They're Cows, We're Pigs - Softcover

Boullosa, Carmen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802137865 ISBN 13: 9780802137869

Publisher: Grove Press, 2001

Synopsis

The emerging societies of the Caribbean in the seventeenth century were a riotous assembly of pirates, aristocrats, revolutionaries, and rogues -- outcasts and fortune seekers all. In They're Cows, We're Pigs, acclaimed Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa animates this world of bloody chaos and uncertain possibility through the eyes of the young Jean Smeeks, kidnapped in Flanders at age thirteen and sold into indentured servitude on Tortuga, the mythical Treasure Island. Trained in the magic of medicine by le Negre Miel, an African slave healer, and Pineau, a French-born surgeon, Smeeks signs on as a medical officer with the pirate band the Brethren of the Coast. Transformed by the looting and violence of pirate life, Smeeks finds himself both healer and despoiler, servant and mercenary, suspended between the worlds of the law-abiding, tradition-bound "cows" and the freely roaming and raiding "pigs."

About this title

Review:

In 1666, 13-year-old Jean Smeeks leaves his native Flanders for Tortuga, notorious 17th-century pirate refuge. In the reeking, pitching quarters of the vessel, a woman reveals herself to him--and to him only. It is her fate that sets the novel's moral compass, for what attracts her is a renegade Tortugan community, the Brethren of the Coast--anti-colonialist buccaneers who represent, in part, the upside of lawlessness: communalism and no locked doors. The downside? Women are forbidden.

Boullosa's natural affinity, she tells us in her forward, is with "the universe of the feminine," so what is she getting at in this male-drenched, violent world? "A laboratory," she suggests, "of things feminine in absentia."

The narrative is a retelling of the historical account The Buccaneers of America, published in Belgium in 1678. Boullosa's Smeeks is reminiscent of another plucky, fictional hero of the same era, Moll Flanders; both were old beyond their years, and their status as outsiders made for compelling and insightful moral commentators.

Boullosa's perspective is shaped, as is her language and aesthetic, by the ideals and charismatic standing of such contemporary social activists and thinkers as Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Che Guevara, and Susan Sontag. This colonialist stew of massacre, mayhem, and ideals perverted by the very forces it seeks to overthrow allows Boullosa "to look into dreams destroyed in their time ... "

Carmen Boullosa, one of Mexico's most distinguished contemporary poets and novelists, has written 10 poetry collections, three plays, and eight novels. They're Cows, We're Pigs is her first to be translated into English.

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About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0802137865
• ISBN 13: 9780802137869
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192