La extranjería se hizo un tema esencial de la literatura venezolana / Michelle Roche Rodríguez

Foreignness Has Become An Essential Topic In Venezuelan Literature

Images of the journey, nostalgia and hybridity are the contributions of migration to the work of Venezuelan authors.

Gustavo Guerrero: “Without ceasing to be Venezuelan, I feel as close to France as a recruit for the Foreign Legion.” Photo: Alexandra Blanco

Since the end of the 20th century immigration has become a reality for the country that up until then had received with open arms the European diaspora that survived wars and dictatorships, as well as those Latin Americans coming from nations suffering from violence and poverty. Approximately 40% of Venezuelans today dream of establishing themselves somewhere else and nearly half a million of them accomplished this last year, which means that the separation from friends and family has become a national trauma and, of course, this has also occurred in the literary material of many writers, especially those who have established themselves in other places.

Proof of the centrality that understanding the phenomenon has acquired in Venezuelan letters is the publication in 2012 of the poetry anthology Exilios: poesía latinoamericana del siglo XX, edited by Marina Gasparini. In this book, uprooting, as well as nostalgia and diaspora, construct the metaphors of contemporary authors. Another example is the panel that represented Venezuela in the 2012 Guadalajara International Book Fair, entitled: “Venezuela: Migratory Narratives,” where the conversation focused on migration as an element in writing. Definitive proof is the recent publication of Pasaje de ida: 15 escritores venezolanos en el exterior, a selection of texts compiled by Silda Cordoliani in which the fiction writer —who still lives in Caracas— interviews various authors about what Venezuela feels like from abroad.

Literary Turtles. The move made by Venezuelan authors is noted in their work through the use of the metaphor of the journey, the description of estrangement in certain characters and the use of nostalgia as an emotional atmosphere in texts. The language also changes, because the autochthonous is amplified by what is heard in new everyday encounters. And yet, Venezuela remains a trademark in the background.

“In the majority of the writers who have left, the center of their literary imaginary continues to be Venezuela. Authors like Israel Centeno, Gustavo Valle, Camilo Pino, Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, Juan Carlos Chirinos and Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles are turtles who have taken their country with them on their backs,” points out the literary critic Violeta Rojo.

The editor Luis Yslas, for whom the sensation of foreignness —“that feeling of being far from a place that might grant a sense of belonging”— is inherent to the creative person, explores Rojo’s idea further: “To the movement from one register to another —the literary exercise— is added the movement beyond a territory. That second movement, for private or public reasons, might install itself (or not) in their works, although this might not necessarily happen in every case.”

Although he recognizes that Venezuelan writers abroad belong to different generations and realities, he points out: “The migratory experience has given them a vision that, without abandoning the references of the native land, expands, enriches, multiplies the notion of belonging.”

The Projection of the National. Many critics see the change of residence of national authors as opportunities for the projection of Venezuelan literature, as was the case with Argentine literature due to the diaspora that originated in the Dirty War, or with Colombian literature as a result of the conflict of the drug wars. But not everyone agrees: “I’m not sure that the departure of writers from the country will help internationalize our tradition. I think that process is moving in another direction, I get the impression that Spaniards publish themselves and have a quota of minorities,” says Rojo.

For the poet and essayist Gustavo Guerrero, who lives in Paris, recommending Venezuelan books and participating in the dissemination of his country’s letters are means of assuming his identity in his work as literary adviser at the Gallimard publishing house. “I’ve contributed to creating dossiers, to organizing round tables and to editing works that might allow one to influence that unity within the university,” he explains. Like Guerrero in France, Méndez Guédez and Chirinos are active promoters of Venezuelan literature in Spain, where they live.

In a world that is more and more globalized, the opportunity exists for establishing links between Venezuelan authors in and out of the country, so as to finally crystallize a solid literary tradition.




{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 24 August 2013 }

Alba Rosa Hernández redescubre a Ramos Sucre

Alba Rosa Hernández Rediscovers Ramos Sucre

Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio didn’t have any idea who José Antonio Ramos Sucre was in 1978. It was during a seminar given by Guillermo Sucre that she discovered the work of the poet from Cumaná. She liked it so much she decided to write her master’s thesis on the deceased Venezuelan author. That led to the study Ramos Sucre: La voz de la retórica, a book that has just been published again in a new edition by Monte Ávila Editores

The work, which was first published in 1990, is an analysis of the writer’s oeuvre. Hernández explains how Ramos Sucre arrived at the prose poem, his evolution, his different stages until he found the definitive form of his texts. The new edition was published just as she wrote it nearly three decades ago, without major modifications or corrections.

The Venezuelan essayist, in her moment, wanted to rescue or rediscover the poetry of the man from Venezuela’s Oriente region. Hernández believes that even today Ramos Sucre’s work needs to be explained. “He will always be a difficult author. Ramos Sucre, like certain authors, is one of those who require a key to decipher them. And I think the book offers details to help understand him,” said the native of Ciudad Bolívar, who won the Andrés Bello Research Prize, Social Sciences category, from Simón Bolívar University with La voz de la retórica.

José Antonio Ramos Sucre’s oeuvre transcended his time period. Hernández still works on the poetry of the writer who committed suicide in Geneva in 1930. “Ramos Sucre was our great contribution to the renovation of poetry, he was the one who placed Latin American poetry at the cusp of universal poetry (...) Ramos Sucre forces you to discover the language, to search in the dictionary, to think about the words. He revalues them. He renewed the language from its roots, he was in opposition to the avant-garde,” added Hernández, who also studied Classical Philology at the University of Florence.

Alba Rosa Hernández reads Ramos Sucre every day. And she would like for the poet’s work to be consumed by many. “When I feel bad I open his poetry at random so that his words might help me. I have him as a fetish author (...). What I hope the book might accomplish is that people read Ramos Sucre more. He doesn’t need critics but rather readers,” concluded the Venezuelan author. Monte Ávila Editores has placed her contribution in bookstores once again.


{ El Universal, 24 August 2013 }

Reflexiones sinceras / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Sincere Reflections

     Despite the infinite diversity of temperaments, the greater part of us can complain like José Asunción Silva on the eve of his death regarding intellectual effort that is febrile and without method. Never has the wise precept of studying a few things deeply been violated with greater frequency than in our days. Foolish activity overwhelms us, unhealthy activity, perhaps the result of the agitated contemporary life where even for our Spanish or indigenous slowness time has become gold.
     This culture almost always acquired quickly, as one of its best results, erudite men anguished by knowledge and scant creative power, the personality disappears under so many strange ideas, we think with the opinion of authors we’ve read, we are dominated by the urge to cite as with Jean de La Bruyère. We acquire a bad idea of own ourselves that forces us to repose. Then what happens to reading is what afflicts the individual who without realizing submits his intelligence and his will to the opinions and feelings of the social center to which he adheres.
     No era weighs more on the life of men of letters (giving this denomination its most ample sense) than that of effort without repose, followed by long and sterile exhaustion, in which our thinking does not condense but wanders like a cloud without ever specifying its forms. Life is then vulgar, it appears in complete monotony, since generally those states of mind don’t coexist with a powerful feeling capable of dominating us and providing ideas their unity. At which point more than one of us will lament the good era of his childhood or the better one of our grandparents who truly enjoyed the ancient leisure whose signification was peace and absorption, reading the interminable Spanish novels that made them dissipate in a dream tranquil as their existences the tropical drowsiness. Often tormented (?) by the anxiety of knowing soon how much presents itself within our reach, we form the project realized by very few of studying selectively, but this is a purpose that doesn’t resist curiosity or the fear of being left behind; somewhat like a fatal whirlwind overtakes our floating spirits in the manner of that infernal hurricane the poet saw maintain without repose the souls that love had made guilty. Remote and more desired the more distant the hope of reading one single book remains for us, comfort that for being so effective Eça de Queiroz doesn’t forget it among those things that made existence a pleasure for the main character in one of his works, sickened by the refinements of civilization and freedom of death by the regenerative wind of the native mountains.

February 1912




Originally published in the magazine Comando Atenas in Caracas, 15 May 1912.




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }