Tomás Eloy Martínez, hecho en Venezuela / Daniel Fermín

Tomás Eloy Martínez, Made in Venezuela

                     [Photo: Nicola Roco]

Tomás Eloy Martínez (Tucumán, 1934 - Buenos Aires, 2010) wrote a myriad of news articles during the time he lived in Venezuela. The Argentine, a reference in Latin American journalism, practiced his career in the nation that served him as a refuge from the dictatorship in his country between 1976 and 1983. Ciertas maneras de no hacer nada, an anthology published by La hoja del norte, gathers the essential texts he wrote in Venezuela.

The first half of the book is dedicated to certain places. A theater actress who was practicing with her group in the Jesús Soto Museum in Ciudad Bolívar, a salt mine worker in Araya who nearly falls in love with his sister, a singer from Calabozo who tries to break his own father’s record of 32 children. A series of anonymous beings who offer a glimpse of Venezuela in the 1970s.

The second part of the anthology gathers profiles and interviews with figures from Venezuelan culture. Juan Liscano, Guillermo Meneses, Vicente Gerbasi, Andrés Bello, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Jacinto Fombona Pachano. Intellectuals from that era who were profiled by Martínez. Texts reflecting his passion for the arts, stories charged with a lucidity that resists time.

The following are some of the phrases spoken by the figures he profiled:

—It’s very tempting to be a leftist poet, but it’s so sad to realize how it destroys the true meaning of poetry.
(Juan Liscano, 1976).

—All poetry is political. What I reprove is that it be used as a combat instrument, as a stone in the barricades.
(Juan Liscano, 1976).

—To write: speaking our torments aloud, making peace with the dead who haven’t quite left us.
(Adriano González León, 1975).

—Maybe I write for that reason: I aspire to transform my life through literature.
(Salvador Garmendia, undated).

—One doesn’t just write for something, but also for someone.
-(Tomás Eloy Martínez, 1975).

Sergio Dahbar was in charge of the prologue and compilation of the book, which also includes an introduction by Jaime Abello Banfi. Ciertas maneras de no hacer nada, which owes its title [Certain Ways of Doing Nothing] to a phrase spoken by the novelist Adriano González León to his interviewer, closes with Martínez’s farewell to his wife Susana Rotker, who was run over by a car in 2000. A book that more than one Venezuelan journalist should read.




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 30 May 2015 }

El país en una maleta: Entrevista a Héctor Torres / Daniel Fermín

The Country in a Suitcase: An Interview with Héctor Torres

                  [Photo: Nicola Rocco]

A man who drives the wrong direction up a one way street; a young man who’s a victim of a crime on a bus; pedestrians who are forced to avoid all the obstacles on the city sidewalks; a boy who jumps from the top floor of a mall. Héctor Torres once again explores Venezuela’s national identity in Objetos no declarados: 1001 maneras de ser venezolano mientras el barco se hunde (2014), which has been published by Puntocero.

“The book complements Caracas muerde (2012). It’s another side of the same topic. If in that book I addressed the spiritual state of the citizen, here I focus on how many of us have contributed to the violence and chaos of the country. Earlier I offered a panoramic view, now I speak introspectively about how each of us participates in the disaster. I felt like I needed to finish saying things that were still unresolved from the first book.”

Emigration is the connecting thread of Objetos no declarados. The title is a metaphor of the elements —good and bad— that Venezuelans carry in their suitcases when they leave the country. Because no matter where you go, your origins travel with you, like contraband. The paranoia typical of Venezuela’s insecurity even when you’re in the safest place in the world, the annoyance of apologizing for everything on the outside, the lack of discipline when it comes to following certain laws.

“The stories came out of conversations I had with friends living abroad. The topic of migration has become something very important. One, because of today’s polarization, two, because until now Venezuela was never a nation of emigrants. People are incapable of seeing the person who emigrates as someone who’s looking for opportunities, but rather as someone who gave up, who betrayed something I can’t even define. The very fleeting idea of thinking they escape the problem yet taking the problem with them. Just like the family, the country is a brand. You can say you’re leaving Venezuela because it’s broken but you go somewhere else and run a red light.”

Power is another topic in several of the stories that make up the book. Power reflected in a girl’s manipulation of her mother so that she’ll scold him in a subway car. Or the bad service of clerks in a store or in any institution, as if they themselves won’t be clients or won’t have to run an errand in the near future. Torres narrates anecdotes that reflect how the obsession with authoritarianism among Venezuelans is still manifested today, even within smaller confines.

“I think we have a long tradition of abusing power. First, we’re a people of caudillos, where the figure of the great father is always fundamental. We’ve grown up with the image that there’s one Venezuela who’s superior to all the rest, which is Simón Bolívar. And that contributes to us living like eternal orphans. If you read La escribana del viento, by Ana Teresa Torres, you realize that Venezuelan society in 1640 already had some of the elements we still see today: abusive, despotic power. When we enter a crisis, the true nature of a society is revealed.”

Héctor Torres nourishes his literature with the streets, with the country’s daily situations. Caracas, because of its stories, its chaos and its violence, is an ideal place for writing. Literature as a reflection of what we are, a way of interpreting a nation from the intimacy of its anonymous characters: the old man who runs a tiny stall for making phone calls, the parents who take their kids to school day after day, the different social classes in Venezuela.

“Reality allows that. Here in Venezuela the crime novel writes itself. Crime, absurdity, contaminated power, we see these every single day. One of the few enviable things about Caracas is the possibility of infinite topics for whoever wants to write. Literature slows down life. It allows us to read ourselves, to relive certain moments. Like watching a video of something we already did. Because daily life impedes us from having a critical attitude toward the events around us, more so in a city as chaotic as Caracas. People live with rules that exist but aren’t applied. According to their individual norms, every man for himself. Because of how corrupted institutions have become in the country, it’s a matter of survival. We’ve become accustomed to violence, to resolving things on our own.”

Héctor Torres has already said he isn’t trying to make an analysis or a social condemnation. His interest is simply literature. The Venezuelan writer is very clear about the fact that a book can’t change a country’s reality, that Objetos no declarados can’t do much in the face of the impunity that reigns in Venezuela. He merely shows it, points to it, exhibits it with a glance that is somewhat removed from the vertiginous rhythms typical of a daily routine.

“Literature tries to reflect reality as faithfully as possible. In the hopes it might produce something in the reader. That it might move people. David Foster Wallace said it: whoever’s calm, shake him up; whoever’s uneasy, give him some calm. It’s an epic ambition to think you can modify a city by merely writing. We’ll leave that to the politicians, to the heroes or saviors of the nation. Literature serves as a consolation. Whoever feels like a stranger in his own country can realize he’s not the only one, he can provide a slight feeling of hope. It could produce a factor, that some people might think they can live in a different manner. Literature shouldn’t ever have the ambition of producing a political change because then it becomes a pamphlet. That’s very dangerous.”




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 23 November 2014 }

Ana Lucía De Bastos: “La poesía es, en el fondo, forma” / Daniel Fermín

Ana Lucía De Bastos: “Poetry is, at its core, form”

                  [Photo: Nicola Rocco]

Ana Lucía De Bastos (Caracas, 1983) was given an illustrated version of Margarita, the poem by Rubén Darío, when she was just five years old. She liked the book so much she began to recite it by memory wherever she might be (at school, at the homes of family members). It was the first experience with poetry for the writer who yesterday presented her book Y ahora, extiéndeme al sol (Bid&Co, 2014) at the bookstore El Buscón in Caracas.

The first poetry collection by the Caracas author is a compilation of her old texts. De Bastos gathered poems that she had in folders, notebooks and e-mails. Until she realized there was a familiarity among them. The body, the skin, the spirit, the word, the verb, love. De Bastos explores these topics in his first publication.

Y ahora, extiéndeme al sol has fictional intentions. There are poems in which the author tells of certain situations. De Bastos believes poetry can always make use of other literary genres. “I use the anecdote as a vehicle that leads to the feeling, the emotion I might want to transmit through the text. Poems are, at their core, form,” said the graduate of the Central University of Venezuela, where she studied Literature.

De Bastos’s collection mentions other authors. Eugenio Montejo, Roberto Calasso, Hanni Ossott, Herberto Helder, among others (“we all have mothers and fathers in literature,” she said). There are also texts that make references to voices, to saying it all in writing. “Some people write because reality isn’t enough for them. I do it because reality overwhelms me, I do it as a means of facing it,” added De Bastos, who received a Master’s in Editing at the University of Barcelona in Spain.

De Basto’s passion for books goes beyond writing and/or reading. The poet is also in charge of an artisanal project (Alhilo Editorial), that for the moment has only published one title in its catalog (Días raros, by Sara Fratini). “I do it as an anchor to Venezuela, so I might have something to come back to,” concluded the author, who currently lives in Spain. Over there, meanwhile, she’s working on her first novel.




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 15 August 2014 }

Gustavo Valle, otro viaje interior / Daniel Fermín

Gustavo Valle, Another Inner Journey

                                  [Photo: Mai Albamonte Pizarro]

Gustavo Valle (Caracas, 1967) had his first migratory experience when he was 17 or 18 years old. That passage through the Gulf of Cariaco later served him when he recreated the landscape in Happening, which won the Multi-Genre Prize of the Sociedad de Amigos de la Cultura Urbana in 2013. A road novel about escape, abandonment, guilt.

“I think escape is a topic that interests me, it’s evident in Venezuela today. Literature doesn’t function like an escape but rather an immersion. Escape translates into a type of unknown map. You don’t know quite where you’re going, but in that movement you might find a few clues.”

The new book by the Venezuelan writer is a story in which the protagonist, a frustrated theater actor, flees after a culpable homicide. An escape that leads him to reencounter himself, his own origins. An existential thriller that is also an inner journey. Like the literature Valle himself enjoys reading and making.

“The main character of my novel confronts extreme situations and the way he finds answers is by going on a trip, or actually an escape, to a remote place. I think that during physical displacements a ferocious mechanism for psychic reflection is activated. My characters are in permanent movement precisely because in that movement they find the answers to those questions that unsettle them.”

Valle is a migrant being. He’s been in Buenos Aires for several years now (before that he spent some time in Spain). His fiction is always bringing him back to his origins. Writing in order to return to memory, to the place he left. His first novel, Bajo tierra (2009), was the product —among other things— of an obsession with Caracas; in Happening, there’s also something of that oppressive city, of that space that expels, or frightens, its inhabitants.

“Writing fiction has moved me to establish my scenes in Venezuela and to imagine the country and its people. More than a reencounter with the country I think it’s a way of surprising myself with it, and of exploring and thinking about it. I mean, it’s an exercise of permanently interpolating my own identity.”

That said, Valle doesn’t write for a Venezuelan reader, nor for any other single nationality. He merely writes, with no other intention.

“Writers simply write for their readers, and before that for themselves, since we’re the first and inevitable reader we have. Readers tend to be a mystery for the writer and writing a book for oneself or for someone else is to aim at a moving target. The best thing is to save that ammunition for the writing itself.”

Valle’s literature tends to evoke memories and nostalgias. Remembering is an exercise of construction, as one of the characters in Happening says. Seeing writing as a form of memory, or —maybe— as a means of remaining through art.

“I believe one of the great tasks of literature and art is to work with memory. And especially in our country, where we’re living through an epidemic of amnesia. But memory, once it’s evoked, modifies itself, transfigures itself, and it moves reality towards a terrain where reflection and judgment can be exercised better. When we turn our glance backwards we’re also imagining our past, which is the best way of looking forward. I mean, without a story there’s no future. But I’m not talking about history’s narrative, which is indispensable, but rather the memory that’s conceived by fiction.”

There’s another phrase in Happening that says, to represent is to be oneself not someone else. Valle thinks writing is also a means of unfolding, of putting on a mask that might be transparent. Or not.

“Not just unpacking yourself, which requires a great deal of bravery, but also unpacking others. Even unpacking everything, if possible: prejudice, power, customs, morality. I mean, when we write we always try to open and unpack. Reality tends to present itself to us in only one of its fronts and the task of the writer is to reveal the others. Just like you on a mask, you can also pull out other ones.”




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 21 September 2014 }

Israel Centeno: “Venezuela hoy espanta” / Daniel Fermín

Israel Centeno: “Venezuela today is frightening”

Israel Centeno (Caracas, 1958) recreated a post-apocalyptic Venezuela in his new novel. Jinete a pie (Caracas: Lector Cómplice, 2014) is a fragmented love story that takes place in a world dominated by motorcycle riders. There are pedestrians who must survive the hunts imposed by the hordes that wield power, there are voices trying to reconstruct their past, to provide continuity for their memory.

“We are incapable of remembering things that happened just two years ago. The dynamics of Venezuela make us forget what came before. It’s a very toxic atmosphere where everything gets distorted. I see my characters as if they were licing a nightmare within a mirror where they’re reflected in multiple ways. When I look at my country, that’s the type of story that comes out, that’s the discourse I capture.”

Jinete a pie [Rider On Foot] is the beginning of a trilogy in which Centeno proposes a deconstruction of modernity in Venezuela, amid an atmosphere of Gothic realism. It takes place in the Altamira district of Caracas that, according to one of its characters, was at one point the last holdout of the resistance. “Because the country,” Centeno assures us, “is like a mystery, or a horror story.”

“Today in Venezuela rationality is being broken, fractured. We even celebrate death when it takes away an enemy. We witness the apparition of figures that blend into each other, they could be vampires, witches, politicians. The country’s reality is frightening. Much more than the tales of Gothic horror from the 18th and 19th centuries. You see rituals linked to politics. The fact that Simón Bolívar was disinterred, that Chávez and others shouted “Fatherland, Socialism or Death!” at his bones, this is all somewhat chilling. If you place all that in a different scenario it would fill anyone with fear. Imagine that all the powers in France appear and worship the ashes of Napoleon Bonaparte. That would make everyone panic. Hugo Chávez walked to his death surrounded by a bizarre mysticism. Nicolás Maduro slept in Chávez’s tomb. I haven’t seen anything more Gothic than that. There’s a castle at the foot of the mountain, a tomb in a castle. We’ve got enough elements to exploit Gothic literature for 200 years.”

Israel Centeno tries to understand the country through fiction. No one who writes about Venezuela can avoid reflecting our reality, of interpreting it, analyzing it. Because during moments of crisis, of violence, of social confrontation, of deaths, there’s not much else a writer can do.

“Literature can’t assume the role of political parties nor that of their leaders. Literature can only do what it tends to do: establish a connection and links between reality, fiction and the truth. Writing in any field is a means of resistance, it’s a political position. There’s nothing else I can do. Literature can’t save anyone, but I can keep writing. Any publication that appears in this context is a political gesture that won’t free us. I won’t land in Caracas with books, nor will I try to tell people that the more they read the freer they’ll be. You can’t expect the writer to be more intelligent than everyone else, that he construct a truth for the rest to follow. I think it’s been a curse for Venezuelans to believe in Messiahs. I don’t want that type of heroism.”

One of the protagonists of Jinete a pie says that without rights we’re all equal, that this is the only possible equality. There are many voices in the novel that pretend to own the truth. Israel Centeno believes that Venezuela today points in that direction.

“Everyone is equal in a concentration camp; everyone is equal when you’re in a supermarket with no food. When equality is imposed on you in such a manner that your rights are taken away. When you can’t have access to dollars on the exchange market they equalize you. When they kill all of us, we’re equal. Venezuelans are suffering from a flood of violence that is State policy. It’s a way of equalizing. Impunity strips the citizen of his right to enjoy public spaces. No one can enjoy those places without fearing he’ll be killed in a horrible manner.”

In Jinete a pie there was a pact between pedestrians and motorcycle riders. After multiple safaris in which they would kill pedestrians, they arrived at a pact of non-aggression against the weak. Until the rules are broken (including a curfew). And the truce, or dialogue, imposed by those in power is over.

“It’s like those acts of justice that exist in Venezuela. The Supreme Court judges dictate in favor of the murderer, which is the government. Power has become an element that persecutes, that tortures, that hunts, that lays blame on others. The Supreme Court decides when that hunt should be augmented or not. Maduro calls out for dialogue but he breaks it. That’s the reality, the suspension of the safaris is the alleged plan for peace in which they keep killing us.”

Israel Centeno finished writing this novel in 2011. It wasn’t made in response to the recent acts of violence involving collective paramilitary groups at the service of the government. The author, who once watched a group of motorcycle riders in Caracas beat up an elderly man for crashing into one of their motorcycles on the highway, isn’t trying to demonize them.

“It’s not that motorcycle riders are evil. It’s that when Maduro calls them his “gentlemen of steel” he’s giving them blank check. If I give them immunity, I turn them into a criminal arm. It’s not a possible reality to think of a world dominated by them, it’s a reality that already exists. Now the problem is to revert the situation without taking away all their rights.”

The protagonists of Jinete a pie can’t leave the zone, that destroyed Altamira that became one of the cantons into which the country has been divided. Centeno doesn’t want to sell an epic of urbanization. It is merely a vision that comes after a conflict that is suggested. There is also a love that is unable to find itself, that suffers from distrust, from paranoia, from the fracture itself that reigns over society; a pathological love that looks like hate, that alters people and tries to cure itself.

“The reading I would give is to ask, up to what point was the city made parochial to an extreme. Up to what point did each place in Caracas become divorced from the other, up to what point did it cease to be a whole and become small cantons, fragments with no connection. In the story there’s a defeated Altamira, in the shadows, in darkness, in uncertainty, as if they were mere zombies.”


More Books

• Israel Centeno has already completed the other two parts of the trilogy that begins with Jinete a pie. El cruce de los vientos [The Crossroads of the Winds] and La torre invertida [The Inverted Tower] complete the saga of a post-apocalyptic Caracas.

• The Venezuelan writer also has another trilogy waiting to be published. It is a story about Sherlock Holmes that takes place between the United States and Venezuela right during the time period when Arthur Conan Doyle made his character disappear for three years. Centeno has him solving cases in both countries.

• The Caracas-born writer has also just completed two other novels: one about a love affair and another one about social networks and the impossibility of writing. He is also giving shape to a third one about the guerrilla fighters in Venezuela during the 1970s. “I’ve written more than ever during the last few years,” said the novelist.

• Just recently a publishing house in the United States released a translation of his 2002 novel El complot. The process of bringing the book from Spanish into English was under the care of Guillermo Parra. [Israel Centeno, The Conspiracy, Pittsburgh: Sampsonia Way, 2014]




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 25 May 2014 }

Rafael Cadenas, contestaciones: Entrevista / Daniel Fermín

Rafael Cadenas, Replies: An Interview


(Photo: Venancio Alcázares)


Before the Interview:

Rafael Cadenas (Barquisimeto, 1930) listens to the anecdote about Mario Vargas Llosa’s arrival at Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía, Venezuela.

The journalist speaks:

There were so many journalists at the airport that a bystander approached to ask:
“Dude, who’s coming?”
“Vargas Llosa.”
“The basketball player?”

Rafael Cadenas smiles. He tells his own anecdote:

“You made me recall the Spanish essayist Juan Marichal, who always received letters from people asking him to sign a ball. They confused him with the pitcher.”

The journalist smiles.

Two examples of how a writer will never be as famous as any professional athlete, that any singer or actor can have a greater impact on people than an intellectual, even if he’s won the Nobel Prize in Literature or if he has been honored for his work (Rafael Cadenas was recognized this week by the mayor’s office in the Caracas district of El Hatillo).


Interview (Cadenas reads the answers to a questionnaire sent beforehand by mail):

Years ago, you spoke of the uselessness of literature (1969), and also of the null influence of writers in a society that no longer listens to them (1981). Now I ask you: Is it worth it to write to today? Does it make sense to insist on the value of literature if it can’t prevent the world from falling apart?

It’s not useless. Writers do have an influence even if it’s a minority that reads them, but not quite for preventing events that are beyond what human beings are able to do.

Last month, a group of artists (including you) gathered at the Chacao Cultural Center in Caracas to demand the liberation of political prisoners. Leopoldo López is still in jail. Can a writer, artist or intellectual (not the work itself, but the person, the author) do something in the face of the abuse of power beyond raising his voice, establishing a position?

He can write, speak, say what he thinks, as on that occasion, when I read phrases and sayings in defense of the prisoners, the students and of Teodoro Petkoff, a fundamental figure in Venezuela, whose great contributions have been the political party Movimiento al Socialismo, his books and his newspaper Tal Cual.

I cite one of your sayings: “When the State becomes a giant in a country, its inhabitants become dwarves.” Do you think that power today, in Venezuela, steps on the people?

It’s clear that it represses brutally, even peaceful demonstrations. It already has blood on its hands, but it blames the victims for being assaulted with bullets, buckshot and tear gas. It doesn’t blame those who shoot, and it maintains armed groups that exist beyond the law. And yet, dialogue is indispensable, though the government has to depose its arrogance, because it doesn’t possess the truth. It’s actually possessed by ideas whose results we all suffer, including that part of the people that supported it and deserves respect, just like the opposition.

A phrase you read in Chacao, attributed to a dictator, says that when he engages in dialogue he doesn’t like to be interrupted. In the present context: Do you think there can be an agreement or a negotiation between the government and the opposition?

What the opposition is asking for is fair, but the government makes no concession maybe because it considers that a sign of weakness, when it’s actually an opportunity for a shift toward democracy that can save us. Because everything we’re seeing today denies democracy. The regime violates the Constitution even though it waves it around deceitfully, the public powers are at its service, the National Assembly doesn’t live up to its name. It has taken over TV and radio stations to produce propaganda day and night, it threatens the press and plans to impose on the country a way of not thinking. It also attacks the universities, particularly the Central University of Venezuela. The hatred they feel toward them could lead to the destruction of the universities, which would be a tragedy. That’s why all Venezuelans should defend the universities, however they can, always peacefully.

A phrase in your book Anotaciones says: “Poets don’t convince / nor do they conquer. / Their role is elsewhere, alien to power: to be a contrast.” What happens when a writer becomes an ally to power?

He loses the critical function, which is one of his main characteristics, and he joins his fate to that of the government. Neither of them knows how history will treat them.

And isn’t receiving a prize from a mayor’s office, to a certain degree, accepting something from power? Does a tribute in the career of an author who is already consecrated serve a purpose?

Accepting a distinction doesn’t mean allying oneself to power, because you maintain your independence (...). The recognition has a personal significance: I’ve spent half my life in this municipality, that’s why I accepted it.

In a conversation with Marco Rodríguez in 1978 you said that if you had to interview someone whose opinion you considered important you’d ask him what it means, for him, to live. I’ll take your word: What does it mean, for you, to live?

If I knew I’d say it. I can only tell you that for me it’s tied to the unreachable mystery, the one that surpasses the entirety of the enormous, important and worthy body of knowledge achieved by humanity. I’m referring to the absolute unknown that we vainly hope to know. Daily life is inserted there, in that dimension, even though most people don’t notice it.


Post Interview:

Send Mario Vargas Llosa my gratitude, as a Venezuelan, for everything he’s doing for the country.

*

Related Note: The Poet Who Wrote About Sports

Rafael Cadenas was a sports journalist in the 1950s. He worked for the daily Récord, run by Carlos Luis Barrera (“a great democratic fighter”), alongside the poet Ida Gramcko and her husband José Benavides. He was just a university student who read Marx and watched baseball. His experience only lasted a few months before the newspaper was closed.

The Venezuelan poet used to write articles and reviews, always with the help or advice of Segundo Cazalis. “The veteran journalists were those who covered baseball. They’d send me to write pieces about basketball or tennis, sports I didn’t know very well,” recalled Cadenas, who is a fan of the Cardenales of Lara baseball team.

Rafael Cadenas still enjoys watching the Big Leagues. Also the final days of the Venezuelan season. The writer played baseball when he was young in his native city. “I remember there was an enormous stadium in which the home runs never left the field because no one could get the ball past the fence.”

Back then, the writer from the state of Lara didn’t enjoy basketball. He preferred baseball along with literature. “The passion for soccer in Venezuela is very recent. When I was a kid you rarely saw someone playing it. It wasn’t practiced much in schools,” he added. Journalism today would enjoy his writing.




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 27 April 2014 }

Elogio a la libertad: Entrevista a Guillermo Sucre / Daniel Fermín

In Praise of Liberty: An Interview with Guillermo Sucre

“Literature has always been a revelation of great human or social problems.” “The intellectual should stand against all dictatorships. And what we have is a form of dictatorship,” assures the writer Guillermo Sucre.

[Photo: N. Rocco]

Guillermo Sucre (Tumeremo, 1933) knows about dictatorships: he was detained twice by the regime of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. On 23 January 1958, when the caudillo fell, the Venezuelan writer was in a Ciudad Bolívar prison alongside the journalists José “Chepino” Gerbasi and Ramón J. Velásquez. Today, at 80, the author fights for democracy with the word, with books such as La libertad, Sancho: De Montaigne a nuestros días, which was recently published by Fundación Valle de San Francisco and Cooperativa Editorial Lugar Común.

The essayist’s new work is a compilation of essays by writers who suffered political or religious conflicts in specific periods. The Frenchman Étienne de La Boétie, who wrote “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” (“It is not necessary to pulverize the colossus but rather to stop sustaining it and you will see it fall from its own weight and break into pieces...”); the Dutchman Baruch Spinoza who said, in his Theologico-Political Treatise, that the “the most violent State will be the one in which each person is denied the freedom to saying and teaching what he thinks...”; the Venezuelan Mariano Picón Salas, who during the Pérez Jiménez era analyzed the word “revolution” in a text; or the Englishman Isaiah Berlin, who in “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West” warned: “that subjection to a single ideology, no matter how reasonable and imaginative, robs men of freedom and vitality.” All were selected with a commentary by Sucre himself, who wrote the prologue.

The volume of essays, that gathers texts from eight writers, was born from the courses Sucre gave for the Certificate in Liberal Studies at the Fundación Valle de San Francisco. The professor would share the work of the authors who are in the book with his students. “I began to realize there was an intelligent democratic consciousness in those writers Not a frivolous democracy but a profound and creative one (...) It’s good for young people to connect with a variety of thoughts, although it’s also clear that I’m not going to include a tribute to a dictatorship or a caudillo,” said the winner of the 1976 National Prize for Literature.

Guillermo Sucre believes that Venezuela today is close to being a totalitarian regime. Upon reading this book one inevitably finds similarities with the country’s current situation. One asks if history repeats itself or if human beings never change. And La libertad, Sancho is a way of marking a stance. “It’s like a silent but well-organized protest by means of authors with an important philosophical value (...) We don’t have complete freedom here, it’s a partial freedom (...) Picón Salas said that one must always maintain a certain amount of skepticism and hope.”

It was Michel de Montaigne who wrote that regarding the liberal arts, one must begin with the art that makes us free. Fiction, according to Sucre, can bring us closer to that freedom. “Literature has always been a revelation of great human or social problems. With the rise of revolutions, there emerges a committed literature that transforms revolution into an absolute truth that can’t be criticized. And literature is the exact opposite: a search for diverse points of view. Miguel de Cervantes, for example, writes in praise of liberty. He says we don’t owe it to anyone but that instead it’s a product of ourselves. Man by nature is a free being.”

The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, another one Sucre cites, said that utopian thought becomes malignant when it’s in the service of tyranny. The same happens with writing as an instrument of power. “I think it loses its richness. The writer diminishes his work because it lacks that type of neutrality, of impersonality, that an author must have in order to see reality in all its aspects,” added Sucre, who warned that one must be careful not to go to extremes (“One can become a fanatic. All extremisms, on the right or on the left, lead to dictatorship...”).


The Role of the Writer

La libertad, Sancho includes phrases that should be cited by more than one politician or thinker today. Another example to highlight: Albert Camus, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, said that the writer cannot be at the service of those who make history but rather of those who suffer it, that the task of his generation, in postwar Europe, was not to remake the world but to prevent it from coming undone. The task of the intellectual today continues to be the same as then: to resist or preserve. “Whoever tries to change the world arrives at failure. (...) Without freedom there is no morality. The intellectual should stand against all dictatorships. And what we have is a form of dictatorship. The last elections revealed that this is a very divided country. There’s no transparency. An intellectual has to stand against forceful regimes in which a military influence is very evident,” said Guillermo Sucre, who before the elections of 7 October 2012 wrote an article entitled “Democratura. Chávez, el camino de la dictadura” [Democra-tatorship: Chávez, the Road to Dictatorship].

There was a time when the Venezuelan essayist had drifted away from political activity. With the arrival of so-called 21st Century Socialism, he once again manifested his position. “Starting in 1998, I confess that I do act with a certain concern for the country’s fate. (...) People should have an interest in politics so that it’s not resolved by only a few. You don’t necessarily have to be an activist, but you should have an awareness of what’s happening. (...) Freedom implies a responsibility. I can’t use it to harm someone else. Freedom is what makes judgment and morality possible and it gives us a fuller sense of life. You have to struggle constantly. Thinking that we attain freedom and it lasts forever is false. Eternal is what totalitarian regimes try to become.”


—And if today you were the same age you had in the days of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, how would you defend freedom?

—I would do the same thing as before. I would have been at the university, at the protest they held recently. But you also have to use your intelligence and skills. You have to have a clear mind, a certain serenity so as to not be clumsy and become hysterical.

*

Venezuela Today

• Regarding the current Government: “Everything comes down to threats, to fear. This is a militaristic Government and that’s reflected in the country’s budget: it spends more in the Ministry of Defense that in those of Public Health, Education or Agriculture.”

• Regarding freedom of speech: “Censorship or self-censorship exists. The opposition newspapers have to publish the information the Government disseminates, but the newspapers aligned with the Government never publish what the opposition states.”

• Regarding politics before the arrival of Hugo Chávez: “Until 1998 there were discrepancies between all the political parties, but there was a shared truth, which was to be opposed to a dictatorship.”

• Regarding political prisoners: “Freedom implies there will be no unjust prison sentences, and in Venezuela there are unjust prison sentences. Judge Lourdes Afiuni was only recently granted conditional freedom, which is shameful. There should be a type of amnesty for those prisoners.”




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 7 July 2013 }

“La poesía es una forma de vivir” - Entrevista Luis Enrique Belmonte, poeta / Daniel Fermín

“Poetry is a way of life” - Interview with Luis Enrique Belmonte, Poet

(Photo: Enio Perdomo)

One morning in the 90s, Luis Enrique Belmonte (Caracas, 1971) skipped an exam at the Escuela de Medicina to read César Vallejo. This is how the doctor began his relationship with literature, which opens a new chapter with the publication of Compañero paciente, a collection of poems that’s nourished by his experience as a psychiatrist in order to assume an empathetic view toward suffering. Proof that poetry can also be therapeutic.

The Venezuelan poet took a few elements from his job and applied them to his verses. “I realized that psychiatry is related to writing. Not on a thematic level, but in terms of other tools. Clinical observation, for example, is something that has elements of the poetic. As well as attentive listening,” said the writer, who has published six previous books.

The author of Inútil registro sees literature as a psychedelic experience, as a form of revealing the mind’s content. However, he doesn’t assume it as self-therapy. “People say that poets don’t need psychoanalysis. I understand that it can be, at certain times, a means of exploration, but it’s not therapy. I think it can be, actually, a risky career. Poetry is sometimes nourished by states of psychic turbulence,” added the writer.

Belmonte’s last book was Salvar a los elefantes, a short novel. That incursion into fiction perhaps led him to the prose-like verses that predominate in his most recent book, which was published by Lugar Común. “The collection has a tone that leans toward fiction. I don’t know if it was because of that novel. Many of my poems have those registers. I make a more communicative, more discursive poem. I’ve always had an approximation to prose.”

The author himself had already said that Compañero paciente is one of those books that he’s enjoyed writing. “I really liked how, unconsciously, it’s very oriented toward the more fraternal aspects of life. That seemed pleasant to me. To think of a book that’s about the fraternity of beings, with friendship amidst the circumstances the poetic subject encounters.”

In the book he offers a portrait of the solidarity that exists among patients (“He says that when things get bad / one forgets they can get worse,” page 25), or the life of an anatomist (who is “dying several times without finally dying,” page 41). He also offers a section in which he gives advice to street dogs (“Don’t complain so much about hunger: keep looking, you always find something,” page 83, or “Read Cervantes in a kennel,” page 81). “I think there are many processes of healing tied to this book. I think we can conceive of poetry as a means of preparing for life. And life is tied to death. Poetry is a way of life,” explained the winner of Spain’s Adonais Prize for Poetry in 1998.

Belmonte also won, in Venezuela in 1996, the Fernando Paz Castillo Poetry Prize. And in an old interview he said prizes can interrupt the course of a budding voice. It happened to him. “It distracted me a bit. Suddenly you’re no longer anonymous, you begin to receive accolades that don’t let you focus on the process of writing. The ideal condition for a writer is solitude or anonymity. Or the anonymity that solitude grants.”

Since then he publishes very little. Or much less than before. It took him five years to write Compañero paciente. “It has to do with a more mature awareness of the responsibility of saying. And one still doubts. I corrected this book until the day it was sent to the printer (a copy in his house has corrections marked with a pen). That’s when I understood you never finish a book, but instead say goodbye to it,” concluded Belmonte. Poetry requires patience.




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 6 July 2012 }