What is strange, I thought at that moment, is not that rage and death, corruption and cruelty, multiply and grow under the narco sky, but that these two lovers exist, here, recently showered, lavishing on each other with the always unprecedented, always unrepeatable, always transparent gestures of something that, if I were a little braver, I would not hesitate to call, fair and square, love.
“Under the Narco Sky,” by Cristina Rivera Garza, from Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (translated by Sarah Booker)
This sentence makes me feel the complicated expansiveness of life, a stretch of terrible and beautiful contrasts: rage, death, corruption, cruelty; and the image of two freshly showered lovers, lavishing each other with love. The narrator is spellbound and stunned that in such a crummy place you can find two people in love.
What creates the vastness is the not…but structure. “Not that rage and death….but that these lovers exist…” It’s a twist on the more common structure, not only… but also, which was a favorite of William Faulkner.
It’s the perfect structure to depict the narrator’s shock and amazement at finding love among the ruins. The narrator can’t turn away, which is captured by the string of modifiers that flesh out the lovers. It’s also highlighted by the phrases separated by commas to describe the lovers because the phrases interrupt the flow of the sentence, mimicking the jaggedness of the narrator’s surprise.
It’s a sentence full of rhythm created by balance, or the pairing of two things—rage and death, corruption and cruelty, multiply and grow, and fair and square.
The rhythm is enhanced with anaphora, the repetition of word(s) at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses or sentences: always unprecedented, always unrepeatable, always transparent gestures of something that… The third use of anaphora introduces a new rhythm because it’s longer, leading to the confession of the narrator--if I were braver, I would not hesitate to call, fair and square, love.
With this beautiful rhythm, the subtext suggests that love wins over all the bad stuff in that city.
The Making
Think of what you want to contrast. It’s a diluted form of antithesis, the rhetorical term for the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas. Why diluted? Because technically the contrast is presented in balanced phrases and clauses. ("And let my liver rather heat with wine/ Than my heart cool with mortifying groans." (Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare).
To use Garza’s architecture, start the sentence with the first aspect of this structure, the “not.” By using “What” it appears at first blush that the sentence will be a question. It isn’t, but it captures the surprise of finding love here. Note, she could have written, “It is not the rage and death,…but…”
Add balance with two different pairings. Here, Garza used “rage and death” and “corruption and cruelty.”
More balance comes in with two verbs. Garza used “multiply and grow.”
Now comes the turn in the sentence. Whenever you use the conjunction “but,” the sentence heads in a different direction, as it does in Garza’s sentence. What follows contrasts with what came after “not.”
Here comes the anaphora! Write three phrases or clauses using anaphora.
Can you include more balance?
Give it a try! Create something. Let me know what happens.
I’ll be teaching “How to Write Stunning Sentences” for the independent bookstore, Book Passage, August 13, 10:30-12:30pm. Online, which means it doesn’t matter where you are.
Here’s the link:
https://www.bookpassage.com/event/online-class-nina-schuyler-how-write-stunning-sentences
And here’s the link to pre-order my new creative writing journal for $15:
https://www.fictionadvocate.com/product/stunning-sentences-a-creative-writing-journal/
Another tough one. I particularly like the inclusion of the colloquial phrases 'recently showered' and 'fair and square' in this sentence, with its otherwise kind of lofty diction. The lovers are a touch of the normal in the midst of all that 'rage and death' etc. My sentence, to give a little context, refers to a teaching post I had once inside a prison. Here it is:
What would defeat me, I realised very quickly, would not be fear or fatigue, lockdowns or searches, those obstacles I expected to wear me down behind those high, cold walls, but that the same mindless bureaucracy and staffroom hierarchies operated here, masquerading as security, as safeguards, as support structures, as accountability, those meaningless catch-phrases that had almost defeated me in more regular classrooms outside the prison system.
As always, this is truly a stunning sentence, all the more impressive since it's a translation.
I look forward to the next sentence from you as soon as I've digested the current one.