Guillermo Sucre o el país imborrable / Antonio López Ortega

 Guillermo Sucre or the Indelible Country

    (Photo: Roberto Matta)

In today's Venezuela, writers and intellectuals die without receiving any official recognition, even when they've worked as state functionaries. The pain, the sorrow, the exercise of remembering their works, is reserved for their followers, their students, their readers. Waves emerge suddenly, from within an atomized society, to fill the void of lost forms, basic protocols: it is the disconsolate students who lament the loss of a great teacher. We've once again lived through these scenes since last Thursday, July 22, the day of his death. This time it corresponds to Guillermo Sucre, Venezuelan poet, essayist and critic born in 1933, one of the essential figures of what's known as the Generation of 58, that legion of novelists, poets, playwrights and essayists that emerged alongside the recuperation of democracy after the fall of the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez.

If any career fit Sucre's temperament, being an educator suited him best: teaching, in the context of leaving a legacy, was for him a civic vocation, a tool that guarantees the continuity of the republic. That impulse, moreover, avoided provincialism, and clearly aimed at a universal vision: his word always opted for recognizing in the literatures written in Spanish a great system of exchanges and confluences, that is, a single map on which one reveals peaks, plains and overflowing rivers. The professor, yes, his most public aspect, because as a poet, the most intimate sphere, he said very little, despite being one of our giants of the 20th century. He was so extreme with himself, with his own voice, that he hid his books in peripheral editions (the more austere, the better), under a sort of impulse where the draft was more valuable than the expression itself. Which might explain why it was easier for him to talk about others, the great Latin American poets, rather than himself. The plot he made his own like few did (the choral verb of a continent) was his mirror: always seeing himself through others (the other voices) to erase his own semblance.

A unanimous judgment tends to recognize La máscara, la transparencia (1975) as a unique book, ahead of its time: in its pages the author brandishes, maybe for the first time, the integrated map of 20th century Latin American poetry, as no one had ever seen or conceived it before. I recall during my first reading of the book as an adolescent, I underlined a phrase that more or less said: "It's no longer a matter of making an inventory of being, but rather inventing it." It was a license to throw aside the Adamic vision that follows us, ever since the chroniclers of the West Indies: naming the world according to its flora and fauna. In more recent words, Sucre has spoken about being a subject of history, if not an object. And this is why the gains of subjectivity, above all in poetry, are no small feat: an exercise in emancipation, where verbal freedom becomes all-encompassing. That saying, used by the teacher Sucre to incite new poets, might explain why Venezuelan poetry reaches a peak in generations following his own, because if we're speaking about decisive genres, I doubt there's a better one than what's being written today thanks to Cadenas, Montejo and Sucre, teachers who have left us an indelible legacy.

Antonio López Ortega, Venezuelan writer, has gathered the collected poems of Guillermo Sucre in La segunda versión (Madrid: Pre-Textos, 2019).

{ Antonio López Ortega, El País, 26 July 2021 }

Yolanda Pantin o la poesía ciega / Antonio López Ortega

Yolanda Pantin or Blind Poetry

Last October 27th the Venezuelan poet Yolanda Pantin (1954) received in Mexico the highest award in her extensive and very singular oeuvre to date: The 2015 “Poets of the Latin World” Prize. This prize created in 2007, which is traditionally awarded to a Mexican poet and to one from the Latin American literary world, was also given to Antonio Deltoro, a coincidence that surprised Pantin herself, since Deltoro’s work is always on her radar as she follows Mexican literature. The fact is, with only eight years of existence, Pantin and Deltoro are added to the names Juan Manuel Roca, Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, Antonio Cisneros, Ledo Ivo, Juan Gelman, Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco, Nuno Júdice and Piedad Bonnett, some of the poets who have won the prize in recent years.

The distinction for Yolanda Pantin, however, reveals an excellent move on the part of the jury, because researching the literary reality of Venezuela today, with books that don’t circulate, with prizes that no longer exist, with magazines no one remembers, is always a frustrating exercise, if not an impossible one. Today’s poets and fiction writers have grown accustomed to this cultural desert, creating their own mechanisms for survival. Names like Rafael Cadenas or Eugenio Montejo, both authors born in the 1930s, already belong to the canon of Ibero-American literature, but it’s harder to identify the subsequent generations from other horizons. To that end, Venezuelan poetry of the last four decades, to say the least, is completely unknown.

Giving a prize to the work of Yolanda Pantin, however, means recognizing lines that are invisible for many readers. For example, it’s a recognition of the obstinate vocation of foundational poets such as Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva (1886-1962), María Calcaño (1906-1956) or Luz Machado (1916-1999), precursor voices who continuously opened the century to that alterity a thousand times buried or erased. It’s also a recognition of a prodigious generation, that of the 1980s, to which Pantin belongs with Igor Barreto, Armando Rojas Guardia, Harry Almela, Santos López or Edda Armas, to name just the poets with an extensive oeuvre. And lastly, it’s a prize for the persistence of a referent of Venezuelan poetry that’s not always dominant, and is associated with metaphysics or with self doubt regarding the essence and value of poetry.

While Pantin has admitted that early on the driving force of her poetry was mourning, or by transposition, the Vallejian idea that one must search deep within to find it, today she admits poetry is an imposition, a mandate, a dictation that’s received and transcribed. “Poetry doesn’t obey any voice, only its own. It’s blind: it doesn’t depend on anything for its existence.” This notion of blindness, which remains fascinating, doesn’t quite lead to a lack of vision but rather to a depersonalization. Because if Pantin’s poetry has played with anything, it’s been the idea of the death of the subject. Her books turn out to be a continuous exercise of voices, a type of counterpoint where discourse matters instead of roles. Poetry is made despite the speakers, who for the effects of the verses are accidents or pretexts.

The recent publication of her collected poems, País (1981-2011), with the Spanish publishing house Pretextos, might aid in the necessary dissemination of an oeuvre that’s now being read in Mexico. The originality of Pantin’s verse is based on the childhood memories of Casa o Lobo, the feminine voice of Los bajos sentimientos, the dialogue of lovers in El cielo de París, or the irony of Poemas del escritor, books that seem like ascending exercises to reach a deeper level of reflection where poetry is subject and object, an excessive and autonomous creature that must be contained in the indelible sense of loss experimented when one reads and rereads pages that are also abysses.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 19 November 2015 }

Rafael Cadenas: la meditación por delante / Antonio López Ortega

Rafael Cadenas: Meditation In Mind

                  [The poet Rafael Cadenas at his home in Caracas, October 15, 2015.
                  Photo: Miguel Gutiérrez]


At age 85 and in full health, the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas (Barquisimeto, 1930) leads a relatively ascetic life. A resident of La Boyera, a neighborhood in southeastern Caracas, he lives among his readings, his verses and his translations. He rarely gets on the phone, except to honor the friendship of those he’s close to, and his speech is so deliberate, so much the result of a permanent meditation, that it’s always preferable to speak with him (or actually, to see him speak), than to listen to him over the phone. A variant of that routine continues to grow over the years: his evening appearances at the El Buscón bookstore, in the nearby Las Mercedes neighborhood, where Katyna Henríquez, a veteran bookseller, sets up an easy chair for the master. There he sits, reads, talks with visitors and is even capable of signing a copy of one of his books for some distracted reader. That presence extends to the presentations of books by young and not so young poets, as if some sense of duty moved him. In these times when the public apparatus has been completely divorced from artistic creation, artists close ranks and create a common front. Cadenas presents himself in those spaces with his habitual appearance: silent, uncombed, wearing a vest with small pockets and a bag he carries on his shoulder for putting in or taking out books.

It’s curious that a great living poet of the Spanish language, immersed in classics of Asian philosophy, Pre-Socratic authors and English Romantic poets, occupies his hours in thinking about the meaning of the public, so degraded in Venezuela today. But one can’t forget that, towards the end of the 1950s, in Tabla Redonda, the literary group of his younger years, along with the great historian Manuel Caballero and the unjustly forgotten novelist Salvador Garmendia, both now deceased, a great deal was said about the public, and also about the political. Those were the years of the fall of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez and of the recuperation of democracy, and all artistic efforts were magnetized by renovation and hope. In summary, and going against what his poetry represents, Cadenas is an author with a solid political formation, who is skilled at unmasking demagogues, populists or aspiring dictators. If his poetry continues to explore the unfathomable mystery of existence, the public man, who speaks very little, who listens a great deal, practices with his mere presence, maybe unknowingly, a majesty, an auctoritas, that covers every space where he is present like a mantle.

Can we think of a political reading of Cadenas’s poetry? Undoubtedly not beyond what the circumstance of living in the polis might mean, since not even his poem “Defeat,” whose wide circulation has eclipsed his best work, was carrying out doctrinaire motivations: rather, it was speaking of an individual deception in the face of collectivist causes. In summary, always keeping in mind skepticism or criticism, as an alarm against fixed or unmovable ideas. The statements, contestations (as he calls them) or haikus that have characterized his most recent books, could certainly present us with the soliloquies of the powerful, the proclamations of solitary men or blind speeches, but always as if we were immersed in a chorus of lamentations or nonsense. Slightly in the line of Shakespeare, human madness, or purposeless violence, are incarnated in empty speakers who let loose the most delirious speech. Whoever might think this isn’t meditation as well, beyond how inexplicable beauty can be or how miraculous consciousness can be, will be mistaken.

A Cadenas country that has continued to be created during these ill-fated years, and it’s the one that goes beyond his presence at presentations or his very occasional interviews. It has to do with his spirit, with his word, with his example, with his public acts. It’s something closer to honorableness, to honesty, to civic responsibility. Sixty years of poetic creation speak for themselves; they reflect a summit that all the young people want to scale, even if it’s just to catch a glimpse and see the panorama from the heights. Most definitely, everything has been a meditation, entering into the depths, knowing that the time of being isn’t the time of our life, intuiting that immortality belongs to humanity and death is merely an individual experience. In those edges is where this poetry of debris moves, one that’s always moving closer to a hole that no one can unveil, that always essays an approximation, because poetry is finally tentative, an essay, a feint against the void. The legitimacy granted by all true proposals, every proof of life, is motive enough to feel that in this work there’s also a country, with characters, adventures, destinies and encounters. And this country is sometimes more solid than the other one, the one that should be a reference but is now a quilt of remnants. That’s why the young poets want to walk in the country of Cadenas, along with the not so young poets, as well as readers of all types. In order to find some certainty, to understand that it’s better to meditate than to lie, to verify that the immortal time of poetry is not the present time and its death toll.




Andrés López Ortega, Venezuelan writer and editor, is the author of La sombra inmóvil (Pretextos).




{ Antonio López Ortega, El País, 17 October 2015 }

Luis García Morales (para Elisa Lerner) / Antonio López Ortega

Luis García Morales (for Elisa Lerner)

In these past fifteen years (2000-2015) we’ve lost important Venezuelan writers. I’m not referring to a quotidian importance, but rather a transcendent one. These are authors who marked the 20th century, who sculpted it until giving it the shape of a prodigious century, with variable, arrogant, resonant, intimate, revelatory voices. Sadly, we attend the gradual disappearance of two generations: those born in the 20s and those the 30s. Novelists like Gustavo Díaz Solís, Salvador Garmendia, Adriano González León; or poets like Juan Sánchez Peláez, Eugenio Montejo, Francisco Pérez Perdomo have departed without receiving a word of thanks from the country. Because that’s another extenuating circumstance that makes the situation even more devastating: the feeling that this culture without a memory doesn’t think, doesn’t value what has made it possible. If these authors spoke of our human landscape, they described it to its core; if these authors elevated our nature into metaphysical realms; if these authors spent their days working until they found the “common traits,” why does the humanity that survives them walk unmoved, numb, ignorant? The first lack is institutional and corresponds to the State that doesn’t recognize its great figures, but then we also have a lethargic, dismantled apparatus (institutions, universities, press, literary groups) that doesn’t appreciate the good, the transcendent, maybe because it’s immersed in a storm that consumes the days with greater urgencies: murders, tortures or hunger.

Another magnificent voice we’ve lost in these days increasing the funeral choir is that of Luis García Morales (1929-2012). A poet from the state of Guyana, a member of the literary group Sardio, president of the Consejo Nacional de Cultura in the 1980s, his poetic works, although brief and discreet, were clearly innovative and responded to an honest reading of his time. With this I want to say that his readings were the best, he was up to date with the great contemporary masters, especially the French and English, and his expressive intensity had few antecedents among us. His verbal luxury aligned him with Juan Sánchez Peláez, and his manner of revealing the gaps within matter displayed an uncommon penetration. Of course images from childhood (the grandiosity of the Orinoco river, for example) are transformed to levels in which the origins are erased, becoming pure abstraction, but that same procedure is the one an artist like Jesús Soto would use to admit that the poles of his “penetrable” kinetic sculptures were no more than the solar gleam the river itself would emit, especially during sunset hours.

In books like El río siempre or Lo real y la memoria, García Morales is able to combine landscape and memory to such a degree that the reader isn’t able to distinguish between one and the other. We could say a memory might be a tree, or that a bird is actually a thought. To go deep into the landscape is to go deep into memory, or seeing is the same as remembering, or admiring is the same as meditating. When the poet tells us these verses: “I write the ghost and it’s my oblivion / I write my name / And the water passes overhead / Washing its darkness,” it remains clear that existence and non-existence are false antinomies, or that the name of something and its erasure are the same. Just as the ancient river wanders our sleep and divides us in two, likewise the memory of the poet, when we think it’s gone and it continues within us.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 16 July 2015 }

Creación y sombras / Antonio López Ortega

Creation and Shadows

                                            [Eugenio Montejo, 2007, by Gorka Lejarcegi]

An essential 20th century Venezuelan poet, Eugenio Montejo, died in June of 2008. Very few friends went to his wake in a dilapidated funeral home in downtown Valencia, a city in which he grew up, studied and cofounded the legendary magazine Poesía, for many years a reference in the creation and dissemination of poetry throughout the Latin American continent. Montejo had also been, in the last stage of his life, a functionary with the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry, where he not only directed with the novelist Elisa Lerner the magazine Venezuela, a type of cultural display window for the country, but he also took on with accreditation the task of being a cultural consul in Lisbon. From there he dedicated himself to disseminating Venezuelan literature in Portugal and Portuguese literature in Venezuela. Portuguese emigration to Venezuela during the first half of the 20th century, which many estimate to be approximately half a million inhabitants, spoke of unbreakable ties and presupposed a great deal of exchange programming. However, the sleeplessness of an intelligent and faithful functionary wasn’t enough, nor was the National Prize in Literature conferred in 1998 or the Octavio Paz International Poetry Prize he was awarded in 2005, for the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry or the government that proclaims itself as Bolivarian to send a flower wreath or to even publish a brief obituary in the national press. Those glories, it’s understood, didn’t belong to them, and so the only they saw in the Valencia funeral home was an unburied corpse.

This behavior is repeated almost exactly with other great writers. Neither the novelist Salvador Garmendia (1928-2001), perhaps the most important of the last five decades; nor the fiction writer Adriano González León (1931-2008), awarded the Biblioteca Breve Prize in 1968 in Spain for his novel País portátil; nor the poet Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003), an avant-garde voice par excellence; none of them deserved a single tribute, mention or gesture. For them there was only ignorance, a blemish, non-existence. These are the actions of those who in school textbooks make a capricious selection of historical episodes or who when recounting political history suppress everything that has to do with the democratic period between 1958-1998. In the sphere of culture, moreover, the omissions are embarrassing. No intellectual who has made any critical pronouncement, who has signed any manifesto of denunciation or who in an interview has expressed some type of discontent, has any right to anything: no invitations, fellowships or acknowledgments. Those privileges are reserved only for the faithful, in other words, for those who’ve ended up remaining silent, betraying their old codes and, in some cases, writing praises for the “Eternal Commander.”

Venezuelan artists in these times have finally understood the chessboard where they must or can move. And in that game they know the State doesn’t exist, that nothing can be expected from any cultural policy. They’ve only gained one advantage from this injustice, so as to not call it a disgrace: they’ve become more persistent, more obsessive and even more professional. When survival is threatened, energies emerge from unknown places, but they emerge. It doesn’t matter if there’s nowhere to publish, if the national museums no longer open their doors or if the billboards of the theaters have become banal. In the end one creates for another present, one that is by force alternative, or maybe for the future, when the country or the audiences might be different. Beyond the artists the country has expelled, who also exist, there’s a type of secret diaspora of those who remain in Venezuela and protect themselves from all the plagues: ostracism, isolation, skepticism or self-censorship. The hour invites us to band together in groups, to meet up, to unite our wills, and all initiatives are welcomed, no matter how insignificant they might seem. The only consolation, or the only truth, that floats above these sometimes invisible initiatives is that, when from a possible future someone looks back at these ill-fated hours, they might discover that only the artists of this lock-up will have written the best essays, the best poetry collections; they will have conceived the best works of visual art, the best installations; they will have composed the best plays, the best choreographies. Artistic truth is in the shadows and not in the bureaucratic and even militaristic pomp the Venezuelan government wants to sell as cultural goods.

Any cultural politics that considers itself modern should always guarantee spaces for creation, which are sometimes mysterious and even fragile. Nascent artistic vocations are always uncertain and can make a developing poet waste his talent in other affairs. Who enters that world of fragilities and assures that the artistic condition won’t lose a great voice? Who influences that moment of decisions and avoids major frustrations? We’ve existed very far from these, you might call them exquisite, ruminations but other realities and purposes have understood quite well there’s nothing like pure and free creation for social transformations. This has been understood, even unconsciously, by artists working with very few rudiments and forgotten by any sign of cultural politics in Venezuela.

Maybe the flower wreaths that Eugenio Montejo deserved will arrive in the future. They actually exist in the voices and hearts of his heirs, the young people who read him with fruition and don’t stop admiring his verses. Not every era knows how to recognize its own children and the one that governs us now ignores them all.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El País, 28 February 2015 }

Un país llamado Cadenas / Antonio López Ortega

A Country Called Cadenas

In light of the tribute to Rafael Cadenas that has taken place this week at the PoeMad Poetry Festival in Madrid, it’s worth reflecting on the gravitation of an oeuvre that has represented, why not say it, the most important textual adventure of these times. His poems accompany us like talismans since 1958, with the apparition of Una isla, and it has already been five decades of closeness, revelations, renunciations, lessons or apprenticeships. My generation, in particular, has grown up with this poetry, has drunk from it, has made all of its sonorities its own. He is our poet par excellence, our secret company, our figurehead. Some might say this praise has nothing to do with a poetry that describes humility, that seeks the essential in life, that removes itself from exaggeration, that sees the I —sacrosanct institution of the West— as a great trap. But maybe our historical accidents, our political and moral ruin, have seen in this poetry of abandonment, paradoxically, a last resort. Cadenas never thought his poetry could mean so much to so many readers who seek it or find a refuge in it. But once again it has been the circumstances that have labored for this conjunction to exist.

It’s also worth noting that the referent of the country, faced by the avant-garde, has meant very little. It was disdained, it was kept in the vault for lost objects. But this conviction also revealed that no one really values what they already have, like the air we breathe. The country, let us say, is a fait accompli, it’s the closet where we hang our clothes. With that security, with that firm ground, literature advances with complete freedom, concerned with its own evolution, expressing outrage at conservative ideas and planting flowers in the heads of the obtuse. Until, of course, the country ceases, stops, dissolves, which is what is happening now. They are taking away the strip from which we would lift off, they hide certainty from us, they dissolve the culture that explained us and gave us exposure. The freedom with which an oeuvre like Cadenas’s has grown and evolved to critique the sense of possession, the foolish urges, the vanity, the superfluous ways of life today, and has advocated, instead, in favor of transcendence, of the flame that is all being, of a condition that is more celestial and less earthly, while it also ceases or suspends itself without the certainties that have seemed natural, eternal to us. And it has been in these last few years when, surprisingly, without being predetermined, that the work of Cadenas, faced with the lack of a country, grows among adepts and readers to constitute itself as an alternate country, with its own geography, inhabitants, feelings and certainties. This is what happens with great works when the sustenance that postulated them disappears. 




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 23 October 2014 }

Autores venezolanos en España / Antonio López Ortega

Venezuelan Authors in Spain

Towards the end of the 1980s, thanks to the efforts of Katyna Henríquez, Siruela published the complete works of José Antonio Ramos Sucre. There are no copies left of that beautiful edition, and today the great poet from Cumaná is once again unknown. A decade later, in an effort that owes a great deal to Ana Nuño, Lumen published the collected poetry of Juan Sánchez Peláez, that served for many years as the point of entry for global readers into that strange and hallucinatory voice of ours. But no trace remains on the bookshelves of that austere edition with a brown cover. More recently, few people have known that an edition of the complete short stories of José Balza, published thanks to the efforts of a top-notch researcher from Granada named Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga, was left trapped in the deposits of the publishing house Paréntesis, after it quietly went bankrupt.

But not all the news is about omissions, of course. Luckily, there is evidence of a sustained though sometimes imperceptible ascent. The publishing house Candaya, for example, which is celebrating its first decade these days, has published books by José Barroeta, Ednodio Quintero, Victoria de Stefano, Marina Gasparini and María Auxiliadora Álvarez, to mention some of the more well-known names. Just a few years ago, Paginas de Espuma welcomed the complete short stories of Arturo Uslar Pietri, edited by Gustavo Guerrero. And Guerrero, for Galaxia Gutenberg, dedicated a beautiful anthology to the poetry of Rafael Cadenas, Vicente Gerbasi, Eugenio Montejo, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Juan Sánchez Peláez and Guillermo Sucre. The prestigious Anagrama has awarded prizes recently both to Alberto Barrera Tyszka for his novel The Sickness, and to Gustavo Guerrero for his study of the “commissioned” novel La Catira, by Camilo José Cela. Finally, the case of Boris Izaguirre, with several novels under his belt, already enters the circuit of authors who are sought and venerated by the general public.

Special mention should be given to the publishing house Pre-Textos from Valencia, which has been noting the quality of Venezuelan poetry for several years, at first with initial editions of Vicente Gerbasi and Juan Liscano, and more recently with the systematic pulication of works by Rafael Cadenas and Eugenio Montejo, who are already authors of reference for global poetry. In 2012 Pre-Textos maintained that lineage by publishing the selected work of Alejandro Oliveros along with a poetry collection by Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas. For the end of 2014 they’ve announced the collected works of Yolanda Pantin and Igor Barreto.

Additionally, the Venezuelan authors who have migrated to Spain, a type of secret diaspora that’s no longer so, not only publish their own work with Spanish houses, but are authentic promoters of their fellow countrymen. Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez and Juan Carlos Chirinos stand out as perhaps the most major voices, but right beside them are Slavko Zupcic, Armando Luigi Castañeda and the precocious Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles. All of this constitutes a map of powerful voices that continue to add meaning and to open a path for themselves by the force of their talent within a demanding and competitive publishing world. There are many others who, in the field of fiction or poetry, are just starting to make themselves known, but the phenomenon responds to a line of expansion, and not regression.

It’s worth remembering that these Venezuelan cultural landscapes in foreign lands are a symptom of our times. Venezuela has gone from being a country that welcomed immigrants to a country that expels its citizens and their talents. All the effort that can be seen in Spain, by vigorous publishing houses and writers, is the work of a chain of impulses, of enthusiasm and no small amount of faith. On that shore they are reconstructing the face that is being undone on this side. A country that is not the one that is drowning us right now will recognize what these sons of the diaspora did to keep alive the pulse of a culture that refuses to weaken amidst empty proclamations and military parades.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 5 June 2014 }

Crónica subterránea / Antonio López Ortega

Subterranean Chronicle

I hear two similar pieces of news in less than an hour. The first arrives via the phone from Mérida and concerns a student in intensive care; the second one I read in a morning newspaper and has to do with the unconscious state of another student. These two clinical cases are supplemented by news of torture, jailings, the faceless wounded, the disappearances. This is our harvest: extermination. Except it seems to be lived on a second plane, hidden from the reality of the surface. In other words, we pump gas while someone tortures; we buy what little there is to be found while someone assaults someone else’s body; we jog in a park while someone shoots to kill. There are two circles that never touch: normality, which shrinks each day, and abnormality, which we start to see as just another habit.

But make no mistake: it’s not just another habit; it’s the negation of life itself, of coexistence; it’s the death of the minimal requirement needed to call ourselves a country, because when it comes to the term republic, we fall into academic depths.

In the second circle, that pulses while we go to the bakery and can’t find any milk, there are mothers who cry, there are families in mourning, there is weeping that finds no consolation, there are victims without killers. Who talks about that chronicle, who brings it to the surface? Who’s keeping count of the abuses, who writes about the pure pain that will never know about the soulless beings who have provoked it? Mothers say they have to be close to their children; students ask to not be left alone; passersby say there’s nothing they can do. Meanwhile, the country bleeds to death, particularly the country of young people, which is like imagining the future and only seeing a blind old man. Everything in Venezuela becomes landscape, daily habit, conversation in the hall. Nothing transcends; nothing moves us. The murders are like trees: obstacles in the road; the deaths are like old news: they repeat our tedium. How can someone smile, how can someone go to the barber shop, how can someone swim in the sea?

Beneath appearances, themselves incomplete, there is a subterranean chronicle (that no one sees, that no one wants to see) that is only shared by mourners. Tales travel from one trench to another, as though carried by anonymous soldiers: the news of a death, the anxious search for a particular medicine, the cure that never comes, the beings that don’t wake up, the girlfriends that won’t see their boyfriends anymore, the mothers that suffer like titans, the fathers left with only tears of stone. The most understanding will ask themselves: What have we become? The most skeptical will tell themselves: To what country of oblivion have we travelled?

The death of feeling, the word, consciousness, of a reason to be. All we are is impulses, compliments, inconsistencies. All we are is servile beings, dead in life, carrying our heart in a wheel chair.

At least the subterranean chronicle brings us proof of life, news about people who are moved, faces of people who have reasons to suffer, suspicions of impulses that might be human. These lines are for them, these empty impulses that would rather be closer to their death than to our own are for them.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 8 May 2014 }

Cultura contra la muerte / Antonio López Ortega

Culture Against Death

Each time I hear a waltz by Antonio Lauro, immersed in the mysteries of its sonorous depths, I feel that this is where the most important Venezuelan contribution to universal music is to be found. With good reason the Australian guitarist John Williams, who knew his universal repertoire, praised his unique pieces as moments of transcendence.

The great Jesús Soto, in a confession to José Balza, recalled that his optical art had been born on the shores of the Orinoco river, where he would rest in the afternoons to watch the glimmers of the sunset on the water’s ripples: who knows if the genesis of kinetic art could have been that chromatic vibration. Rufino Blanco Fombona, a notable prisoner of General Juan Vicente Gómez, wrote the first literary diary of our tradition while he was in prison.

And we are also indebted to Rufino, according to the testimony of Ángel Rama, because the Biblioteca Ayacucho publishing house was a reinvention of the Biblioteca Americana project that the Caracas-born writer conceived during his years in Madrid. The choreography “Jungle,” presented in the 1970s by the dance troupe Danzahoy, inscribed us in the world currents of contemporary dance. The Brazilian curators who visited us in the 1980s recognized the Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art as the most important of its kind in Latin America.

Our graphic designers produced the most important logos and posters, receiving awards in Poland, but also the best editions, receiving awards in Leipzig. There was a time when the National Center for the Book recognized with its prizes the best efforts of the nation’s graphic design industry, including alternative initiatives. In 1993 Venezuela was the invited country at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, an honor we have not deserved again.

Our photography attained an unequaled splendor starting in the 1970s, with true international exposure. Our visual arts, sheltered by a solid network of museums, mastered all the contemporary discourses and, undoubtedly, managed to be at the head of the continent’s proposal in the plastic arts. In the 1960s Venezuela established the state-funded publishing house Monte Ávila Editores and the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize, institutional platforms that welcomed, first, a good portion of exiles from Spain and, second, the intellectual diaspora from South America that was fleeing dictatorships. That welcoming gesture, perhaps only with the exception of Mexico, always open, has not been repeated in recent years.

It’s good to remember these cultural acts, that are essentially national, in order to counterpose them to the mediocrity of our politics, the baseness of our leadership and the corruption of the language through which the highest authorities speak to us. In general terms, the country has never been up to the level of its creators and, yet, they have given everything for the country. That forgetting and abandonment has been more lacerating in recent times, because if before we were condemned by our careers —what public role could a poet play?, any leader would ask himself—, now we’re condemned by positions or credos.

A true cultural apartheid divides the creative field into critics and supporters. And we already know what the critical position entails as a consequence: ostracism in the face of any public funds. If, despite everything, our creators survive with admirable health, this is because public indifference is already a part of our genetic condition.

During times when the smell of death, of the republic’s dissolution, of national crisis, is to be found everywhere, it’s good to pay close attention to the voice of our creators, who have never made distinctions of any kind and much less discriminated against the acts or gestures of our people. Facing the death of meaning, of the conditions for citizenship, now and always, culture and more culture. Or spoken much more eloquently in the verses of the great singer José del Pilar Rivera: “If I happen to be dying / and they come looking for me / to sing no matter what / I’ll abandon Death and be going.”




Translator’s Note: The original verses by José del Pilar Rivera are: “Si yo muriéndome estoy / y me vienen a buscar / como sea para cantar / dejo la Muerte y me voy”




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 2 January 2014 }

La muerte del estratega / Antonio López Ortega

The Death of the Strategist

The death of the Colombian poet Álvaro Mutis (1923-2013), after he turned 90, confirms an inevitable tendency: the gradual disappearance of the great Latin American authors born in the decade of the twenties. Until just a few decades ago they were very live presences, but they are slowly entering the silence of dusk while their work grows in stature. What the body abandons —decrepitude—, the soul conquers in another manner. And soul for a valid author ends up being his work, which ceases to belong to him and is passed on to others, his readers or authentic heirs. A sonnet by Quevedo, for example, quickly ceases to belong to the author in order to pass into the memory of men, like Borges was fond of saying: if within the human scale there is any operation of transcendence, of the abolition of time, that operation is the artistic work, that always arrives to stay.

The last visit by Mutis to Venezuela occurred between the years 1989 and 1990. He was no longer just the great poet of the Spanish tongue, but also the inventor of Maqroll, the Gaviero. He made declarations, he was interviewed, they took him to television shows, he spoke with friends and was captivated by Venezuelan women. He was a modest, simple man, capable of speaking with anyone. He had an unfathomable curiosity for the human species, which would take him from admiration to sadness. Not in vain, his public positions as a monarchist or anarchist never ceased to be a provocation for the scant determination of a humanity he felt was downcast. As with all the great poets of the Spanish tongue who passed through Caracas, visiting the Venezuelan Juan Sánchez Peláez was like an obligatory rite. In his old house in Altamira, dense with trees and sonorous frogs, “Juanito,” as he called him, would welcome him in black leather easy chairs where their glasses of scotch would ring late into the night. Being a witness to this dialogue between colossi, or elves, or children who marvel at the air itself, was a great, dazzling blessing, where the poetic word crowned everything.

But the Mutis that mosts interests me, closer to the poet than to the novelist, is the one who would gravely lead us to perhaps his most personal world view: what would lead him to affirm that the human condition was the only condition without hope, and in some way tragic. Desperation, a term that he himself seemed to have coined, perfectly defined our existence. Mutis wrote very few short stories, but one of them, masterful from beginning to end, was called “The Death of the Strategist.” Set during the period when the Byzantine succumbs to the invasion of the Persians, a Roman general named Alar, the Illyrian, a non-believer, solitary and pessimist, waits for his death in the extremities of the Empire. He has tried religions, he has known all the landscapes, he has lived through all the wars, he has fled from the recently Christianized and fanatical Roman bureaucracy. His motto is clear: to move away, reduce himself, constrict himself. Until one day, by chance or following an order by his superiors, he meets Ana, the Cretan, the only real love of his life, and he falls for her, as though faith had won his spirit over. And yet, the days he can live with Ana are brief, and in the end the only thing left is the memory, which is what nourishes his final days. Alar dies under the rigor of an ambush of archers: the first arrow cuts into his ribs and the last one into his neck. While he dies, while the blood flows and mixes in with the sand, the only image that sustains him, this time on his knees, is Ana the Cretan’s translucent skin, which revealed her blue veins like subterranean rivers.

I tend to think that the true Mutis is Alar, the great hopeless one. If Mutis has closed his eyes it’s because he too has seen, in his last sigh, the blue veins of Ana, the Cretan.




{Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 26 September 2013 }

Anacronías / Antonio López Ortega

Anachronies

An implacable observer of Venezuelan reality – the Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec, who lived in Caracas for about ten years while editing the magazine Nueva Sociedad – used to tell me that our society, while seemingly modernized, thought of itself through a rural lens, as though it had no relationship to any new events. We have to recognize that in our speech, for instance, similes that have to do with flora and fauna are abundant, and we also have to remember that most Venezuelanisms, according to Ángel Rosenblat, originate in games and chance. The stamp of turning significant events into nature is so marked that even petroleum, perhaps the 20th century’s most influential milestone, rather than being seen as a rupture of the pastoral paradigm, is understood within the context of sowing it, that is, of returning it to the earth, as if a hundred years of extraction were not enough to speak to us of another reality.

This fixation could even be laughable if it didn’t mean, on the other hand, a true process of social immobilization. If everything is earth and its excretions, then cities, streets or aqueducts are third-rate solutions. Today’s urban impulse, of which the capital city is the best example, is non-existent. In this revived process of reconquering lands, even at the cost of invasions, the cities are abandoned: there is no one to theorize them, to reread them, to invest in their progress. A vegetal, heavy and preterite arcadia conquers the minds of our leaders while the cities rot. But the state of our cities is barely an example of what is actually an anti-modern thought that ends up opposing everything, instead of navigating these challenging times in order to opt for improvements and to correct excesses. And after so much excess, against any model, it ends up finding nothing.

Our civic images belong to the past, as though we had already lived them. And they belong to the past because that’s where we seemed to feel most comfortable, as if the uterus were enough shade rather than thinking of adolescence or adulthood. Seen from a psychotherapeutic angle, we prefer immaturity, inconsistency, instead of facing the challenges of later stages. Except that no responsibilities exist within immaturity, no life project, no vision for the future; nor is there any effort, tenacity or desire for improvement. Let the vegetal arcadia rule, we say to ourselves, with pastures moved by the wind and cows that graze with millenary chewing.

These ages of ours will have to be seen in a not too distant future as a true social reversal, as a fear of growth, as a rejection of the minimal modernizing impulse we harvested in previous decades. Under the narcotic spell of petroleum, betting as ever on a state economy, the sum of individual efforts evaporates without incurring in collective construction. We already know the brand: of a society that is its own prisoner, immobilized by its own lack, nostalgic for a lapsed imaginary, ignorant of the processes all modern societies set for themselves so as to be up to the task of global challenges, which translate every time into growth, as well as human development and environmental equilibrium.

To live in anachrony – that could be the slogan –, as though we were someone else’s dream, as if 25 million beings depended on the good or bad nights of a single dreamer.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 15 April 2008 }

Descapitalización / Antonio López Ortega

Decapitalization

Not just the one that has become obvious to us in recent years – of the young people who emigrate, of the professionals who line up at the consulates, of the oil workers who’ve ended up finding jobs in Canada or Qatar, of the information or communications technicians that are absorbed by multinational companies. Nor the one that relates to the field of economics, when a company stops investing because the risk or the regulations dampen even the most optimistic visions. Rather, I’m referring, as defined by the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, to “the social or cultural impoverishment of a community.” There are inner exiles that decapitalize us, works whose null reception impoverishes us, individual efforts that never connect with the country (with what we understand as the national country). People write, think or reflect for another time, maybe not this one, because we’ve now added political misery, sectarianism and so many other illnesses to human misery. The sense of belonging to a collective fades in parallel lines that run alongside nothingness and never touch or coincide.

Never has the homeland – that concept so worn out, so trampled by military boots – been so foreign to its children. The decrepit old woman marches along a path and doesn’t gather anyone in her lap. She is perfectly indifferent, alienated by the current government and avid for flesh that looks more like cannon fodder than human. Since all consensus has died and we are moved only by interests, the discourses of validation or celebration cross paths without establishing real foundations. Not even the past serves as a source from which we drink the same water: to some it seems insipid, others find it filthy, and others yet see a mere simulacrum in the transparency.

We also decapitalize ourselves when our own are only recognized abroad, beyond our borders: the Octavio Paz Prize for Eugenio Montejo, the Herralde Fiction Prize for Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Armando Reverón’s retrospective exhibit at the MoMA. During the first week in October, on the occasion of the publication of his Complete Works by the Spanish publishing house Pre-Textos, the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas will be the guest of honor at a great tribute in Madrid’s Casa de América; poets from Spain and the world, along with well-known critics and researchers, will discuss one of the major oeuvres of our contemporary poetry. Sadly, an event of this nature is inconceivable in our country today.

It could be that Cadenas is from Barquisimeto, that he was exiled in Trinidad during the years of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, that he founded the literary group Tabla Redonda in the already distant sixties, that he wrote a startling book for readers of that era (as was the effect of Los cuadernos del destierro), that he was a professor at the Escuela de Letras at UCV until his retirement and that he’s read and translated English and American poetry like no one else among us. It could be that Cadenas has written all his books in this country, that his referents have in some way been those of this reality, that his Spanish has been the creation of our tongue, of this colloquialism, of this thought. All this history, all this forging can be recognized, we could make them our own, but they are truly enjoyed by others today, by all Hispanicity, from which we seem to be more and more absent each day. This is also a way of decapitalizing ourselves, of letting others reap the benefits of what we’ve created with so much effort with our own in mind.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 31 July 2007 }

Regencia / Antonio López Ortega

Regency

A few historians have wanted to recognize the university and the army as the two most important traditional breeding grounds for modern political leadership in Venezuela. This could be because both institutions have always achieved a consistent balance between social and regional representation. In simple terms, army and university are profoundly representative since they’ve concentrated within their core, origins, creeds, social origin and the desire for self-improvement. That’s where the similarities cease, of course, because the ends and means of both institutions eventually branch off in opposite lines. On one side (army), concentration of power, verticality, uniformity of visions. On the other (university), expansion of knowledge, horizontality, diversity of visions. The other big difference is that the mixture of university (as the civil estate that it is) and politics is not only natural but favors the student (many political leaders start out by being leaders at their own universities). While the mixture of army and politics, at least in what is understood as modern democracy, is always explosive, maybe because the military estate, bound by specific jurisdictions, must always be subordinated to the civil estate.

The military appetite for power – a specter that, as Ramón J.
Velásquez would point out, we thought was buried since 1958 – continues to thrive in contemporary Venezuela and conceals, as it did in the past, a profound disdain for civil forms, which are always more sinuous and forced when the hour comes to find a necessary democratic consensus. But what is most difficult for us to recognize is, when the decline of the civil estate – in other words, the political estate in effect since 1958 – ended up imploding and allowed, at a point of extreme emptiness, the entrance of military jurisdiction as the only sustenance of power in a hopeless Venezuela. Whoever can rewind back to the year 1998, when the electoral choices of the common citizen were split between an ex-beauty queen and an ex-coup plotter, will be able to see the abyss we faced. That a historic party such as Acción Democrática, kidnapped by a civil caudillo with presidential appetites, could have wagered on a clearly losing option with only weeks to go before elections speaks of an inexpressible decrepitude.

In view of what is evident since 1998 – the militarization of politics, of the forms of governance, of public habits, of social orders, of governmental terminology –, it’s worth asking ourselves if what we now have as a form of government is actually simply an exercise in regency, that is, a period estranged from conventional political forms, a hole in the democratic road that’s temporarily filled in while we wait for the historical line of succession to recover its sense of orientation and purpose. At least it would be a benevolent explanation, so as to not speak of the abuses and the patrimonial losses of the nation. Since civil power, incapable of regenerating its leadership, fell apart in all aspects, the military estate, with its habitual appetite, has come to take hold of its possessions like a regent who occupies a throne.

It could be that the real sovereign power of the people hasn’t reached adulthood, but its growth is unstoppable. The return to the university as a political breeding ground is barely a sign of the slow renovation of the civil estate. And in that variegated mixture of identities, conditions, regions, social extracts and sexes at least we can perceive an identifying principle capable of being a nucleus for a Venezuela with no need for militias or uniforms to imagine a shared destiny.




Translator’s note: Antonio López Ortega was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he’ll use for travel to the U.S. and England in preparation for writing a novel.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 19 June 2007 }

Las otras voces / Antonio López Ortega

The Other Voices

With the recent disappearance of the writer Elizabeth Schön (1921-2007) we’ve possibly lost the last great Venezuelan poetic voice of the twenties. Along with her, just a few years ago, we also lost Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003), whose legacy and influence continue to grow continentally due to the avant-garde accent of his voice, its sonorous device, its perennially fresh and renewed vision. Schön belonged to an airy, metaphysical current of Venezuelan poetry. It has been a marginal current, but a powerful one nonetheless. Poets like Ida Gramcko (1924-1994), Alfredo Silva Estrada or Alfredo Chacón emanate from that current and evolve toward other horizons.

These deaths raise the question of their work’s dissemination, and the situation is uneven in this field. To speak of the projection of Venezuelan poetry is to speak of an uneven process, which when achieved is due more to the efforts of the poets themselves than to the publishing houses or public policies. In 1988, under the Siruela imprint in Spain, an anthology of Ramos Sucre appeared called Las formas del fuego. Beginning with that pioneering gesture, there have been a succession of editions or translations in various countries, with greater or lesser resonance. The complete poems of Sánchez Peláez, for example, was taken up by the prestigious Lumen imprint in 2004 and today it remains the great Venezuelan poet’s definitive text. The thirties generation seems to be living through a stellar moment – especially if we pause to consider the work of Rafael Cadenas and Eugenio Montejo –, since their editions and recognition abroad are obligatory references. But the forties poets – such José Barroeta (1942-2006) or Hanni Ossott (1946-2002) – already have editions of their complete work in important Spanish editorial houses. The list would be longer because of the additional efforts needed in regards to the arrangement and promotion of poetic oeuvres, and not only in the case of Elizabeth Schön, as necessary as they are deserved. Closer poets whose deaths interrupted mature works – such as Miyó Vestrini (1938-1991) or Elí Galindo (1947-2006) – would also deserve this distinction.

The voice of the poets – we’ve known this since Homer – always moves beneath historical currents and vicissitudes. It is the other voice of societies: the one that could be the equivalent of the voice of the unconscious on the psychic plane, always reverberating beneath thought and ideas.

It is the voice that remains, that belongs to deep humanity, and the one that gathers the misfortunes, accidents or phantasmagoria of human desires. The voice of the poets survives while historical pomp disappears or ends up trapped in marble. One could say that History varies, for good or ill, due to intrinsic reasons. But facing variety, which is inconstant by nature, it’s good to hold up the invariability of poetry, the voice that remains.

All cultures, in their most extreme or compromised moments, have known to quench their thirst in those fountains so as to recognize, in their misplacement, what has nourished the past and will nourish the future. This is why we must return to the poets: to recognize the trunk from which the branches flourish, to reconcile ourselves with the word that doesn’t stain or diminish itself each day, to seek refuge in the soul and to understand that suffering, no matter how prolonged it might be, is always fleeting.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 5 June 2007 }

Desde la periferia / Antonio López Ortega

From the Periphery

In a certain manner, we are aging. That is, part of the country is aging, quickly, without being able to contribute anything to what we might call the national destiny. It is a crude sensation, a real one, which installs itself in the collective spirit, like a sledge hammer that falls from the sky. If what certain theorists define as social capital is measured by the highest social consensus, we obviously live in a dismantled society, where every sector looks in a different direction. Although it sounds like a euphemism, the old State occasionally exhibited an instrument that in its own way offered a vision: the Plan for the Nation. Something that allowed planning, getting ahead, glimpsing the future. What might be our Plan for the Nation today? Nothing we might share as a collective. Or in any case, nothing that we know of, and if it did exist it would be in the hands of a small sect.

There is a centripetal, vertiginous effect in Venezuelan society. A whirlwind takes us on an unknown route, amidst sonorous bursts, amidst the whips of shadows, and no one is surprised any more. Whoever shows up with any state of consciousness only procures a way of retreating, thinking the whirlwind won’t drag them away completely. This is a passing illusion that allows a temporary reassurance. The most benign, those who have dreamed of a country different from the actual one and the one in the past, fight to participate in some way – with ideas, with reflections, with projects –, but the whirlwind ends up repelling them because it only feeds on discards. This is the hour of followers, not thoughtful beings. A fundamental value of modern democracy – participation – is exercised in a slanted manner: those who don't question participate.

Not participating is a way of aging, of dying – at least democratically –. The sensation of being on the periphery, of not being able to contribute, of not finding channels, separates more than one and it disintegrates us as a Nation; it is the families that emigrate, the professionals who leave, the young people who seek their destiny elsewhere. Not believing in the country, seeing no future in the country… – Therein lies our society’s greatest defect –. At a moment that is propitious for invoking all social forces, for creating the greatest consensus, for gathering the best talent, we have veered off on an unproductive and anachronistic short cut: division, pugnacity, debasement. The opportunity for a quantitative leap presented itself, possibly the only one available to us in the final years of the 20th century to create an economic paradigm different from the petroleum-dependent one. But today we are more of the same: wasteful, pretentious, inconsequential. Of past kindnesses, none remain; but of errors, all the possible and imaginable ones.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 3 April 2007 }

El mestizaje como legado / Antonio López Ortega

Mestizaje as a Legacy

In these days honoring the centennial of Arturo Uslar Pietri's birth, in which luckily many cultural institutions and universities from all corners of the country have participated, we are once again obliged to ponder the value the master gave to the concept of "mestizaje" in defining Latin America's cultural specificity. Obviously, the concept is not of his exclusive invention nor does it belong exclusively to his time. We find antecedents in the texts of the Emancipation, in Simón Rodríguez, in Andrés Bello, and later on in a large portion of the intellectual developments of the XIX and XX centuries. The novels of Rómulo Gallegos, to give one example, are a cultural wager that makes a melting pot of cultures live alongside each other with coinciding vocations. The union of opposites, or of differentiated elements, can be seen in the founding doctrines of the Republic, and fortunately the constitutions we've had have continued to employ the term as a defining lever.

The situation is no different in Latin America, where the great thinkers and artists have established in mestizaje the foundation for their ideas and the fountain of their prodigious images. From José Vasconcelos to Alejo Carpentier, from Octavio Paz to Carlos Fuentes, cultural mestizaje has been seen mostly as a discursive strength, as a unique gift of our historic specificity, as a legacy that is profusely enriched by cosmovisions. A narrator as curious as Juan José Arreola went further and sustained that our mestizaje could not be circumscribed merely to the constitutive trilogy of the Indian, the African or the Spanish.

Through Spain we inherit—he acknowledged—the Islamic culture, the imprint of the Visigoths, the final consequences of the Roman empire. The simple culture of the Iberian settlers, previous to the Roman conquests, survives 2,000 years later in our Andes in a word as beautiful as "páramo." Moreover, in idiomatic peaks such as the work of José Lezama Lima, the concept of "Baroque culture" would seem to be an evolutionary state of mestizaje. According to the Antillean master, the imago is the expressive tool with the greatest power of aesthetic concentration. And that concentration is inadmissible without the synthetic faculty of mestizaje.

By cultural mestizaje we should understand mixture, crossing, synthesis, the cannibalization of certain senses by others. It is found in customs, in habits, in ways of dressing, in the kitchen, in music, in urban rites, in country chores. It is found in our prodigious faces, which range from an Andean austerity to a Barlovento voluptiousness. It is found in our beliefs, in our religious faith.

It is found in our family values, in what we've inherited from ancestral cultures and in what we've adapted from outside cultures. A certain cosmopolitan vocation, present from the moment Venezuela follows the literature of the Enlightenment, provides a doctrinal base for the Emancipation, and it also speaks of a culture open to influences and crossings. An expression of traditional music like the Veleño drums, from La Vela de Coro, is inexplicable without the human, commercial and cultural trafficking that historically have characterized the relations between the coasts of Falcón state and the Dutch Antilles; and another such as the Guayana Calypso is inconceivable without the crosssing of influences and the migratory waves that went from the British or French Antilles to the mining town of El Callao.

A food historian such as José Rafael Lovera reminds us that the similarities between the Veracruz tamal and our December hayaca could perhaps be due to the commercial traffic during colonial times that carried Venezuelan cocoa to the ports of Veracruz and brought back Mexican dishes and spices to the shores of La Guaira.

During times when the temptation of the originary consumes wills, passions and false proclamations, it is to our benefit to keep in mind the intellectual and human effort we have spent over several centuries defining the mestizo condition of our culture. The supposed original purity—which leads people to knock down the statue of Columbus, to replace institutional logos with Panare tribal ideograms or to defend a concept of the endogenous that implies pure races and cultures—reminds us what Nazism postulated about a supposed Aryan purity. Facing reductionist temptations, which truly reflect a profound ignorance of our cultural processes, we should remember along with Carlos Fuentes that the most prodigious experiment in mestizaje in our continent has been the reappropriation of the Spanish language. To write in the Spanish of the Americas is the equivalent of placing all our cosmovisions on the sacrificial altar. But from that arduous, substantial effort, which invents unforeseen images and pushes syntactical properties to extremes, has surged one of the world's greatest literatures.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 27 June 2006 }

Dos países / Antonio López Ortega

Two Countries

Two countries exist, at the same time.

One is the most visible, the vociferous, the forcibly media-driven, the one that postulates itself as real, with its front page headlines and its crime pages. It is the country of misery, of the daily emergency, of inefficacy taken to its most exquisite extremes, of the operations that always come to the rescue of habitual chores. It is the country that displays the worst of our culture: corruption, immorality, spiritual lowliness, Venezuelan craftiness. It is the country that is closest to the State, or perhaps more accurately to Power, that thrives thanks to public funds, that displays a wealth of dubious origin, that elevates its arrogance above the collective miseries or the infinite ignorance.

Actually, it is not a country too far removed from the one the voter repudiated and finally condemned in the ballots in 1998, in hopes of a nobler public scene, one that is more transparent and conscious of its own goals. This country is bicephalous: what it postulates in its discourse, always with fanfare, is undone by its actions, or by their absence. It is a deceitful, or perhaps mythomaniacal, country that believes the word suffices in forging realities. It is a country that, in its most delirious facets, dreams of continental integrations, only to settle for shortcuts, or that strives to unsheathe eighteenth-century swords without realizing the new century is carrying a new energy paradigm under its arms.

While the country of imperial vocation, with its Cyclops body and clay feet, sates itself with its tepid adventures or with its street corner dreams, another country, forcibly realer and more desperate, survives it. It is a country closer to the social act, occult or half-buried, suffering and disoriented, that clamors for a more benevolent reality, that dreams a future for its children, that still believes in the effort or nobility of work. This country goes below, like a subterranean current. It is the historical country, that survives every sudden attack, that resuscitates after each ruin. It is the real country, with its vicissitudes and limitations on its shoulders, with its beliefs and disinterest, with its imperturbable values, that sometimes lets the other live for it while in its depths it harvests a dream of alternatives.

In its most visible or desperate postures, this country protests, closes down a street, makes demands of an undelivered housing plan, aspires to a job offer, offers bodies and victims so the delinquency that decimates it might be sated.

The grandiloquent country goes one way and the quotidian country goes the other. They walk on opposite trails and they never meet. The first uses a blind man’s stick, believing it represents everything, that it concentrates everything, while the other wanders in disbelief, constructing another sense of reality, or perhaps leaving tracks for the future. Since its condition is one of infinite waiting, it organizes itself in its own way to survive the adverse times: it is the one that flowers in an apartment building collective, in a neighborhood association, in a citizens assembly; it is the one that restores an abandoned school or plants trees in an empty lot, it is the one of the children that grow and are shaped in the net of the Fe y Alegría foundation, or in the System of Youth Orchestras.

In its moments of highest consciousness, when despair does not torture and tear it apart, this country joins up with effort, daily work, the education of its children and social reconstruction. It is not the country of omnivorous Power, which turns thieves into magistrates or transforms soldiers into delinquents. It does not have the authority to subvert order, nor to give other names to extreme realities like the poverty that grows or the delinquency that increases. There is no dissolving discourse, nor any magician’s gestures, in this quotidian, street-wise country, that fights with grit so that life does not fall from its hands, like water running nowhere.

That one country might go to encounter the other, like two reconciled brothers, would be the greatest of omens. That the powerful, self-sufficient country might show a minimal gesture of humility and join with the real country, so as to be one, would be an event of major design. It is entirely desirable, but perhaps it is not a possibility. These separations, however, these divorces without the separation of belongings—History confirms this—, have their ends, have their limitations. Either a nation is the consensus of the collectives, or it is no such thing. The rooms might be different but the house remains the same. And unlike what happens in “Casa tomada”—the memorable short story by Julio Cortázar—, no one can go out into the street with immunity and throw the key in the gutter.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 4 April 2006 }

Sergio Pitol, Mérida y el Cervantes / Antonio López Ortega

Sergio Pitol, Mérida and the Cervantes

For Diómedes Castro

A ventured thesis: the 2005 Cervantes Prize recently granted to the great Mexican novelist Sergio Pitol marks the first distinction for a Latin American writer of the post-Boom. Until now, in one way or another all the protagonists of that prodigious generation had been awarded a prize but with Pitol we move to another bench. It is not a matter of distinguishing authors with an encyclopedic breath but rather of stopping to appreciate the narrative meanderings the Boom's results went on creating or discarding by the wayside.

With Pitol we celebrate the peak of what, in words better spoken by Deleuze, would be a minor literature. That is, a literature more nourished by periferies than by centers, more in love with brief formats than extensive ones, more friendly with the fragment than with the maxim, closer to exploration and more skeptical of discoveries.

With Pitol, also, by accident or not, a paternity is discerned: that of the new Hispanic literature, the one with the most avant-garde accent, since authors such as Enrique Vila-Matas, César Aira, Juan Villoro, Roberto Bolaño and a few others have drunk from his springs to augment their own riverbeds.

By the light of the recent edition of El mago de Viena, a type of literary diary in which Pitol recounts periods from his beginnings as an unknown writer until now, it is worth pondering the influence that Venezuela and some of its writers had on those more than doubtful origins. The mark of a journey between Havana and the port of La Guaira, on board the cruise ship Francesco Morossini, fixes what was the writing of his first "passable but a bit pompous" poem for the critical eye of the budding poet. Pitol recognizes it wasn't in Tepoztlán—"some four years after that first trip to the Caribbean"—where he began his work but rather on that almost forgotten journey where he aspired to "describe the qualities of the ocean, its music, its brilliance and opacity and the contrast of its magnitude with the diminutive, greyish and atonal destiny of man." Once on dry land, a letter of introduction from Alfonso Reyes allows him to establish contact with Don Mariano Picón Salas and, through the latter's interventions, to attend a reading circle every Saturday curated by the poet Ida Gramcko in her own house with the occasional presence of Antonia Palacios, Oswaldo Trejo, Salvador Garmendia and Picón Salas himself. Pitol also recalls the long stay in a mansion in Los Chorros, at that time in the outskirts of Caracas, where he dedicated himself to reading and, possibly, writing "horrendous Dadaist poems" he later discarded.

But his second Venezuelan chapter, or at least the most significant one (literarily speaking) since his Caribbean journey, was undoubtedly the Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas celebrated in Venezuela's Mérida in 1993. A crucible of crossed literary destinies was created in that Andean city and marked Hispanic American fiction of that moment in no small dimension. The Spanish editor Jorge Herralde has said that, because of that encounter, Pitol met César Aira and tried to introduce his work in Spain. Likewise, Vila-Matas mentions that the Mérida Biennial allowed him to talk with Pitol like never before and sponsor a major diffusion of his work in penninsular publishing houses. Attending the same event in 1993 were Juan Villoro and the recently deceased Colombian novelist R.H. Moreno Durán, followers as well—along with the Venezuelans José Balza, Victoria de Stefano and Ednodio Quintero—, of the great master who is honored today. Pitol presided, without intending to—his humble giant's silhouette always placed itself in front of false flattery—, a movement in gestation whose lights we now see spread across the Ibero American verbal continent.

Sergio Pitol has affirmed: "Language, form, plot appear simultaneously and from the start; each entity goes along leading the others, and the pulsations, tensions, fissures and reconciliations produced in them allow me to build an oblique, oneiric, delirious storytelling vision, and to achieve an open and happily conjectural ending." This could be, more or less, the definition of an ars poetica that many of the best Latin American novelists of the moment follow.

I am referring to a tendency that doesn't wager only for history, that broaches the narrative pulse as an entity, that intuits within the narrative manner the very development of the story.

This lineage belongs to Pitol and his legacy is carried today by the continent's new voices. It is not insignificant that the Cervantes Prize has noticed this: by distinguishing Pitol the critical judgement takes a triple leap and puts itself at the tip of the spear. On few but wise occasions, consecration can also be a figure from the avant-garde.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 13 December 2005 }

La pobreza como condena / Antonio López Ortega

Poverty as a Curse

Material poverty, of course, but also infinite spiritual poverty. Times of misery but also times of the death of ideas, of anachronisms, of ideological survivals. What vision of the world today can validate concepts such as nutritional security, endogenous development, asymmetric warfare? The poverty of ideas is a reflection of the poverty of goods. “Poor poor country”—said the motto of a seminar promoted by the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello not long ago—. Our essential, primary, unavoidable theme is the theme of poverty. Poverty in all its facets: not only that of the beggar who asks from a wheelchair, of the street performer who entertains with balls of fire at stoplights, of the Wayúu Indian girl who crashes her little face against your car window; but also that of political leadership, of public institutions, of the educational system. Nothing escapes the putrefaction and each day we submerge ourselves more in the mud. A minister makes a declaration and his language is trash, a mayor speaks and his ideas are trash, a teacher gives a class and thinks his students learn something. It has already been decades of deterioration, malnutrition and mental dysfunction. Organic masses who wander, who spend their day rummaging through the trash, who collect cans in sacks.

In the 1960s the middle class, which is the one that makes a country grow, represented more than 20%; today it barely exceeds 10%. The most poverty-stricken [la clase E], on the other hand, make up more than 50% of the population according to recent surveys. There is no locomotive that will pull such a heavy and immobilizing load. If the statistics keep rising, if the deterioration is not contained, a wave of mendicancy will flood everything: properties, land, streets, gestures, beliefs, worldviews. There is no greater curse than poverty; or, better said, there can be no future without a reversal of poverty. But to add to the ills, in a period of oil earnings without precedents, the governmental rhetoric (or what is today understood as the State) actually disconnects itself from society. Just as in earlier periods, the “Petrostate” deploys its maximum splendor: the agenda does not include the social anxiety but rather a phantasmagoric rosary that includes assassinations, invasions, bilateral conflicts, internal enemies. The supposed great solution is no different from past formulas and has evolved very little beyond assistance formats, which is like keeping a dead person always at the edge of death.

It is convenient for a certain State that it all be this way, for a certain State occupied in other affairs it is convenient that the great masses remain ignorant, that they resign themselves to their crumbs, that they remain imprisoned within their daily misery, so that it can perpetuate its power and domain. Because the other option, the real and qualitative leap, the real and decisive inclusion, will always bring political risks. True sovereignty, at least in modern democracy, is individual sovereignty, the independence of spirit, the forging of criteria. We are speaking of an actual citizen, associated with work, with education for his children, immersed in the chain of economic circulation, and not this old-fashioned and battered collectivist rehearsal that confiscates properties, denigrates wealth and covers its own inefficiency by blaming those who produce it. It is easy to rule in poverty; what is difficult, because it is upright and worthy, is to rule amidst the prosperity of citizens. A society of the poor is equal to a poor government and poor discourses. An endless chain whose links continue to grow.

But these chains, as our National Anthem reiterates, can be broken, even if it is done unconsciously. The image of a man who during the Caracazo disturbances [in 1989] jumps onto a car, or carries a slab of beef ribs over his back, speaks not so much of looting but of re-appropriation. Poor Venezuelans can be in the most extreme misery but they associate the notion of progress with goods: the little piece of land, the little house, the little car. Material goods, their own, earned through sweat. Ignorance may be widespread but everyone coincides in recognizing a State, yesterday and today, as all-powerful as it is useless, as grandiloquent as it is incapable of generating sources of work and diversifying the economy. We suffer under the State because it has not exercised its essential role: to be the catalyst of social and economic change.

Old recipes are sold like new ones while the great evils remain. If the social explosions of past eras responded to causes that still remain, nothing allows us to think they can’t happen once again. Desperation gives bad advice and can take us through bad roads. But we would also have to understand that all human existence has limits and hunger is one of them. If the bulk of our society continues to sleep, doped up by misery, let us hope to God its awakening won’t be as violent as the ones from past eras.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 4 October 2005 }

Montejo y la poesía venezolana / Antonio López Ortega

Montejo and Venezuelan Poetry

Eugenio Montejo receives the Premio Octavio Paz in the name of Venezuelan poetry and, by extension, in the name of a language that is already over a thousand years old. In his acceptance speech in the presence of the Mexican authorities and the custodians of the prize, he didn’t want to be generous—he has always been so with his peers and with strangers—as much as consistent. We should remember that, regarding aesthetic and intellectual affiliations, Montejo has consistently seen himself as an inheritor. And one assumes the inheritors, at least the grateful ones, always give thanks.

Should we remember that the Premio Octavio Paz, in Montejo’s hands, is the highest international distinction that Venezuelan poetry receives? Perhaps only Arturo Uslar Pietri—with his celebrated Príncipe de Asturias and his not so celebrated Rómulo Gallegos—offers some type of comparison in the wider literary field. But it is good to remember that with Montejo the giants of the XX century also receive that prize: José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva, Fernando Paz Castillo, Rodolfo Moleiro, Vicente Gerbasi, Luz Machado, Juan Liscano, Ida Gramcko and Juan Sánchez Peláez, just to mention those who have left us.

The prize given to Montejo is a reading of the recent past but also of the vigorous present of Venezuelan poetry, as isolated on the continent as it is significant in values and distinct voices. We haven’t engaged other poetic bodies of the language with sufficient intensity but the exceptions, when these have occurred, count in our favor. The cases of Rafael Cadenas and Eugenio Montejo—undoubtedly the two most important Venezuelan poets of the moment—are representative when we enumerate the quantity of editions, anthologies, tributes and translations that have been dedicated to them in the last decade. The bulk of the movement has come from the outside in, as if the centers of criticism and validation, both academic as well as institutional, recognized in both of them the major signs of a crusade.

Venezuelan poetry has opened itself to the world on its own, thanks to the effort, curiosity and persistence of the poets themselves. The range of correspondences, the invitations received, the translations done both outwardly (projection) and inwardly (knowledge), the experiences of young writers in academic centers abroad, all these speak of a diaspora that has nourished interest and erased ignorance. To this we can add the value Venezuela had as a center for the publication of poetry from the continent (Monte Ávila, Fundarte, Pequeña Venecia, Angria) and as a center for valuation (a certain key moment of the Universidad Simón Bolívar, under the impulse of Guillermo Sucre, produced a celebrated anthology of Latin American poetry, which even today is among the major reference points of the continent).

This entire impulse is not lost but instead expands. It is astonishing to see the quality and rigor of the young poets, owners of very singular readings and voices. It is astonishing to see—if the classification is admittedly jarring—the promotion of poetesses, who at least since the 1980s have sustained a range of originality and expressive wager unheard of in the verbal Latin American continent. It is astonishing to see the efforts of certain editorial imprints, those that maintain themselves against hell and high water and without official subsidies. This speaks of a fortitude that belongs fundamentally to the creators and, secondarily, to a living society of readers, promoters and editors.

All of this and more has been represented by Montejo in Mexico. A prize of writers for writers, a prize of literature for literature, a prize that heightens the word through the word. Behind his discrete figure and proverbial work, stand all of us, both those who left the word as a trace, as well as those who continue to cultivate and pierce it. His example is that of all who with rigor, perseverance and engagement see a sense of commitment, truth and durability throughout time in the word, far beyond short cuts, false favors and empty rhetoric.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 23 August 2005 }