As World War II ground to its bloody, bitter end—Allied planes strafing Dresden and other German cities, Hitler and Goebbels retreating into a Berlin bunker—a “hunger winter” stalked Europe. The weekly caloric intake for Dutch citizens plunged beneath the prescribed daily numbers, resulting in the death of some 16,000 souls in a partially liberated nation and adversely affecting children and pregnant women; cells churned in overdrive to protect function, with chemical signals disrupting DNA switches, an “all hands on deck” crisis at the molecular level. Later, studies revealed that these epigenetic changes passed along to offspring and then to their offspring, a process known as DNA methylation: trauma literally inscribed in the code of life, chipping away at health span. Similar results were found among Swedish descendants of the Överkalix famine (1867–1869) and a Chinese population in Suihua, among the most severely affected by China’s Great Famine (1959–1961).
The Greek origin of trauma translates as “wound” or harm to the body. Javier Zamora’s searing, lauded Solito evokes both the physical and mental anguish of the term as the author re-creates his journey as a nine-year-old in 1999, when his grandfather took him from his native El Salvador to Guatemala, entrusting him to a “coyote” who was expected to convey Zamora and others to the U.S.-Mexico border and across to “La USA,” where the boy would join his parents in California.
Solito teems with traumas, mammoth and small, rendered in a visceral first person and a whirligig literary language that blends Spanish and English, a blare of trucks and helicopters in the background. Zamora brings us into the agonies he and his “family” of strangers endured for seven weeks, describing them as they motor and drift along the Pacific coast and hike the Sonoran Desert near Nogales. The boat trip itself is cramped: seasick, Zamora and his peers vomit over the side, seagulls swooping and feeding in their wake. Once inland, the group moves from safe house to safe house like contraband, until they approach “La Línea,” patrolled by La Migra, the “bad gringuitos,” who, at the behest of U.S. authorities, halt and deport migrants. Zamora captures his first encounter with La Migra in images beautiful and terrifying: “Now we’re standing in front of guns. Big guns hanging from shoulder straps. Little guns on belts. The soldiers are wearing boots, black ones, big leather ones…. Their guns shine when the sun hits the metal in a certain way.”
A second attempt also derails. A confrontation leads to detainment, conjuring “kids in cages” from the recent Trump era. “I’m in a zoo. A cage,” Zamora writes. “I’m a monkey with at least twenty-one other monkeys. Everyone wears a long face…. This is our room. It’s like the back of a trailer, if the back door was made of black metal bars. Three walls. One tiny window at the back of the room lets some sunlight inside.” The next crossing succeeds, but the migrants, strung out single file, a “Centipede,” wander a dusty landscape studded with brush and saguaros, dehydrated and hungry, seeking shelter from the heat. Zamora’s weakened legs collapse; his ability to eat is compromised. “The tortilla is a cold plate in my hands,” he observes. “I bite and the dough is hard. My mouth is too dry; swallowing is difficult.”
Inherited trauma, and how it molds our DNA, is a hot topic among epigenetic researchers, who, in addition to studies of generations tainted by famine, are now drawn to other, provocative lines of inquiry. Women pregnant on September 11, 2001—especially those in their third trimester—gave birth to smaller infants, on average. A cohort of mothers were diagnosed with unusually low levels of the stress-related hormone, cortisol, and the same was true for their babies. This seemed counterintuitive, but investigators had sampled children of Holocaust survivors with high degrees of PTSD and low cortisol, observing that stress hormones can dial themselves down to reset the body’s thermostat, a finding replicated in rape victims and veterans of the Vietnam War. (Lower levels of cortisol have been found in people with PTSD.) Longevity experts such as Eric Verdin, president of Marin County’s Buck Institute, suggest that upheavals like Zamora’s can alter the expression of critical genes and the proteins that sustain us.
Solito, then, brilliantly depicts a boy in the crosshairs of his own fight-or-flight instincts. Zamora’s poignant reunion with his parents is the book’s crescendo, but a 2021 coda offers a catharsis of another kind. As an adult and acclaimed poet, Zamora embarked on the grueling work of crafting his memoir, triggering painful conversations, including one with his father and mother, who’d surrendered their child’s fate to strangers and his own resilience: “They both cried as they remembered what I smelled like when they first saw me—‘piss, shit, sweat, a nasty stench’ they’ve never forgotten.”
As noted by Verdin and his colleagues, social well-being—connection—is not only a factor in increased health span but a balm to lingering trauma. Patricia and Carla, a mother and daughter also on the journey, nurture Zamora through horror upon horror; Solito is an ode to their compassion. Zamora’s grandfather, the key figure in orchestrating his escape, remains a presence through Solito beyond the moment when they part in Guatemala: “I’ve never seen his face like this: crunched up and wrinkled like an empty water bag, tense, his veins popped out, his skin pink, all of the emotions of those times tacked onto his face, but there’s also a faint smile.” Zamora transcends a brutal odyssey, and the marks potentially encrypted within each of his cells, by treating psychological scars with the therapeutic tools of his trade. Writer, heal thyself.•
Join us on June 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Zamora, CBC host John Freeman, and special guest Ingrid Rojas Contreras will gather to discuss Solito. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
