Venezuelan Literature or the Country Without A Past
Judging by the publishing boom of recent years, people are reading more national authors than a decade ago. The reason is clear: the country now hurts more than ever amidst the grinding gears of the Bolivarian revolution.
Notwithstanding, readers seem to lean toward the historical or political essay, written by historians, journalists, analysts from various specialties, or toward biography (the collection published by El Nacional, the texts of historian Inés Quintero or the book by Alberto Barrera and Cristina Marcano on president Chávez). Surely novelists like Federico Vegas, Alberto Barrera and Francisco Suniaga have been able to achieve various new editions of their books and the choices offered by Venezuelan literature are more ample and diverse than ever, if we include private and public publishing houses. But there seems to be no audience, enough to absorb the offerings.
Faced with this situation, it’s best not to fool ourselves: dear reader, please forget about the low number of readers, the miseries of education, the reigning lack of culture or the evils of television. Sure, we read, but not our literature.
For example, more than forty thousand copies of the anniversary edition of Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez were sold. People read newspapers, magazines and also books by people involved with radio and TV like Leonardo Padrón, Oscar Yanes and Laureano Márquez.
Manuel Caballero, Inés Quintero and Elías Pino Iturrieta sell their history books; from another specialization, Rafael Arráiz Lucca has been successful with his panorama of Venezuelan history. People buy the Harry Potter adventures or Paulo Coehlo, a mix of religion and self-help with the barest trace of narrative. Examples abound, but I think these few are enough to make myself understood.
Literature is not a reference point in Venezuela. University students of Literature (although this is changing) don’t feel part of a tradition that functions as a legacy and, also, as a point of departure for introducing modifications. The interest in history books is a healthy political and intellectual tendency and a symptom of our ailments.
The key is in the past, yes, but this awareness doesn’t translate into a revaluation of the civil legacy to national life, but instead a return to history as an attempt to explain the Bolivarian revolution, an event whose enduring consequence should be that we propose to regain our political, social, economic, juridical, scientific and cultural conquests of the last two hundred years, to deepen and surpass them. We don’t read our literature because it doesn’t form part of our experience as Venezuelans; it’s not about a lack of quality but rather a national inability to see ourselves in the achievements of the past; an inability that collaborated with Chávez’s arrival to power.
{ Gisela Kozak Rovero, Tal Cual, 24 June 2008 }
Showing posts with label Tal Cual. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tal Cual. Show all posts
6.26.2008
6.19.2008
Montaje ideológico del siglo XXI / José Rafael López Padrino
21st Century Ideological Montage
Since it was first proclaimed by the lieutenant colonel, 21st century socialism (that is, social-militarism) has been nothing more than a slogan, a simple marketing procedure whose praxis has been subject to political settings (polls, public opinion, electoral rearrangements, etc.). It is simply a commercial brand that the Bolivarian revolution has needed since its launch into the ideological market.
This 21st century social-militarism is characterized by a contradictory thought, one that merely demonstrates great intellectual poverty and a pathetic ignorance of the history of 19th and 20th century socialism. The doctrinaire bases of this new ideological imposture are not to be found in those forged by Marx, Engels or Lenin, but instead come from Benito Mussolini, Giovanni Gentile and Alfredo Rocco, who realized an adaptation and superposition of Benedetto Croce’s anti-positivism, with the voluntarist personalism of Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche, along with the nationalism of Maurras and d’Annunzio.
Anti-imperialism is reduced to the insults the lieutenant colonel proffers against the resident of the White House, although paradoxically he hands over our oil wealth to the transnational corporations linked to the empire’s interests (semi-public enterprises). We ask ourselves: How can we call this ideological falsification 21st century socialism, when it ignores the most basic contributions of what the experience of socialism in history meant and continues to mean? This endogenous fraud is reduced to the image of the lieutenant colonel and his media blunders. In effect, there is not a single publication that provides a minimal theoretical sustenance to this social-militarism, beyond the propagandists who worship the figure of the single Leader and helmsman of the process. Sadly, this political perversity has been supported by a bureaucratized left that’s tired of fighting and avidly wants to enjoy the pleasures of capitalist consumerism. Who have not only abdicated criticism because they consider it inopportune and inconvenient, but have reached the shameful extreme of contradicting their founding principles (if they ever had any) by vehemently defending a pestilent and despicable militarism.
21st century social-militarism does not represent any form of emancipation for the poor as it pharisaically proclaims: on the contrary, it is an essay destined to provide bourgeois society a political structure meant to amplify the bases of support for a State capitalism dressed in olive green with military boots and a pistol. It is a neo-despotism that criminalizes political dissent and promotes a single thought, has allowed the rise of a new business oligarchy (Empreven, Confagan), impelled the militarization of the country, and worsened the condition of workers by deepening their exploitation.
{ José Rafael López Padrino, Tal Cual, 19 June 2008 }
Since it was first proclaimed by the lieutenant colonel, 21st century socialism (that is, social-militarism) has been nothing more than a slogan, a simple marketing procedure whose praxis has been subject to political settings (polls, public opinion, electoral rearrangements, etc.). It is simply a commercial brand that the Bolivarian revolution has needed since its launch into the ideological market.
This 21st century social-militarism is characterized by a contradictory thought, one that merely demonstrates great intellectual poverty and a pathetic ignorance of the history of 19th and 20th century socialism. The doctrinaire bases of this new ideological imposture are not to be found in those forged by Marx, Engels or Lenin, but instead come from Benito Mussolini, Giovanni Gentile and Alfredo Rocco, who realized an adaptation and superposition of Benedetto Croce’s anti-positivism, with the voluntarist personalism of Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche, along with the nationalism of Maurras and d’Annunzio.
Anti-imperialism is reduced to the insults the lieutenant colonel proffers against the resident of the White House, although paradoxically he hands over our oil wealth to the transnational corporations linked to the empire’s interests (semi-public enterprises). We ask ourselves: How can we call this ideological falsification 21st century socialism, when it ignores the most basic contributions of what the experience of socialism in history meant and continues to mean? This endogenous fraud is reduced to the image of the lieutenant colonel and his media blunders. In effect, there is not a single publication that provides a minimal theoretical sustenance to this social-militarism, beyond the propagandists who worship the figure of the single Leader and helmsman of the process. Sadly, this political perversity has been supported by a bureaucratized left that’s tired of fighting and avidly wants to enjoy the pleasures of capitalist consumerism. Who have not only abdicated criticism because they consider it inopportune and inconvenient, but have reached the shameful extreme of contradicting their founding principles (if they ever had any) by vehemently defending a pestilent and despicable militarism.
21st century social-militarism does not represent any form of emancipation for the poor as it pharisaically proclaims: on the contrary, it is an essay destined to provide bourgeois society a political structure meant to amplify the bases of support for a State capitalism dressed in olive green with military boots and a pistol. It is a neo-despotism that criminalizes political dissent and promotes a single thought, has allowed the rise of a new business oligarchy (Empreven, Confagan), impelled the militarization of the country, and worsened the condition of workers by deepening their exploitation.
{ José Rafael López Padrino, Tal Cual, 19 June 2008 }
6.18.2008
Luto para la poesía / Francisco Massiani
Mourning for Poetry
To Eugenio in memoriam
To David Mauri, to Níyume
A day of mourning for Spanish language and love poetry:
A something dies
So much dies
The spirit of the written word
Of great poetry
The poet Eugenio Montejo has died
I recall him sitting in a little bar
In the Latin Quarter
Surely with a coffee
Maybe a beer
With his round eyeglasses
His blue jacket
On that chilly afternoon, didn’t I see
David Mauri,
Marta Araujo with her profoundly blue eyes,
The poet Enrique H. D’Jesús,
Indio Guerra,
The great Tarek Souki?
We spoke briefly
Eugenio was sparing in speech:
“Do you know Marie De Place?”
I asked him
And he answered, like someone for whom every word hurts
Every pulse
Of every spoken word:
“Yes, we had something.”
That was it.
Yes: Poetry’s heart is wounded
Eugenio’s delicate and large heart
Yes: I saw him once and that was it.
A day of mourning for Spanish language poetry
And love poetry
He died in silence, without fanfare,
Eugenio Montejo.
{ Francisco Massiani, Tal Cual, 12 June 2008 }
To Eugenio in memoriam
To David Mauri, to Níyume
A day of mourning for Spanish language and love poetry:
A something dies
So much dies
The spirit of the written word
Of great poetry
The poet Eugenio Montejo has died
I recall him sitting in a little bar
In the Latin Quarter
Surely with a coffee
Maybe a beer
With his round eyeglasses
His blue jacket
On that chilly afternoon, didn’t I see
David Mauri,
Marta Araujo with her profoundly blue eyes,
The poet Enrique H. D’Jesús,
Indio Guerra,
The great Tarek Souki?
We spoke briefly
Eugenio was sparing in speech:
“Do you know Marie De Place?”
I asked him
And he answered, like someone for whom every word hurts
Every pulse
Of every spoken word:
“Yes, we had something.”
That was it.
Yes: Poetry’s heart is wounded
Eugenio’s delicate and large heart
Yes: I saw him once and that was it.
A day of mourning for Spanish language poetry
And love poetry
He died in silence, without fanfare,
Eugenio Montejo.
{ Francisco Massiani, Tal Cual, 12 June 2008 }
6.16.2008
Clarísima confusion / Silvio Orta Cabrera
Extremely Clear Confusion
Totalitarianism blinds. On October 22, 1956 the [former Interior Minister Pedro] Carreño of the Hungarian Stalinist regime banned the march planned by students for the following day, accusing them of “allowing themselves to be manipulated by imperialism.” The students reached the National Assembly. The police repressed them and the Hungarian revolution began, crushed to the tune of Socialism or Death by Soviet troops. The totalitarian adores violence and military boots.
Fifty-one years later on another October 22, a march by students in Caracas was authorized. On the 23, they tried to reach the National Assembly (a delegation of them was able to). Red-shirted militias persisted in ambushing and assaulting them, as they did days later to the veteran Pompeyo [Márquez] and the young [Yon] Goicoechea at the Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador. The government accused the students of allowing themselves to be manipulated by the empire.
On October 29 a Chavista intellectual sent me an article regarding the threat of imperialism to the Bolivarian revolution. His conclusion includes supporting Chávez and the constitutional “reform.”
I told him: “I don’t doubt the threat. But, does that obligate us to say Yes to the ridiculous Chávez-Escarrá “reform” that, from the start, discriminates against Venezuelans who aren’t socialist and makes an illuminated continuist the most equal of all equals? Such nonsense gets tangled in the string of errors that have fractured every venture of socio-totalitarianism. It obeys not only the professional deformations of the jackbooted commander and the typical lurches of Carlos Escarrá’s dismal Constitution, but also, with more responsibility, the intellectual complicit with the cult of personality, the key to failure.
“Whoever practices this disrespects himself and when he does this he weakens his own ethics and, by disseminating it, that of other citizens. Is that any way to form a New Man for a New Society? The plague aborts slaves within a bureaucratic and repressive apparatus, generally submitting them to misery. False revolutions based on hunger and oppression do last. There you have Cuba and North Korea as (bad) examples.
“They cling to the same sophism–I added–by which, facing the threats of the Yankee Empire against the Soviet Empire, we once put up with the Stalinist horrors. You won’t sever my free thought again with that cardboard cup. Whoever believes in democracy and freedom should stand up against the Bush Empire, against the Chavista one and against all fundamentalisms.”
“I understand. There’s a lot of confusion,” he sympathizes with me. But for me there is none, and I owe a great deal to [Minister of Culture] Farruco Sesto, the one who looks at us like a conquistador looking at Indians in the 16th century. His recent abuses find this mestizo defending the Indio de Cumaná statue and reading the novel No será la Tierra, by Jorge Volpi, thus confirming my desire to vote No to the “reform,” because there has never been more clarity amidst the confusion.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 8 November 2007 }
Totalitarianism blinds. On October 22, 1956 the [former Interior Minister Pedro] Carreño of the Hungarian Stalinist regime banned the march planned by students for the following day, accusing them of “allowing themselves to be manipulated by imperialism.” The students reached the National Assembly. The police repressed them and the Hungarian revolution began, crushed to the tune of Socialism or Death by Soviet troops. The totalitarian adores violence and military boots.
Fifty-one years later on another October 22, a march by students in Caracas was authorized. On the 23, they tried to reach the National Assembly (a delegation of them was able to). Red-shirted militias persisted in ambushing and assaulting them, as they did days later to the veteran Pompeyo [Márquez] and the young [Yon] Goicoechea at the Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador. The government accused the students of allowing themselves to be manipulated by the empire.
On October 29 a Chavista intellectual sent me an article regarding the threat of imperialism to the Bolivarian revolution. His conclusion includes supporting Chávez and the constitutional “reform.”
I told him: “I don’t doubt the threat. But, does that obligate us to say Yes to the ridiculous Chávez-Escarrá “reform” that, from the start, discriminates against Venezuelans who aren’t socialist and makes an illuminated continuist the most equal of all equals? Such nonsense gets tangled in the string of errors that have fractured every venture of socio-totalitarianism. It obeys not only the professional deformations of the jackbooted commander and the typical lurches of Carlos Escarrá’s dismal Constitution, but also, with more responsibility, the intellectual complicit with the cult of personality, the key to failure.
“Whoever practices this disrespects himself and when he does this he weakens his own ethics and, by disseminating it, that of other citizens. Is that any way to form a New Man for a New Society? The plague aborts slaves within a bureaucratic and repressive apparatus, generally submitting them to misery. False revolutions based on hunger and oppression do last. There you have Cuba and North Korea as (bad) examples.
“They cling to the same sophism–I added–by which, facing the threats of the Yankee Empire against the Soviet Empire, we once put up with the Stalinist horrors. You won’t sever my free thought again with that cardboard cup. Whoever believes in democracy and freedom should stand up against the Bush Empire, against the Chavista one and against all fundamentalisms.”
“I understand. There’s a lot of confusion,” he sympathizes with me. But for me there is none, and I owe a great deal to [Minister of Culture] Farruco Sesto, the one who looks at us like a conquistador looking at Indians in the 16th century. His recent abuses find this mestizo defending the Indio de Cumaná statue and reading the novel No será la Tierra, by Jorge Volpi, thus confirming my desire to vote No to the “reform,” because there has never been more clarity amidst the confusion.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 8 November 2007 }
6.13.2008
Breve visita a Cuba / Cantórbery Cuevas
Brief Visit to Cuba
It would be difficult, even in the most luminous days of Pericles’s Athens, to find such profusion over slender columns with their abundantly ornamented Ionian, Doric and Corinthian capitals, as the one that ceaselessly amazes – even today (even for an ancient and once assiduous visitor to that beautiful metropolis) – whomever passes not just through Old Havana, but also – and perhaps with more persistence – throughout the ample, extensive and very antique avenues such as 10 de Octubre, the Calzada del Cerro heading south, culminating in the once aristocratic crossroads of Santos Suárez and La Víbora.
In one of those venerable houses with lively capitals in this final neighborhood left over from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, bordering a tree-lined and shaded park on the highest point in the city and with my back to it, I spent the final mornings and evenings of the closing millennium, enjoying from its ample terrace the incredibly horizontal and pristine landscape of the most dazzling Caribbean metropolis to ever exist suspended in time.
I was kindly taken there by my grandchildren last December (under the pretext of one of them visiting an old Cuban combatant and former comrade in arms from the crazy sixties, an untiring and festive colonel retired from the Revolutionary Armed Forces: the unusual Mochila), and I must acknowledge it was a gratifying visit which included, moreover, a quick tour of Oriente.
I won’t discuss political aspects that no longer interest anyone after being threshed over to the point of exhaustion, and I’ll merely be redundant in mentioning the commonplace of a population that catches one’s attention with their usually effusive, bon vivant and by no means stiff mood, even amidst their universal condition of, to say the least, solemn poverty.
One is instantly repulsed by: a) the general unraveling of the venerable facades everywhere and the probable imminence of collapse in not a few of the most impressive ones; b) the dishonorable impact on an impoverished population of an arrogant and growing tourism (by all appearances as beneficial to the economy as it is catastrophic for communism); c) the shameless commercialization of a face, which is surely making Ernesto Guevara’s bones turn in his mausoleum in Santa Clara.
On the other hand, after a quick adjustment to the environment, the following aspects delight the spirit: 1) the mild odor of organic waste spread on the streets and reminiscent of old Barranquilla; 2) the absence in the pleasant town of Guantánamo (and surely despite itself) of motor vehicles and their substitution by innumerable horse-drawn carriages full of passengers; 3) the proverbial loquaciousness of Cubans of any latitude and condition; 4) their natural disposition to rhythm – more than to melody – no matter the time or place; 5) the women with fruit-like haunches and sensuous behavior; 6) that contradictory and blanketing atmosphere of ancient timelessness in which half a century has made no mark other than dressing the passersby with improbable clothing belonging to no era, and, as I already mentioned, the merciless unraveling of walls and facades.
In this respect I will add, so as to round out this brief review of a trip as unexpected as it was refreshing, that when it came to an end, after a three-day tropical storm, Havana suddenly revealed itself to me, from the ample terrace, in all the decrepit splendorous virginity of the great exiled city of Chronos “with a radiant future at its back.” At that moment I recalled how in an old science fiction novel, I can’t remember if it was by Asimov or Bradbury, the entire Indian Republic is bought by a powerful northern consortium and converted into Indiastries, C.A.*
I don’t think the island could sustain so much. But let us imagine that once its tenacious president has disappeared definitively (without even needing the arrival of such an extravagant and improbable possibility) and facing the blows of a single, overwhelming global economy, an entertainment transnational has the idea to acquire the central district of the capital and its surroundings up to La Víbora, just as it stands today. It would be the deal of the century: restored structures and facades with their essence unaltered and the park nourished by retro vehicles, an extensive scene outside of time would be available for nostalgic multimillionaire films, with virtual Hemingways and George Rafts, also providing a fantasy “Theme Park.” Personally, I would find its purchase by Disney odious.
* Translator’s note: The book is The Space Merchants (1953) by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth.
{ Cantórbery Cuevas, Tal Cual, 25 January 2001 }
It would be difficult, even in the most luminous days of Pericles’s Athens, to find such profusion over slender columns with their abundantly ornamented Ionian, Doric and Corinthian capitals, as the one that ceaselessly amazes – even today (even for an ancient and once assiduous visitor to that beautiful metropolis) – whomever passes not just through Old Havana, but also – and perhaps with more persistence – throughout the ample, extensive and very antique avenues such as 10 de Octubre, the Calzada del Cerro heading south, culminating in the once aristocratic crossroads of Santos Suárez and La Víbora.
In one of those venerable houses with lively capitals in this final neighborhood left over from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, bordering a tree-lined and shaded park on the highest point in the city and with my back to it, I spent the final mornings and evenings of the closing millennium, enjoying from its ample terrace the incredibly horizontal and pristine landscape of the most dazzling Caribbean metropolis to ever exist suspended in time.
I was kindly taken there by my grandchildren last December (under the pretext of one of them visiting an old Cuban combatant and former comrade in arms from the crazy sixties, an untiring and festive colonel retired from the Revolutionary Armed Forces: the unusual Mochila), and I must acknowledge it was a gratifying visit which included, moreover, a quick tour of Oriente.
I won’t discuss political aspects that no longer interest anyone after being threshed over to the point of exhaustion, and I’ll merely be redundant in mentioning the commonplace of a population that catches one’s attention with their usually effusive, bon vivant and by no means stiff mood, even amidst their universal condition of, to say the least, solemn poverty.
One is instantly repulsed by: a) the general unraveling of the venerable facades everywhere and the probable imminence of collapse in not a few of the most impressive ones; b) the dishonorable impact on an impoverished population of an arrogant and growing tourism (by all appearances as beneficial to the economy as it is catastrophic for communism); c) the shameless commercialization of a face, which is surely making Ernesto Guevara’s bones turn in his mausoleum in Santa Clara.
On the other hand, after a quick adjustment to the environment, the following aspects delight the spirit: 1) the mild odor of organic waste spread on the streets and reminiscent of old Barranquilla; 2) the absence in the pleasant town of Guantánamo (and surely despite itself) of motor vehicles and their substitution by innumerable horse-drawn carriages full of passengers; 3) the proverbial loquaciousness of Cubans of any latitude and condition; 4) their natural disposition to rhythm – more than to melody – no matter the time or place; 5) the women with fruit-like haunches and sensuous behavior; 6) that contradictory and blanketing atmosphere of ancient timelessness in which half a century has made no mark other than dressing the passersby with improbable clothing belonging to no era, and, as I already mentioned, the merciless unraveling of walls and facades.
In this respect I will add, so as to round out this brief review of a trip as unexpected as it was refreshing, that when it came to an end, after a three-day tropical storm, Havana suddenly revealed itself to me, from the ample terrace, in all the decrepit splendorous virginity of the great exiled city of Chronos “with a radiant future at its back.” At that moment I recalled how in an old science fiction novel, I can’t remember if it was by Asimov or Bradbury, the entire Indian Republic is bought by a powerful northern consortium and converted into Indiastries, C.A.*
I don’t think the island could sustain so much. But let us imagine that once its tenacious president has disappeared definitively (without even needing the arrival of such an extravagant and improbable possibility) and facing the blows of a single, overwhelming global economy, an entertainment transnational has the idea to acquire the central district of the capital and its surroundings up to La Víbora, just as it stands today. It would be the deal of the century: restored structures and facades with their essence unaltered and the park nourished by retro vehicles, an extensive scene outside of time would be available for nostalgic multimillionaire films, with virtual Hemingways and George Rafts, also providing a fantasy “Theme Park.” Personally, I would find its purchase by Disney odious.
* Translator’s note: The book is The Space Merchants (1953) by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth.
{ Cantórbery Cuevas, Tal Cual, 25 January 2001 }
6.10.2008
Eugenio Montejo / Simón Boccanegra
Eugenio Montejo
We’ve lost Eugenio Montejo, one of the noblest voices amid the poetry written in the tongue of those who pray to God in Spanish – as Rubén Darío said in one of his verses. However, this mini-columnist cannot speak of the poet. Others do so today with superior knowledge than my own. Instead, I have to say something about Eugenio Montejo the citizen. A citizen of this republic whose torments were never foreign to him. Dante reserved one of the worst places in hell for those who during times of profound moral crisis opted for the comfortable posture of silence or for an accommodating “neutrality.” Montejo wasn’t one of those. A profound sense of moral duty, much more than a political one, made him negate all pretensions that his work be used as an instrument by a regime that, without gesticulations and from his discrete position in public life, he rejected with absolute firmness as an expression of a moral decadence that repulsed him. This country is fortunate that it can depend on poet-philosophers – as Francisco Rodríguez so accurately describes them – such as him and Rafael Cadenas, who are able to give sustenance, with their mere conduct as citizens, to the deep moral revulsion these Venezuelan times inevitably generate in all good people. Of the poet, his pure verses remain, with their robust simplicity and density, along with the sage chronicles of his various heteronyms and the example of his moral rectitude. This is no minor legacy for the country he loved.
{ Simón Boccanegra, Tal Cual, 9 June 2008 }
We’ve lost Eugenio Montejo, one of the noblest voices amid the poetry written in the tongue of those who pray to God in Spanish – as Rubén Darío said in one of his verses. However, this mini-columnist cannot speak of the poet. Others do so today with superior knowledge than my own. Instead, I have to say something about Eugenio Montejo the citizen. A citizen of this republic whose torments were never foreign to him. Dante reserved one of the worst places in hell for those who during times of profound moral crisis opted for the comfortable posture of silence or for an accommodating “neutrality.” Montejo wasn’t one of those. A profound sense of moral duty, much more than a political one, made him negate all pretensions that his work be used as an instrument by a regime that, without gesticulations and from his discrete position in public life, he rejected with absolute firmness as an expression of a moral decadence that repulsed him. This country is fortunate that it can depend on poet-philosophers – as Francisco Rodríguez so accurately describes them – such as him and Rafael Cadenas, who are able to give sustenance, with their mere conduct as citizens, to the deep moral revulsion these Venezuelan times inevitably generate in all good people. Of the poet, his pure verses remain, with their robust simplicity and density, along with the sage chronicles of his various heteronyms and the example of his moral rectitude. This is no minor legacy for the country he loved.
{ Simón Boccanegra, Tal Cual, 9 June 2008 }
6.09.2008
Poeta, Caballero / Fernando Rodríguez
Poet, Gentleman
We can already hear the echoes within the country and surely beyond its borders of the unexpected death of one of the major poetic voices of our literary history – among those we can count on a single hand, Eugenio Montejo. But also, an oeuvre that expands with unusual celerity, considering that poetry is a slow animal that moves from soul to soul – in new fields and other languages. He dies, then, just as all the roads were opening for him and, this is the important thing, at an hour when we could expect maturity and the extreme purification that would crown his long march through the paths of poetry.
Of course, this sad hour is no time for analyzing his work, now is a time for lamentation, perhaps a prayer – a secular one in my case. But I would like to say something very generic that has to do a great deal with professional deformation, something that might seem scandalous for some. Much of the great Venezuelan philosophy in recent years has been made by poets: [Rafael] Cadenas, [Armando] Rojas Guardia, to cite just two examples. Philosophy in the Socratic sense, which doesn’t use academic and technical rigors, but instead serves for living, for loving and suffering, as well as for dying. Maybe because poetry is an ideal manner, perhaps the most ideal, for expressing the inexpressible, for approaching the great questions that have no answer. Wittgenstein, that jealous custodian of the expressible – so little – affirms in the Tractatus to the surprise of many, that what really matters is music, that sublime form of expressing the inexpressible, unavoidable and decisive human necessity, perennial metaphysics.
I think Eugenio was a poet-philosopher. I think his work contains a fascinating vision of the world. Not just because there’s an immense gravity in everything he sings but also because, conscious of our cognitive limits, he approached the ineffable with a mixture of vehement fascination and critical limitation. I believe he never encountered God – at least in his books – but he pursued his hiding places, fantasized about that citation, imagined his substitution by the gods of the word and beauty, he lived and wrote to make us worthy of his respect and himself worthy of ours. Without ever letting himself be turned into a myth, he peered into the beyond, cosmonaut, suffering soul, reincarnated bird. Poetry always at the limits, in suggestion, in the desire that one must work to make of the cosmos and our ephemeral presence the measure of a call to be a part of divinity. But, along with that conceptual sagacity, his passion for life and that elevated form of it that is language, helped his poetry avoid austerity and sententiousness and become pure music, a dance of words, incessant metaphor, still and magical song. Language had to be set in steel in order to reach such confines. And perhaps that musicality – modest, full of happiness, amazed by how much exists, love and the bird that trills – is one of the reasons for his capacity to reach so many and such diverse sensibilities. A doctoral student told me recently that a concept by Merleau-Ponty, the manner in which the exterior world calls us and which has the structure of dialogue, could be found magnificently in one of the poems of Algunas palabras, “The Trees”: hearing the shriek of a thrush “I realized that in his voice a tree was speaking, / one of so many, / but I don’t know what to do with this sharp, deep sound, / I don’t know in what type of script / I could set it down.” A beautiful and measured pantheism that respects the limits of the best skepticism.
But Eugenio was above all Eugenio. The gentleman who cultivated restraint and friendship, elegance and affective devotion. Perhaps the most beloved of our contemporary artists. And at the same time a man of firm convictions, for whom this country degraded by military boots was a daily torment, the antithesis of that harmonious and transcendent kingdom that was his spiritual dwelling place. For those of us who had the unspeakable fortune of being his friends, we have lost someone, as Montaigne would say, who made us better than what we will be, an excellence that makes demands.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, Tal Cual, 9 June 2008 }
We can already hear the echoes within the country and surely beyond its borders of the unexpected death of one of the major poetic voices of our literary history – among those we can count on a single hand, Eugenio Montejo. But also, an oeuvre that expands with unusual celerity, considering that poetry is a slow animal that moves from soul to soul – in new fields and other languages. He dies, then, just as all the roads were opening for him and, this is the important thing, at an hour when we could expect maturity and the extreme purification that would crown his long march through the paths of poetry.
Of course, this sad hour is no time for analyzing his work, now is a time for lamentation, perhaps a prayer – a secular one in my case. But I would like to say something very generic that has to do a great deal with professional deformation, something that might seem scandalous for some. Much of the great Venezuelan philosophy in recent years has been made by poets: [Rafael] Cadenas, [Armando] Rojas Guardia, to cite just two examples. Philosophy in the Socratic sense, which doesn’t use academic and technical rigors, but instead serves for living, for loving and suffering, as well as for dying. Maybe because poetry is an ideal manner, perhaps the most ideal, for expressing the inexpressible, for approaching the great questions that have no answer. Wittgenstein, that jealous custodian of the expressible – so little – affirms in the Tractatus to the surprise of many, that what really matters is music, that sublime form of expressing the inexpressible, unavoidable and decisive human necessity, perennial metaphysics.
I think Eugenio was a poet-philosopher. I think his work contains a fascinating vision of the world. Not just because there’s an immense gravity in everything he sings but also because, conscious of our cognitive limits, he approached the ineffable with a mixture of vehement fascination and critical limitation. I believe he never encountered God – at least in his books – but he pursued his hiding places, fantasized about that citation, imagined his substitution by the gods of the word and beauty, he lived and wrote to make us worthy of his respect and himself worthy of ours. Without ever letting himself be turned into a myth, he peered into the beyond, cosmonaut, suffering soul, reincarnated bird. Poetry always at the limits, in suggestion, in the desire that one must work to make of the cosmos and our ephemeral presence the measure of a call to be a part of divinity. But, along with that conceptual sagacity, his passion for life and that elevated form of it that is language, helped his poetry avoid austerity and sententiousness and become pure music, a dance of words, incessant metaphor, still and magical song. Language had to be set in steel in order to reach such confines. And perhaps that musicality – modest, full of happiness, amazed by how much exists, love and the bird that trills – is one of the reasons for his capacity to reach so many and such diverse sensibilities. A doctoral student told me recently that a concept by Merleau-Ponty, the manner in which the exterior world calls us and which has the structure of dialogue, could be found magnificently in one of the poems of Algunas palabras, “The Trees”: hearing the shriek of a thrush “I realized that in his voice a tree was speaking, / one of so many, / but I don’t know what to do with this sharp, deep sound, / I don’t know in what type of script / I could set it down.” A beautiful and measured pantheism that respects the limits of the best skepticism.
But Eugenio was above all Eugenio. The gentleman who cultivated restraint and friendship, elegance and affective devotion. Perhaps the most beloved of our contemporary artists. And at the same time a man of firm convictions, for whom this country degraded by military boots was a daily torment, the antithesis of that harmonious and transcendent kingdom that was his spiritual dwelling place. For those of us who had the unspeakable fortune of being his friends, we have lost someone, as Montaigne would say, who made us better than what we will be, an excellence that makes demands.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, Tal Cual, 9 June 2008 }
5.10.2008
Maius noster / Oswaldo Barreto
Maius noster
Regarding what happened that spring of 1968, which we now designate with double metonymy as the French May, people speak “with anxieties and fears” – as Darío would say – not just in Paris and France but anywhere in the world. Before and after those events there were others identified or distinguished to the degree of the mood of whoever evokes or revives them. Sometimes we speak about May as a revolution and other times, we ourselves, each one and all of us, speak of a social explosion or the ephemeral realization of a utopia.
And yet, as soon as we stop at each of these comparisons, we find the historical figure of May is different from those other references in that it continues to be permanently discussed everywhere on Earth. It’s true this doesn’t happen with other events we’ve stumbled upon in our lives: insurrections, mutinies and revolutions; exoduses, discoveries and conquests; explosions of horror or of collective festivity, these are all events that present themselves (and represent us) at specific moments; always with the same traits: they’re documents and also monuments with the solemnity, the precision and the distance of what already happened and occurred in the way we tend to see it now, almost always with the same feelings. Alternately, the French May always comes back to anyone who lived it or stumbled upon it at some moment, with different faces and profiles that awaken within us again, within each one of us, anxieties and fears, but also always in a different manner.
The French May, more than any other genre of historical event most resembles those novels that fiction readers turn into “their novels,” those they’ve never been able to abandon because they’ve never been able to master them completely. Each moment provides an impulse to engage in a new reading and discover the possibility of reading. It’s a matter of seeing the entire work as one reads any work, that is, by discovering new themes and elements, as well as a new hierarchy based on interests and affections between those new elements we’ve just discovered.
May always offers the possibility of affirming today the exact opposite of what we negated yesterday and what we’ll be able to reaffirm tomorrow. Today, for example, I think May is the only revolution that remains alive, absolutely alive, precisely because it never triumphed, in the sense that those who rebelled never reached power. Other revolutions died and will be seen as cadavers, even if unburied, because those who took power made sure to murder them. We will continue to talk about May because each person has his own, Maius noster.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 9 May 2008 }
Regarding what happened that spring of 1968, which we now designate with double metonymy as the French May, people speak “with anxieties and fears” – as Darío would say – not just in Paris and France but anywhere in the world. Before and after those events there were others identified or distinguished to the degree of the mood of whoever evokes or revives them. Sometimes we speak about May as a revolution and other times, we ourselves, each one and all of us, speak of a social explosion or the ephemeral realization of a utopia.
And yet, as soon as we stop at each of these comparisons, we find the historical figure of May is different from those other references in that it continues to be permanently discussed everywhere on Earth. It’s true this doesn’t happen with other events we’ve stumbled upon in our lives: insurrections, mutinies and revolutions; exoduses, discoveries and conquests; explosions of horror or of collective festivity, these are all events that present themselves (and represent us) at specific moments; always with the same traits: they’re documents and also monuments with the solemnity, the precision and the distance of what already happened and occurred in the way we tend to see it now, almost always with the same feelings. Alternately, the French May always comes back to anyone who lived it or stumbled upon it at some moment, with different faces and profiles that awaken within us again, within each one of us, anxieties and fears, but also always in a different manner.
The French May, more than any other genre of historical event most resembles those novels that fiction readers turn into “their novels,” those they’ve never been able to abandon because they’ve never been able to master them completely. Each moment provides an impulse to engage in a new reading and discover the possibility of reading. It’s a matter of seeing the entire work as one reads any work, that is, by discovering new themes and elements, as well as a new hierarchy based on interests and affections between those new elements we’ve just discovered.
May always offers the possibility of affirming today the exact opposite of what we negated yesterday and what we’ll be able to reaffirm tomorrow. Today, for example, I think May is the only revolution that remains alive, absolutely alive, precisely because it never triumphed, in the sense that those who rebelled never reached power. Other revolutions died and will be seen as cadavers, even if unburied, because those who took power made sure to murder them. We will continue to talk about May because each person has his own, Maius noster.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 9 May 2008 }
4.29.2008
Aimé Césaire, creador de libertades (fin) / Oswaldo Barreto
Aimé Césaire, Creator of Liberties (Conclusion)
The fact that these days people all over the world are talking about the death of Aimé Césaire as an event that has repercussions on the political and cultural actions now taking place in almost every corner of the planet, this is related to the way that man linked his life with those of all black people and, through them, with that of all the earth’s pariahs.
We want to say that what a young colonized man of the Antilles, educated in the European metropolis, forged as a personal project continues to be a program for a struggle that belongs to millions simultaneously grouped together and spread all over the world. And this project, that Césaire forged during the years preceding the explosion of the First World War and that he himself baptized as “negritude,” is an endeavor that involves “assuming the social and cultural consequences of being from black Africa or a descendant of black Africans.” And assuming that modality of “being in the world” – as was already said in that era – meant for the artist and politician with a vast knowledge and a stubborn will to autonomy that Césaire already was, giving himself over to a search for the paths of liberty, lost liberty or a liberty yet to be reached.
To seek liberty, as with the search for independence, is relatively easy. What is costly, as we well know, is to maintain them, to avoid above all that they be confiscated from us precisely in the name of liberty and independence. And Aimé Césaire, as an artist and politician, regardless of the genre in which he worked within both fields (poetry, drama or essays, as an artist; mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of his island, for over 50 years, or member of the French Parliament during numerous periods, as a politician; and promoter of innumerable forums, encounters, congresses and publications, where he tended to fuse his aptitudes for accomplishment in both), was always willing to pay the necessary price for maintaining the search for liberty. In this way he adhered to the communist movement when it seemed like the only true path toward achieving the emancipation of mankind. And when it became evident that actually existing communism had become the complete opposite: the path toward the dominance of a single man over masses that are submissive to him, Césaire publicly renounced his condition as a member of the French Communist Party (“I don’t betray or deny, I want doctrines and political parties to be built to serve mankind, not for mankind to serve doctrines or political parties.” Letter of Resignation from the CP) and formed a political party in his native country and for his native country, with no pretensions other than to undertake a “Copernican revolution against that entrenched custom of political parties on the left and right, of acting for us, planning for us, thinking for us (and in this way seizing from us) the initiative in everything, which is a primary condition for exercising liberty.”
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 28 April 2008 }
The fact that these days people all over the world are talking about the death of Aimé Césaire as an event that has repercussions on the political and cultural actions now taking place in almost every corner of the planet, this is related to the way that man linked his life with those of all black people and, through them, with that of all the earth’s pariahs.
We want to say that what a young colonized man of the Antilles, educated in the European metropolis, forged as a personal project continues to be a program for a struggle that belongs to millions simultaneously grouped together and spread all over the world. And this project, that Césaire forged during the years preceding the explosion of the First World War and that he himself baptized as “negritude,” is an endeavor that involves “assuming the social and cultural consequences of being from black Africa or a descendant of black Africans.” And assuming that modality of “being in the world” – as was already said in that era – meant for the artist and politician with a vast knowledge and a stubborn will to autonomy that Césaire already was, giving himself over to a search for the paths of liberty, lost liberty or a liberty yet to be reached.
To seek liberty, as with the search for independence, is relatively easy. What is costly, as we well know, is to maintain them, to avoid above all that they be confiscated from us precisely in the name of liberty and independence. And Aimé Césaire, as an artist and politician, regardless of the genre in which he worked within both fields (poetry, drama or essays, as an artist; mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of his island, for over 50 years, or member of the French Parliament during numerous periods, as a politician; and promoter of innumerable forums, encounters, congresses and publications, where he tended to fuse his aptitudes for accomplishment in both), was always willing to pay the necessary price for maintaining the search for liberty. In this way he adhered to the communist movement when it seemed like the only true path toward achieving the emancipation of mankind. And when it became evident that actually existing communism had become the complete opposite: the path toward the dominance of a single man over masses that are submissive to him, Césaire publicly renounced his condition as a member of the French Communist Party (“I don’t betray or deny, I want doctrines and political parties to be built to serve mankind, not for mankind to serve doctrines or political parties.” Letter of Resignation from the CP) and formed a political party in his native country and for his native country, with no pretensions other than to undertake a “Copernican revolution against that entrenched custom of political parties on the left and right, of acting for us, planning for us, thinking for us (and in this way seizing from us) the initiative in everything, which is a primary condition for exercising liberty.”
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 28 April 2008 }
4.27.2008
Derrotar una involución histórica / Pompeyo Márquez
To Defeat an Historic Involution
Throughout my life I have learned that each society establishes for itself the tasks that its development and progress demand. The current regime has become a shackle for that evolution. This is precisely where we find the truly revolutionary content. Humanity marches toward the liquidation of poverty, toward the equality of the sexes (it was marching with only one foot, the incorporation of women accelerates its social development); toward the defense of the environment, among other major goals for the millennium outlined by the United Nations.
Within that perspective of development, it’s an extremely grave error to want to build the future on a base of the destruction of everything now in existence. That constitutes a reversal. What experience teaches is to conserve those advances that have been made and to project them toward new stages of development. For instance, wanting to ignore that Venezuelan society was advancing and wanting to erase all of it is primitivism, it’s an involution.
Let’s check several facts: the progress in education, the productive apparatus that was being developed, the advances in farming, the leap away from centralization and caudillismo represented by the process of decentralization, the election of governors, mayors and neighborhood associations. There were new demands that went beyond the so-called partyocracy, corruption, bureaucracy, and matters relating to Judicial Power and jails. And so on, successively.
What was needed were new advances, the correction of vices and solutions for the new problems that the combination of misery and poverty presented. That’s what Chávez offered. But now we see the opposite: a militaristic autocracy, the desire to squash pluralism and decentralization. In the name of a “21st century socialism” that’s a near carbon copy reproduction of the monstrous mistakes of the cult of personality, of centralization and wanting to sweep away everything from the past. In sum, a copy of so-called “actually existing socialism,” whose remains are to be found in Cuba and North Korea.
None of what’s happening in India, in China, in Vietnam; none of what’s occurring in Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Chile) is being acknowledged. They are read in a backwards manner. To say that advances happen without national and foreign investment, while simultaneously fighting savage capitalism, is to place oneself outside reality.
Alright, I’ll finish this commentary by pointing out with necessary emphasis that it’s indispensable we defeat this historic involution. And this must be done at the same time we prepare ourselves for the November elections, when we have to present the best candidates, ones who can create consensus and who have proposals that pay attention to the central necessities of regional and local communities.
{ Pompeyo Márquez, Tal Cual, 25 April 2008 }
Throughout my life I have learned that each society establishes for itself the tasks that its development and progress demand. The current regime has become a shackle for that evolution. This is precisely where we find the truly revolutionary content. Humanity marches toward the liquidation of poverty, toward the equality of the sexes (it was marching with only one foot, the incorporation of women accelerates its social development); toward the defense of the environment, among other major goals for the millennium outlined by the United Nations.
Within that perspective of development, it’s an extremely grave error to want to build the future on a base of the destruction of everything now in existence. That constitutes a reversal. What experience teaches is to conserve those advances that have been made and to project them toward new stages of development. For instance, wanting to ignore that Venezuelan society was advancing and wanting to erase all of it is primitivism, it’s an involution.
Let’s check several facts: the progress in education, the productive apparatus that was being developed, the advances in farming, the leap away from centralization and caudillismo represented by the process of decentralization, the election of governors, mayors and neighborhood associations. There were new demands that went beyond the so-called partyocracy, corruption, bureaucracy, and matters relating to Judicial Power and jails. And so on, successively.
What was needed were new advances, the correction of vices and solutions for the new problems that the combination of misery and poverty presented. That’s what Chávez offered. But now we see the opposite: a militaristic autocracy, the desire to squash pluralism and decentralization. In the name of a “21st century socialism” that’s a near carbon copy reproduction of the monstrous mistakes of the cult of personality, of centralization and wanting to sweep away everything from the past. In sum, a copy of so-called “actually existing socialism,” whose remains are to be found in Cuba and North Korea.
None of what’s happening in India, in China, in Vietnam; none of what’s occurring in Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Chile) is being acknowledged. They are read in a backwards manner. To say that advances happen without national and foreign investment, while simultaneously fighting savage capitalism, is to place oneself outside reality.
Alright, I’ll finish this commentary by pointing out with necessary emphasis that it’s indispensable we defeat this historic involution. And this must be done at the same time we prepare ourselves for the November elections, when we have to present the best candidates, ones who can create consensus and who have proposals that pay attention to the central necessities of regional and local communities.
{ Pompeyo Márquez, Tal Cual, 25 April 2008 }
4.25.2008
Aimé Césaire, creador de libertades (II) / Oswaldo Barreto
Aimé Césaire, Creator of Liberties (II)
With Notebook of a Return to the Native Land Aimé Césaire went back to the communitarian life of Martinique and entered the Parnassus of French poetry, with André Breton as his godfather (though not his discoverer), one of the founders of surrealism as we all know. That double condition already made him an important black man and even a guide for the black community of Martinique, as well as for black poets writing in French. But Césaire started to become the Fundamental Black Man and the great creator and attendant of liberties after his encounter with Haiti during World War II, the only independent black nation at the time.
“Haiti is the first black colony to have fought for its independence and, once that independence was achieved, to have adopted a republican regime. That happened at the end of the 18th century and yet the Haitian people are one of the most dissatisfied. Haiti fascinated me because it’s a magnifying glass through which we can view the entire Antilles as well as Africa, and if we study Haiti’s history we can become aware of all the problems of the Third World.
The fight for independence is glorious, it costs a great deal of blood and tears. It is an epic. But I would say that independence is relatively easy. After independence comes tragedy, since it is at that moment – people should already realize this – when the difficult struggle begins and the struggle for liberty takes on its true meaning. And there’s no possible alibi, since independent man has to work things out with himself alone.” (Interview with Jalid Chrabi, 1961)
At the beginning of the 1940s, during his first stay in Haiti, the Martinican poet became aware that his problem as a black man and as a poet was also the fundamental problem of all those who struggle or had struggled for independence: what to do with the liberty conquered, how to consolidate and maintain it within artistic creation and community-based life.
From that moment of consciousness – as people tended to say in the realms of the Left during those 1960s we evoke so often – Césaire dedicated himself to a major struggle, on the political plane as well as on the plane of artistic creation, in order to affirm that each man, no matter his color, faith or ideology, is responsible for conquering and affirming the liberty he seeks. With his actions and his verb, Césaire dedicated himself to showing that the right to liberty is a matter of personal struggle for each individual and not something given by leaders, parties or doctrines. That one has to mistrust all of them, especially because they often stifle liberties under the well-worn pretext of defending them. Starting from these coordinates of personal responsibility and a search for liberty, we will see how Césaire built his life, his work and those of millions and millions of his contemporaries.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 24 April 2008 }
With Notebook of a Return to the Native Land Aimé Césaire went back to the communitarian life of Martinique and entered the Parnassus of French poetry, with André Breton as his godfather (though not his discoverer), one of the founders of surrealism as we all know. That double condition already made him an important black man and even a guide for the black community of Martinique, as well as for black poets writing in French. But Césaire started to become the Fundamental Black Man and the great creator and attendant of liberties after his encounter with Haiti during World War II, the only independent black nation at the time.
“Haiti is the first black colony to have fought for its independence and, once that independence was achieved, to have adopted a republican regime. That happened at the end of the 18th century and yet the Haitian people are one of the most dissatisfied. Haiti fascinated me because it’s a magnifying glass through which we can view the entire Antilles as well as Africa, and if we study Haiti’s history we can become aware of all the problems of the Third World.
The fight for independence is glorious, it costs a great deal of blood and tears. It is an epic. But I would say that independence is relatively easy. After independence comes tragedy, since it is at that moment – people should already realize this – when the difficult struggle begins and the struggle for liberty takes on its true meaning. And there’s no possible alibi, since independent man has to work things out with himself alone.” (Interview with Jalid Chrabi, 1961)
At the beginning of the 1940s, during his first stay in Haiti, the Martinican poet became aware that his problem as a black man and as a poet was also the fundamental problem of all those who struggle or had struggled for independence: what to do with the liberty conquered, how to consolidate and maintain it within artistic creation and community-based life.
From that moment of consciousness – as people tended to say in the realms of the Left during those 1960s we evoke so often – Césaire dedicated himself to a major struggle, on the political plane as well as on the plane of artistic creation, in order to affirm that each man, no matter his color, faith or ideology, is responsible for conquering and affirming the liberty he seeks. With his actions and his verb, Césaire dedicated himself to showing that the right to liberty is a matter of personal struggle for each individual and not something given by leaders, parties or doctrines. That one has to mistrust all of them, especially because they often stifle liberties under the well-worn pretext of defending them. Starting from these coordinates of personal responsibility and a search for liberty, we will see how Césaire built his life, his work and those of millions and millions of his contemporaries.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 24 April 2008 }
4.24.2008
Aimé Césaire, creador de libertades (I) / Oswaldo Barreto
Aimé Césaire, Creator of Liberties (I)
Aimé Fernand David Césaire, one of the great contemporary French poets, politician and playwright, tenacious anti-colonial fighter, born on June 26, 1913 in Basse Pointe on the northeastern end of Martinique, died on April 17 in the island’s capital, Fort-de-France.
Those words, which we find with little variation among the infinity of obituaries published in European and American newspapers, themselves justify these other words we find on the Web page: www.cesaire.org, dedicated to the funeral rites celebrated in Fort-de-France:
Le negre fondamentale s’en est allé
La Martinique et tous les damnés de la terre lui rendent hommage
(The fundamental black man has left us
Martinique and all the wretched of the earth pay homage to him)
No, the former speak of someone who has already died while the latter words, which could serve as an epitaph, speak of what Aimé Césaire was as a man and of the world he desired for his fellow humans. The Fundamental Black Man, among all the black people of the earth, those in Africa, in the United States and those belonging to the diaspora dispersed throughout the other Americas. All of them belonging to the wretched, to the condemned of the earth.
But just as not all the wretched are black, neither was Aimé Césaire just a fundamental black man. Césaire, a member of a “subaltern” race, has been what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was, a member of a ruling and hegemonic race for his time, the fundamental man. Simply and proudly, the man, without distinguishing between races, cultures or credos. Just as Goethe was fated to live through the vicissitudes that were imposed on liberty, that is, on the liberties of all men, by the French Revolution, and the actions of its defenders and its gravediggers, in this manner Césaire lived in order to face similar vicissitudes, the ones that were imposed on the liberties of the entire planet by the communist and Marxist revolutions that began in 1917, when our poet was beginning his life.
And this movement in search of the paths of liberty begins right at the start of a small book: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939):
As there are hyena-men and panther-men, I would be
a Jew-man
a Kaffir-man
a Hindu-man-from-Calcutta
a Harlem-man-who-doesn’t-vote
It was a colonized black man who began this search in a world where all black people were still colonized. Despite Haiti, as we shall see.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 23 April 2008 }
Aimé Fernand David Césaire, one of the great contemporary French poets, politician and playwright, tenacious anti-colonial fighter, born on June 26, 1913 in Basse Pointe on the northeastern end of Martinique, died on April 17 in the island’s capital, Fort-de-France.
Those words, which we find with little variation among the infinity of obituaries published in European and American newspapers, themselves justify these other words we find on the Web page: www.cesaire.org, dedicated to the funeral rites celebrated in Fort-de-France:
Le negre fondamentale s’en est allé
La Martinique et tous les damnés de la terre lui rendent hommage
(The fundamental black man has left us
Martinique and all the wretched of the earth pay homage to him)
No, the former speak of someone who has already died while the latter words, which could serve as an epitaph, speak of what Aimé Césaire was as a man and of the world he desired for his fellow humans. The Fundamental Black Man, among all the black people of the earth, those in Africa, in the United States and those belonging to the diaspora dispersed throughout the other Americas. All of them belonging to the wretched, to the condemned of the earth.
But just as not all the wretched are black, neither was Aimé Césaire just a fundamental black man. Césaire, a member of a “subaltern” race, has been what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was, a member of a ruling and hegemonic race for his time, the fundamental man. Simply and proudly, the man, without distinguishing between races, cultures or credos. Just as Goethe was fated to live through the vicissitudes that were imposed on liberty, that is, on the liberties of all men, by the French Revolution, and the actions of its defenders and its gravediggers, in this manner Césaire lived in order to face similar vicissitudes, the ones that were imposed on the liberties of the entire planet by the communist and Marxist revolutions that began in 1917, when our poet was beginning his life.
And this movement in search of the paths of liberty begins right at the start of a small book: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939):
As there are hyena-men and panther-men, I would be
a Jew-man
a Kaffir-man
a Hindu-man-from-Calcutta
a Harlem-man-who-doesn’t-vote
It was a colonized black man who began this search in a world where all black people were still colonized. Despite Haiti, as we shall see.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 23 April 2008 }
4.21.2008
Stalinismo tropical / Teodoro Petkoff
Tropical Stalinism
This year the government’s celebration of the events of April 2002 had a precise objective: to destroy the figure of general Raúl Baduel. The vast amounts of hot air spent during those days, Yo El Supremo’s superfluous speeches broadcast on required TV and radio bulletins, the liturgy of Puente Llaguno and general García Carneiro’s intervention, all had a guiding thread: to demonstrate that Baduel had nothing to do with the president’s return to Miraflores Palace and that this “Hero of the Revolution” is actually nothing more than a traitor.
The procedure recalls the manipulations of history that took place in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s era and which always ended, after a certain amount of time, not only with the death but also the disappearance from history of the people Stalin condemned. It would begin with a campaign of insults against the “enemies” that covered them in mud, in order to then, once they were sufficiently destroyed politically and morally in the eyes of the citizenry, not only execute but also erase them from history with impunity. Stalin dedicated himself with zeal to destroying in this manner the entire Bolshevik elite who led the revolution of 1917. In this manner the great leaders of the Bolshevik assault, along with thousands of old revolutionary fighters, were erased from history, including Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and finally Leon Trotsky himself. The slaughter had a quality that could seem comical if it hadn’t been such a tragedy: each time Stalin liquidated a member of the communist directorate of 1917, that individual was eliminated from the photographs where he appeared as a leader. So every year the official photographs had to be retouched.
Fidel Castro has also been given to these types of exercises, although with less amplitude than what was done in the USSR. There is a famous photograph of Castro with Carlos Franqui, the director of Radio Rebelde in the Sierra Maestra mountains and later one of the first dissidents, standing to his right. After Franqui left Cuba, he too was taken out of the photo.
This constitutes one of the profound differences between a democratic conception of life and a totalitarian one. A democratic vision of history assumes contradictions. No one would think of erasing general Manuel Piar from our history. A totalitarian regime, on the other hand, is proud of projecting a monolithic image. Both the part relating to past history, of which it claims to be a descendant, as well its own, cannot present fissures or contradictions, and much less positions countering the leader.
We continue to be perplexed by the effort to copy practices that are not just aberrant but frankly stupid, such as the notion of writing history to please the chief. But, on the other hand, if this Stalinist campaign against him demonstrates anything, it’s the importance of having the name Raúl Baduel.
{ Teodoro Petkoff, Tal Cual, 21 April 2008 }
This year the government’s celebration of the events of April 2002 had a precise objective: to destroy the figure of general Raúl Baduel. The vast amounts of hot air spent during those days, Yo El Supremo’s superfluous speeches broadcast on required TV and radio bulletins, the liturgy of Puente Llaguno and general García Carneiro’s intervention, all had a guiding thread: to demonstrate that Baduel had nothing to do with the president’s return to Miraflores Palace and that this “Hero of the Revolution” is actually nothing more than a traitor.
The procedure recalls the manipulations of history that took place in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s era and which always ended, after a certain amount of time, not only with the death but also the disappearance from history of the people Stalin condemned. It would begin with a campaign of insults against the “enemies” that covered them in mud, in order to then, once they were sufficiently destroyed politically and morally in the eyes of the citizenry, not only execute but also erase them from history with impunity. Stalin dedicated himself with zeal to destroying in this manner the entire Bolshevik elite who led the revolution of 1917. In this manner the great leaders of the Bolshevik assault, along with thousands of old revolutionary fighters, were erased from history, including Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and finally Leon Trotsky himself. The slaughter had a quality that could seem comical if it hadn’t been such a tragedy: each time Stalin liquidated a member of the communist directorate of 1917, that individual was eliminated from the photographs where he appeared as a leader. So every year the official photographs had to be retouched.
Fidel Castro has also been given to these types of exercises, although with less amplitude than what was done in the USSR. There is a famous photograph of Castro with Carlos Franqui, the director of Radio Rebelde in the Sierra Maestra mountains and later one of the first dissidents, standing to his right. After Franqui left Cuba, he too was taken out of the photo.
This constitutes one of the profound differences between a democratic conception of life and a totalitarian one. A democratic vision of history assumes contradictions. No one would think of erasing general Manuel Piar from our history. A totalitarian regime, on the other hand, is proud of projecting a monolithic image. Both the part relating to past history, of which it claims to be a descendant, as well its own, cannot present fissures or contradictions, and much less positions countering the leader.
We continue to be perplexed by the effort to copy practices that are not just aberrant but frankly stupid, such as the notion of writing history to please the chief. But, on the other hand, if this Stalinist campaign against him demonstrates anything, it’s the importance of having the name Raúl Baduel.
{ Teodoro Petkoff, Tal Cual, 21 April 2008 }
4.15.2008
Cuentos con agua y jabón / Carmen Victoria Méndez
Short Stories with Soap and Water
[Photo: Saúl Uzcátegui for Tal Cual]
Salvador Fleján studied Literature in his youth, but in order to become a fiction writer he had to spend a season washing cars in Miami. Sponge in hand, the author discovered that topics like immigration and Venezuelan identity were there to be told from the perspective of fiction.
His first book of short stories is called Intriga en el Car Wash (Random House Mondadori, 2007). The book has sold one thousand copies in six months, a very high number for a first-time author.
– What made you write Intriga en el Car Wash [Intrigue at the Car Wash]?
– It all began with that shaking of the tree the government called the “Cultural Revolution.” About four years ago I worked in the department of publications for the Museo de Bellas Artes, but changes occurred within cultural politics and I was left without a job. I decided to move to Miami. There I worked all types of jobs. I washed many cars, until I was left with a lesion on my back. I returned and things got better, but I wanted to create a sort of tribute to those days by writing that story, which provides the title for my first book.
– Was the topic of the Venezuelan as immigrant unexplored within contemporary fiction?
– The topic of immigration hadn’t been exploited as I wanted to read it: in short fiction. That first story has to do with the attack against the twin towers and two Venezuelans stuck in that mess. It’s very autobiographical, because I wanted to speak of the things that happened to me and what I heard in Miami.
– Are you interested in decadent characters?
– I wouldn’t say they’re decadent; they’re just beat up by life. It’s about a couple 40-something year olds who are always looking for an exit that might not be the best one but, mind you, I don’t want to be edifying or moralizing. I’m just motivated by the telling of the story. When I embarked on this literary project I wanted to make a plan and I said: “This book will be about Venezuelan icons.” Those classic characters are the baseball player, the beauty queen, the salsa singer, the horse race announcer and the emigrant to Miami.
– Are you writing a second book?
– Yes. It already has a title: Televisión confidencial. It’s fiction based on television, in other words, all the stories will be propelled by that apparatus. In fact, one of the stories in that book is “La cuchara de Uri Heller.” That story won Urbe Bikini magazine’s Erotic Story Contest, and it reflects a girl’s sexual experience while watching a TV program with this famous psychic.
– What do you see as the cause of the editorial boom the country is experiencing right now?
– People have talked a lot about the boom, about a new air in Venezuelan fiction, but it’s a bit exaggerated. What’s actually happened is that the editorial market for imports was constrained. Few novelties arrive from abroad nowadays. And what the local editors did was look for people who were doing something new in order to launch them. By chance, what was being written was new, alluring and broke slightly from the aesthetic that came from the 70s and 80s. It’s safe to say that between the late 90s and today a large number of very good, unpublished writers has emerged. But the boom is a market matter.
– Is that why your work was unpublished for several years?
– I’m 40 years old and I began to write at 35. I knew how to wait. I told myself that when I had something truly important and entertaining to say that I’d do it.
– You studied Literature many years ago. Why did you repress your desire to write fiction?
– I was very young when I came out of the university. And desire has nothing to do with one’s capacity to write. I really want to be a millionaire, but that’s not enough. In order to write, there has to be a conjunction of things like talent, passion and a lot of effort. When I sat down to write I finished three or four stories at once. I submitted them to contests like the SACVEN [Sociedad de Autores y Compositores de Venezuela] and Colombia’s Literature Biennial and they won. That surprised me. I said to myself: I like what I’m doing, this is what I’ll do. That was the beginning.
– Is writing short stories a risk?
– The risk is not in the story but within whoever writes them. There are many bad writers, that has nothing to do with the genre. Every person who can write using syntax thinks he has the talent to put together a story, create characters, profile scenes, and that’s not easy.
{ Carmen Victoria Méndez, Tal Cual, 14 April 2008 }
[Photo: Saúl Uzcátegui for Tal Cual]
Salvador Fleján studied Literature in his youth, but in order to become a fiction writer he had to spend a season washing cars in Miami. Sponge in hand, the author discovered that topics like immigration and Venezuelan identity were there to be told from the perspective of fiction.
His first book of short stories is called Intriga en el Car Wash (Random House Mondadori, 2007). The book has sold one thousand copies in six months, a very high number for a first-time author.
– What made you write Intriga en el Car Wash [Intrigue at the Car Wash]?
– It all began with that shaking of the tree the government called the “Cultural Revolution.” About four years ago I worked in the department of publications for the Museo de Bellas Artes, but changes occurred within cultural politics and I was left without a job. I decided to move to Miami. There I worked all types of jobs. I washed many cars, until I was left with a lesion on my back. I returned and things got better, but I wanted to create a sort of tribute to those days by writing that story, which provides the title for my first book.
– Was the topic of the Venezuelan as immigrant unexplored within contemporary fiction?
– The topic of immigration hadn’t been exploited as I wanted to read it: in short fiction. That first story has to do with the attack against the twin towers and two Venezuelans stuck in that mess. It’s very autobiographical, because I wanted to speak of the things that happened to me and what I heard in Miami.
– Are you interested in decadent characters?
– I wouldn’t say they’re decadent; they’re just beat up by life. It’s about a couple 40-something year olds who are always looking for an exit that might not be the best one but, mind you, I don’t want to be edifying or moralizing. I’m just motivated by the telling of the story. When I embarked on this literary project I wanted to make a plan and I said: “This book will be about Venezuelan icons.” Those classic characters are the baseball player, the beauty queen, the salsa singer, the horse race announcer and the emigrant to Miami.
– Are you writing a second book?
– Yes. It already has a title: Televisión confidencial. It’s fiction based on television, in other words, all the stories will be propelled by that apparatus. In fact, one of the stories in that book is “La cuchara de Uri Heller.” That story won Urbe Bikini magazine’s Erotic Story Contest, and it reflects a girl’s sexual experience while watching a TV program with this famous psychic.
– What do you see as the cause of the editorial boom the country is experiencing right now?
– People have talked a lot about the boom, about a new air in Venezuelan fiction, but it’s a bit exaggerated. What’s actually happened is that the editorial market for imports was constrained. Few novelties arrive from abroad nowadays. And what the local editors did was look for people who were doing something new in order to launch them. By chance, what was being written was new, alluring and broke slightly from the aesthetic that came from the 70s and 80s. It’s safe to say that between the late 90s and today a large number of very good, unpublished writers has emerged. But the boom is a market matter.
– Is that why your work was unpublished for several years?
– I’m 40 years old and I began to write at 35. I knew how to wait. I told myself that when I had something truly important and entertaining to say that I’d do it.
– You studied Literature many years ago. Why did you repress your desire to write fiction?
– I was very young when I came out of the university. And desire has nothing to do with one’s capacity to write. I really want to be a millionaire, but that’s not enough. In order to write, there has to be a conjunction of things like talent, passion and a lot of effort. When I sat down to write I finished three or four stories at once. I submitted them to contests like the SACVEN [Sociedad de Autores y Compositores de Venezuela] and Colombia’s Literature Biennial and they won. That surprised me. I said to myself: I like what I’m doing, this is what I’ll do. That was the beginning.
– Is writing short stories a risk?
– The risk is not in the story but within whoever writes them. There are many bad writers, that has nothing to do with the genre. Every person who can write using syntax thinks he has the talent to put together a story, create characters, profile scenes, and that’s not easy.
{ Carmen Victoria Méndez, Tal Cual, 14 April 2008 }
4.12.2008
Cinco páginas no bastan / Carmen Victoria Méndez
Five Pages Are Not Enough
[Photo: Saúl Uzcáctegui for Tal Cual]
Rodrigo Blanco Calderón is joking when he says that, for the sake of humanity, he won’t write poetry again. Actually, this teenage passion bequeathed him an aesthetic handling of language that now constitutes his brand as a fiction writer. This is evidenced in Una larga fila de hombres [A Long Line of Men] and Los invencibles [The Invincibles], the titles with which he irrupted onto local fiction.
Blanco harvests two books and an equal number of prizes between 2006 and 2008, when he won El Nacional’s Short Story Contest and the convocation for Unpublished Authors at Monte Ávila Editores. According to consensus, more than a promise, this young man is a worthy representative of a new generation of Venezuelan fiction writers and an exponent of the editorial boom that has taken place in this country in recent years.
– There are so many of books being edited in the country, don’t you fear that your work won’t reach posterity in the face of such an excessive offer of literary texts?
– I don’t agree with the notion that the writer wants to reach posterity. I don’t write with the idea of posterity in mind. But I imagine that being a part of what’s called the editorial boom puts all of us writers at the risk of succumbing amidst the tide of books. But it’s a danger that’s always there, with or without a boom. What guarantee does one have that the books being published will be read within 10 years? And more importantly: How can we expect them to say something to readers in that time?
Fortunately, there’s a good correlation of publications, of contests and writing workshops that I think have a lot to do with what’s happening: today more is edited and more is read in the country.
– If you don’t seek posterity, then what motivates you to write?
– Mi motivation for writing is giving form to the stories I keep thinking. With Los invencibles I didn’t have a specific perspective beyond being able to write the story like I had it in mind. In that sense the intent is as if being very immanent to the work. Anyways, I think the impact a book can have doesn’t depend much on the author. It happens because of the readings, I don’t know, because of the empathy people might establish with the book.
– What are the dangers of the short story?
– The hardest thing about writing a short story is restraint: to achieve maintaining a story in a limited number of pages, because all narratives can end up being novels. The short story also demands a quota of intensity that another genre might not require. I think the greatest difficulty of writing a short story is maintaining that intensity line by line.
– But your literary proposal is more extensive than intensive.
– The longer short story has been given to me in a very natural way. Five pages aren’t enough for me. I need between 15 and 30 to tell the story I want to. But the result is still a short story.
– In Los invencibles you echo the murders that occurred in Plaza Altamira. Did you have any doubts about placing fiction and politics in one bag in such a polarized country?
– Actually, when I wrote that story I didn’t have the Plaza Altamira events in mind, which had of course already occurred. The political question came as a type of unconscious trauma and settled there. Evidently the relationships between the events and my narrative are present. After I read the story I said to myself: “Wait, people are gonna think I’m talking about that,” but it really wasn’t my intent at all. I imagine that politics, violence and conflicts are so ingrained in one that they flower when the time comes to write.
– Do you feel like a paladin for this new generation of writers?
¬– I resist the notion that we automatically think a group of writers publishing at a certain moment are a generation per se. And in Venezuelan literature right now many generations cross paths. Oscar Marcano and Federico Vegas are my literary cousins, their writing is completely contemporary to me even if we aren’t the same age.
– Have you found coincidences in the lyrical handling of language that characterizes Marcano and Vegas?
– I think there’s an affinity in the type of stories they tell, and in how they tell them. Their literature is conversational without abandoning the poetic. That’s what I like.
– Will you write poetry again?
– For everyone’s sake, I don’t plan on returning to it.
{ Carmen Victoria Méndez, Tal Cual, 8 April 2008 }
[Photo: Saúl Uzcáctegui for Tal Cual]
Rodrigo Blanco Calderón is joking when he says that, for the sake of humanity, he won’t write poetry again. Actually, this teenage passion bequeathed him an aesthetic handling of language that now constitutes his brand as a fiction writer. This is evidenced in Una larga fila de hombres [A Long Line of Men] and Los invencibles [The Invincibles], the titles with which he irrupted onto local fiction.
Blanco harvests two books and an equal number of prizes between 2006 and 2008, when he won El Nacional’s Short Story Contest and the convocation for Unpublished Authors at Monte Ávila Editores. According to consensus, more than a promise, this young man is a worthy representative of a new generation of Venezuelan fiction writers and an exponent of the editorial boom that has taken place in this country in recent years.
– There are so many of books being edited in the country, don’t you fear that your work won’t reach posterity in the face of such an excessive offer of literary texts?
– I don’t agree with the notion that the writer wants to reach posterity. I don’t write with the idea of posterity in mind. But I imagine that being a part of what’s called the editorial boom puts all of us writers at the risk of succumbing amidst the tide of books. But it’s a danger that’s always there, with or without a boom. What guarantee does one have that the books being published will be read within 10 years? And more importantly: How can we expect them to say something to readers in that time?
Fortunately, there’s a good correlation of publications, of contests and writing workshops that I think have a lot to do with what’s happening: today more is edited and more is read in the country.
– If you don’t seek posterity, then what motivates you to write?
– Mi motivation for writing is giving form to the stories I keep thinking. With Los invencibles I didn’t have a specific perspective beyond being able to write the story like I had it in mind. In that sense the intent is as if being very immanent to the work. Anyways, I think the impact a book can have doesn’t depend much on the author. It happens because of the readings, I don’t know, because of the empathy people might establish with the book.
– What are the dangers of the short story?
– The hardest thing about writing a short story is restraint: to achieve maintaining a story in a limited number of pages, because all narratives can end up being novels. The short story also demands a quota of intensity that another genre might not require. I think the greatest difficulty of writing a short story is maintaining that intensity line by line.
– But your literary proposal is more extensive than intensive.
– The longer short story has been given to me in a very natural way. Five pages aren’t enough for me. I need between 15 and 30 to tell the story I want to. But the result is still a short story.
– In Los invencibles you echo the murders that occurred in Plaza Altamira. Did you have any doubts about placing fiction and politics in one bag in such a polarized country?
– Actually, when I wrote that story I didn’t have the Plaza Altamira events in mind, which had of course already occurred. The political question came as a type of unconscious trauma and settled there. Evidently the relationships between the events and my narrative are present. After I read the story I said to myself: “Wait, people are gonna think I’m talking about that,” but it really wasn’t my intent at all. I imagine that politics, violence and conflicts are so ingrained in one that they flower when the time comes to write.
– Do you feel like a paladin for this new generation of writers?
¬– I resist the notion that we automatically think a group of writers publishing at a certain moment are a generation per se. And in Venezuelan literature right now many generations cross paths. Oscar Marcano and Federico Vegas are my literary cousins, their writing is completely contemporary to me even if we aren’t the same age.
– Have you found coincidences in the lyrical handling of language that characterizes Marcano and Vegas?
– I think there’s an affinity in the type of stories they tell, and in how they tell them. Their literature is conversational without abandoning the poetic. That’s what I like.
– Will you write poetry again?
– For everyone’s sake, I don’t plan on returning to it.
{ Carmen Victoria Méndez, Tal Cual, 8 April 2008 }
4.08.2008
Monte Ávila, Rafael Cadenas, Carlos Noguera / Simón Boccanegra
Monte Ávila, Rafael Cadenas, Carlos Noguera
Assuming as reliable the information provided by a professor at UCV’s Escuela de Letras regarding a supposed veto against the work of Rafael Cadenas by Monte Ávila, this mini-columnist made the mistake of publishing a critical note about the matter, revealing my surprise about such behavior coming from Carlos Noguera, the director of the State’s publishing house. Well, the information I commented on doesn’t coincide with the truth. The exact opposite is the case. It is Cadenas himself, along with Eugenio Montejo, who refuses to publish his work with Monte Ávila. Moreover, Noguera has made efforts to publish the verse of the great poet from the state of Lara. So, I apologize to Carlos Noguera for having attributed a censor’s spirit to him. Having received the information, it left me a bit perplexed because I know Noguera well enough to realize that intolerance isn’t one of his characteristic traits. Forgive me, my friend, but in such singular times as these, when the weirdest things happen, and after one has seen so many old friends, once furious critics of Stalinism, who become mute when faced with Farruco [Sesto]’s abuses and other excesses in the cultural landscape, I attributed to you a responsibility that isn’t yours. I’m happy to know you don’t run with that crowd.
{ Simón Boccanegra, Tal Cual, 8 April 2008 }
Assuming as reliable the information provided by a professor at UCV’s Escuela de Letras regarding a supposed veto against the work of Rafael Cadenas by Monte Ávila, this mini-columnist made the mistake of publishing a critical note about the matter, revealing my surprise about such behavior coming from Carlos Noguera, the director of the State’s publishing house. Well, the information I commented on doesn’t coincide with the truth. The exact opposite is the case. It is Cadenas himself, along with Eugenio Montejo, who refuses to publish his work with Monte Ávila. Moreover, Noguera has made efforts to publish the verse of the great poet from the state of Lara. So, I apologize to Carlos Noguera for having attributed a censor’s spirit to him. Having received the information, it left me a bit perplexed because I know Noguera well enough to realize that intolerance isn’t one of his characteristic traits. Forgive me, my friend, but in such singular times as these, when the weirdest things happen, and after one has seen so many old friends, once furious critics of Stalinism, who become mute when faced with Farruco [Sesto]’s abuses and other excesses in the cultural landscape, I attributed to you a responsibility that isn’t yours. I’m happy to know you don’t run with that crowd.
{ Simón Boccanegra, Tal Cual, 8 April 2008 }
3.24.2008
El preso del Viernes Santo / Silvio Orta Cabrera
The Good Friday Prisoner
From the late 40s until the mid 50s I never missed a single Good Friday procession of the Holy Sepulcher, back in la Victoria. At the head of the procession was the fixed presence of a very humble man, who handed out movie flyers, wedding invitations and burial notices, a man with a long name, Nemesio Enrique Romero Castillo, who would always enunciate it when replying to us with irritation after we’d call him “Perico!” [parakeet], a nickname derived from the physiognomy of his crooked face. Aside from those instances, he was as peaceful as his honest linen coat, Chaplinesque shoes and crumpled grey linen hat with its black band.
Carrying a long pole, Nemesio led the procession so as to make sure the images, especially the tallest ones representing the Nazarene and the Pained One, didn’t get stuck on electric wires. A fervent member of the Society of the Holy Sepulcher, he assisted the progress of the dead Christ with a severity that accentuated the “Popule Meus” of José Ángel Lamas, resonating since 1801.
On those Fridays we would crowd in front of the police station to watch the prisoner they’d release. This is where the entourage and the compassed balance of sweaty bodies would pause the longest under the heavy image, a life-sized, marble reproduction of the martyr, to whose weight were added the thick windows of the funerary box and the cedar beams of the stage used to support the sculpture. The prisoner came out somewhat embarrassed, thanked the Lord and accompanied the procession until the nearby end of the trajectory at the Matriz church.
Nothing else. No thanks to the Mayor and his other captors. How different from president Correa subordinating the fall of Raúl Reyes to the argument that this event had prevented his plan to liberate ten more hostages in negotiations with the FARC, with Ingrid Betancourt among them! How far from the smiling impiety and the mixed-up clamor and consumerism of Piedad Córdoba calculating how much closer to the presidency each liberated person might bring her! How unlike the mercantile scream of “Manuel, send me Ingrid!,” which translates as “Help me, comrade, make 83 percent of Venezuelans forget the mobilization of the ten armored battalions, the anguish and the thousands of millions that my bellicose bluffing cost at least two nations, my own actions as a rrrevolutionary man of peace.” The already “ephemeralist” peace of 4 February 1992.
Do they understand how miserable it is to nourish themselves with the kidnapped victims? (I know, Chávez. You’ve proclaimed yourself opposed to kidnappings, so don’t manipulate them.) Chained every night. Unable to caress their families. Every day, an island surrounded by death on all sides. Is this how the New Man is built? With terrorism as barbaric as Bush’s arbitrary mess in Guantánamo? Your shouting, Chávez, doesn’t release prisoners on Good Friday. Though you may not believe it, you are not the Lord of Christians or non-Christians.
This is what I want to say today, at midnight on the Thursday I turn 72.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 24 March 2008 }
From the late 40s until the mid 50s I never missed a single Good Friday procession of the Holy Sepulcher, back in la Victoria. At the head of the procession was the fixed presence of a very humble man, who handed out movie flyers, wedding invitations and burial notices, a man with a long name, Nemesio Enrique Romero Castillo, who would always enunciate it when replying to us with irritation after we’d call him “Perico!” [parakeet], a nickname derived from the physiognomy of his crooked face. Aside from those instances, he was as peaceful as his honest linen coat, Chaplinesque shoes and crumpled grey linen hat with its black band.
Carrying a long pole, Nemesio led the procession so as to make sure the images, especially the tallest ones representing the Nazarene and the Pained One, didn’t get stuck on electric wires. A fervent member of the Society of the Holy Sepulcher, he assisted the progress of the dead Christ with a severity that accentuated the “Popule Meus” of José Ángel Lamas, resonating since 1801.
On those Fridays we would crowd in front of the police station to watch the prisoner they’d release. This is where the entourage and the compassed balance of sweaty bodies would pause the longest under the heavy image, a life-sized, marble reproduction of the martyr, to whose weight were added the thick windows of the funerary box and the cedar beams of the stage used to support the sculpture. The prisoner came out somewhat embarrassed, thanked the Lord and accompanied the procession until the nearby end of the trajectory at the Matriz church.
Nothing else. No thanks to the Mayor and his other captors. How different from president Correa subordinating the fall of Raúl Reyes to the argument that this event had prevented his plan to liberate ten more hostages in negotiations with the FARC, with Ingrid Betancourt among them! How far from the smiling impiety and the mixed-up clamor and consumerism of Piedad Córdoba calculating how much closer to the presidency each liberated person might bring her! How unlike the mercantile scream of “Manuel, send me Ingrid!,” which translates as “Help me, comrade, make 83 percent of Venezuelans forget the mobilization of the ten armored battalions, the anguish and the thousands of millions that my bellicose bluffing cost at least two nations, my own actions as a rrrevolutionary man of peace.” The already “ephemeralist” peace of 4 February 1992.
Do they understand how miserable it is to nourish themselves with the kidnapped victims? (I know, Chávez. You’ve proclaimed yourself opposed to kidnappings, so don’t manipulate them.) Chained every night. Unable to caress their families. Every day, an island surrounded by death on all sides. Is this how the New Man is built? With terrorism as barbaric as Bush’s arbitrary mess in Guantánamo? Your shouting, Chávez, doesn’t release prisoners on Good Friday. Though you may not believe it, you are not the Lord of Christians or non-Christians.
This is what I want to say today, at midnight on the Thursday I turn 72.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 24 March 2008 }
3.22.2008
“Guayaquil,” cuento críptico / Cantórbery Antonio Cuevas
“Guayaquil,” Cryptic Story
The unwitnessed interview between Bolívar and San Martín on 26 July 1822, at the Ecuadoran port of Guayaquil, suggests the topic for a capricious homonymous tale by Jorge Luis Borges. The story begins with the pompous and melancholic first-person lament of a narrator resigned to never being able to see, directly, Bolívar’s handwriting in a letter that has allegedly been exhumed, where the Liberator refers to the events of this enigmatic encounter. The speaker, an imaginary Borges, a History professor at a Buenos Aires university, is officially selected to take a copy of the noteworthy letter to Argentina from a fictitious Caribbean republic. However, another candidate is proposed by the Universidad del Sur, doctor Eduardo Zimmermann, a German-Jewish scholar who had been persecuted by the Third Reich because of a tangential accusation by Martin Heidegger. The two academics agree on negotiating who should be the definitive choice and they meet at the Argentine’s home. Doctor Zimmermann, physically insignificant, scruffy and at first somewhat nervous, slowly begins to transmit a growing confidence in his handling of the topic and of himself. According to him, San Martín’s resignation could have obeyed any cause: that he fell into a trap; that he was actually a European soldier who really didn’t know where he stood; that he resigned due to abnegation, or merely that he was tired. And as for the stray letter, he downplays the importance of the handwriting and places it on the person who writes it. He says to the other: “Bolívar could have wanted to mislead his correspondent or, simply, he could have been misled himself. You […] know better than I do that mystery lies within us, not in words.”
We gradually come to suspect that what is really happening is that, in parallel, two battles of will are taking place, where one of the parts imposes itself by sheer insistence that the mission corresponds to him – and that he will obtain it (in the case of the professors, the defeated one ends up signing a letter already written by the other man, explaining to the minister the reasons for his resignation). The intrigue regarding the contents of the epistle passes to a second plane: it is merely the pretext for a speculation on determination and will in man.
* * * * *
And another hidden message: Higuerota; the Placid Gulf; the Occidental State, as the story opens; and later: captain José Korzeniowski; Sulaco; doctor Avellanos and his grandson Ricardo; and the fifty-year History of misrule all turn out to be (save for Korzeniowski, its author’s real name) items borrowed from Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. It’s likely that few Spanish-speaking readers knew the original English version of that novel when Borges published “Guayaquil” in El informe de Brodie, and thus they would have been unaware of what he was discussing at first.
{ Cantórbery Antonio Cuevas, Tal Cual, 13 March 2008 }
The unwitnessed interview between Bolívar and San Martín on 26 July 1822, at the Ecuadoran port of Guayaquil, suggests the topic for a capricious homonymous tale by Jorge Luis Borges. The story begins with the pompous and melancholic first-person lament of a narrator resigned to never being able to see, directly, Bolívar’s handwriting in a letter that has allegedly been exhumed, where the Liberator refers to the events of this enigmatic encounter. The speaker, an imaginary Borges, a History professor at a Buenos Aires university, is officially selected to take a copy of the noteworthy letter to Argentina from a fictitious Caribbean republic. However, another candidate is proposed by the Universidad del Sur, doctor Eduardo Zimmermann, a German-Jewish scholar who had been persecuted by the Third Reich because of a tangential accusation by Martin Heidegger. The two academics agree on negotiating who should be the definitive choice and they meet at the Argentine’s home. Doctor Zimmermann, physically insignificant, scruffy and at first somewhat nervous, slowly begins to transmit a growing confidence in his handling of the topic and of himself. According to him, San Martín’s resignation could have obeyed any cause: that he fell into a trap; that he was actually a European soldier who really didn’t know where he stood; that he resigned due to abnegation, or merely that he was tired. And as for the stray letter, he downplays the importance of the handwriting and places it on the person who writes it. He says to the other: “Bolívar could have wanted to mislead his correspondent or, simply, he could have been misled himself. You […] know better than I do that mystery lies within us, not in words.”
We gradually come to suspect that what is really happening is that, in parallel, two battles of will are taking place, where one of the parts imposes itself by sheer insistence that the mission corresponds to him – and that he will obtain it (in the case of the professors, the defeated one ends up signing a letter already written by the other man, explaining to the minister the reasons for his resignation). The intrigue regarding the contents of the epistle passes to a second plane: it is merely the pretext for a speculation on determination and will in man.
* * * * *
And another hidden message: Higuerota; the Placid Gulf; the Occidental State, as the story opens; and later: captain José Korzeniowski; Sulaco; doctor Avellanos and his grandson Ricardo; and the fifty-year History of misrule all turn out to be (save for Korzeniowski, its author’s real name) items borrowed from Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. It’s likely that few Spanish-speaking readers knew the original English version of that novel when Borges published “Guayaquil” in El informe de Brodie, and thus they would have been unaware of what he was discussing at first.
{ Cantórbery Antonio Cuevas, Tal Cual, 13 March 2008 }
3.05.2008
Se compra oro viejo / Silvio Orta Cabrera
We Buy Old Gold
Hardcore Chavismo is en route to deciding in favor of Terror, just like that, with a capital T, no matter how Falangist it mind sound. The various actions and behavior – cult of personality, militarism, control over education and culture… – which reveal the fracturing of the attempt to establish a socialist model different from ones that have failed, are supplemented by actions and behavior that concretize the menace of terrorism.
The victory on December 2, 2007 rejected the consititutional changes aimed at accelerating by electoral means the formerly-named “process,” later baptized by the German Heinz Dieterich, Marxist consultant to the government, as “21st Century Socialism,” a pompous name whose launch at the beginning of the century sought to synchronize socialism with the present, to separate it from the totalitarian past and give it a futurist makeover. It reminded me of those businesses, often owned by Colombians, that announce: “We Buy Old Gold.”
But beyond the rejection, December 2nd inflicted upon Chávez his first electoral defeat, as a consequence of the mistake of associating his image with the results at the urns. And that’s where the majority vote buried the myth of the unbeatable Chávez. Even worse, once the character lost what little sense of discretion adorns him, he threw the dice betting on the even worse misstep of associating his own existence with the defeat of the regional candidates in the upcoming elections on November 23rd. Such a paranoid error, which could submerge Venezuela in a war – Chávez dixit – is synthesized by his bark of “They’re coming for me!” with which he hopes to conjure the spirits and elevate the moral of his crestfallen and diminished faithful.
If even in its weakness the opposition’s unity contributed to the victory of December 2nd, Chávez and hardcore Chavismo added another element, by dividing the pro-government ranks with the dogmatic and personalist mania of the stillborn single party. That stubbornness was influenced by the military harassment copied from the dictatorial Soviet communist formula, the pliability of some ex-communists (what a shame about Jesús Sanoja, Roberto Hernández!) and the jingle of the neo-adulators that prohibits confronting the Leader, their “Daddy.” What shamelessness!
Since December 2nd, Chávez spends his days and nights exploring the feasibility of a defeat and he openly prepares himself alongside hardcore Chavistas. This is demonstrated by the symbiotic acknowledgement of the FARC, the return to the use of violence against any opposition, the siege against Globovisión, the sergeant’s scolding of Últimas Noticias [pro-government newspaper] and the bloody terrorist act against Fedecámaras perpetrated by one of those red Falangists praised by miss Lina Ron [pro-government activist]. “Tell me who your friends are!”
These are signs of hardcore Chavismo’s possible descent into the inferno of terror. Nothing would prevent this possibility if fear were to impel a step back by plural Venezuela, that larger population which includes the Chavista majority that is neither suicidal, nor fatuous, nor corrupt and is aware that no one escapes from terror. But if that entire Venezuela, civilian and military, historically opposed to cowardly terrorism, joins together solidly and makes an effort to hand Chávez another overwhelming defeat, the crime of treason will remain an abortion.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 5 March 2008 }
Hardcore Chavismo is en route to deciding in favor of Terror, just like that, with a capital T, no matter how Falangist it mind sound. The various actions and behavior – cult of personality, militarism, control over education and culture… – which reveal the fracturing of the attempt to establish a socialist model different from ones that have failed, are supplemented by actions and behavior that concretize the menace of terrorism.
The victory on December 2, 2007 rejected the consititutional changes aimed at accelerating by electoral means the formerly-named “process,” later baptized by the German Heinz Dieterich, Marxist consultant to the government, as “21st Century Socialism,” a pompous name whose launch at the beginning of the century sought to synchronize socialism with the present, to separate it from the totalitarian past and give it a futurist makeover. It reminded me of those businesses, often owned by Colombians, that announce: “We Buy Old Gold.”
But beyond the rejection, December 2nd inflicted upon Chávez his first electoral defeat, as a consequence of the mistake of associating his image with the results at the urns. And that’s where the majority vote buried the myth of the unbeatable Chávez. Even worse, once the character lost what little sense of discretion adorns him, he threw the dice betting on the even worse misstep of associating his own existence with the defeat of the regional candidates in the upcoming elections on November 23rd. Such a paranoid error, which could submerge Venezuela in a war – Chávez dixit – is synthesized by his bark of “They’re coming for me!” with which he hopes to conjure the spirits and elevate the moral of his crestfallen and diminished faithful.
If even in its weakness the opposition’s unity contributed to the victory of December 2nd, Chávez and hardcore Chavismo added another element, by dividing the pro-government ranks with the dogmatic and personalist mania of the stillborn single party. That stubbornness was influenced by the military harassment copied from the dictatorial Soviet communist formula, the pliability of some ex-communists (what a shame about Jesús Sanoja, Roberto Hernández!) and the jingle of the neo-adulators that prohibits confronting the Leader, their “Daddy.” What shamelessness!
Since December 2nd, Chávez spends his days and nights exploring the feasibility of a defeat and he openly prepares himself alongside hardcore Chavistas. This is demonstrated by the symbiotic acknowledgement of the FARC, the return to the use of violence against any opposition, the siege against Globovisión, the sergeant’s scolding of Últimas Noticias [pro-government newspaper] and the bloody terrorist act against Fedecámaras perpetrated by one of those red Falangists praised by miss Lina Ron [pro-government activist]. “Tell me who your friends are!”
These are signs of hardcore Chavismo’s possible descent into the inferno of terror. Nothing would prevent this possibility if fear were to impel a step back by plural Venezuela, that larger population which includes the Chavista majority that is neither suicidal, nor fatuous, nor corrupt and is aware that no one escapes from terror. But if that entire Venezuela, civilian and military, historically opposed to cowardly terrorism, joins together solidly and makes an effort to hand Chávez another overwhelming defeat, the crime of treason will remain an abortion.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 5 March 2008 }
3.01.2008
Rómulo Betancourt / Pompeyo Márquez
Rómulo Betancourt
To Virginia Betancourt
February 22, 2008 marks the centenary of the birth of Rómulo Betancourt. I saw him for the first time in 1936, a few months after the dictator’s death, at a meeting that was held in the Circo Metropolitano of Plaza Miranda. Dozens of speakers participated that day. I joined the Student Federation. I was jailed several times. My life changed. A decree by Eleazar López Contreras expelled 47 activists. Rómulo was able to hide. Political parties were banned. I had the fortune of being a “connection” during the first Conference for the PDN [Partido Democrático Nacional]. I was able to live alongside all of its leaders for a week, in a large house in Catia that belonged to Antonio Bertorelli. I saw Rómulo engage in heated discussions with Jóvito Villalba, Inocente Palacios and Miguel Moreno. As the kids say nowadays, the “ultimate” was when I was in San Agustín del Sur, in the house of a comrade named Estrella that had a double exit and served as a “shell” for Betancourt.
I leave the PDN and join the PCV [Partido Comunista de Venezuela]. I was 17 years old.
It is a great truth that historical personalities and events must be examined in perspective, and at a distance from their actions. On more than one occasion I have recognized that character who came from the student struggles of 1928, who had elaborated, along with his fellow comrades, the Barranquilla Plan that completely transformed the struggle against Gómez by introducing ideas and proposals to pull the country out of the shadows under which it lived. That group, with Rómulo as its leader, was correct in confronting the Caribbean Bureau and the Communist International, in rejecting the Stalinist dictatorship and outlining a democratic path that kept Venezuelan reality in mind.
For reasons of space, I will mention he was also correct in fighting the insurrection of the 1960s. It’s true he exercised repression. In my case, I was detained during that time. I reject the repressive excesses. I honor those comrades who were assassinated, tortured, disappeared. That is part of the truth. The other is that during that period we chose a mistaken path that some who are with Chávez today refuse to acknowledge, or forget they once recognized it as a mistake. The assaults at Carúpano and Puerto Cabello, kidnappings of airplanes and boats and of members of the North American Military Mission, of Museum Cadres, of Alfredo Di Stéfano. Blowing up aqueducts. Guerrilla armies in various regions.
We couldn’t convince the country that Venezuelan democracy had failed in 1960 when it had been installed with our participation in 1958-59, after the defeat of Pérez Jiménez. Betancourt defeated us.
It would be foolish to deny he was an untiring fighter for democracy.
{ Pompeyo Márquez, Tal Cual, 29 February 2008 }
To Virginia Betancourt
February 22, 2008 marks the centenary of the birth of Rómulo Betancourt. I saw him for the first time in 1936, a few months after the dictator’s death, at a meeting that was held in the Circo Metropolitano of Plaza Miranda. Dozens of speakers participated that day. I joined the Student Federation. I was jailed several times. My life changed. A decree by Eleazar López Contreras expelled 47 activists. Rómulo was able to hide. Political parties were banned. I had the fortune of being a “connection” during the first Conference for the PDN [Partido Democrático Nacional]. I was able to live alongside all of its leaders for a week, in a large house in Catia that belonged to Antonio Bertorelli. I saw Rómulo engage in heated discussions with Jóvito Villalba, Inocente Palacios and Miguel Moreno. As the kids say nowadays, the “ultimate” was when I was in San Agustín del Sur, in the house of a comrade named Estrella that had a double exit and served as a “shell” for Betancourt.
I leave the PDN and join the PCV [Partido Comunista de Venezuela]. I was 17 years old.
It is a great truth that historical personalities and events must be examined in perspective, and at a distance from their actions. On more than one occasion I have recognized that character who came from the student struggles of 1928, who had elaborated, along with his fellow comrades, the Barranquilla Plan that completely transformed the struggle against Gómez by introducing ideas and proposals to pull the country out of the shadows under which it lived. That group, with Rómulo as its leader, was correct in confronting the Caribbean Bureau and the Communist International, in rejecting the Stalinist dictatorship and outlining a democratic path that kept Venezuelan reality in mind.
For reasons of space, I will mention he was also correct in fighting the insurrection of the 1960s. It’s true he exercised repression. In my case, I was detained during that time. I reject the repressive excesses. I honor those comrades who were assassinated, tortured, disappeared. That is part of the truth. The other is that during that period we chose a mistaken path that some who are with Chávez today refuse to acknowledge, or forget they once recognized it as a mistake. The assaults at Carúpano and Puerto Cabello, kidnappings of airplanes and boats and of members of the North American Military Mission, of Museum Cadres, of Alfredo Di Stéfano. Blowing up aqueducts. Guerrilla armies in various regions.
We couldn’t convince the country that Venezuelan democracy had failed in 1960 when it had been installed with our participation in 1958-59, after the defeat of Pérez Jiménez. Betancourt defeated us.
It would be foolish to deny he was an untiring fighter for democracy.
{ Pompeyo Márquez, Tal Cual, 29 February 2008 }
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