Rebolledo dividió el país / Eduardo Febres

Alejandro Rebolledo Divided the Country

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First Limitation:

I’m writing this near Barcelona, but the one in Anzoátegui state, Venezuela. An old private joke from the year Alejandro Rebolledo wrote Poemas del distroy, Juan Barreto won the elections for the mayorship of Caracas, and Andrés González Camino and I met up in Barcelona, Spain (2004). Diego Sequera, who stayed in Caracas, wrote it: “I’m in Barcelona but the one in Anzoátegui, motherfucker.”

I won’t call you a motherfucker (dear reader), but I am close to the Barcelona in Anzoátegui, and Andrés is in that other Barcelona right now, from where he gave me the news of Alejandro Rebolledo’s death.

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Second Limitation:

I’m writing this text from memory. Just like the public classes Adriano (González León) gave, and the private rounds of drinking with Adriano, to which an enormous percentage of writers from three generations have had access. From my generation, through his son Andrés. From Rebolledo’s generation, thorough his daughter Giorgiana, I suppose, though not that many. And from Adriano’s, through Adriano himself.

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Third Limitation:

I didn’t read Pim Pam Pum either. I tried to fourteen years ago and it didn’t hook me. From what people say (that it’s the novel of the nineties) I suppose it’s because the type of rebel I was never quite adapted to the consensual rebellion that Urbe magazine sold.

Later on I got half way through it, when Andrés went to visit me in Buenos Aires and brought it with him. I didn’t finish reading it because I felt it became simply annoying. But I do recognize that at first it seemed alright to me.

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Fourth Limitation:

Saying Alejandro Rebolledo (1970-2016) divided the country is only true if we’re talking about that minuscule part of the country that’s the radius of influence of Venezuelan literature and bougie-punk nerds. So it’s precisely that minuscule part of the country that I’m talking about, because for that part of the country Rebolledo has been for at least a few days the last name that gives a form to a visceral, ferocious and extensive confrontation, which although it’s mobilized by the affective (and maybe precisely for that reason), seems to determine sides in a logic that doesn’t belong to the omnipresent national polarization.

(For the reader who doesn’t belong to that part of the country: the most successful writer of my generation, Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, wrote a lapidary and vitriolic article against the literary hagiography surrounding the recently-deceased author of the novel Pim Pam Pum (1998/2010) created on social media by his readers and mourners. And the reactions, responses and opinions continue to multiply).

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Fifth and Final Limitation, and Our Main Point:

It could be that the passions will subside a long time from now or soon. But elements already exist that make us affirm that the Blanco Calderón-Rebolledo affair is the first literary schism of the 21st century in Venezuela, as José Ignacio Calderón suggested to me yesterday.

The first schism in the 21st century Venezuelan literary field, as we all know, wasn’t a literary schism, and it still persists. It’s the schism called Bolivarian Revolution or Chavismo, which didn’t create new readings in the field, or disputes regarding ways of reading and defining what the literary might be, but instead subsumed them in the ideological horizon.

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The literary aspect in that schism has been functional for one of the groups in the dispute. Because as we proposed a while ago here: the best Chavista writing isn’t literature, and if there are Chávistas who write good literature, the good things about that literature isn’t that they’re Chavistas, in the same way that the good things about their Chavismo isn’t the literary.

Did Gustavo Pereira, Luis Britto García, Earle Herrera, José Roberto Duque or Juan Calzadilla become worse writers because they’re Chavistas? No. Chavismo (auto) expelled them from the spaces of literary valuation.

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I detect small but significant symptoms in the Urbe-Prodavinci affair, a disposition of logics that subvert and transcend that non-literary schism that’s symmetrical to the national polarization.

For one, I identified almost completely with the article by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón (with whom I don’t have a single political idea in common) when I read it for the first time. First because I reject that postmodern nineties Fukuyama cool cynicism that Rebolledo and Pim Pam Pum represent. And second because of its invitation to look beyond the Los Palos Grandes neighborhood of Caracas and to read two of those writers who by means of their Chavismo were (auto) expelled from the literary scene.

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Once I understood the affective, social and cultural dimensions of the Pim Pam Pum phenomenon, and of Rebolledo’s non-visible work as a DJ and promoter (just like there’s a non-visible work in Adriano’s drinking sessions, keeping in mind the obvious differences), I reread Blanco Calderón’s article and I understand the concerns it raised among many people. Regardless, the experiment was already made: when I shared the article, I found immediate empathy and resonance among people in my own ideological spectrum. Mercedes Chacín, editor of Épale CCS, shared the article by Blanco Calderón who a few weeks ago told the European press that Chavismo is an illiterate dictatorship; Giordana García Sojo asked me if I have a copy of Blanco Calderón’s new novel The Night, so she could borrow it. In the following hours, I noticed figures from the up until now monochord literary world in Venezuela pushing beyond their limits in the tone of a dispute between the Chavista-dominated Esquina Caliente of downtown Caracas and the opposition neighborhood of El Cafetal.

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Someone (me yesterday, for example) could say this isn’t a literary dispute but rather a show-business, generational and affective one. But literature is also made of all those aspects, just like it’s made of politics. What’s happening is that the way people understand politics in this dispute is different from the great narratives of war and dictatorship.

The article that unleashes it isn’t the most legible starting point, because it’s an article that rejects reading. But precisely for that reason it reveals the discussion of the literary field in all its crudity: it’s a discussion about what should and shouldn’t be read.

That’s why I don’t rule out that Rebolledo or Blanco Calderón might be good points to begin looking at the only place where (as I already said) the literature of Chavismo can be found: in the ways of reading (or no longer reading in the future).

After all, if the poet Chávez cited in his final speech was Borges, there’s no reason to expect the literature of Chavismo be written by those we call “of the left.”




{ Eduardo Febres, Contrapunto, 26 August 2016 }

¿Y dónde está la literatura del chavismo? (algunas sentencias lapidarias) / Eduardo Febres

And Where is the Literature of Chavismo? (A Few Lapidary Precepts)

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Chavista literature is a contradiction. An aporia. In any form of Chavista writing the weight of the anchoring Chávez/Chavismo turns any horizon different from the political one into nothing. It subordinates and subsumes it. And more so if it’s a horizon as fragile as the literary one. My neighbor Aquiles Zambrano wrote about this in an episode of lucidity: “If it’s Chavista then it isn’t literature: it’s Chavismo, in other words, a political discourse.”


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Chavista writing, if it’s authentic, is political, and its horizon is the possible, which isn’t always verifiable, but does point towards the truth. That’s why the best Chavista writing isn’t literature, and if there are Chavistas who write good literature, the good aspects of that literature are not that they’re Chavista, in the same way that the good aspects about their Chavismo aren’t the literary ones.

“Today’s events are what matter. But more than writing them, they must be produced,” could be a key phrase for the Chavista writer.


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That was written by Rodolfo Walsh in 1969, in a private diary (published in Argentina in the 1990s), where the same tension moves through all the pages more or less from 1968 onwards. A tension the editor of those private papers (Daniel Link) condenses into “there’s no separation between life and literature.” But it gets better on the scene in this anecdote from the diary: “The time I should have spent on the novel I spent, mostly, in founding and directing the weekly for the CGT (General Central for Workers).”

You can rest assured that during these past fifteen years the time for writing novels of the best Chavista writers has likewise not been dedicated to the novel. And if there’s something similar to what we can call “Chavista literature,” one of the places to look for it is in the possible diary, or the email inbox, of one of those writers: in a writing that transforms into text the conflict described by Juan Calzadilla: “Not being able to choose action is always the fate and tragedy of all poetry.”


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That conflict can end up producing a very potent writing, between the irreversible addiction to literature and the deep conviction that: “All males should ignore and curse literature. Reading it is a dissipation worthy, at most, of the harem’s deceitful odalisques and perverse eunuchs. ”

A lapidary precept by our Caribbean poète maudit, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, who also passed through and experimented that tension, although he never got close to political life except by accident, and in fact fled from the world and from life.

Nevertheless, his imaginary, isolated, bookish and self-destructive manner of living heroically produced a writing much more revolutionary, for example, than that of his contemporary Andrés Eloy Blanco, who really was a poet of the people, and definitely wanted to place his literature at the service of revolution.

Revolutionary literature has rarely been made by those who wanted to serve political revolution with literature, and it has always been made by those who have aimed to go beyond the limits of what is known and read as literature in their time.

The best place to look for the literature of Chavismo is in the future, or in forms of reading (or not reading) in the future.

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One place where you definitely won’t find the literature of Chavismo is in established literature. Though there are plenty of writers who’ve tried to simplify (and capitalize) the storm of Chavismo from the comfort of that literature, all of them have crashed straight into what Che already warned against in 1965, in Socialism and Man in Cuba: “Authentic artistic research is annulled and the problem of general culture is reduced to an appropriation of the socialist present and the dead (but not too dangerous) past. This is how socialist realism is born.”




{ Eduardo Febres, Contrapunto, 7 October 2015 }

El gobierno de El Dorado / Eduardo Febres

The Government of El Dorado

                  Instead of a river of gold, the capital of the country where we found
                  El Dorado has a river of shit. (Photo by Caracas A Pie)

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Enrique Bernardo Núñez saw two situations: this country was forged in the struggle with heroic stubbornness for “two big objectives called by some people myths or mirages”: El Dorado and freedom. Both of them equally bloody, having occurred, full of mosquitoes, illnesses, starvation and death, and in the utopian logic of a pilgrimage that when it stops becomes unnatural, becomes something else.

The crusade for El Dorado could join the series of precursors to Kafka that Borges imagined. But even more, a story about the search for El Dorado where freedom substitutes for gold: an encampment that lasts however long it lasts to find out there is no freedom there. Or that yes, there’s freedom, but not a city made of freedom, where the fountains and even the septic tanks emit freedom. And then we have to move somewhere else to keep looking for it, and the encampment is abandoned and we build another one.

The model of a portable country is a nation condemned to a pilgrimage, to wander rootless, with no limits, in search of a freedom that when it seems to have been found has already become something else and forces us to keep moving.*

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Núñez saw in both chimeras two ways of understanding history, but also an image of two forces facing off in “the struggle developing on the planet” (June 1948, the end of WWII and the beginnings of the Cold War). “The struggle between man and gold. Between gold and the will or the spirit,” he wrote.

Slightly to the margin of the ideological and warring fantasies that gave order to that struggle as a war between the Western and Eastern empire in the second half of the 20th century, Núñez wasn’t proposing an easy solution to that tension. He reminded us that “all the treasures of the Americas weren’t enough for Spain to subjugate Europe. Nor did they serve to prevent its own decadence, and in our days we’ve seen great nations sink beneath the weight of all their riches. In contrast, others have resisted for their love of freedom.” But that didn’t prevent him from recognizing that “in man’s struggle for freedom, gold has won most of the battles.”

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In that reflection, of an almost cruel honesty, I find a model for reading the wandering of a country-encampment which is simultaneously idealist but with a miner’s consciousness. Where we find verifiable acts even crueler than Núñez’s affirmation: the city where gold is born never literally appeared in Venezuelan territory, but it does have an immeasurable common pit of combustible fossils, that creates the conditions necessary to create money almost like a demiurge.

Our friend William Serafino published a few months ago an essay in two parts that provides a brief historical review of the mechanisms for generating profit-looting exponentially greater than production. And in the most recent version of the business world’s swindle, the image of the empty storage container, carrier of gigantic profits, is a consumation of the mirage of El Dorado turned into merchandise. But while the mirage of El Dorado opens bank accounts, large estates and a model for creating wealthy people without wealth, what happens to the mirage of freedom?

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“This ideal of freedom is the very history of Venezuela. And this is why we should continue with it,” Núñez closed his speech after being incorporated into the Academy of History. I think that, despite all the dangers and disasters the ideal gives us, there’s always a common sense pointing in that direction in the Venezuelan imagination.

But if El Dorado found a formula to pass from a Medieval fantasy to a postmodern economic context, it seems that up until now all the formulas for freedom (an even independence) that are formulated in the political field can’t avoid strengthening the economic mirage, which at the same time does nothing but assault and impede and postpone the freedom and independence of everyone, while propitiating that of only a few.

Thus, in the government of El Dorado, the encampments (the ministries?) are taken apart and moved just when they’re about to stop being mirages, and while the great mirage of profit redoubles its density of unbearable reality.




* Translator’s note: Febres is alluding to the novel País portátil (1968), by Adriano González León (1931-2008).




{ Eduardo Febres, Contrapunto, 6 May 2015 }

Si hay impunidad no hay un coño (o a dónde ir a protestar) / Eduardo Febres

If There’s Impunity We Don’t Have Shit (Or Anywhere to Protest)

                  [Photo by Eduardo Febres]

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Was Chávez killed? It’s hard to believe, but the truth is we don’t know. I think that if we find out one day it will be through a declassified file from U.S. intelligence, because the Venezuelan State, as far as we know, hasn’t moved a finger to find out. Nicolás Maduro announced an investigation that if it ever proceeded we never found out about it, and there are people convinced he was killed, just like there’s more people convinced he wasn’t. But in terms of knowing, no one knows.

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But we do know very well that the indigenous leader from the Yukpa tribe Sabino Romero, who died two days before Chávez, was killed. After many attempts, threats, warnings, gunshots, blood, and above all after a cascade of impunity, they killed him. When he was traveling from Tocuco to Shaktapa, they shot him dead in front of his wife.
And ever since then, impunity continues to drag other corpses to join them.

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There are five people in jail for complicity with the murder of Sabino, all of them sentenced to seven years, none of them are the killer. The person accused of pulling the trigger, Ángel Romero Bracho, hasn’t been sentenced. And the trial wanders from the table to the dining room. Convened for January 9th, it mobilized a few people at the doors of the Palace of Justice. A handful of people (twenty, thirty people) who are following the process and paying attention to it.
Among other things, because the masterminds (who aren’t clearly pointed out, but we suppose with a great deal of precision and elements that they’re ranchers) still haven’t even been touched by the law.

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When they arrive at the courthouse they find out there’s no court session. Amidst a muddled and bureaucratic circulation of information, they’re able to find out it had been moved to January 6th, the Día de Reyes holiday and practially an official day off. And in a coincidence that’s quite convenient for paranoia and evil, the street leading to the Palace of Justice was blocked off by security forces. Supposedly because of a graduation (“These motherfuckers are graduating with a degree in corruption,” was overheard).
When they lift the show of force (facing the inoffensive convocation, the suspicious-paranoid version supposes), the protest moves to the Palace, with a bit more intensity.

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The protest? Nothing extraordinary in how it played out, aside from a few protestors with their faces painted in tribute to the First Peoples: a blocked street, a few hand-held signs, some shouts, proclamations and demands.
What’s extraordinary are the comments overheard, among the passersby on the sidewalk in front of the Palace.
One: “Go back to the east side of Caracas.” A purée dissociated by the State-run TV station VTV, who can’t conceive how a group of people, most of them young, most of them cheerful, most of them pissed off, would protest, demand, shout, express their indignation in the face of impunity, without being opposition protestors.
Sabino is a symbol of impunity, amid a shit storm where thousands of other injustices circulate. And he is a symbol defended with the conviction that Chávez lives, or you don’t defend him at all. As it’s also a conviction one fights for with the knowledge that in those paralyzed, prudish, rigid, aged, ignorant and comfortable sectors of Chavismo, Chávez doesn’t live.
Another: “Why are these people protesting such a stupid thing, if I just spent four hours today in a food line.” This one not as much of a purée but equally dissociated, by TV but also by his own misery (the inner TV), who can’t put the two neurons together he needs to understand that as long as there’s impunity there won’t be shit anywhere. Not for him and his selfishness, not for anyone.

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The poor street vendor who thinks it’s fair to exploit the poor (and his likeness, his brother, the poor man who buys from him); the National Guard who smuggles one, two, three, one hundred thousand kilos of whatever (and his likeness, his brother, the narco or the smuggler who sets up the deal), the exploiter of the dollar exchange system, who looted until the only thing left were empty containers (and his likeness, his brother, the casual exploiter of the system, who takes a few crumbs through his credit card), as well as whoever kills, rapes, steals or tortures. They could all fit in that place, facing those who fight for the symbol of Sabino.
This place is an accomplice and artifice to all of them. This is where all the food lines could end, all the empty shelves, all the massacres, the cases like Simonovis, Afiuni, Danilo Anderson along with some type of answer as to why it sometimes seems like the government wants to and can’t.
This is where the cancer, as well, could end.




{ Eduardo Febres, Contrapunto, 14 January 2015 }

Turba nuestra (o el otro bicentenario) / Eduardo Febres

Our Mob (Or, The Other Bicentenary)

                  [“El Caracazo, 1989” by AVN/Francisco Solórzano]

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There’s nothing progress and order fears more than the mob. A belligerent force with no visible head that moves with the infinite power of what no longer fears dying. And in Venezuela, a divinity from which saints emanate.

No one prays literally to the mob: one prays to Ismaelito, to Crude Oil, to Isabel the Kid, who didn’t emerge from the mob, but whom the mob of 1989 spread like the rumor of a coup d’état.

As well as the Our Chávez, which is a product of that mob and has been rejected and prayed to.

Routine. Like the poet Dalton said: “When revolution appears on the horizon the old cauldron of religions heats up.”

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What isn’t prayed for to the mob as an entity, is attributed to it as power. The mob of 1989 is the magma that broke the floor of the country’s old story, to eventually solidify itself as a new narrative landscape. That’s why the anti-Chavista imaginary drools at the possibility that the mob might reappear and break what’s been established by the revolution: because all of that was made with the symbolic capital the mob bequeathed it.

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Anti-chavismo was wagering on the mob by any means necessary in 2014, and we all know how that turned out. And that’s the possibility that Nicolás Maduro conjures with his so-called Shake-Up (one of the names of the mob) when talking about about political restructuring that fulfills one of Henrique Capriles Radonski’s electoral promises from 2012, to adjust the prices of various regulated products and to announce the imminent increase in the price of gasoline.

Calm down, ladies and gentlemen: there will be no shake-up (no mob), because I’m the one doing the shake-up. No one’s about to come down from the hills because we’re the ones who’ll climb them.

Very clever, but nothing new: the specter of the shake-up has more power in Venezuela than any political party. And nothing explains the economic politics of the Bolivarian revolution (and many other things) better than reading it as an a recurring attempt of that shadow, that seen from a different perspective seems insatiable.

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In order to invoke the mob, the aristocrat Leopoldo López chose the most forced and least representative milestone of the bicentennial of the first heroic mob: that 12th of February of 1814, when Venezuelan patriots had their only moment of glory against the armies of servants and slaves who, allied with José Tomás Boves, took over the entire country that year (by the way, the same year the government chooses as its emblem, although Hugo Chávez was thinking of something else).

2014 and 1989 are points of no return in our history when the indisputable protagonist is the mob. But not just any mob. It’s the mob of the people who make everything in this country. The second meaning of the mob [turba] explains it well: “flammable fossil made of residual vegetables accumulated in swampy areas (...) which when burned produces thick smoke” (Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy). A mob that splits history in two isn’t just a group of malcontents on Twitter, hormones and paramilitary friends: it’s the union by contagion of the people that make things move: the fuel of history’s motor.

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That also explains the congenital failure of anti-Chavismo in relation to the mob. Two hundred years ago Boves had been in Caracas for two months and he had already recruited the beggars and bums to take them out to work on the plantations, he had given the best positions to blacks, mulattos and “people of color” and he was already intimidating the Spanish crown as well as the flowering English capitalists.

That man (who had yet to read Simón Rodríguez) understood before Simón Bolívar that “the material force resides in the mass and morals of the movement,” and he interpreted better than anyone the desires that were being expressed in a chaotic and dispersed manner by that mob that accompanied him.

Not very different from what Bolívar accomplished in his time, and what the Bolivarian revolution has done in these fifteen years.

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And what do you think the 2014 uprising would have accomplished if it had advanced towards the appropriation of the private instead of the destruction of the public?

Only the mob knows.




{ Eduardo Febres, Contrapunto, 17 September 2014 }