Guillermo Sucre o el país imborrable / Antonio López Ortega

 Guillermo Sucre or the Indelible Country

    (Photo: Roberto Matta)

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

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

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

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

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

Venezuela en verso / Javier Rodríguez Marcos

Venezuela in Verse

Venezuela has become a powerhouse of the poetry in Spanish that is relatively well-represented in Spain from a publishing point of view. Joining anthologies such as La poesía del siglo XX en Venezuela (Visor, 2005), selected by Rafael Arráiz Lucca, and Conversación con la intemperie (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2008), under the care of Gustavo Guerrero, we now have Rasgos comunes, a monumental volume that extends from Francisco Lazo Martí, born in 1869 and died in 1909, to Luis Enrique Belmonte, born in 1971. Antonio López Ortega, Miguel Gomes and Gina Saraceni have completed their selection with figures such as Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Vicente Gerbasi, Juan Sánchez Peláez —­honored in the book’s title—, Rafael Cadenas, Guillermo Sucre, Eugenio Montejo, Igor Barreto, Ana Nuño or Alejandro Oliveros. Between the amorous (and dolorous) intimacy of Arvelo Larriva and the Anglo-Saxon tinged narrativity of Oliveros there’s an entire century of poetry with all its seasons: surrealist, metaphysical, popular...

If I had to choose one living name, it would be Yolanda Pantin (Caracas, 1954), who dominates the art of conjugating mystery and realism, irony and emotion, and the author of at least one masterpiece: the book Correo del corazón. Her poetry is collected in País (Pre-Textos, 2014).


{ Javier Rodríguez Marcos, El País, Babelia, 19 July 2019 }

Ednodio Quintero, Venezuela / Enrique Vila-Matas

Ednodio Quintero, Venezuela

                  [Ednodio Quintero & Enrique Vila-Matas, Madrid, 2017, via @ednodio]

There will be no Rómulo Gallegos Prize this year, which for many people is further proof of the destruction of the public sector that manages art and culture in Venezuela. “Institutions have been de-naturalized, the museums, the libraries, they are no longer what they were,” points out Antonio López Ortega, Venezuelan novelist, essayist and well-known cultural consultant, for whom the most surprising thing about all this is that, despite all the problems in recent years, the quality of creation in Venezuela remains intact. His words immediately reminded me of Ednodio Quintero, born in 1947 in the state of Trujillo near the beautiful Andean city of Mérida. This great novelist has built a literary world charged with its own dense, marvelously invented reality whose point of departure has always been the imagination of the village elevated to its fullest potential; I still remember the pleasant and strong impression I had in 1991 of his first novel, La danza del jaguar.

Quintero is seen more and more as an essential writer, but the recognition of his work has been slow, due to an infinity of reasons, among which we might include the cultural drift of a Venezuela isolated from the rest of the world and also the fact that he belongs to the category of what Fabían Casas, speaking of Bolaño, called “writers from before,” in other words, he belongs to the category of those who were never simply writers, but also points of connection between life and literature, lighthouses where young people cans see themselves reflected. Quintero is one of those “writers from before,” and it’s possible that, in the long run, being far away from the media spotlight was beneficial for him, because it allowed him to accede to the ideal of certain noble novelists: to become pure text, to be strictly a literature.

At the center of his most recent novel, El amor es más frío que la muerte (Candaya), there’s a moment when the narrator, the writer from before, “the stateless one,” hero of women (in the manner of Adolfo Bioy Casares, but with a Japanese influence), observes that a rock has the shape of a tomb and it reminds him of Procrustes’s bed. A bed of stone, he thinks. And he lies down face-up on the cold slab and says he feels comfortable, serene like a king in a house for all time. That intense instant of the novel could hold the absolute key to the eternal, dynastic body that Quintero’s texts enthrone in the history of literature for all time; one could say the Venezuelan is in tune with that famous outburst by Pierre Michon in Corps du roi, where we’re told the monarch has two bodies: one eternal, dynastic, that the text exalts and consecrates, and which we arbitrarily call Shakespeare, Joyce, Beckett; and another mortal, functional, relative body, the rag, that moves towards carrion; who’s called, and is only called Dante, and wears a little cap he pulls down toward his flat nose; or he’s just called Joyce and wears eyeglasses, or he’s called Shakespeare and is an affable and robust rentier with an Elizabethan gorget.




{ Enrique Vila-Matas, El País, 24 July 2017 }

Alberto Barrera Tyszka: “Hugo Chávez melodramatizó la política” / Javier Lafuente

Alberto Barrera Tyszka: “Hugo Chávez made politics melodramatic”

                                    [Photo: Camilo Rozo]


He was at his house in Caracas, in front of the TV, when he heard the news. Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, that man who would speak from eternity, who had erased time with his speeches, announced that he had cancer. Alberto Barrera Tyszka (Caracas, 1960) was surprised, like the rest of the country. “It was something that wasn’t factored into any of the hypotheses,” recalls the author in a Bogotá café. He’s the winner of the latest Tusquets Prize in Spain for Patria o muerte, a novel born of various texts he was already writing and which were finally brought together by Chávez’s illness. The resulting book is a radiography of Venezuela today and it consecrates the writer, author of the biography Hugo Chavez: The Definitive Biography of Venezuela's Controversial President, perhaps the best biography of the Bolivarian leader, as the greatest exponent of his country’s literature, and in good measure of Latin America’s.

QUESTION. You return to Venezuela with this novel. What moved you to do that?

ANSWER. At first, I had no intention of approaching Chavismo through literature, probably as a reaction to the biography I wrote. But I was interested in the process in which Chávez’s illness appears, because I’m interested in the fragility of human beings, I try to connect with the reader through pain. It seemed to me like an ideal context for trying to inquire about Venezuelans and what we were living.


Q. What did you discover?

A. The novel tries to repeatedly address the topic of charisma. What happened for Venezuelans to become hooked, in favor of or against, on the same figure at the same time. But it isn’t a novel about Chávez, in the end he’s in the background, dying, it’s a novel about the Venezuelans who are living under that spell.


Q. Has that spell continued?

A. Chávez insisted a great deal on constructing himself as a myth, in sacralizing his own figure and, of course, the corporation that remained after that lives. But I thought that myth would last longer in the lives of Venezuelans. It’s not that present, or his heirs have squandered it very quickly. They’ve misspent the inheritance they were given in a quick and vulgar manner.


Q. It’s a novel, but it’s written as if it were non-fiction.

A. It engages in a very strong dialogue with the real, it includes many things I’ve heard. The writer is a type of spy who’s always stealing things he hears, looks at, watches. The stories kept emerging. One was from a novel I was writing before Chávez’s illness. There are people in literature who advance with plans, I’m not like that, I’m not too methodical, I advance blindly.


Q. On December 6th there will be elections for the National Assembly. How do you think change can happen in Venezuela?

A. I like to think that we’ve lived under the threat of a political violence that won’t materialize. I definitely think the opposition can win. But, how will the Government administer that triumph, that’s the problem. They want to present democratic alternation as a crime. Chavismo doesn’t realize that it failed in its attempt to impose its model. The only possible exit for Venezuelans is to accept our complexity, to overcome the mediocrity that polarization represents. There’s no possibility of building a country if we can’t count on each other. Those who think history is an interruptor and that we’ll return to 1998, before Chávez came to power, are mistaken.


Q. What have you felt after writing something so real, but so harsh about your country?

A. I was very scared it would sound like an op-ed novel, that people would think it was written in order to denounce. No, I don’t want to denounce a regime or anything like that, but rather to tell the story of the plurality that exists in the country.


Q. Plurality and polarization.

A. It’s part of Venezuela’s reality, children who don’t talk to their parents, estranged siblings. Chávez made politics melodramatic. A moment arrived when it seemed Venezuelans had been born to attack or support a government.


Q. What type of novel is Venezuela?

A. I think there’ll soon be a lot of books that have to do with the country’s situation. The time is right for writers to begin writing or thinking about what we’re living. People have started to find refuge and seek something in books that they haven’t found in the media, which is reliability. There has been a resurgence of history books, of journalism. The media polarization makes everyone unreliable. Although there’s also the phenomenon of investigative journalists who’ve moved to websites, very serious people with acknowledged prestige have been doing investigative journalism from those pages: Armando.info, Runrunes, Contrapunto...


Q. What do you enjoy the most when it comes to writing?

A. Television is work that feeds me. What I enjoy the most is literature. Even more than the column I write for El Nacional. When I started to write columns 20 years ago it was something more personal. Now if I write about the clouds I get stoned by people. There’s a type of dictatorship of political urgency and society is in submission to it. As if no other vital spaces existed.


Q. What do telenovelas provide you when it comes time to write literature?

A. They’re very different formats. In literature the imagination and ambiguity are fundamental. Television can’t handle that complexity, it’s a kingdom closer to the stereotype. But it’s given me more efficiency for dialogue and a better idea of narrative speed.


Q. A prestigious scriptwriter, you won the Herralde Prize, now the Tusquets. You’re touched by success.

A. No, it’s not true. I wouldn’t even mention it. I’m very disciplined. Prizes give you a sensational push, but it doesn’t mean you’ll write better. You can’t believe that.




{ Javier Lafuente, Babelia, El País, 26 November 2015 }

Rafael Cadenas: la meditación por delante / Antonio López Ortega

Rafael Cadenas: Meditation In Mind

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


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

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

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

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




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




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

El último gran surrealista: Juan Sánchez Peláez / Edgardo Dobry

The Last Great Surrealist: Juan Sánchez Peláez

                  [Juan Sánchez Peláez in 1979, by Vasco Szinetar]

The seven books the Venezuelan Juan Sánchez Peláez published between 1951 and 1989 are gathered in a single volume. A baroque union of mysticism and eroticism.

Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética (Barcelona, España: Lumen, 2004)


The recent disappearance of Juan Sánchez Peláez (Altagracia de Orituco, 1922 - Caracas, 2003) gives this book the entity of a final milestone, the solemnity of a closure: with the deaths in recent years of the Peruvian Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, and the Argentines Olga Orozco and Enrique Molina, Sánchez Peláez was the last of the great representatives of the enormous plateau that Surrealism reached in Latin American poetry. Our tenacious baroque vocation —the American tendency of looking at words as if they were carnal objects as recent and astonishing as the world they needed to name— and a certain epic spirit in the cultivation of the 20th century aesthetic Left favored that great impetus of the movement founded by Breton. A chapter that opens in 1928, just four years after the publication of the first “Surrealist Manifesto,” when the magazine Qué appears in Buenos Aires, founded by Aldo Pellegrini. At that time Neruda was in Rangoon writing his first Residence on Earth and a few years later Lezama Lima, in Havana, was announcing the “Death of Narcissus”: “The hand or the the lip or the bird were snowing.”

The word, streaked with divergent senses, strips its own materiality. If the accent in the Surrealism of the Americas is markedly erotic, as for example with the Chilean Rosamel del Valle (an explicit influence on Sánchez Peláez), it is, in the first place, because of that visibility of the word as an unsettling object, dislocated from its reference: “The words sound like gold animals,” writes Sánchez Peláez. He appeared at the beginning of the 1950s in the vortex of that movement that had transformed poetry into a laboratory of rare images: his first book, Elena y los elementos (1951), which opens with an epigraph from Éluard as a declaration of principles, takes hold of the surrealist imaginary almost violently: “Milk bread of the moon, dark drum of cereals / Precipice of clouds that drowned my sleeping face in the waters.” Filiación oscura (1966), Lo huidizo y permanente (1969) and Rasgos comunes (1975) represent the most powerful zone of his voice, in search of a you whose encounter doesn’t, however, alleviate anxiety: “To her, my ritual of drinking at her breast because I want / to begin something, in some direction.”

A baroque union of mysticism and eroticism, as Valente noted regarding Westphalen, with words that also apply to Sánchez Peláez: “He belongs by nature and lineage to a tradition marked by the intense exploration of poetic language.” Eugenio Montejo, relatedly, designs a Venezuelan genealogy when he situates him as a descendant of José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930): “From him Sánchez Peláez inherits the emphatic and sumptuous tracing of the word.” Ramos Sucre (whose Obra poética, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Poética, 1999, is available), one of the rare geniuses who appeared after the dissolution of Modernismo, wrote almost exclusively prose poems, in the wake of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and the Baudelairean spleen, but already closer to the progressive abstraction that Symbolism operated on the construction of the phrase. Sánchez Peláez was also a master of the prose fragment, which he alternated with verse in nearly all his books. This barely posthumous compilation of his poetry reveals, complete, the images of a journey through one of the most extreme territories of poetic invention.




{ Edgardo Dobry, El País, 18 September 2004 }

Creación y sombras / Antonio López Ortega

Creation and Shadows

                                            [Eugenio Montejo, 2007, by Gorka Lejarcegi]

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

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

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

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

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




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

Rafael Cadenas: “La poesía es poderosa e insignificante” / Javier Rodríguez Marcos

Rafael Cadenas: “Poetry Is Powerful and Insignificant”

                         [Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas. Photo: Álvaro García]


If there’s a poet who is pursued by one of his poems, it’s Rafael Cadenas. The poem is called “Defeat,” a landmark of Latin American literature, written by the Venezuelan poet when he was 32 years old. He’s now 84 and smiles timidly when asked if he’s tired of that litany that seems to follow him, that begins: “I who have never had a trade / who have felt weak facing every competitor / who lost the best titles for life / who barely arrive somewhere and already want to leave (believing that moving is a solution)...” and continues with a first person portrait of someone who thought his father was eternal, who was “humiliated by professors of literature” and who has “been abandoned by many people because I barely speak,” or is “ashamed of acts I haven’t committed.”

Cadenas, a timid man who is more stealthy than silent, picks up the book the journalist has placed on the table, he skims over the verses as though they belonged to someone else and concludes: “I’m not tired of it, but this poem doesn’t reflect who I am today. I wrote it in the middle of a personal crisis... well, a depression. If so many people liked it that was because it coincided with the political situation of the sixties and the consolidation of democracy in Venezuela with Rómulo Betancourt.”

Awarded the National Prize for Literature in his country in 1985 and the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages in Guadalajara, Mexico —formerly known as the Juan Rulfo Prize— in 2009, Rafael Cadenas is in Madrid to read his poetry today at the Poemad poetry festival and to participate on Tuesday in a colloquium on his work at the Casa de América. He doesn’t mind traveling —he lives in El Hatillo, in the metropolitan area of Caracas— but he’s not very enthusiastic about interviews. “It has nothing to do with journalists,” he clarifies. “It’s just that I’ve never gotten used to that apparatus,” he says pointing to the tape recorder that’s running. “It’s best if we chat, you take notes and later improve on whatever I’ve said.” Very shortly, in fact, he will publish a book of interviews —“but most of them I answered in writing”— while he is also finishing a new book, En torno a Basho y otros asuntos. It will be published by Pre-Textos, the Spanish house that released in 2007 the more than 700 pages of his Obra entera (previously published by Mexico’s Fondo de Cultura Económica) and which two years ago also released Sobre abierto, his last book to date.

“Don’t disdain anything. / The frog gave Basho / his best poem,” he writes in that book. The new one, Cadenas says, follows that path: reflections on the Japanese haiku master and, as the title says, “other matters.” Which ones? “We’ll see what appears. Sobre abierto is very tied to daily life, but there’s a side of me that’s very close to thought. As Antonio Machado would say, the great poets are failed metaphysicians and the great philosophers, poets who actually believe in the reality of their own poems.”

Rafael Cadenas is the author of classics such as Los cuadernos del destierro (1960) and Falsas maniobras (1966), the book that includes “Defeat.” These were followed by Intemperie, Memorial (both from 1977), Amante (1983) and Gestiones (1992). “I know that title [Managements] seems like a book about administration,” the poet explains, “but I was speaking about other managements, psychic ones.” And he adds: “One never knows why one writes something, I don’t know what has been for me what the frog was for Basho, what I do know is I’ve continued to lose, what would I call it, exuberance? There’s plenty of mystery in daily life.” Slow and laconic, with the gestures of a wise man —he called himself a tightrope walker in a poem—, Cadenas measures each word and uses his shoulders and eyebrows to accompany his answers. That might explain —“so as to not be pretentious”— why he prefers to say mystery rather than transcendence, thought instead of philosophy and sayings rather than aphorisms.

Dichos [Sayings] is the title, precisely, of the book he’s carrying as if he were going to yet another exam instead of an interview. He opens it and reads: “How many collapsed utopias. This opened your eyes. Be thankful.” It’s more than just a lapidary phrase, in the case of someone whose communist activism against the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez led him as a twenty-something year old to be exiled on the island of Trinidad. “It’s 30 kilometers from Venezuela. You can get there by motorboat,” he says, downplaying the dramatic element of an event that influenced his most famous book, the previously mentioned Cuadernos del destierro [The Exile Notebooks]. “At first I lived off help from my family; later on, by teaching at a school.” He spent four years there, returning to Caracas in 1957 and a few months later he witnessed the fall of the dictator, “who was a 20th century dictator, now they’re not as blatant.” In 1958 he published La isla, a collection of poems that opens with an epigraph by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz: “Unhappy under tyranny, / unhappy under the republic, / in one we sighed for freedom, / in the other for the end of corruption.” What do people sigh for today in Venezuela? “The margin of freedom is being reduced on a daily basis in Venezuela. The Government shut down the opposition TV stations and now it’s going after the critical newspapers, they’re being left without newsprint paper to publish. That is intentional. That’s why I insist in defending democracy despite its faults. Of course it needs to be reformed, but accusations against corruption can only be effective when there’s a separation of powers within a government.”

Cadenas emphasizes that he has never been afraid to say what he says —“sometimes they insult me, but there’s never been an act of aggression against me”—, but he is skeptical about the social role of a poem: “Poetry is all-powerful and insignificant. Insignificant because its influence in the world is minimal. Powerful because of its relationship with language. Politics empties meaning from words —democracy, justice, freedom—, and poets call attention to that emptiness. Words lose their value if they don’t correspond with the thing they designate. It’s nothing new. Confucius called it “rectification of names” and that’s what a poet is: someone who rectifies.”




{ Javier Rodríguez Marcos, El País, 17 October 2014 }

New Novel by Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez Narrates the Violence and Corruption of Chavista Venezuela

                    [Photo: Maialen López (EFE)]

The movements of mysterious green suitcases that leave Caracas for Prague, Geneva, Rome or Madrid occupy the nearly four-hundred pages of Los maletines (Siruela), the new novel by the Venezuelan writer Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez. The grey and insignificant little man that carries them doesn’t know what he’s transporting but it must be important since that’s why they watch him, beat him, torture and chase after him, one and all, who are all bad and corrupt because there’s no good guys in this homemade spy story set in the inhospitable and treacherous Caracas of a dying Hugo Chávez, who is never named. “I’m superstitious. I haven’t wanted my blood to turn by citing in my novel the name of this character who poisoned our existence and brought me and the country such bad luck,” says the writer from Caracas who has now lived in Madrid for more than two decades. “But the caudillo’s name isn’t as important as the human situation his power generates.”

The Caracas of Los maletines is a rude and ill-tempered city where one minute you’re alive and the next you’re dead. The perfect setting for a crime novel where violence, stray bullets, brutality, abuse and tense situations, are always a threat, already there. Méndez Guédez acknowledges that his Venezuelan readers see the tragic dimension of his novel, while non-Venezuelans might notice a more humorous aspect that seems to exaggerate the violent gesture of a city that, in actuality, can be even crueler and more aggressive than its fiction. “Something painful has happened in Venezuela,” he says somberly. “It seems significant to me for a country to make horror something daily. You stop for coffee amid gunshots, news of kidnappings, violence, terrible things... and life goes on. My eye is local but estranged. I’ve been in Madrid for many years now, and from here a situation like that really shocks me. It’s also true that from a literary perspective, as a crime novel, that tension seems seductive to me because it’s a genre of viscous atmosphere and ferocious drama.”

“Chávez who poisoned our existence and brought us bad luck”
One of the motivations for Los maletines appeared one day when he was driving through Caracas. A taxi driver confessed a deep desire to Méndez Guédez that seemed fair to the author. “He told me that what he wanted was throw a surprise, make a whole bunch of money and escape from everything with his family, to save his children, to save them from having to live through that hell.” When he got out of the taxi he noticed he had been circulating through the location of his next novel and that this driver’s anger had procured him a topic. The difference between his story and that of the George Roy Hill movie “The Sting,” “with two bad guys who get revenge against two other bad guys,” is found in how it’s anchored in the violent, bureaucratic and corrupt reality of Chavista Venezuela. “I had in mind Agent 86, a bungling spy,” he recalls. “The reality of Venezuelan intelligence agencies today is shoddy. I was interested in portraying the ridiculousness, the cheesy, the soap opera quality of the exercise of power in Venezuela, without ignoring that it remains power and thus it intimidates, even if it seems like a military boot with purple lace.”

Los maletines is a Caracas novel. Its characters bear that city’s traits. Its heroes, two fed-up citizens who end up in a picaresque situation as they take revenge against the system, which leads to an unraveling where the lesser of two evils wins. “I was interested in having a happy ending in a country that doesn’t have them. I liked the idea of at least saving two people via fiction.” At the same time, the author wanted to destroy stereotypes with deep roots in that society. He dismantles the myth of the macho latin lover with a protagonist who fails spectacularly each time he goes to bed with a girl and places alongside him an unconventional gay friend who is addicted to boxing and not to Miss Venezuela contests. “The characters are constructions based on people you know. You mix into one character traits from six or seven people you know and that’s how the protagonists emerge, in this case two friends who’ve been knocked around by life, Caribbean lazarillos with different postures who end up agreeing on friendship and their attempt to escape. There are lots of people like them.” They’re surrounded by characters typical of Caracas: corrupt officials, swindlers, murderers, unscrupulous types, violent people, grifters, arrogant, miserable, frauds, cheaters, santeros, fanatics and, of course, that new national typology that is the Chavista Cubans, characters that push the city —and the novel itself— towards routes of frenetic urban thrillers. “Los maletines is an artifact of fiction,” as its creator defines it, “but it’s based on real reconstructions.”

“I wanted to portray the ridiculousness of the exercise of power in my country”
This is the first time Méndez Guédez, author of titles such as Arena negra, Chulapos mambo, Tal vez la lluvia, Una tarde con campanas or El libro de Esther, so directly addresses political matters in that divided Venezuela, but it’s not his first to portray the Caracas where he grew up, or the return to topics like paternity, love and solidarity amid stories that, while having the political crisis as a backdrop, always move between Venezuela and Spain, their two countries. “I became a writer because I was a solitary child who read a lot and was useless for anything else. When I was young I tried to improve the episodes of El Zorro that I’d see on television, or I’d invent stories in which Bolívar and the Indian chief Guaicaipuro were superheroes. I always say that I became a writer because of a vital rejection. I grew up in a working class neighborhood and I didn’t know how to dance. That marks you there, it makes you different.”




{ Omar Khan, El País, 14 July 2014 }

Ednodio Quintero, literatura resistente en estado puro / Flor Gragera de León

Ednodio Quintero, Resistant Literature in Its Pure State

                               The writer Ednodio Quintero. / Carmen Secanella


Ednodio Quintero (Las Mesitas, Trujillo state, Venezuela, 1947) has been on vacation for a few days in a wild place in the high peaks of the Venezuelan Andes. The same one that saw him born when there was no electricity or cars, “a zone with a Medieval imaginary and customs” for which he feels grateful. There is a curious relationship between the author, who occupies a place among the greats in the literature of his country, and geography. His father had a political position as a registrar that forced his entire family to continuously move around, and Quintero’s first memories are tied to a type of chronology of places. Afterwards, other memories have come linked to the great cities such Mexico D.F., Paris and Tokyo, all of which he confesses to admire.

But critics describe the austere and hallucinatory landscape of his childhood as being inseparable from the cadence and register of his very personal voice. Despite that deep connection to the land, some miss the target by mistakenly trying to find biographical references in Quintero’s literature. Or subjectivities. Or classifications. He has cultivated all types of work: novels, essays, movie scripts and those tales of disconcerting borders whose second compilation has now been published by Barcelona’s Editorial Candaya in Ceremonies, after the first one titled Combates (1995-2000). The stories in the latest volume were written during the twenty year period between 1974 and 1994 and they represent that purely literary universe to which he has aspired. He doesn’t play down his effort or laziness along the way. “It’s hard for me to be a realist author. I put dreams, reality, personal experience in a blender... It’s a gift that some God has given me, even though I’m polytheistic...,” he says on the phone from Venezuela’s Mérida, where he now lives. It’s a matter of “the imagination at the service of nothing, literature in its most pure and savage state.”

“I remember a dream I had when I was four years old. A demon was chasing me and I found myself escaping; hidden in a cloud I took off flying,” he recalls. In an almost casual manner, the author directly highlights a great pursuit in his life: freedom. “It’s the value I defend the most,” he clarifies. Quintero mocks the vanity of artists, those who depend on their ego, which is something that makes him “laugh,” as well as the servitude that comes with certain “leonine contracts” from publishing houses that demand periodical publications. In order to publish El hijo de Gengis Khan (Seix Barral, 2013), a successful novel in Venezuela, he had to wander around for six years to various publishing houses and even then, he declares without resentment that he’s “like a 19th century writer.” “Today there’s an anxiety for fame. My good friend César Aira ironically recommends that in those cases you should publish first and write later...”

Nor does he seem to wear a watch on his wrist. He went for ten years without writing and he explains how he took advantage of that time to “read the classics” and to fill himself up “with lots of music.” “It’s hard for me to see myself as a writer and I don’t have the discipline... like that of a functionary. I write in bursts.” While he sarcastically assures me that people scold him because he spends his money or because he gives it away too quickly, at the same time he says he’s frightened by another, very different loss, his reason. “I fear mental deterioration.” And he adds, clarifying the fact that he’s joking: “I might commit suicide if I get Alzheimer’s, if I can remember where I put the gun...”

For this lifelong voracious reader, among whose memorable readings he treasures Don Quixote which he went through “almost in one sitting,” movies have been another great love and an important influence on his writing: “My fiction works through images, I like Westerns a lot....” One of them actually serves to illustrate the point: Ednodio Quintero says he goes into places and functions “like a scanner” of everything that enters through his eyes. Sight is the star among his senses.

The author’s short stories speak of a vital struggle sustained by heroes whose resistance is narrated from an insurmountable interior and through the first person “which provides much more verisimilitude and is much stronger.” If the topic of the strength and the struggle that carve his literature is addressed, Quintero supports himself with a religion he’s made to fit his measure: “Being alive is a miracle... Existence is given to us for a brief time not so much for our enjoyment but rather for learning.”

And he makes it understood without any qualms about the modesty of his response that if he considers himself a survivor it’s also because of the Venezuela he inhabits. “We’re still here, we won’t give up.” He was told that his book El arquero dormido. Cinco novelas en miniatura (Alfaguara) “had been a premonition of what happened afterwards, the strange experiments of 21st century socialism, out of step with the times.” He repeats the words that point to a resistance so as to shore up strength against that “hesitancy” about discussing the topic of Venezuela after Hugo Chávez, “because dirty laundry should be done at home.” “We’re navigating in a strange experiment here that could wander off into something dangerous.” One of the examples he offers as to how the people who think like him keep themselves afloat is the emergence of independent publishing houses that have established their own circuit in his country or the activity that goes on in social media.

“The European viewpoint seems strange to me, very complacent for some reason (towards the Government of Venezuela) because there’s an anti American sentiment you can see in the press....” “They would have to experience the reality here.” Quintero mentions “the unhinged economy, the inflation,” the practical muzzle placed on the mouths of those who disagree, not because they’re prohibited from expressing their opinions —“there’s no persecution like in dictatorships”— but because the official media have appropriated everything.

“I’m not very hopeful that there’ll be any changes soon but people have been waking up little by little.”




{ Flor Gragera de León, El País, 14 January 2014 }

Cuando el libro solo sirve para apuntalar una mesa coja / Israel Centeno

When the Book Only Serves to Hold Up An Uneven Table

The State publishing houses, although they incorporated a few independent voices, became institutions of governmental propaganda


Hugo Chávez came to power 14 years ago with a political project that in the name of inclusion systematized the exclusion of anyone who did not enroll in the “revolutionary project.” This did not leave out the cultural spectrum. The period that preceded Chávez’s government, with all its mistakes that can be pointed out, specifically in the editorial sector, was diverse and inclusive. One could find the most plural currents of thought and the promotional and informational platform treated them with a transcendent vision.

In order to understand the topic of Venezuela, we must note that the country lives off its petroleum rent. The State monopolized, since before the Chávez era, the book industry along with many other things. What happens when the State comes undone in the government, or is mixed or fused into it? It begins to demand in exchange first solidarity and then unconditional allegiance to the political project incarnated by the government.

If it’s true that before Hugo Chávez the policies of the State could alienate the production and distribution of the book, since 1998 up to now, the state of the politics, that is, the ideology, propaganda and an excessively populist and authoritarian sense of Chávez’s project, demanded to subordinate any of these disciplines to the Bolivarian project.

In the name of the people’s inclusion the people were excluded from the possibility of contrasting an ample catalog, and of authors of being part of it and enriching it. The State publishing houses, while they kept up appearances by incorporating a few independent voices, created ideological strategies, made their production biased and turned themselves into institutions of governmental propaganda.

I have heard the argument that the book sector grew, that we now have a national printing press, a literary agency, a book distributor and an organization for the promotion of the book. With the return of the independence of powers and if a serious comptroller’s office were to look into these institutions, more corruption than benefits would be revealed.

The International Book Fair (FILVEN), which had seven editions before Chávez, and in which I had the honor to work, was impoverished in its offerings, year after year we saw it become a monochrome fair, similar to the one put on in Havana.

The prestigious Rómulo Gallegos literary prize maintained its quality, but a condition was added to the verdict: it’s preferable, underlined, that the author be someone from the left.

Many things survived despite it all, maybe we can glimpse a positive aspect. Some literary biennials were able to maintain their independence. It’s worth noting the Mariano Picón Salas Biennial in Mérida. Others were swept out of the country, like the José Rafael Pocaterra Biennial of Valencia. The Venezuelan author found himself forced to knock on the doors of publishing houses outside the country. Independent editorial projects that have had to struggle against the obstacles the governmental control of access to dollars has imposed: a lack of materials and higher printing costs.

Critical spaces were closed.

There were no critiques without consequences.

We could say that this inclusive project that ended up excluding the plurality of authors and readers who seek a universality of ideas had a positive effect: it made the artist and the author reflect on how corrosive absolute dependence on the State can be and it moved them, perhaps touching their core survival instinct, to go out into the world and struggle for a space beyond the official orbits, to put forth editorial projects and to reinvent themselves in order to stay afloat.

Despite the propaganda and the effect caused by the free distribution of multitudinous editions of certain classic works, today no one can affirm this wasn’t populist squandering: those books ended up serving the most unusual functions without promoting reading. For the promotion of reading, one needs a coherent strategy that is sustained over time, alongside the inclusion of the amplitude of signifiers of human thought.

During these 14 years we saw revenge, an exhibition of resentments, a great deal of noise and “revolutionary” propaganda.


Israel Centeno (Caracas, 1958) is a novelist and editor. He has published the novel Hilo de cometa (Barcelona: Editorial Periférica).




{ Israel Centeno, El País, 13 March 2013 }

¿Qué literatura tras Chávez? / Gustavo Guerrero

What Literature After Chávez?

Venezuelan citizens wait to receive a free copy of Don Quixote, Caracas, 2005./EFE

A couple days ago, Beatriz Lecumberri, the author of La revolución sentimental (2012) —undoubtedly one of the fairest and best informed works of journalism on Venezuela’s recent history— wrote in this same newspaper: “Chávez, over the years, also continued to leave an important part of the citizenry outside his project for the country. With me or against me. And political exclusion substituted social exclusion.”

Literature has not been an exception to these discriminatory practices. Today there is an abundance of testimonies of the gap they have created among many writers and people within the world of letters. More so considering that, before the arrival of Chávez to power, the world of Venezuelan literature, as visitors from abroad would notice with surprise, was a very small space, civil and familiar. Under the protective shade of our oil-producing State, the struggles for symbolic capital were basically resolved through aesthetic positioning and the distribution of administrative positions and national prizes, without the ideological positions of individuals disturbing a certain climate of respect and cordiality. Many of the current directors of Chavista cultural institutions and many of their current opponents were thus able to share, for many years, identical benefits and they enjoyed relatively balanced dealings.

The radical nature of how things change starting in 1998 modifies within a few years this relatively strange landscape in Latin America. Towards 2006, the novelist Ana Teresa Torres can’t avoid confirming it: “Today, at the principal activities organized by the government (writers conferences, book fairs, poetry festivals) and the international events with official invitations for Venezuela, the only required writers are ones aligned with the government, almost always the ones who form part of the bureaucratic payroll. Opposition writers publicly denounce that their participation has been excluded; others, the majority, exclude themselves voluntarily and their absence is notorious in the events and celebrations of government-aligned writers (and vice-versa). National prizes tend to orbit suspiciously among the unconditional ones...”

I don’t think that, in the seven years that separate us from the Torres citation, the discriminatory drift has ceased or diminished. But one of the collateral effects it has produced, has been to push many authors to go in search of other instances of intellectual and literary legitimation and, in particular, that decisive instance of readers. As opposed to what would happen about 20 or 30 years ago, today their numbers have increased with the reading campaigns and moreover today their interest continues to grow for everything that Venezuelan literature might be able to say about the country. Not in vain have some spoken of, until about two years ago, a small fiction boom that was related to the double conjunction highlighted by the development of the editorial market and the educational policies of the government. Authors such as Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Federico Vegas or Francisco Suniaga, for example, today enjoy en independence that allows them the dissemination of their novels among an important group of readers and they are not subject, like others, to only depending on the institutional acknowledgment of the cultural apparatus of the State.

The few attempts that have been made up until now to reunify the field and reconcile the writers from both factions have been unsuccessful. Thus, the II Internacional Encounter of Fiction Writers in Venezuela organized by the Ministry of Popular Power for Culture last November ended with an exchange of accusations and an open confrontation between opposition novelists, such as Gisela Kozak, and Chavista figures, such as Carlos Noguera and Humberto Mata.

However, no one is unaware that sports and culture have traditionally been privileged circles for minimizing differences and negotiating consensus in situations of extreme political polarization. If the fervor for the national soccer team, the Vinotinto, continues to be one of the few factors capable of gathering Venezuelans together, it isn’t naive to think that sooner or later literature might be able to open one or another space for dialogue. Because there is nothing more urgent in a divided country, full of hatred and where weapons circulate in large quantities.

A la pregunta ¿qué literatura después de Chávez?, la respuesta, en la coyuntura actual, es, pues, una que busque afanosamente las palabras, las narrativas y los símbolos que nos devuelvan a todos el respeto, la sensatez, la tolerancia y el espíritu crítico; una que cree las condiciones mínimas para restablecer los vínculos comunitarios en una nación hecha pedazos.

To the question “What literature after Chávez?”, the answer, at the current juncture, the answer is one that might laboriously seek the words, the narratives and the symbols in order to give us back respect, common sense, tolerance and the critical spirit; one that creates the minimal conditions for reestablishing community ties in a nation that has been torn to pieces.


Gustavo Guerrero is Editorial Consultant for Latin America at the publishing house Gallimard in Paris.




{ Gustavo Guerrero, El País, 13 March 2013 }

Épica para el más acá / Israel Centeno

An Epic for the Here and Now

The not-dead comandante will ascend to immortality, he will be seated beside the Liberator father and will govern the earth. His kingdom was never of this world.


The Great Question

From the moment when Hugo Chávez established his conspiratorial lodge under the shadow of the mythical samán tree in Güere, he plotted to articulate and make the assault on power effective, he already had the consciousness of a founder of religions: he needed to go beyond it and transcend himself in the direction of the eternal exercise of power by means of faith.

Why is it that the lieutenant colonel comandante and only and unquestionable leader of the Bolivarian revolution, when he had before him the medical reports that revealed that his life expectancy was very limited, why didn’t he retire to seek peace and intimacy in his final months, saving his country and the people he loves so much, not just the confusion, but more division and the deepening of hatreds, instead of an onerous and useless electoral campaign that was won for the benefit of his death?

What matters is the people and Hugo Chávez has always said that he is the people. There is no room for any other interpretation. His glory and triumph over death are the triumph of the disinherited people, etcetera.

The president’s final electoral campaign had as its objective to reaffirm himself as a power that he would continue to wield in any manner as long as he lived, a matter already guaranteed by the collapse of State institutions and the submission of all public powers.


Viviremos

This was the exclamative slogan of his final campaign. Insensitivity? No, subtlety. We will live, despite death. After death. Here and now or beyond, We Will Live.

That’s what it was about.

Subtlety.

The core of the discourse of he who now dilates his step toward glory has been expressed at every moment by the immortality of his project, in other words in He himself. His discourse is religious and the huge audience of his telenovela required sacrifice, passion and even death.

Right now, Chávez the heart of the people, agonizes.

Or he’s dying.

Or he’s already dead.

Or he returns ready for the altars.


The Dogma of Consubstantiation

In Venezuela the truth doesn’t exist, dogmas of faith (and speculations) exist.

The medical reports emitted by bureaucrats have to be believed as dogmas of faith (and at the same time as speculations, a portal towards another chapter of a metaphysical telenovela).

But something is rotten in that Cuban sea of happiness. A dense fog has covered the presidential entourage in the tropics, with circles corrupted by counter-information and military intelligence, geopolitics, the destiny of all the possible etceteras are mixed in the aseptic rooms of a bunker transformed into an intensive care unit. The caudillo, intubated or not, no longer belongs to himself, now he is led by his political engineers toward the consummation of his epic. The light at the end of the tunnel appears: there’s life after death. Keyword: Viviremos.

The personal project, after drinking from the cup at his Gethsemane, moves at the speed of a cruise ship amidst a Cuban Venezuelan melodrama, the avatar begins to feel the omnipresence of his new divine reality. He will suspend his life above the absence of truth hanging in limbo and when he crosses that limbo he will become a myth. He is about to create wonders. That could make him feel very happy, notes one of his scriptwriters.

It’s been hard work. Two years of diligently weaving the plot toward the consubstantiation of Chávez the son into father Bolívar: Chavismo is a religion and Chávez is the God incarnate, who will rise to sit beside the eternal Bolívar. He would have told Fidel: “Father, take this cup from me.” Oh, sorry. It was to Bolívar.

All of this seems to have been created by the mad mind of a radio soap opera scriptwriter from the nineteen-fifties, an ambitious task of political engineering insistent on the execution of fatality’s script, momentum. That’s what political intelligence is about, a naive voice from the guilty First World left might note, interpreting the momentum. Another might answer him: it’s actually a matter of consecrating the hero’s otherworldly glory.


Let’s Observe Another Subtlety:

Hugo Chávez, as always and against all logic, has borne his tragicomedy throughout the ordeal. Things seem to fit into a Holy Week soap opera where all pacts of verisimilitude have been violated. He insisted on profaning Simón Bolívar’s tomb to obtain his DNA, under the pretext of proving he died from poisoning. The only thing obtained from that, and this is crucial, was a portrait with features that made Chávez seem physically similar to the Divine Bolívar. This portrait (after death?) will have the same symbolic meaning of the cross. In that face, the lieutenant colonel comandante draws his own sign and validates his prophecy regarding his own eternity. There’s no doubt that this portrait, regardless of the outcome, will become a relic that will hang from the necks of his believers.

From the first reveilles of his revolution, his project seemed to gravitate toward the will to die in power. One life wasn’t enough to change the destiny of a people. But drawing near the end of this season of the revolutionary soap opera, things go beyond the grave, and there we see him astride the caudillista tradition of Spanish literature, The Song of My Cid, he could ride on Bolívar’s horse and inside Santa Evita’s corset: soaking up Christian eschatology.

In order to rise to heaven
You need
A big ladder and another little one

The not-dead comandante will ascend to immortality, he will be seated beside the Liberator father and will govern the earth. His kingdom was never of this world. And we can almost hear the comandante master tell his apostles: “Ramírez, Diosdado, Maduro: upon this army, this Petro-State-PDVSA and this Party, you will build my church.”

“Heaven and earth will pass, but not my words.”

Marxists have always been amazed by the virtues of scientific materialsim to establish religions, but never before have they reached this degree of maximum perfection.

In this season of the Bolivarian tragicomedy’s new chapters Chávez the miraculous will appear wandering all over the world, making the left and the mute speak in tongues; performing miracles. And we’ll be able to read post-Chávez as a Chávez who never left, who remains in the omnipresence of popular divinity. His vicars and his church will be the guardians of the process and the faith.

The dogma won’t take long to be consolidated. And Power will continue to be wielded by his ineffable spirit.

It’s a shame that many see Chávez’s illness as a fortunate punishment, a fortunate political crossroads, the possibility of regaining the paths of modernity. They forget that illness is not a punishment. And above all they forget that Hugo Chávez’s exit from the scene will not be political: it will be religious. Here, life and death do not exist. And all of this will guarantee the well-known manipulations of his “spiritual strength” for his persistence as a reality and as a myth. What’s worse: Chávez’s vicars on earth will remain intact, with the Petro-State at their feet: fascist militarism, the populist and rentier culture of the Venezuelan and a dramatic absence of institutions.


Israel Centeno is a Venezuelan writer, author of the novel Calletania (Madrid: Editorial Periférica).




{ Israel Centeno, El País, 18 February 2013 }

Venezuela posorwelista / Israel Centeno

Post-Orwellian Venezuela

A hyper analyzed reality reverberates and generates all kinds of noise; a racket with few possibilities of harmonious articulation of something true. Illness and death are common topics in our nature, but reading them within the Venezuelan context, determined by caudillismo and the tensions produced by political polarization, imposes an unscrupulous glance. The countersign remitted from the revolution’s political command seems to be, sow the speculative rumor in order to reap victories.

There exist many readings of the comandante-president’s illness. Its possible consequences and the conclusion of the condition that afflicts him, determine the log of political dialectics with the most varied of interpretations; each one seems more creative than the next; disproportionate, distant, ironic, sarcastic; all the rhetorical figures have been invoked, all the winks and the annoyance of an oscillating and recurring language used for addressing the core of the situation. What situation? What illness? What truth are we seeking? Those who follow the topic of Hugo Chávez’s sanctification navigate through all the contradictions contemplated by dialectical materialism —paradox—. They’re assaulted by an embarrassing certainty when they try to answer the anxieties expressed in the questions everyone formulates: we lack the phenomenological elements to ponder a little something: in plain Spanish, a simple pathology exam and a medical report confirmed by a doctor, in order to establish the truth. But for a while now, truth in Venezuela is a misplacement closer to morbid gossip than to facts.

The Government’s information organisms play the role of a great disinformation machine, whose only objective is to dilute and disperse any possibility of constituting an event without any ambiguities. The murder of truth is a propagandist’s first objective; to plant ideas and make the masses act in accordance with the scenarios prefigured by the political —religious?— operators, an end. The Ministry of Popular Power for Communication and Information thus ends up becoming the Ministry of Popular Power for Disinformation and Propaganda.

The strategic, or dramatic, line seems to be to raise the volume on the suffering, agony and probable death of the comandante president, mixing the different layers of reality manipulated by the Government’s immense propaganda infrastructure, employing the vicious totalitarian habits used by other experiences towards the end of preserving power for the faith of the parishioners and even for those who call themselves heretics; to create Chinese shadows, marvels, melodramas and above all blending until homogenization an awaited product that has been worked and desired by the Chavista status quo. The use and abuse of television, radio, mandatory national broadcasts, communicational guerrillas, civic-military concentrations and the dramatic exposition of the contradictions among the spokesmen of The Party in the social media, all of this has a predictable political-religious end very far removed from the expected informative function.

An autocratic government that has become the owner of all the institutions of the State does not inform, does not speak the truth; no one in its milieu enjoys the liberty of expressing himself spontaneously; moreover, the disappearance and the rumors about the illness, death and possible resurrection of the leader, though they might seem like a paranoid hyperbole by Orwell, are manipulated by the leader from whatever limbo he might find himself in today, now and always. Augmenting the static and the versions to be found regarding an event serves a single purpose: to contaminate, as is the custom, any situation that might be moderately acceptable. And its objective is to displace the national interest toward wherever might be deemed necessary and convenient by the revolution, the new Church, and the vicars of Chávez on earth.


Israel Centeno is a Venezuelan writer, author of the novel Calletania (Madrid: Editorial Periférica).




{ Israel Centeno, El País, 14 January 2013 }

Lorenzo García Vega ya duerme en Playa Albina / Edgardo Dobry

Lorenzo García Vega Now Sleeps in Playa Albina

(Photo: Gorka Lejarcegi)

There are those who actually believed a place called Playa Albina actually existed, as Lorenzo García Vega indefectibly called Miami, where he lived for many years as an exile; he had been born in 1926 in Jagüey Grande, Cuba, and he has just died in Florida’s Metropolitan Hospital. He was the youngest member of the Orígenes group, based in the Havana of the 1940s around José Lezama Lima and the magazine of the same name; in Los años de Orígenes (Caracas, Monte Ávila; 1978-Buenos Aires, Bajo la Luna, 2007) García Vega tells of how he met the “Master”: “I was in the backroom of a bookstore and a spectator said to me: Kid, read Proust! It was Lezama Lima.”

But Los años de Orígenes is far from being the typical memoir glorifying the author and his mentors. As with everything García Vega wrote, it’s difficult to define, almost impossible to gloss and because of that an extraordinarily read, very intelligent and free from all complacency —with the world and with himself— since, who was he going to be afraid of and who was the man who had invented Playa Albina going to ingratiate himself with, that place where everything, even desolation, was almost impalpable? Los años de Orígenes was a critical exercise of personal and collective memory, of a bitter humor, in which García Vega manifests his admiration and gratitude towards Lezama, but also his intolerance towards the Catholic whiff of a good part of the group that surrounded him; the rejection of the construction of the Lezama myth, sustained in good measure by writers and critics who never knew him and yet established a thesis regarding the relation between the poet’s asthma and his punctuation; the biting critique of the foundation and ceremonial of Neo-Baroque Havana-Parisian rituals commanded by Severo Sarduy, “Severo also a living marble flower”; in the end, the chronicle (veiled, like an omnipresent perfume) of the difficult situation of those who, after Castro’s revolution, left Cuba to never return again: with all the penury of the exile and, on top of that, without the least bit of solidarity from the Latin American intellectual system, nearly all of it committed to Castro, what he would call “the opportunistic purity of the farcical Latin American left.”

In a quiet, fragmentary way, full of self-irony and implicit laughter, García Vega built the alternative to revolutionary, Neo-Baroque or post-structuralist tropicalism and its carnavals with more or less fortunate adjectives. No mueras sin laberinto, El oficio de peder, Cuerdas para Aleister and Devastación del hotel San Luis are some of the García Vega’s books, almost always written in what we could call poetic prose if we admit here that “poetic” has nothing to do with sentimentalism, coloratura, the magic of instants or the sublime epiphany: “I have just visited the grave of a friend who recently died, in Chacarita, and it makes me desperate to understand that the dead will always be lying down,” he wrote in Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto, which his friend the poet Elsa López published last year in Ediciones La Palma; and also: “A sad reality of this Playa Albina where I live. Drums, knick-knacks. What in the end doesn’t sound, even after one spends the day playing the drum.” Playing the drum: writing the poem; persisting in what’s useless and even in what’s absurd as a —unique— form of survival. To create a self-portrait under the figure of one more piece of rubble from the century’s deliriums of greatness and their illuminated guides.

And yet a good portion of the best Cuban poetry wouldn’t be the same, wouldn’t be as good, without Lorenzo: we see it in Antonio José Ponte, in Rolando Sánchez Mejías, in Idalia Morejón, in Rogelio Saunders, in Pedro Marqués de Armas. Because that absurdity of life and of the story from which García Vega brings to fruition in his Playa Albina isn’t far from the tragicomic contortions of Beckett’s characters, or from the meticulous self-destruction of Bernhard’s protagonists, to mention two authors he admired. That is, the assumption of the great Cuban inheritance in poetry but with that unexpected, extemporaneous or unseasonable torsion of Lorenzo’s bitterness, that reduces the sweet aftertaste of Baroque styles that boomed for so many years into prestigious fine dust. In his final book, Palíndromo en otra cerradura, homenaje a Duchamp (Barcelona, Barataria, 2011), he wrote: “I maintain myself without naming myself. For how long? It’s a face that is nothing, a whiteness of the dry. Its lights —it’s a plane— pass over the night. It’s also like a rare stamp. It’s very curious.” Very curious, yes: like his fate, which is partly our own, that of his readers; and like his death now.




{ Edgardo Dobry, El País, 2 June 2012 }

Sin título / Rafael Cadenas

Untitled

The poem in order to care for poetry

Shouldn’t seem like a poem

I don’t seek perfection but truth

It interests me even though I don’t know it

And I struggle to make it known

Hopefully it’ll turn up in my folders

Respectable listeners don’t be alarmed:

You know so well how to hide your head




Translator’s note: Poem in honor of Nicanor Parra being awarded the Cervantes Prize in Spain.




{ Rafael Cadenas, El País, 22 April 2012 }

Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto / Edgardo Dobry

Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto

Poetry. Lorenzo García Vega (Jagüey Grande, Cuba, 1926) was the youngest member of the group led by José Lezama in the Havana of the fifties, an experience to which he gave testimony in Los años de Orígenes (1997, published a second time in Buenos Aires in 2007). A book completely removed from self-serving memories and the trickle of prestigious names: García Vega speaks there of the “baroque boogie,” of “the lie of the French,” of “the opportunistic firmness of the farcical Latin American left.” Since, residing in Miami (which he indefectibly calls “Playa Albina”) for forty years now, he had to endure the unconditional support for the Cuban revolution, that condemned the true exiles of that Latin American chimera to ostracism; and the profuse mythology surrounding Lezama and the Orígenes group, against which he took revenge in that book. At once heir to this last resplendence of great Cuban poetry and marginalized, alone, without a tribune, a press or a professorship, García Vega wrote a series of desolate and funny poems, without pity or vain commiseration. Closer to Samuel Beckett’s convulsions of pain and laughter than to any neo-baroque rhetoric in use, there we have extraordinary, extremely unique books that have been published lately: El oficio de perder, No mueras sin laberinto, Devastación del Hotel San Luis. At eighty-five García Vega publishes this book made up of two blocks –Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto–, in a hybrid genre of prose poem, a sketch of chronicles of the void, fragmentary reflection removed from all systems. To the marginality of the exiled poet, of the man stripped of his destiny without receiving anything in return, sharply disillusioned of any fantasy of redemption (for him, for the world), he now adds the resentment of old age, received like a jovial mask: “Sitting at the living room sofa, at five in the afternoon –I didn’t do anything else (if before five in the afternoon you can say I did anything).” Or this: “A sad reality of this Playa Albina where I live. Drums, knick-knacks. What finally makes no noise, even if one spends the day playing the drum.” Play the drum: write the poem. Nietzsche said: “Nihilism is a type of idleness.” But a form of humanism persists in desolation, in the uncomfortable laugh, in the histrionic astonishment of true pain. If you want to know what forms truly contemporary poetry seeks in our language it is impossible not to read Lorenzo García Vega.


Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto
Lorenzo García Vega
Ediciones La Palma, 2011
284 pages. 13 euros




{ Edgardo Dobry, Babelia, El País, 10 September 2011 }

Ante “la diosa ambarina” / Antonio Puente

Facing “the Amber Goddess”

“I already knew that coming to Europe this time of year wouldn’t guarantee anything,” he said to break the ice, glancing at the untimely whirlwind outside the large window of his humble room in Madrid. “Well, like any other time of year and any other place,” he concluded, with his proverbial causticity, the fist at the mouth of great shy people and, as in a cubist frame, on his lean Indian face, his piercing and astonished obsidian eyes. Emilio Adolfo Westphalen –whose death occurred a decade ago on August 17th, and his birth a hundred years ago in July– at the time was already more than an octogenarian; but only the publication, a few years ago, of his brief collected poems, Bajo las zarpas de la quimera (Alianza, 1991) –a clinical title, like the eye of his poetics, since it speaks simultaneously of finding oneself under the claws of the chimera and of how depressed one emerges from it– would make him emerge from his condition of enormous secret poet.

After his resplendent books of youth, Las ínsulas extrañas (1933) and Abolición de la muerte (1935), surreal and magmatic, he kept silence for more than forty years, to come back with a laconic and hermetic poetry by which to register the subsidiary character –no more than an “astonished somnambulist” subjected to the whims of the “the amber goddess”– granted by the poet’s task. A succession of epitaphs, ludic and incredulous, chiseled by a senile boy, he composes his books of old age –above all Belleza de una espada clavada en la lengua (1980) and Ha vuelto la Diosa Ambarina (1988)–; at times, as expressive as the mortal simile of this sudden railroad stop: “The train has stopped in the opaque and echoless silence of the anonymous night. It is the arrival at the terminus –there will be no resumption of agitation, noise or anxiety.” And, on occasion, with a point of redemption regarding his complete skepticism and condolence regarding human relations: “Irreconcilably linked / At the edge of desperation / Exchanging business cards.”

Why the great analogical blackout in the intermittence of his poetry? “I would say it left in a fortuitous manner because of perhaps necessary circumstances, and it reappeared afterward in a necessary manner because of fortuitous circumstances,” he answered my question, incorrigible, while, outside, the rain has remitted from the overflow that he himself tended to use in the poetry of his youth, and acquired the sober preventative rhythm he gives it in his old age; thus, in “Error de cálculo”: “The sea has slipped in the poem as in its cave or natural shelter without taking into account the difference of proportions. When the seams give in under the weight, where will all the accumulated bluegreen end up draining?” A retaining wall and, along the way, an affectionate and melancholic palinode regarding the delusions of grandeur of the youthful poet, are promoted by his later poetry. Tightens the saddlebags of he who cannot be anything more than a humble carrier of a “pocket apocalypse”; whose task does not go beyond “underlining emptiness.” This is why he abhored (at that point he did speak at length, when it stopped raining and the summer sun filtered through his bathrobe) the “kettle drums of rhetoric,” and sustained that “erudition is the poet’s main enemy.”

Facing poetry’s exclusive domain, the poet prays: “I am not –I will never be anything but an astonished somnambulist facing the dreadful Beauty of the Amber Goddess.
Nothing exists –nothing can exist beyond the Amber Goddess and her Beauty of a dazzling and lethal Medusa.” What’s more, the poem always comes up short when it faces that omnipotence of poetry: “What might the poem be if not a castle demolished before it is erected / Innocuous work of the diligent scribe or poetaster?”

In the beauty of the Amber Goddess (supreme face of Fate) the nimbus of death and the judgment of the woman-child coincide. The old poet from Lima confesses: “Sudden and irresistible desire to bite juicy coralline damp lips –to deliberately sink (but strongly –but implacably) my teeth in a half opened mouth (...) Hallucinating rite –but an instant more lived than any image plucked from oblivion.” And he soon notices that amber has appeared with the spontaneity of a gang of adolescents “with nubile bodies and minuscule breasts,” who, by merely jumping rope, take him to the agonized awareness: “Why would it always be tender girls who would mark him with the terrible iron of amorous anguish and dissatisfaction?” In compensation, Westphalen sends into the wind the most camouflaged and imperishable epitaph one might imagine: “To aspire to become those fallen leaves that burn in the pupils of certain mulatto girls.”

Antonio Puente (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1961) is a writer, journalist and literary critic. His latest publications are the poetry collections Agua por señas and Sofá de arena (Ediciones Idea).




{ Antonio Puente, Babelia, El País, 27 August 2011 }

Chávez y el nuevo arte del melodrama / Israel Centeno

Chávez and the New Art of Melodrama

The president’s cancer is the theme of the latest chapter of the great Bolivarian soap opera where nothing’s missing: the trip to Cuba; truth and lies; chemotherapy and the caudillo’s epic battle against illness


Norberto Ceressole, probably the first media consultant and scriptwriter for the Bolivarian Revolution, profiled the media format of a neofascist venture. Once the media had been assaulted an intimate relationship would be established from the realms of power between Hugo Chávez and others through screens, newspaper headlines and the then-incipient Internet; the emotional tie between caudillo, Armed Forces and the people would be created. The lieutenant colonel, star of two bloody military disturbances and a successful electoral process, would assume the direction and acting of an epic telenovela.

The episodes have been innumerable. In just a decade 1,995 obligatory TV and radio broadcasts have been transmitted. The Venezuelan revolution didn’t have a triumphal entry into Caracas nor did it assault the Romanov’s Winter Palace. From the start the populist exploit was expressed live and direct in an open studio and set up for the broadcast of an eternal spectacle; scene after scene. The Pretty Revolution wins ratings and livens the melodramatic dialectic between individuals, political parties, religious believers, media owners, business executives, heads of State, housewives, military personnel, Hollywood actors and directors –Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Danny Glover, etcetera–, and with that entelechy named the people. There’s room for everyone in what’s beginning to be called the great Bolivarian soap opera.

We could highlight some of its famous chapters: The Constituent. The Treacherous Brothers. The Coup. The Return. The Strike. You’re Fired. Military Officers in the Plaza. Fidel and the Sea of Happiness. Referendum. Fraud? Bonanza. Iran and me. It Smells Like Sulfur Here. Plebiscite.

The most recent frame is titled Cancer.

Exterior daytime: the president leaves to go on tour, he waves goodbye at the door to his plane, shakes his immense humanity before the cameras. Second frame: trip through South America. Third frame: short layover in Havana to say hello to Fidel.

Meanwhile, far from the cameras: Venezuela is immersed in a disproportionate electricity crisis, shortages. Violent crimes and prison riots.

Plot in Havana: the brief visit of a few hours turns into the disappearance of the hero. The ministers go to Havana and return to Caracas, they don’t conceal a bias of worry, someone lets the word illness escape. The Minister of Information denies the rumor in the social media: “Chávez is healthy as a horse.” This affirmation is enough for the news-centered murmur about his health to respond chaotically. Some representatives from the Government party admit it, others deny it.

The first truth: Fidel gives part of it; the president commander has had an emergency operation for a pelvic abscess. Opportunely, the word cancer is filtered out of nowhere and it bubbles through all the cracks of the national show. The atmosphere resembles a trading floor. Each person has his own diagnosis: prostrate, intestine; metastasis.

Opening of dramatic comment: official denial. The president is healthy. A medical report is demanded amidst a reactive stampede. The official realm maintains ambiguity, but lets us see a dispute for the succession. Adán, the president’s brother, calls for a fight that will transcend the electoral field; the opposition points to a vacuum of power and demands respect for the Constitution; the country founders as if nothing were happening, scarcity, insecurity, the everyday as a backdrop.

Second truth and prognosis: Fidel appears on the scene once again and sentences: Hugo Chávez has cancer and he will beat it. The exaltation is generalized, no one wants to refrain from commenting, all the media platforms are activated. The enthusiasts say that for the first time in many years the country dares to think of a reality without Chávez. The pollsters sustain that the president’s media absence will damage him irreversibly. (Aside: Venezuela burns.)

Third truth: Hugo Chávez appears. Little is left of the corpulent and enthusiastic commander. He’s lost some pounds and is gaunt. He’s wearing a tracksuit like his mentor; he admits he’s waging a battle against a terrible illness. The man who shouted Socialism or Death!, despite his circumstances points out that the slogan is life. I Will Live, We Will Live! (Unanimous compassion.)

After a brief period of uncertainty, of ups and downs in rumors, the compassionate unanimity is broken and Venezuela accuses unease regarding the sensation that Havana is the new seat of power. Fidel surprises and declares: Chávez is going to surprise Venezuelans. President Chávez arrives at Simón Bolívar Airport at dawn, he’s greeted there by a multitude of cameras and microphones, he goes to the Balcony of the People at the presidential palace where he is televised in front of the multitudes and tells his truth. In his narrative he’ll make each crucial moment of his battle for life coincide with the events of the Bicentennial of Independence, he’ll superimpose an individual system of symbols over the key points of the emancipation.

Thinner but energetic, he tells how on June 24th, day of the Battle of Carabobo, he’ll wage the battle for his life in the operation room; on July 5th, day of the signing of the declaration of independence, he manifests his need to live in power until 2031, because the revolution has barely begun. He replaces slogans and questions the color red as the only symbol of his revolution. The three phases of his recovery process coincide with the phases of the consolidation of the liberation process he leads. Like Bolívar in Pativilca he has decided to rise and conquer. The multitude shouts: Rest, President! The ministers cry, the celebration of the bicentennial of Independence begins, but the emancipation disappears as a central figure of the spectacle. The cameras focus on registering the epic military processions, the nationalist holocausts, the recreations of great moments of the homeland around the figure of a Bolívar reincarnated in the struggles of commander Hugo Chávez against his illness.

He returns to Havana to receive a dose of chemotherapy. Heroes and villains check their numbers. Upon returning he declares that Fidel told him: “Boy, you don’t have anything anymore, you’re gonna live.” (Ovation.) “I was scanned by a spectacular apparatus and not a single malignant cell was found.” (More ovations.) From that moment he takes to the media again (did he ever abandon it?). On an obligatory TV and radio broadcast of all national media he will perform his exercises, take his pills in the middle of pious litanies, display his fighting spirit attacking the unity of the opposition: he challenges imperialism, promotes the fight against sectarianism, tends bridges toward the middle class and fractures the logic of his adulators: “They’ve forced me to wear red and that’s suspicious.” The audience receives news, he’s “getting rid” of his hair. Two sequences later, he appears with his head shaved and shows off his new look for the empire.

Cancer becomes a terrible telenovela with universally high ratings.

A revolution that needs an epic reveals the difficulties of its caudillo. His fight against the oligarchy, coups, colic, the empire and now the olympic struggle against a terminal illness. The sick art of governance. The leader confuses the social I with his own self, he becomes the creator of reality. He breaks reason, breaks the pacts of verisimilitude without any consequence in his acceptance. Truth ceases to matter and what is of interest is what occurs around a suspended truth, a truth that will never be known, an indefinable, postponed truth. Hugo Chávez has added techniques to the manipulation and integration of messages: the caudillo rides the new communication platforms, fractures his audience’s frontal lobe and injects emotional suspense into the limbic zones of the collective brain.

Many chapters of the TV soap opera have yet to be lived. New sessions of chemotherapy and afternoons in Havana beside Fidel are to come; both of them will consider the staging of a glorious agony, they’ll comment on Nietzsche and caress the idea of Zarathustra’s rebirth. Before Hugo, truth was the first victim of absolute power, now he has shifted the paradigm, the end of the melodrama will no longer be the revelation of a truth but rather the acceptance of a lie. The truth will sit beneath the surface like a detail as long as there’s a scriptwriter and actor to trivialize and disperse it in thousands of farces.


Israel Centeno is a Venezuelan writer.




{ Israel Centeno, El País, 15 August 2011 }