The Adventures of China Iron follows the tales of the young wife of a legendary Argentinian gaucho as she escapes her suffocating lifestyle with a small dog, leaving behind her children and hopping onto a wagon with a Scottish woman, and grows into her identity. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s dreamy prose, translated by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre, whisks you away to the colourful pampas as China relates her discovery not only of herself, but of the beauty of her country, uncovering it to the reader in sentimental images of the wild freedom the pampas brings.
With a strong thread of the effects of Imperialism running through the novel, Cámera builds up grand ideas of the British Empire as China Iron sees through the eyes of an imperialistic Scottish woman, before these illusions are quickly shattered in open discussions of lies, propaganda, and deliberate bloodshed. Like losing a religion, China’s new-found faith in this foreign culture is dashed into the dusty ground, leaving her pining for escape again. The pampas becomes more and more beautiful as it is described in gorgeous, sentimental prose compared to the confining, course taste of the British Empire experienced first-hand by China and her companions.
‘All that time I had the soles of my feet and my shadow on the ground and the rest of my body up in the sky […] Back there in my pampa, life is life in the air.’
The novel is ultimately a journey of discovery, as China comes into her own and explores different cultures and ways of seeing, before realising her own sense of freedom and happiness. Cámara rewrites traditional ideas of femininity and sexuality, as China discovers her own fluid nature and revels in her sexual freedom. Living nomadically close to nature, she discovers the depths and complexities of her identity, akin to the lagoon she so admires, technicolour waves flashing as beautiful facets of a whole. Native myths and stories are played with as, in a nod to the poem by José Hernández, the legendary Martín Fierro becomes soft, feminine and sexually fluid, a direct challenge to the myth of the hypermasculine gaucho.
‘I wish you could see us, imagine a people who disappear without a trace.’
As I closed the last page of the novel, I was left with a sense of haunting beauty and the futile dream of freedom, a utopia of peacefully mixed peoples. There is a certain sadness, as the wistful tone of the novel gives no illusion as to the fate of this wild land and culture of freedom, as China and her people are chased further and further towards the edges of the land. Through China’s shifting perspective, we gain a holistic view of the fractured land of occupied Argentina, and the lives of those whom various culture wars and colonisation has affected. The Adventures of China Iron is a novel of self-discovery, adventure, and freedom, tinted by a sentimentality for the beauty of the pampas.
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