The origins of nationhood

Benedict writes that the loss of 3 concepts that were once the basis of human existence, gave rise to a need to find a new concept to give our lives foundation, which he proposes to be nationhood. In the theoretical text passage below, it shows how the loss of the old, religiously influenced concept of temporality leads to the desire for the concept of the nation, and the extract from Almanac of the Dead shows how one character, La Escapía, exemplifies this desire.

Benedict writes that the “conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical...rooted human lives firmly in the very nature of things, giving certain meaning to the everyday fatalities of existence (above all death, loss and servitude) and offering, in various ways, redemption from them”. This concept’s “slow, uneven decline...under the impact of economic change...and the development of increasingly rapid communications, drove a harsh wedge between cosmology and history...the search was on....for a new way of linking fraternity, power, and time meaningfully together”. This new way is nationhood.

We have lost that idea of simultaneity, the idea that we are steadily marching towards something, in a biblical sense, that things are a fulfillment of something previously predicted. The present and the past and future are no longer linked for us by religion. Thus, we need nationhood to replace that certainty, that link, as Benedict writes, so as to once again “[root our] lives firmly in the very nature of things]”.

The following passage shows how La Escapia finds this simultaneity, or rather, where she finds it. “Then in the fourth week, the lazy Cubans had begun to read directly from Das Kapital. For La Escapia it had been the first time a white man ever made sense. For hundreds of years white men had been telling the people of the Americas to forget the past; but now the white man Marx came along and he was telling people to remember. The old-time people had believed the same thing: they must reckon with the past because within it lay this present moment and also the future moment”

She has come to believe, not only in the simultaneity of the experience of the thousands of her fellow Mexicans, but also of the simultaneity of the past, present and future. However, it is as Benjamin writes, a simultaneity that differs from the simultaneity of the past. It is a simultaneity of the nation; in the words of Debray “but after all, France is eternal”. It is the idea that previous exploitation should not be forgotten by those suffering now, and those suffering now have a responsibility to those that come after to end this exploitation. All because there is something bigger than the individual, and that is the nation to which all of them as individuals belong to.

In addition, the fact that La Escapía is fighting for the cause of the poor, and is poor herself, makes her a prime example of someone searching for something to replace the certainty of religious temporality in her life. After all, one of the uniquely desirable qualities of religion is described by Benedict is its “imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering”. It responds to that, in a sense, by providing the certainty that there is a purpose to life, that the present, past, and future are inextricably linked. La Escapía and the poor she fights for need such a concept more than anyone, and thus they need nationhood to give them back their footing in an increasingly secular world where this concept is beginning to disappear.