What the Pig Said to Jesus: On the Uneasy Permanence of Immigrant Life by Phillip Garrison (review)

What the Pig Said to Jesus is a collection of mixed-genre essays by former educator, elder, and author Phillip Garrison addressing the uneasy relationship between migrants and immigrants, migration and immigration, as well as national and regional identity. Part reflection, part memoir, part testimonio, part epistolary, the collection is organized into three parts: "Identity Theft," "What You Hear Secondhand," and "What Emerges from the Husk." Each section comprises nine to ten entries, including five testimonios evenly distributed throughout each section.

In his preface, Garrison asserts, "This is a book in praise of mixed feelings" (ix). Many of the essays do indeed explore the mixed feelings he and his immigrant neighbors have for where they came from and where they have arrived. The range of topics he addresses embodies the complex nature of ambivalence and its close association with confusion, disorientation, hesitancy, tentativeness, doubt, and indecision resulting from uprooted lives suspended in states of fear, uncertainty, and impermanence.

This is not Garrison's first time writing about his cross-cultural relationships in the Northwestern US and western Mexico. In two other collections, Because I Don't Have Wings: Stories of Mexican Immigrant Life (2006) and The Permit That Never Expires: Migrant Tales from the Ozark Hills and the Mexican Highlands (2010), he explores what he calls the migratory flow from the Mexican Highlands and the US Midwest to the Pacific Northwest.

Unfortunately, the preface asserts more organization and subject coherence than exists in this assemblage of writings; the topics covered vary widely and are not connected in a way that adds larger meaning as one tries to assess the sum of these parts. Garrison makes a gesture to textual coherence by weaving what he calls testimonios throughout the book, but this device fails to work because, while he acknowledges in "Testimonio 1" that testimonio is a genre Spanish-speaking people use to speak truth to power, his entries under this header greatly deviate from this genre.

The genre of the Latin American testimonio spawned a rich and well-developed tradition of criticism in the late twentieth century. As a literary genre it presumes that the intent of the story being told, often through a mediator, is to bear witness, to testify, to the important social and political truths experienced firsthand by a member of a subaltern group. It is thus associated with autobiographical accounts of survivors of oppression. At its heart, then, it is an inherently political genre, a literature of urgency whose purpose is to motivate social, political, or cultural change. An author of a testimonio is often a person of privilege who serves as an interlocutor to the narrator whose subaltern story is being told. Garrison's testimonio entries in this collection are firsthand observations based on his experiences and often narrate and ruminate on historical or cultural ironies, linguistic anomalies, or literary allusions that reflect his years as a teacher. They thus revolve around him rather than the underprivileged and, at times, digress from the book's primary themes as he discusses topics ranging from the lack of an equivalent word in Spanish for "wilderness" in "Testimonio 5" or his observations on the film The Sniper in "Testimonio 7," to mention but two.

Notwithstanding this misapplication of the testimonio genre, What the Pig Said to Jesus has many redeeming qualities. The collection further solidifies Garrison's solidarity with the migrant community, and it certainly renews his assertion that relationships based on notions of mutuality wrought from common experiences, of basic life goals, of shared human desires, behoove us all. Garrison's heart and political compass are most certainly rightly placed; he has an expansive view of the world in which he strives to encourage his readers to see it the way he does. At the core of his implied argument is that shared experiences should bind people together without regard for borders, history, or national identities...