They're Cows, We're Pigs Book

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.Read More