Entre la tendencia a saber jugar con la luz y las visiones del infierno. Reflexiones sobre temas venezolanos / Dayana Fraile

Between the Tendency of Knowing How to Play with Light and Visions of Hell: Reflections on Venezuelan Topics

                     Armando Reverón, “Landscape”


“Adolescents suffer”
[Los adolescentes adolecen].
A true masterpiece of technocratic Caracas poetics. If not for inventiveness, at least for its diffusion. And yet, it can’t surpass in splendor the more popular
“armadillo works for the guinea pig”
[cachicamo trabaja para lapa]
It doesn’t even compare due to a matter of perception. The second one turns out to be more fascinating because the association is destined to remain in darkness. My lack of referents is absolute. I’ve never seen an armadillo or a guinea pig. Except in photographs, videos or zoos and petting stations. I don’t know anything about their habits, the places the live. I don’t know about the relationship between these animals. The mere association leaves me perplexed. Now is the time of Venezuelans who don't understand Venezuelan phrases.
The enthusiastic nationalists inscribed in a purely no-worries vision propose that “Venezuelanness” is nothing more than cultural artifacts like the dance of the guarandol bird, arepas, joropo music and even the industrially-produced beer of the Polar company. This is a mystification that attempts to delineate us as though we were completely westernized beings facing a display of postcards and souvenirs. It is a reification. It creates artifacts. No one thinks of culture as something that is breathed. It’s turned into a corpse and from it surge, as though superimposed on a puddle of mud, those fragile mummies-testimonies that ceaselessly wave their fingers in the air trying to touch you. The cadaverous doesn’t move nor does it move us.
Relatedly,
there’s also that tendency to always think of mestizaje as being of a whitening nature. I’ve witnessed how the sanitizing vision of mestizaje defends the purely Spanish origin of the joropo to the very end and then I’ve been left astonished when I see how they read authors like Winthrop R. Wright, who argues that the joropo is an ensemble of European songs and forms inscribed in the polyphonic rhythms of African music. If we add the pair of shamanic maracas that accompany any self-respecting joropero, we find ourselves in the presence of an all-out interracial super-production. This would represent a more interesting reading,
and also a more realistic one
of the frenzied beat of the zapateo dance.
Even
when it comes to that meticulous, compulsive stamping that takes place in the joropo style from the Tuy Valleys —and if you don’t believe me, watch the videos of El Gabán Tacateño.
Personally, and I’m speculating here, I think that Venezuelanness is to be found somewhere between a fragment from A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas
published in 1552
and the episode about Tebaldi in search of the perfect yogurt that occurs in the novel El bonche by Renato Rodríguez
published in 1976.
The fragment by De Las Casas constitutes a truly brief aside in A Short Account. Set in a page with too many blank spaces, located between an aside dedicated to the Pearl Coast and to Paria and the island of Trinidad, and the aside dedicated to the Kingdom of Venezuela, we find this short paragraph flowing under the title “Regarding the Yuyapari River.”
And the Dominican begins,
“Through the province of Paria climbs a river called the Yurapari, more than two hundred leagues heading inland...”
And the crystalline peninsula, its luminosity and mangroves all come to mind... "A sad tyrant followed its course for many leagues during the year 1529 with four hundred or more men, and he committed great massacres, burning people alive and wielding swords against an infinity of innocent natives who were in their lands and homes without harming anyone, not paying attention, and he left much of the land in ashes and astonished and fearful..."
The initial beauty plunges toward the territories of the abject. Everything has become a story summarized by a pair of images, flames and ruins...
“And finally...”
De Las Casas continues resigned,
"... he died a horrible death and his armada fell apart. And afterwards, other tyrants succeeded in those evils and tyrannies, and today we see them destroying and killing and damning the souls that the son of God redeemed with his blood..." in this manner outlining it like a never-ending story, destined to be repeated for eternity. I focus on that unknown verb in Spanish, to damn, [infernar]
“to damn the souls.”
What else can these visions of hell be but prophecies. Eternal damnations. I imagine that to damn means precisely the act of making the soul pass through a bit of hell. As though passing through eggs and flour. Becoming inferno, a macabre product of the technology of the spirit. Ever since then, perhaps, we have lived as damned. Irremediably contaminated by inferno. That’s how those fleeting tyrants end up elaborating a version of the story about the bald rooster. That story from Venezuelan folklore that consists of an opening phrase that's repeated forever;
when someone says,
“Do you want to hear the story about the bald rooster?”
“Yes," someone else replies.
“I already told it to you,” the first one says,
and then again
“Do you want to hear the story about the bald rooster?”
And so on
forever
until the other person gets angry or annoyed.
Or they both do.
I was a child the first time I encountered the story of the bald rooster. Dad repeated it to me until he managed to make me feel like I was at the edge of desperation.
Yes.
I.
Wanted.
To hear the story.
But the story doesn’t exist. It’s nothing more than that prefiguration, a hook to catch your lips. A matter for tricksters.
Changing the subject,
the fragment by Rodríguez introduces the “energetic man” in the landscape. An image that circulates, that lives inside a fucked up loop, like the petty tyrant in the boat. But it represents a notable improvement because it comes from the same creators of the “1975 Petroleum Nationalization.” The avatar of the “energetic man,” the political prototype of the oil boom in the seventies, the millions of photos of the presidential candidate Carlos Andrés Pérez leaping over a puddle in an Olympic pose is incarnated in Tebaldi, who like the Wandering Jew seeks the utopia of the perfect yogurt after seeing the movie “The Man on the Eiffel Tower” and discovering Franchot Tone's satisfied expression when “he shoots a yogurt between his chest and back.” Tebaldi understands that this is “the thing,” by which he means, “beatitude, peace, a balanced relationship with the cosmos, the harmonious life” and he gives himself over insatiably to trying all the types of yogurt to be found in Caracas. After buying a cow and producing his own yogurt, he ends up robbing money from the cash register of the company where he works so he can flee to Europe and throw himself into the delirium of travelling on foot throughout the entire continent trying millions of portions of yogurt. However, he never manages to feel what he yearned for, “that beatitude and peace on Franchot Tone’s face.”
Is it the search for El Dorado in reverse?
Venezuelans mount themselves in the libidinal energy of petroleum in order to pursue the fetish of modernity.
We are
the eternal Latin American
positivists.
Caracas was the city of utopia, and that’s why today it seems retro-futuristic to us, with all those beautiful buildings in the modernist architectural style. The streets of Los Chaguaramos, Colinas de Bello Monte and Las Mercedes are an architectural museum from that belle epoque. Even though the streets are sometimes sprinkled with soulless glass buildings in corporate Palm Beach style, the city maintains an atmosphere of a classic cyberpunk story.
Caracas is still the city of utopia.
But the “infernal” utopia of Bartolomé de las Casas.
The city of the reversible utopia. The city of the executive crystal skyscrapers occupied by the impoverished masses always pushed to the limit. The extreme precariousness of cardboard disintegrating in the tropical humidity. The modernity of Caracas is as fragmented, broken, as the windows of those skyscrapers.
Now,
what we know about Tebaldi we know thanks to José, the best carpenter in Galilee. They often run into each other in extremely improbable ways on the roads of Northern Europe. On one occasion when José is getting ready to spend the night around a campfire hidden amidst the trees, he catches a glimpse of a man walking quite decidedly as though he were being dragged by a mirage. Each time he grabs a new portion of yogurt, he fails. The revelation doesn’t materialize and it's hard not to imagine him falling incessantly toward the lower right hand corner of the screen. The petty tyrant from De Las Casas and Tebaldi coincide in the video game recurrence of the story about the bald rooster. Both of them always return from the upper left-hand corner as if they were our telluric versions of the Mario Bros. It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to speak of the story about the bald rooster as a philosophical concept that belongs to us. The truncated story. Very truncated. The very new story
that
unleashes desire,
the utopia of progress.
But it seems to be doomed from the very first phrase to the poverty of progress. Paria-story-metaphor of the earthly paradise in the diaries of Columbus. Liberating and seeking independence in the 19th century, Venezuela-unstoppable-magma, the absolute fantasy of republican emergence.
But all of them, unleavened bread.
They flatten
in the oven.
Nationalism as a political concept is not important to me since it can turn out to be misleading. Nationalism isn’t something unitary that can be considered a solution. It can’t be considered positive or negative by simply speaking in the abstract without analyzing each particular manifestation and I,
understand-that-the-country-is-truly-fucked
but frankly: I don’t like the anti-nationalist diatribes that many Venezuelans are willing to share each time they have the chance. Now it turns out that it's in style to be anti-nationalist...
Evidently,
it’s a reaction to the saturation of Chavismo's discursive manipulation, which has kidnapped the referents, the meaning of the spirit of our imagined community. Some in the opposition have made the mistake of waving a flag in response under the figure of a supposed individualism that denies the existence of something as imperishable and nebulous as Venezuelanness. I think it's a mistake because we should situate ourselves in a thought scheme that takes into consideration our reality, our particularities.
I don’t know if thinking about Venezuela from
Love
is being a nationalist.
But I can’t help it: I like love. So I think about that shack I glimpsed on the road between Puerto La Cruz and Arapito beach in the state of Sucre. A fragile shack made of odds and ends prolifically adorned with pieces of blue glass. It was evident that these were pieces of Solera Light beer bottles. Broken. Crushed against the ground. I think of that radiant shack on the hot road. With all that blue glass filtering the light in a kaleidoscopic manner. The landscape transfigured by the rays of the sun that were pounding its humble walls.
What else did Armando Reverón and the artists of Geometric Abstraction do but play with light? Reverón with his humid, impressionist landscapes, elaborated expressive devices inspired by the light of the tropics. The abstract artists with their kinetic art, marked by optical illusions, assembled the movement of a space that was necessarily crossed and modified by light. The fragments of the “Orange Sphere” by Jesús Soto distributed along the Caracas horizon reach the plenitude of
an artificial sun.
So I like to think Venezuelanness has more to do with collections of contingencies such as these, circumstances that provide us with contours. The tendency to play with light. The tendency to transform the tendency of playing with light into a form of artistic expression. Venezuelanness as a way of thinking and being in the world. Not like a concretist corpse. Venezuelanness is not the “Orange Sphere,” it is all the contingencies that limit its creation and the creation of the kaleidoscope-shack on the road to the beach because it never ceases to amaze me that a Venezuelan living in the middle of nowhere, who has probably never seen the works of Reverón or the Geometric Abstraction painters, can share the same instinct, a similar sensibility accompanied by its respective correlative of know-how, because it never ceases to amaze me that a man living in the middle of nowhere, using waste materials and a rudimentary knowledge, arrives at the same results, reaches the same aesthetic.
So that,
the furious masses that are trying to construct themselves as the extreme opposite of Chavismo are a virus of the system.
“Venezuelan music is horrible, man... Arepas don’t nourish you, they just make you fat as hell, man... Venezuelan writers have always been shit and that's why no one knows who they are, man.”
They’re mistaken when they think that Venezuelanness is disposable, as if it were merely a possible option that can be taken or rejected. In actuality, it’s simpler because it's an organic matter. It is merely features.
For example,
in my case it involves not being accustomed to animals because I grew up in a fishing village that was improvised into a oil-producing city. A fishing village with a single street that in the forties began to transform itself into a zone that would eventually have one of the largest oil refineries in the country. Houses built on top of salt mines. Yellowish sand. Sterile. Tenuous breeze facing the sea. Everything flat. A few sand cliffs here and there. Everything scorching. Blue sky like a mirage. A handful of palm trees. Some sea grapes. The purple, sour fruit, spreading like stains on the pavement. Everything so full of space. The grass planted by the mayor’s office languishing and faded to brown on the traffic islands that separate the streets and highways. A life emptied of animals. Some tiny bird, a black shadow on the sidewalk. A pelican on the beach. A macaw at some tourist inn. No chickens. No goats. No cows. No horses. No roosters. No dogs. No cats. Not many trees. Hardly any trees. Only salt water. Small stones. The sand putting pressure on red skin under the shiny edge of the day. Being blinded by the excessive sun. The industrial chimneys expelling black smoke. Ashes. The industrial gas burners.
When I watch people in Pittsburgh
hugging chickens
I’m immediately overcome by a premonition that I can’t do that. I can't hug chickens. But paradoxically, I fondly remember the stories of my dad eating impossible animals during the survival training he received when he was in the army. Dad emerges in my memories in some thicket on the Colombian border, eating grilled long-tailed monkeys and serpents. Or climbing onto a boat and beating the water with a stick to disperse the deadly piranhas. Or riding grey horses that for some reason I imagined being purple.
Then,
the image of dad sitting in Ciudad Bolívar in front of a plate of turtle pie.
The horror.
Then,
the image of the macaws at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas balancing themselves on the campus palm trees in the green spaces known as No Man’s Land. The man who kidnaps the incredibly beautiful yellow-blue macaw that crashes into the paranoid, tall gates of an apartment building in Los Chaguaramos. The bus on the street’s horizon. The electric fences. A dry blow and a blue shadow cracking the pavement. The man who runs and hides the bruised body of the bird beneath his shirt.
The horror.
And yet
I
can't
hug chickens.
So being Venezuelan involves a collection of contingencies,
like having a certain predisposition to playing with light or having certain probabilities of not knowing how to relate to animals and, perhaps, it might also be that repressed smile at the gynecologist's office when she looks for suspicious bumps in my breasts and starts to recommend that I use sunscreen whenever I leave the house each day and I'm suddenly struck, like never before, by the vision of the tenuous paleness of Pittsburgh, kingdom of ice, because I fully remember
the utter intensity of the light in the city where I was born.
So the gynecologist recommends I use sunscreen every day and I,
I immediately think there’s no possibility of me getting skin cancer. If I survived the light in Puerto La Cruz there's no chance the light of Pittsburgh will defeat me. The majority of us don't even suspect such an atrocity could be possible: to become ill because of the sun.
Impossible, impossible to not see it as an eccentricity on the part of the gynecologist, especially when I recall having spent entire weeks sitting on the sand uninterruptedly, swallowing salt water. Without paying the least bit of attention to sunscreen or moisturizing lotion. The inclement sun of the tropics assaulting the strips of my dry and peeling skin. Charred. Impossible to not think that my indigenous blood protects me from these types of things. And then the salt water floods my mouth and nose while I'm lying on the bed with my legs open as the gynecologist holds a metal pincer and I think of how pleasant it is to be dragged by the currents of the sea while my body floats, overcoming any future sinking. I don't need any sunscreen. I have an understanding with the light. I leave her office holding a piece of paper with information about the services I received. I note that the doctor has written in the box at the top of the page, even though I told her I'm from Venezuela, despite my accent:
Age: 29
Race: white
Ethnicity: not Hispanic or Latino.

Really?

White?

Not
Hispanic
or Latino?

It’s impossible to not think that being Venezuelan is also that. Your racial identity is an indecipherable enigma for any foreigner. They project what they know onto you. They dare to guess and are always mistaken.
In contrast, each day I understand less the meaning of that other word: Latino.




{ Dayana Fraile, Eternal Typewriter, 27 June 2014 }

Dayana Fraile ganó el VI Premio de Cuento Policlínica Metropolitana / El Universal

Dayana Fraile won the VI Premio de Cuento Policlínica Metropolitana


The writer from the state of Anzoátegui obtained first place for her short story “Evocación y elogio de Federico Alvarado Muñoz. A tres años de su muerte.” Delia Mariana Arismendi and Miguel Hidalgo Prince also received prizes.

The fiction writers Dayana Fraile, Delia Mariana Arismendi and Miguel Hidalgo Prince were the winners (among a total of 214 participating texts) of the sixth edition of the Premio de Cuento Policlínica Metropolitana para Jóvenes Autores, according to a unanimous decision of the jury composed of Victoria De Stefano, José Luis Palacios and Luis Yslas.

The first place in the contest fell on the short story “Evocación y elogio de Federico Alvarado Muñoz. A tres años de su muerte” [Evocation and Elegy for Federico Alvarado Muñoz. Upon the Third Anniversary of His Death] by Dayana Fraile (Puerto La Cruz, 1985), “for being a story that successfully articulates diverse narrative verbal tenses, maintaining an efficient tension, while also making use of poetic images that enrich a prose without stridency that is also an elegy for a failed experience.”

They gave the second place to the story titled “Mondadientes,” by Delia Mariana Arismendi (Barinas, 1989), for “possessing a narrative rhythm that doesn’t falter at any time, due to her employment of a simple but effective language that recreates a story of atypical solitudes that come together in the singular figure of a cannibal.

And lastly, they awarded third place to the text entitled “A medio camino,” by Miguel Hidalgo Prince (Caracas, 1984), in which “there exists a sober writing, stripped of ornament, that recreates the story of a geographical and psychological detour, through a fluid and convincing narration that incorporates dialogues of accomplished effectiveness.”

The members of the jury also awarded mentions to the following texts, listed without order of valoration: “Las propiedades curativas del fuego” (by Dacio René Medrano Arreaza), “Hacia una metodología del desecho” (by Noraedén Mora Méndez), “La visión de los lobos (by Enza García Arreaza),” “Erika y Berenice” (by Katy Civolani), “¿Cómo cae un poderoso?” (by Juan Carlos González Díaz) and Sin título, 2010” (by Martha Durán).

The winners will receive a cash award of 8,000, 4,000 and 2,000 bolívares, respectively, as well as appearing, alongside the finalists, in an anthology corresponding to this edition of the prize.

It is worth noting that this edition of the Premio de Cuento Policlínica Metropolitana para Jóvenes Autores took place completely without using any paper, since the convocation and reading by the jury were accomplished by means of digital media, contributing to ecological awareness and increasing the possibilities of the population of young people to which the contest is geared.

The awarding of the prizes will take place on May 31st this year, in the installations of the Policlínica Metropolitana medical center in Caracas.




{ El Universal, 1 May 2012 }

Granizo, de Dayana Fraile. / Luis Guillermo Franquiz

Granizo, by Dayana Fraile.

It is a theater of varietés with continuous shows. It is a game of circus mirrors. It is a kaleidoscope ceaselessly spinning. It is also a conversation overheard from a nearby table, to which we pay attention surreptitiously. At a certain moment, eventually, we change places, sit at that adjacent table and participate in what’s being told, without shyness or shame. Dayana Fraile’s verbal magic functions as an anesthetic for social and literary conventions, it suggests, convinces, seduces. It draws the veil of narrative fantasy and until the end of the book it will find a way to walk across the tightrope without losing its balance and falling into boredom. Dayana Fraile seems to follow in the path of several contemporary authors who prefer to dispense with special effects and speak to the reader bluntly, almost abusing trust, employing a simple and direct language that leaves no room for amazement or false likenesses. She accomplishes it, and very well, offering images written like those of a carousel that spins and barely allows a glimpse, a view, appearing and fading within its own narrative scheme without adding any frivolous explanations that serve no function.

The characters described in Granizo (Caracas: Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana, 2011), winner of the short story collection prize in the I Bienal de Literatura Julián Padrón, make up a symbiotic gallery where each one takes up and offers the other, crossing lines, becoming tangential, speaking among themselves and barely letting us perceive a group energy that is only comprehensible to them. We are passersby in a reconstructed city through the youthful experiences of the protagonist, of the other characters who interact with her, and argue, and cry, and dare to dream or vomit their existentialist entrails, all by means of a language that functions according to what the author wants to tell and portray. It is a simple reading, but not because of that simple or plain. It has nuances, imperfections, wrinkles that confer an adequate credibility to what is narrated. It is a pleasure to read because there are no cardboard cut-outs, poses, pompous moments in the language. It works because the author seems to have worried about the small details, the inconsistencies, weaving well the threads that tie the pieces together using metaphors that make us smile without realizing it.

The different stories are offered as though they came with the trust of a friend’s glance, amid glasses of wine or cups of coffee, whatever might be needed. The narrative style allows for our attention to be sustained, so that one wants to know where these fictional women come from and where they’re going, who occasionally change roles. It is a very feminine book, though not one-dimensional. The characters Dayana Fraile traces are there, at the edge of a glance, names one never pronounces completely, strident colors that run through the opacity of conventional routine. They are characters from a fairy tale that has turned into a concrete reality to the sound of Venezuelan rock. Tangible. Palpable. Recognizable behind a corner, a brief glimpse, indefinite. One is left with the sensation of having arrived in the middle of the work, reaching a fragment that alludes to the rest, to the entire event, just as the day described in Mrs. Dalloway allows us to assimilate the totality of her life, the ceramic pieces scattered in the short stories of Granizo let us to reconstruct a particular universe, a shadow behind the mirror.

I keep thinking of a kaleidoscope due to the sequence of apparently disconnected scenes, although linked together, like a steel spiderweb. A succession that sustains itself through the narrator’s moves, an exchange of places that functions like a hinge, a vehicle for transitions, the bridge that lets us come and go between the various parts of the book, literally. There is also humor. A type of rancid, salubrious humor that pulls a cynical smile of acknowledgment, because the characters are well delineated, with the traits of their humanity nicely distributed and measured to concede to them the appropriate weight for narrative drama. They exist, they almost leap from the page with their complicated literary manners and their city neuroses. I am quite happy to be able to recommend this first book of short stories by a writer who promises, if she decides, to offer us more unconventional fictions. You can find the book in any of the Librerías del Sur throughout Venezuela. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.




{ Luis Guillermo Franquiz, Diario, 2 May 2011 }

Granizo / John Manuel Silva

Granizo


Various constants repeat themselves in Granizo (Caracas: Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana, 2011, 92 pp.), Dayana Fraile’s first book. Namely. The transit toward independence, which people tend to confront when they leave adolescence and begin the path to maturity, in which expectations die beneath the disenchantment of discovering that real life looks very little like what we wish. Characters that are somewhat solitary and broken, possessors of a rabid (though not aggressive) individuality that makes them misunderstood by those around them. Repeated references to pop culture. Poetic constructions that nourish the, almost always, fluid prose that narrates the five short stories contained in this volume. Female characters fighting on a daily basis against the hidden feeling that they are victims of male presences, not necessarily antagonistic ones, such as the father, the landlord, the boyfriend, etc. And an opportune use of irony to temper the gravity of what is being told.

“Tarde de costura” opens the book with an enormous intimacy, sustained by powerful metaphors with a great capacity to suggest the inner torment of the characters. In this case, two girls, Taía and Teresa, the first one very self-assured, the second one submerged in her doubts; both, a reflection of the other.

The prose, which is developed in third person singular for the only time in the book, soon tends toward poetry: “Happiness is a pill, a delirium, Tai, it’s given to us in little pieces, the problem is we try to eat the night in one gulp, and our jaw turns out to be weak, it wasn’t made to chew the stars...” (15)

From the start we guess the tragic fate of one of them, while the other will appear in a later story.

In “Granizo,” this intelligent construction of images that, with few words, draws the main character’s conflicts is sustained: “Poetry came and went, and I would leave it, though occasionally it would stay and take on the shape of a dog’s carcass decomposing on the rug, a discourse ulcerated so as to better recall Baudelaire, to eat its worms with pleasure and imagine myself cross-eyed, ugly, a prostitute, Rimbaldian, dying from cold or maybe syphilis in Paris, just for the satisfaction it gave me to return from those decadent recreations, and realize my life was so removed from those scenes...” (22)

But soon, narrative imprecision marks a pattern. Initially it seems like a mannerist story, locating the protagonist, a university student arriving from the interior of the country, in a rented room in an apartment inhabited by a senile old man and an ailing woman with two children. Fraile doesn’t just dedicate substantial paragraphs to describing these characters, she also does this with the rest of the neighbors in the building, from the concierge to the latter’s daughter, until getting to Patricia, a neighbor who ends up befriending the narrator. But later on, inexplicably, the narrative branches off into a turbulent love story between the protagonist and Jacobo, a psychology student.

The prose that flowed naturally in the first story, here finds itself slightly awkward and affected by a need to over explain: “I didn’t ask for much because the rent was cheap and the building was only a few blocks away from the university and because, after all, I had learned not to be so demanding, and to bite my tongue because, I really had no other choice.” (23; my italics)

Moreover, the characters that appear at the beginning, with the exception of the old man Giacomo, who serves as a reflection of the failure that floats over the protagonist, don’t add anything to the plot and only draw out a story with a few extra paragraphs to spare.

It is, undoubtedly, the least accomplished story in the book, despite having a few of its own narrative merits.

“La vida con Fiori” presents another episode in the life of the previous story’s protagonist. Once again the student in the process of fully assuming her independence can’t help depending on her father’s money and on the decisions of a landlord, obstacles to what the narrative voice defines as a “golden freedom.” (52)

What in the book’s title story was an insubstantial apparition of characters who contributed little or nothing to the central plot, here turns out to be a fortunate construction of the atmosphere surrounding the protagonist. The fact of not fitting in with any of the tribes that inhabit the Escuela de Letras where she studies, described with distant irony, becomes the motive by which the protagonist ends up befriending Fiori, a brilliantly drawn character, in whom the author vindicates attitudes deemed socially strange, as part of a warm personality that values strange people.

The prose in this story, the book’s longest, slowly constructs masterful images that lead to a luminous ending.

A digression is called for: there is frequent talk of two tendencies in Venezuelan fiction. One, present mainly in the novel, that develops themes of a historical and political nature, seeking to generate metaphors about the country’s current historical moment, narrating episodes from the republican history of Venezuela. And another, developed in our short fiction, that makes literature, or to be more accurate, literary wisdom, the central argument of its anecdote. Something notable in Granizo is its evasion of both tendencies, which have constituted themselves into an easy formula for writers who put little effort and imagination into their work.

And this is particularly notable in this story, in which, against the grain, Fraile observes with delicious cynicism that idealized “bohemian life” that some fiction writers insist on glorifying, especially younger ones: “I soon realized that Fiori saw in Venezuelan rock a substitute for religion, or better yet, for environmentalism. That strange passion represented, for her, an act of extreme charity, it was almost like signing up for Greenpeace and devoting yourself to capturing species in danger of extinction throughout the country...” (55)

Likewise: “The most extreme were those who thought they were Beats, and they acted according to what they thought a Beat was, they’d go to class staggering from how high they were and talked about orgies so everyone could hear them. Which isn’t a problem if you manage to write like the angels, the problem was none of those bastards managed to write a single line.” (56)

Relatedly, the country’s social and political situation only appears obliquely in this story, like a distant reality, that takes place on TV, without affecting or influencing the characters’ lives. In other words, any interpretation that tries to explain the stories told here corresponds to the readers, because Dayana Fraile is only occupied with developing her fiction, without having to make moral judgments on the situation in which her characters find themselves.

Sexuality, almost absent in all the stories, save for a brief moment in “Granizo,” is what moves Rita, the central character in “San Miguel Arcángel... entiérrame la espada,” a retired prostitute, who behind her superstitions and Santería practices hides a great personal frustration, which leads her to depression, deciding finally to go out one evening with the narrator in hopes of lifting her spirits and discovering if she still wields the power she once had with men.

Again, one notices the oppression against the feminine, although in this case in a more direct manner: “In those days, saying miss, as I saw it, was the same as saying jail, subhuman or slave.” (76)

Once more, a rhythmic prose with a sharp sense of humor is employed to make the characters more human: “I don’t know why the image came to me of Rita masturbating with the bills the guys were giving her, it was a really ugly image, I almost fell into shock, her hanging on a pole in the middle of the kitchen, wearing red lingerie and moving like those girls you see in the reggaetón videos.” (75)

Finally, reality ends up imposing itself and destroying the protagonists’ expectations.

The female voice gives way to that of a gay man, who had already been drawn in the previous story, in “Lo de Dove,” the story that closes the book. Here, a frenetic succession of conversations demands an attentive reading in order to untangle the central plot: a group of friends, high on synthetic drugs, gather to bring in the new year and contemplate that their dreams and goals have little to do with the lives they lead.

“Desires are shit –Dove added after taking an extra long gulp from the bottle. We’ll never have what we want and what we want isn’t always what we need and what we need, well, you know, that’s shit...” (87)

The expectations that metaphorically crashed in the preceding stories, here do so in a literal manner, closing the book with a frantic scene that ends everything, turning fairies into demons, as we read in one of the final paragraphs.

Surely, Granizo is more than a notable book of short stories, revealing Dayana Fraile as a mature fiction writer who flees from the cliché “literary styles” that inundate the panorama of our fiction, taking the risk of confectioning (in the literal sense of the term) an accomplished volume of short stories that presages a solid voice on our country’s literary horizon.




{ John Manuel Silva, Panfleto Negro, 24 March 2011 }

Palabras de presentación en la lectura de cuentistas latinoamericanos: Enza García y Mario Morenza (USB) / Dayana Fraile

Introductory Remarks at the Reading by Latin American Short Story Writers: Enza García and Mario Morenza (USB)



Good Afternoon.

Thanks to the invitation extended to me by Mariana Libertad Suárez and Editorial Equinoccio, I now find myself introducing two old friends of mine: Enza García and Mario Morenza.

I met both of them in the hallway that connects the Escuela de Filosofía and the Escuela de Letras at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, that hallway belonging to Mario’s other memories. I accompanied them, anonymously, in their first steps as writers during my academic internship at Monte Ávila Editores and I had the opportunity to participate in the editing process of their first publications: Cállate poco a poco by Enza and Pasillos de mi memoria ajena by Mario. I must confess I was very impressed by both manuscripts and that the best of dispositions marked my work and my readings at that time. I have always been inspired by the fiction being produced by young writers in Venezuela.

Enza García and Mario Morenza are a part of that avalanche of young fiction writers today who are transforming the landscape of the national literary tradition. Both of them, in a short span of time, have become central and paradigmatic voices of this emerging generation.

So it was a pleasant surprise to encounter El bosque de los abedules and La senda de los diálogos perdidos, books that received awards during the Concurso Nacional Universitario.

At the risk of seeming too informal, I will say that Enza’s short stories possess the virtue of shaking the floors and also the walls for us. They leave us picking up ceramic and plaster fragments, after a trembling of 7 on the Richter scale, as though it were possible to put everything back in its place with Crazy Glue or Elmer’s. Through her writing, Enza deconstructs traditional imaginaries and manages to assert agency in substantially original spaces of the creation and reading of those very imaginaries. Cállate poco a poco and El bosque de los abedules materialize battlefields between primordial pulsations and ancestral prohibitions. Freud said that all behaviors present themselves provoked by desire and, precisely, in El bosque de los abedules we can observe how a machinery of desire constitutes itself in the territories of logos.

In “El bonsái de Macarena” we notice a particularly interesting use of the keys to the construction of the female subject in these postmodern times. The narrator transcends the trite recourse to feminine victimization, recovering it in an ironic tone, right at the moment when she has taken on the role of murderer.

Simone de Beauvoir proposed that all sexual phenomena contain an existential meaning. “El bonsái de Macarena” seems to project this hypothesis, desire is the true trigger for the characters’ actions.

In this short story the theme of transcendence is important. I can’t help recalling that Simone de Beauvoir also said that the phallus carnally represents transcendence. The allusion the protagonist makes to her lover’s “very little” penis could be a metaphor, then, for the impossibility of attaining transcendence that these characters suffer. This impossibility definitely ends up pushing them toward the territories of anguish, desperation and antisocial behavior.

In another vein, Mario Morenza’s La senda de los diálogos perdidos evidences an excellent use of humor and a sense of the absurd. His characters are inserted in their respective individual tragedies, barely separated by thin walls. Notwithstanding, Mario makes use of the recourse of parody to define infinite possibilities for pleasure. Tragedies end up becoming tragicomedies, without losing in this process their original and constitutive meaning. Maybe this is why all of us who’ve read La senda de los diálogos perdidos remember it with a complicit smile. Mario’s writing, at times profound, at others poetic, also has the great virtue of making us laugh.

Reading Mario is like going to the beach for a weekend: it’s a renovating and fresh experience.

In “Dos tazas de café antes del trigésimo paso” we find some clues regarding the poetics that sustains the book. The narrator comments: “I like to lean on the balcony and watch people go by, see their faces. See how they contort their features. The situation animates me. This activity, in some way, reminds me of the horse races. All the residents of Block 4 return and depart to their own races. Between those two categorical points that establish moments, there exist phenomena of conclusive character. A story. And in their bags or suitcases and purses they carry their fragmented destiny. Minute pieces with which they’ll build their dreams or end up destroying them. One can say I witness the openings and closings of work days.”

Effectively, the intertwined stories of the characters, often nameless, of Block 4, establish a fragmentary narrative sequence charged with emotiveness. From one of imagination’s balconies, Mario reconstructs the lives of characters that balance themselves between the crushing weight of the quotidian and the restorative hope of each setting sun.

In “Adán y Oto, siameses” Mario takes up once again the literary recourse of the double, tearing it from the kingdom of the fantastic and depositing it in the territories of the grotesque. The myth of the double has always reminded us of the fragility of our identities. This myth resignifies the dualism that dominates human thought: body and soul, good and evil, life and death.

Mario, in an interview he gave to a well-known website, affirmed that the situation of the country might have permeated the writing of this short story. Regardless, he declares that his intention was to create an homage to Jorge Luis Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy and Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas. Without intending to establish reductionist readings, it occurs to us that this story, beyond the effective splitting of the country of the Siamese, could have an interpretation of a political bent, one that’s not too evident and which is perhaps deeper: the avatar of those siblings that must remain together, against their will, because they share vital organs.

Undoubtedly, El bosque de los abedules and La senda de los diálogos perdidos enrich and revitalize Editorial Equinoccio’s catalog. With a paper hug, I celebrate the authors and their editors.




Translator’s Note: Enza García Arreaza’s El bosque de los abedules (2010) and Mario Morenza’s La senda de los diálogos perdidos (2008) are published by Editorial Equinoccio at the Universidad Simón Bolívar.




{ Dayana Fraile, presented at Cuentistas contemporáneos latinoamericanos, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, 23 October 2010 }

Mèlancolie / Dayana Fraile

Mèlancolie


This sadness gets tangled in branches
                                                      hangs from plastic vines
silently penetrates me while I scream

Like all sacred beasts it adorns itself with cayennes
burns like a horizon in your palms
dabs itself with cucumber and honey masques

untamed                         rough
disorients the neighbors            carries stones in its mouth

savage
villainous

celebrates the road of the abyss
leaves no room for sleep
drinks water straight from jugs
listens to Chopin records well into the night




{ Dayana Fraile, Lianas de plástico, cuchillos de cartón y otras maneras de pasar el tiempo, 2009 }

Postal / Dayana Fraile

Postcard


I can’t remember how many times this scene has repeated itself. Ana is wrapped from head to toe in her plaid blanket. Aside from her head, I can only see a bit of her hand between the fabric, an incandescent sparkle where the cigarette should be, the quivering ash, always about to fall anywhere except the ashtray. Beth Gibbons shredding her vocal chords in the background, “Nobody Loves Me” playing live, “Over” or “Glory Box” in Sao Paulo.

I’m always sitting on the mattress spread out on the floor, beside the bed, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left. Sometimes the room is smaller or bigger, the window changes position, with more or less things, because the things are essential there, the mountains of CDs, the quartz stones, the teddy bears, the music magazines, the books, always the dwarf bamboo resting in a glass container full of something that looks like colored gelatin, the hair clips, the blister packs of pills scattered on the floor and Ana raising or lowering the music’s volume, arbitrarily, as though she were disconcerted by having a free hand and nothing to do with it.

I light up and extinguish a cigarette, the same cigarette, several times, I think I want to smoke and I light it, I think I don’t want to smoke anymore so I put it out – “You know? I’m tired of being alone” –, Ana always seems to want to add something else, but never does, she entertains herself with the CDs, she wants to make a long enough pause so that the words she has just pronounced, a few seconds ago, will distance themselves enough from those that will soon come. She tries to make some time. She puts on a CD and takes it off, she puts another one on and takes it off, and now she plays a song by Fiona Apple, almost always the one where she says, “Sometimes I feel like a criminal.”


I don’t say anything to Ana when she tells me this, I just listen to her and sometimes I feel like a criminal, laralarala... I light another cigarette, skim through another magazine, and finally end up inventing some story about a sudden and unexpected encounter with some ex-boyfriend, because I know those types of stories fascinate her, she looks at me from the bed, and asks for details about each one of the guy’s actions, about mine, “Seriously?... And what did you do?”, she asks if I pause during the story, as she checks the time on the clock at the bedside table, stretches out her arm and pops another Lexotanil in her mouth.

It’s always the same scene, the same songs, the same eiderdown, the same bamboo buried in gelatin. I think certain people stay within us like a fragmented image, a postcard photograph, a scratched record where the same needle rolls indefinitely. For me, Ana is one of those people. That’s why when I go out for walks in the afternoon without any fixed destination in mind, I sometimes end up at Ana’s door, at any one of her addresses that are subject to constant change. When I go into her room, I feel like a shipwrecked person who has swum across the Caribbean and finally reaches shore.

Even though six months may have gone by since my last visit, when I go into her room I feel I’ve never left, everything is identical to how I remember it, including the sleepy expression on Ana’s face, framed in the empty space of the door as it opens.

It feels good to visit her, it feels good to sit on the mattress she pulls out from under the bed when I arrive, to cook up something quickly, serve a plate of salted chicken strips with slices of pear on the side, creating a strange salad only Ana and myself understand. I invent stories for her, I bring her news from a reality I don’t inhabit either. I think our friendship, at its core, is a lot like that.





{ Dayana Fraile, El Apéndice de Pablo #6, May 2009 }