After months researching the construction of the Panama Canal, a project that claimed thousands of lives between 1904-1914, author Cristina Henríquez wrote a brief note reflecting on the physical labor and the unforgiving conditions workers were subjected to: “The men were machines.”
Henríquez points to this line as a crucial moment in the early research stages of her latest novel, The Great Divide, which came out last year. A work of historical fiction, the book follows several characters with direct and indirect ties to the project—from laborers to local fishermen, soothsayers, physicians and community members resisting the canal and its threats to their homes, livelihoods and ways of life.
“I wanted to get at this idea of the workers’ dehumanized status, the ceaselessness of them swinging their pickaxes again and again and again, their disposability in the eyes of those overseeing the project,” she told me in a recent email exchange about the work. “I don’t believe that particular line survived, but the paragraph that I scribbled down afterward is more or less the paragraph that you’ll find at the start of Chapter 4.”
The passage she’s referring to, reads:
“Every morning these men, who had come from all over the world—from places like Holland, Spain, Puerto Rico, France, Germany, Cuba, China, India, Turkey, England, Argentina, Peru, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Martinique, Antigua, Trinidad, Grenada, St. Kitts, Nevis, Bermuda, Nassau, and Barbados most of all—converged in one place: the Culebra Cut. They poured in on labor trains and scrambled down the mountainside, and when the whistle blew, they worked. From sunrise to sundown, they opened the earth. They stood in mud that came up to their knees. They breathed in coal smoke from the locomotives that ceaselessly shuttled past. Their ears pounded with the hammer of rock drills that echoed against the carved mountainsides. Their hands blistered and bled from squeezing the handles of their picks and their shovels for hours on end. Their legs ached, their shoulders burned, their backs felt as though they were breaking, about to snap in two. They were wet all the time. They could never get dry. They were covered in mud. They could never get clean. Their boots fell apart. They shivered with fever. They sang songs in the rain. They swung their arms and they shoveled again and again.”
Just as many of the characters in Henríquez’s book find their way to each other by happenstance, so too did I with the book’s author. My day job is with a weekly paper in Asheville. Earlier this year we launched a new series intended to look beyond local authors. My initial write-up on Henríquez’s work can be found here.
Shortly after the article ran, my neighbor, George, emailed me sharing his delight in seeing the book in our latest issue. As it turned out, he and Cristina were old friends and former classmates. In the same email, George offered to put me in touch with her, “if that’s something the both of you would find helpful,” he wrote. “Possibly a little late for that, given that the piece has already run, but just throwing it out there in case.”
I enthusiastically accepted, noting my occasional contributions to storySouth. Over the previous month, Henríquez and I exchanged multiple emails about her book. Near the end of our correspondence, George shot me a follow-up asking if Cristina and I had connected. I told him that we had, and noted that the subject line of our ongoing exchange was his name.
Below is that exchange. Thanks, George for the connection. And thanks, Cristina for the thoughtful conversation.
THOMAS CALDER: I’m always curious to hear from other writers about how they balance research v. writing, especially when it comes to historical settings. The temptation to keep researching is always present. At what point were you able to put that aspect aside and focus on the characters?
CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ: I started by reading what is probably the most recognized tome on the Panama Canal: The Path Between the Seas by David McCollough. At that point, there wasn’t anything I was reading for exactly—I had neither a plot nor any characters in mind yet—but I thought the book would give me at least the contours of the canal project. Each time I came across a detail, a timestamp, a description that seemed interesting, I wrote it down, everything in one haphazard, totally disorganized list. The bibliography of that book led me to about ten more books, which I read, and which led me to still more. After a period of peripatetic reading, scenes—like the men at work—started forming in my mind, and characters, and I began to have more clarity (not a lot, but some) about what shape the novel might take. It was a process of following what was interesting to me, which wasn’t necessarily the engineering or the geopolitics (although I needed to be versant in both of those things), but how ordinary people experienced this extraordinary undertaking.
After about six months of doing nothing but reading and notetaking, I started actually writing the scenes that had been gestating in my mind. I kept researching, however, for the five years I spent writing the novel. The breakdown of every day was basically: write in the morning, read/research in the afternoon.
There are different modes of research, though. Sometimes I was looking for a specific detail—a street name, or what month a particular flower blooms, or how much a piece of fruit cost—and in those cases I was scouring the internet, or emailing research librarians, or calling historical societies. That’s research for information. But more often, I was doing research for insight, trying to understand at some foundational level what this world was like. I read plenty of things that didn’t make it into the novel in a direct way, but that I felt I needed to understand nonetheless—everything from the history of railroads to the rise and fall of the Spanish Empire to the workings of the Royal Mail service. I read newspapers from the time, trying to get a sense of the culture in the canal zone, both through the stories that were told and those that were not—the latter being just as important as the former. I watched original U.S. Army footage of ships traversing the canal, I read travel brochures aimed at increasing tourism to Panama then, I looked at hundreds of postcards and photographs, I studied maps, pored over letters, watched documentaries, visited museums and libraries in Panama, consulted scholars and historians. And then, every morning I got up and tried to sort of put all of that aside. I tried to trust that I had gathered whatever I needed, that it was all somewhere in my mind, and that if I sat down and focused on my characters and the story, the things I had learned would bubble up as needed. There’s a temptation to somehow work in every interesting thing you have learned, but my philosophy was to let the characters guide me. If a character cared about a particular historical detail or aspect, then it could go in. If they didn’t, I wasn’t going to twist the story just to be able to include it.
CALDER: I love this! Everything about this response makes me happy. In part, because it captures the chaos and eventual order that is kind of at the core of writing. And the trust you have in the process—knowing to go with your instinct—is invigorating to read about. I also love what you say there at the end. You’ve put in all these hours, months, years of research—and it’s all there and available if and when you need it—but when you sit down to write it’s the characters who are calling the shots. That’s just a beautiful thing. Thank you for sharing such details.
One of the many things I admired while reading your novel is the occasional glimpse into the future. I believe the first one appears on page 66, in which we meet Albert Laurence from Port-au-Prince and Welsey Barbier from Fort-Liberté. The two only appear once in the novel, during a significant scene between two of the book’s main characters, Ada and Omar. In this passage, you let readers know that this moment turns out to be the foundation of a lifelong friendship between Albert and Wesley. This approach, which comes up a few more times throughout the novel with other minor characters, creates a really interesting effect. It reminds readers that we can only see so much of any given story. And that there are so many other untold stories interacting with the characters we’ve happened upon.
Can you speak to this choice in narration? And at what point in the writing process did you start playing around with the idea? And once you committed to it, what was the process like in knowing who and when to look ahead?
HENRÍQUEZ: Ah! The flash-forwards! I have to give all credit for that technique to Edward P. Jones, who employs it brilliantly in The Known World, which was a permanent fixture on my desk the entire time I was working on this novel. I’m always learning from other writers, and there I was writing a novel that was, in many ways, about the centering of people who had long been sidelined, and often completely erased, from the narrative history of the Panama Canal, and I felt very strongly that I wanted to give them their due. A few times during the process of writing, I would stop and scrawl something in all caps across the top of a notebook page, things that were tantamount to instructions, really. One was: Everyone gets a heartbeat. And I really meant that. I wanted readers to have the sense that every character, no matter how major or minor—and sometimes, as you point out, characters that appear for no more than a few lines—had a story, a whole life, of their own, and I wanted to accord the characters the respect that, for me, comes with that acknowledgement.
I can’t remember the first time I tried to actually write one of those flash-forwards—it may well have been with Albert and Wesley—but the sense of fullness that it gave the characters, the sense of value that it imparted to their existences, and the way that it subtly undercut the selectivity of history by insisting that every life, not only the ones we recognize and remember in textbooks, but every life contributed and was of consequence and shifted the balance in imperceptible ways, was what I hoped to achieve.
CALDER: You’ve got me curious now to know if any of your book’s main characters found their initial heartbeat through one of these flash-forward moments. Or did these flash-forwards come in subsequent drafts, at a point where you already had the overall structure set?
HENRÍQUEZ: I believe the flash-forwards developed only in later drafts, after I had already spent a decent amount of time with each of the characters.
CALDER: You manage a lot of characters and storylines within this novel, many of which intersect. Take me through your drafting process. Is it similar across projects? Or was The Great Divide unique in your approach? In the same vein, are you the type of writer who outlines a project before attempting a first draft? Or do you let it all out on the page, addressing structural issues in subsequent drafts?
HENRÍQUEZ: I’ve never been an outliner. In college, when I was first writing short stories, I used to think about them for a while before I committed to writing anything down, so by the time I started I knew basically what would happen in the beginning, then the middle, then the end. I don’t remember why, but in graduate school I remember making a conscious decision to try a different approach. I wanted to see what would happen if I wrote a story without knowing anything about it in advance, or as little as possible. I wanted to figure it out as I went rather than direct it from the outset. What I discovered by proceeding in that manner was that my stories felt much more organic and alive than when I had been writing only after thinking the whole thing through.
That’s still the way I write. I might have a very broad idea (Panama Canal, for example!), but I don’t plot out anything in advance. Drafting only really starts once a bit of language—usually a full sentence, but sometimes just a phrase—arrives in my mind. I write it down, and if I’m lucky, it functions like a stepping stone. I step onto it and wait for another sentence, one that responds to the energy of the first, and then I write that one down, and so on. In that initial draft I’m always just trying to create a path and follow it, pushing deeper and deeper into the wilderness until I’ve gone far enough to look back and see what shape is starting to emerge. In practical terms, that means that I’m writing a whole bunch of scenes that feel more or less like they might go together, although many of them will ultimately get cut, and that feel more or less like they add up to a coherent narrative timeline, although in my experience at least half of them will eventually get rearranged. Not to mention the gaping holes that I will realize, only later, need to be filled! It’s a meandering, iterative process.
The one thing I did differently for The Great Divide is that I wrote it entirely by hand, in unlined notebooks. That gave me a sense of freedom that I hadn’t had before. Order, or even the illusion of order (which the computer is so good at creating, with its uniform fonts and lineation), was out the window. Writing by hand took what is already a messy, exploratory process and made it even more so. But in the best way. I’ve said this before, but writing this novel was the most joyous experience I’ve had in my writing career.
CALDER: Yes! There are so many things I appreciate about your response. You hit on what I love so much about writing: It teaches you to let go of the things that are getting in the way of the story—be it a line of dialogue, a scene, an entire chapter, characters. But writing also helps you understand there is no wasted time or effort. It’s all moving you in the right direction, so long as you trust the process and so long as you’re writing.
I also think it’s so important, especially for any young writers who come across this exchange, to hear you mention joy. I think most writers understand that the writing process—like everything else—comes with the full range of emotional experiences. And obviously for some writers there is genuine pain in working through particular projects. But writing can also be so invigorating. Which, again, is why I appreciate you sharing this detail about your enjoyment in writing The Great Divide.
Especially in light of the novel itself. Because there is a lot of pain in The Great Divide. One of the moments that crushed me was that extended period of silence between Omar, a young native Panamanian who is working on the canal, and his father, Francisco, a fisherman who resents the canal and disapproves of his son’s decision. Amid their silent feud, Omar goes missing. In his absence, Francisco is lost and overwhelmed by guilt concerning his son’s whereabouts.
I want to go ahead and share a beautiful passage from this episode within the novel.
Not speaking to someone was one thing. But not speaking to no one was another thing entirely. The whole time that Omar did not come home, there was no one for Francisco to assiduously ignore. At some point, he started to feel he was coming undone. He stood in the middle of the house and shouted, “¡Hola!” just to hear the sound of his voice, which he had not heard in the house for nearly half a year. He shouted, “The rain is drowning the frogs!” He shouted, “I cannot make sense of this life!” And then he stood alone in the echo and felt worse than before.
What I love about this passage is it also highlights how funny your novel is. Could you speak on the topic of humor and if it’s something you’re aware of as you write and revise, or is just one of the tools in your toolkit that you don’t consciously think about amid the process.
HENRÍQUEZ: I love that you said that. Thank you. I tend to be a fairly earnest writer, and the topics I gravitate toward can be heavy, so I am always looking for moments of levity to help balance everything out, or at minimum to tilt the balance. And isn’t that how life works? In the midst of pain or sorrow, at the most surprising, most inopportune times, we can suddenly find something funny or amusing. Not always, of course, but it does happen—or at least it happens to me.
There’s something the Atlantic wrote about Kurt Vonnegut’s work, and I think about it all the time: “We laugh in self-defense.” In this novel, humor finds its way to the surface through various characters and in various guises, but there’s a moment when the idea of laughing in self-defense gets explicated. During what is otherwise a serious and potentially perilous interaction, one of the characters—Valentina—unexpectedly laughs out loud. The line at the end of that paragraph reads: “For what else was there to do in the face of imminent doom but fight, cry, or laugh?”
CALDER: My last question, which I’m stealing from Ezra Klien, is book recommendations. Outside of the titles you’ve previously mentioned in this conversation, what are three works you’d recommend readers consider. Ideally, these will be titles that influenced The Great Divide — be it fiction or non.
HENRÍQUEZ: You’ve saved the hardest question for last! Only three? I read countless books as I was writing The Great Divide, and so many of them were indispensable to my understanding while others nourished me creatively and still others left me in awe. If I have to narrow it down to three, though, I’ll say Tropic Death by Eric Walrond, which is a short story collection that was originally published in 1926 and has since been reissued. It’s one of the few fictional representations of characters from the Caribbean working on the Panama Canal that I know of, and the stories are electric.
Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal by Marixa Lasso is about the native towns and villages along the canal route that were impacted by the canal construction and what survives of their histories. I wasn’t the same after reading it.
Finally, besides The Known World, which I mentioned earlier, the other book that was a mainstay on my desk the whole time I was writing this novel was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. There’s not much I can say that hasn’t already been said about this masterpiece, but if you haven’t read it, you must.
