In an interview on Psychoanalysing Argentina

Your fourth book is about tango! Tango: The Art History of Love by Robert Farris Thompson.

I could have chosen thousands of books about tango. I’m not a dancer but I do have a passion for tango music and lyrics. This book traces the black, African history of tango. Argentina is famous for whitening its culture. Whereas Brazil still has a mixed-race community and so does Uruguay, in Argentina the blacks were used as cannon fodder in wars against the Indians, and many tango historians have tended to ignore the African influence in a music that is infused with African rhythms. The chances are that the word tango is African, perhaps Angolan, perhaps it was the name of the place or a kind of drum. It’s clearly not Spanish. There are early 19th-century sketches of African mourners at funerals moving in a tango-like way and one of them shows black people carrying a coffin and making these strange movements. It’s possible. Funerals might have been more festive than they are now and certainly people talk about tango as the dance of death. The book hints that it might have come from a ritual funeral dance. Of course, tango used to be part of the carnival culture that has more or less died out now in urban Argentina.

The book says that ‘if nostalgia is a country then tango is its capital’ and that tango is ‘a battle between gravity and space’. Tango in Argentina is a world of metaphor, an ideology, a way of life, a way of allowing the mind to open to cosmic thoughts. It’s very unfashionable with younger people, but even people who don’t like it or live it recognise that it’s the subtext of Argentina – you hear the music in taxis, you see it in the way people walk. Or is tango a reflection of the way they walk – it’s dialectic, I suppose.

The lyrics are very melancholy – it’s all about men being alone, men missing their mothers. Argentina was full of Polish whores in the 19th century. There was a lot of white trafficking for the Italian and Spanish workers there. There weren’t enough women. It’s often associated with the brothel culture of the early 20th century too but that is overstated. In fact, it is not a dance of the man and his whore, of a man and a woman, but it is very probably the music they would have listened to in the waiting-room, while waiting for the woman. It’s waiting-room music, a sort of sensual Muzak.

That’s so interesting. So it’s the fantasy of the act rather than the reflection of it.

Yes. Tango is about constraint and control, well the dance is. The lyrics are often about abandonment, betrayal, homesickness – these are the Argentinian neuroses. A longing for Europe and for mama. Not that it’s particularly a matriarchal culture, but the ‘mama’ is very much revered. There is another book called Tangoanálisis which makes the link between tango and psychoanalysis explicit, saying that tango has a hysterical pattern: seduction, rejection, confusion, longing. This book I’ve chosen is not so literal but just hints at the connections. I don’t think the connections have been fully explored – tango as a way of reading the society rather than a cultural product.

Do you explore them in your book?

I lived in Buenos Aires between 1991 and 2001 and my relationship with it was too intimate to write a travel book so I am trying to write something between a travel book and a memoir. I have to deal with the levels of the relationship I had with it as an ex-pat. The thing about being an ex-pat is that there is only a degree of difference between needing to leave your country because of economic or political pressures and needing to leave because you are unhappy there. The lure of Buenos Aires is that it is a new world city that feels like the old world, and it is so viscerally broken. It takes a long time to get past the wine, meat and women. Argentina has a very beautiful thin skin that one can easily get lost in.