El Techo de la Ballena

I spent the late afternoon yesterday sitting in a park in Cambridge by the Charles, reading more of Juan Villoro's novel El testigo. I'm midway through the book and am enjoying it very much.

While the protagonist, Julio Valdivieso, sits in a bar in Mexico City one afternoon, he's approached by a homeless man who starts talking to him. It turns out to be an old friend he hasn't seen since they were in a writing workshop together in the early 1970s. His friend is a poet who has fallen on bad times. At one point in their conversation the homeless poet mentions El Techo de la Ballena (The Whale's Roof), a collective of radical young writers and artists during the early 1960s in Caracas which included Juan Calzadilla, Adriano González León, Francisco Pérez Perdomo and Salvador Garmendia, among others:


"Yo tampoco sucedí—sonrió—. Las mafias no me dejaron. Ya sabes cómo es esta pocilga. Si no le lames los huevos al príncipe, te jodes. Aquí sólo hay cortesanos. No hay lugar para los poetas de hierro. Nunca habrá genios indecentes, irregulares, hijos de la chingada. Las vanguardias chidas de América (El Techo de la Ballena, los Nadaístas, La Mandrágora) jamás hubieran ocurrido en México. La rebeldía no es de este rancho. Publiqué en revistas de Perú, de Chile, de Colombia, de Venezuela, ahí tengo brothers, ahí estan mis pares, mis carnales del alma, ¡chupe y chupe! Ahí no importa si un poeta se coge a su perro, no tienes que ser un señorito, un gentleman fifirifi, un cosmopolitólogo, todo lo que hay que aparentar en Mexicalpan de las Tunas. Rolé por los Andes y el Amazonas, encontré poetas de lumbre, no mamadas, nada de haikus sobre la caída de la hoja. Luego me regresé y me hicieron el feo."


I first heard about this group when I was at Naropa in 1993. When I told Allen Ginsberg I was Venezuelan (during a brief conversation) he told me about them, asking if I knew their work. He had received an invitation from them to visit Caracas but he was never able to go.

I've been looking up information on this literary group ever since but much of it is impossible to find in libraries or bookstores here in the US. When I was in Caracas in 2001, I came across an excellent essay on the painters in that collective:

Gabriela Rangel, El Techo de la Ballena. Cambiar la vida, transformar la sociedad. De la pintura moderna a la instalación (Caracas: Espacios Union, Cuadernillo No. 24, 1999).

In November of 2002, El Universal's now defunct literary supplement, Verbigracia, published the following essay on El Techo de la Ballena by Juan Calzadilla: "El Nadaísmo y El Techo de la Ballena." In that same issue, Verbigracia also published a small selection of poems from the group: "Poesía contestataria."