather than focus her novel on the mammoth enterprise of the “Big Ditch” or on its complicated history, Henriquez, whose father is Panamanian, foregrounds the experiences of the people who either immigrated to Panama to work on the canal, or who were native to Panama and who, more generally, experienced the effects of the canal project directly on their country and on their lives. For some, the canal offered Panama immediate benefits: regular wages; a jumpstart to a moribund economy, and modernization of the country’s infrastructure. However, for many Panamanians, the canal was simply another geo-political gamble that would disrupt their communities and of their traditional ways of living.
“The Great Divide” is well-researched and does allude to the tensions (one example of the ‘great divide’) that arose between the anticipated benefits of industrial progress and the (un)anticipated and deleterious effects of modern technology, especially when technology was utilized as an instrument of assertive colonialization (another expression of division). Yet the novel also dwells on personal themes, especially the human desire, even need, for belonging: to a place, to others, and to the natural environment. “The Great Divide” explores the intricacies of relationships, and the lingering consequences that occur when relationships—between people, or between people and the land—are unwillingly disrupted or unpredictably severed, or when relationships are allowed places and time to flourish.
The opening of the novel describes the deep relationship between humanity and nature which the people of Panama seem always to have enjoyed:
Somewhere off the Pacific coast of Panama, in the calm blue water of the bay, Francisco Aquino sat alone in his boat. He had built the boat himself from the trunk of a cedar tree that he had stripped and carved with nothing but a stone adze and a crooked knife, whittling it and smoothing it, . . . until he had fashioned that single tree trunk into what he believed was the most magnificent boat on the whole of the sea . . . . (3)
Instantly, the reader is invited into the world of the people and ecology of Panama: a man resting in the calm water of an ancient bay, alone but serene in a boat—“the most magnificent boat on the whole of the sea”—that he had hewn himself from a tree in the neighboring forest. The scene expresses the trust that had long existed between the Panamanian people and the land, as well as the humble bounty of the natural environment. Francisco’s perspective was the perspective of generations of Panamanians who had long lived simply in a world of cerulean waters and gilt sunshine and who were able also to contend with the vicissitudes of that environment with self-reliance and ingenuity.
They regarded nature with respect and wonder, never with defiance or contempt. Francisco delighted in his hand-hewn, cedar fishing boat and was mindful of the vigorous jungle forest and robust immensity of the waters around him that; however, he could not give credence to stories he had heard, in crumbled bits and pieces, about a colossal canal that was to be built not far from where he idled in his boat, through the vast expanse of the astonishing Cordillera Mountains. Francisco could not visualize a project that would result in “. . . putting not one but two oceans in a place where for millions of years there had only been land. Who could believe such a thing?” (4)
The enormity of a construction project that could challenge ancient highlands and the expanse of such a vision overwhelmed his imagination and even frightened him—and understandably angered him: La Boca was “Francisco’s name for the canal, how he thought of it in his mind: a mouth, a gaping hole, ravenously consuming everything in its path . . .. Panama was being swallowed up by the United States. Francisco refused to be swallowed . . .” (69-70). Francisco was like so many native Panamanians who rejected the enormous project as an unnatural disruption of the natural environment and as the cynical exploitation of the Panamanian people and their indigenous culture by a government only too happy to align itself with wealthy and powerful foreigners, like the United States.
Still, other characters plunged into the cold reality of the canal, and their lives became bound up, directly or otherwise, with its construction and its eventual completion. Dona Ruiz, a gentle, local shaman and neighbor of Francisco, attempted to soothe the frantic worry of the people around her by focusing on more spiritual matters. Francisco’s friend, Joaquin, the local fish merchant, was less interested in the actual canal and more anxious about the effect of the canal on a ready supply of fish; his wife, Valentina, an energetic woman sensitive to dream narratives, found, on the other hand, a new purpose in protesting the construction of canal, especially when authorities decided to dismantle the village of Gatun, her childhood home and resettle the entire village—people, animals, houses, equipment, barns—in an other location.
Valentina had hoped the project would not directly impact her or her village home on the riverbank, but when she went one fateful day to Gatun to visit her sister Renata, the impact of the immense work became all too real for her: “[W]hen she and Joaquin actually stepped foot in Gatun, she was horror-struck by what she saw. . . . [T]he trees—hundreds of what had once been leafy banana trees on the eastern side of the river[,] . . . had been burned until they were nothing but charred sticks poking up out of the ground . . .” (104). The reach of the canal was startling to the people and wrenching to the natural landscape: it was able to disrupt lives and to destroy terrains that were far from the actual place of construction.
Yet, the animating spirit of the novel is a resourceful and courageous sixteen-year old girl named Ada Bunting who traveled alone as a stowaway from her native Barbados to seek work in Panama, on the canal project or otherwise. Ada’s decision to leave her family surreptitiously and travel to Panama was a desperate choice, her response to her family’s impoverished circumstances but especially to her beloved sister’s grave illness that required expensive medical treatment. The reader soon realizes that Ada is not as introspective as Francisco—she has too much to do in too small a window of time to sit in a solitary place and contemplate—nor as resistant to the canal, since she is not native to Panama and so feels less the ominous bulk of the massive engineering project.
To help her family, Ada is willing to do anything: “[She] had heard that the most common job for a woman in Panama was doing the wash. She disliked doing the wash, but she would not be choosey . . . if work as a washerwoman was the only work she could get, she would take it. . . . [She] wanted to take care of her sister the way her sister had always taken care of her.”(60-61)
As her story unfolds, Ada regards the canal with an imperturbable detachment, thinking of it only as an impossibly rich source of funding her family’s needs. Fleet of foot and intelligent, inventive and keen-eyed, Ada is resilient in her fearlessness, confident in her intelligence, and tenacious in her deep love for her family and for her native country. The canal, whatever else it might be to others, is for her simply a chance for a future. Ada thus represents a timeless truth about immigration: often only hard necessity or a series of catastrophic events compel people to leave their families, their cultures and the home(lands) they cherish, and embark on uncharted journeys to unknown places. They hope only for the good fortune of a chance to survive.
Ada quickly succeeds in her new environment: her uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time strengthens her resolve. In one instance, for example, she helps save the life of a young man who falls ill in a public place with what Ada recognizes as malaria (the young man happens to be Francisco’s estranged son, Omar, who was willing to work for the canal project, much to his father’s dismay, for the financial help it could offer his family): yet, because of that serendipitous intervention, Ada is invited to work for the Oswalds, other (but quite different) foreigners new to Panama, from the United States.
John and Marion Oswald had traveled to Panama partially in service to the canal but particularly with the hope of finding cures for tropical diseases like malaria. The Oswalds were as new to Panama as was Ada; however, race and class enabled them to settle more comfortably—and, briefly, more securely—in their new home than the many other Adas whom the lures of money and opportunities had lured to Panama. Still, Ada will be present with the Oswalds when an unexpected tragedy befalls them, a sorrowful occasion that serves to underscore the author’s insistence upon the importance but also the fragility of relationships—between people, between people and the land, between hope and survival.
Cristina Henriquez has written an endearing novel of wide scope but particular concern, interweaving the stories of a community of people whose lives and loves signify more than any dazzling feat of engineering. Her characters are ever surprising in their tenacious grasp on the abundance of life, and they gingerly invite the reader into their bountiful and luminous world that will persist in spite of the immense incursion on their landscape and their homeland.
“The Great Divide” is a novel about fearless hope and undeterred spirit. It ends as the canal is being completed, but Henriquez limits that edifice to a shadow in the background, and allows her dynamic characters to control the story to the end, as they sustain their lives and construct for themselves bright futures. Ada, for example, will discover a love of science, Omar will study to become a teacher and Francisco will find himself always surrounded by the scent of violets (his late wife’s favorite flower) and still haggling with Joaquin about the price of fish.
June-Ann Greeley, Ph.D., is Professor of Languages, Literature and Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University. She is trained in classical languages and literature and Medieval Studies, specifically late antique and medieval theology and literature, religious and intellectual history, and classical/medieval (Latin) poetry. Dr. Greeley translates and interprets late antique, Celtic and medieval Latin theological and literary works and explores late antique and medieval spirituality, including the literature of medieval women, medieval mystics (Christian and Sufism); sacred art and architecture; medieval and modern Celtic authors; the emergence of Islam in medieval Europe; Dante Studies, and global medievalisms.
