The City that Doesn’t Flow
Caracas is a difficult city. I don’t know if it seems ugly or beautiful to me, but I do feel her as being enormously complicated. I traverse her as though I were walking on the spine of a great sleeping beast that could wake up at any moment and sink its teeth into me. It's nothing, just an intimate sensation, surely stimulated by news of robberies, murders, along with the filth installed everywhere, the unlivable traffic, the absence of public spaces where one feels at ease. And I’m not simply referring to the central and western parts of Caracas, I also have in mind the areas that are known to be clean and safe. In those areas as well, the feeling I get of passing through hostile territories remains, whether I’m in a restaurant, walking on a sidewalk or sheltered in a mall.
It is as if this city doesn’t flow, as if it has acquired the nature of a thick, muddy, unmoving reservoir, impossible to cut through and unattractive. But above all, a city where everything has a spirit of stagnation, from the heat to the newsstands, from the small buses to the bushes, from the brand name stores to the parking lots.
The oppression of certain invisible but omnipresent, hard and unmovable walls presides over all of it for me. And this is the city where I’ve lived almost my entire life, where I find my best friends, the booksellers I respect, the poets I admire and the mountain that has been fascinating to me ever since I first laid eyes on her. It is the territory of all my remembrances, of my best and worst memories, which is to say, all the ones that live with us until death.
In some way I feel harassed by her or, more precisely, seen with distrust by her thousand eyes, her façades, her broken light posts, her pedestrian zones full of holes like battle trenches, her movie theaters whose carpets exude a sticky mildew smell.
It's nothing, except that only in the refuge of my library, in the homes of a few dear friends or while glancing at new titles in a bookstore do I perceive myself inside the bubbles of that modest quotidian happiness that a city must portion out massively in order for you to feel the breath from which she continues to love you.
Caracas has ended up being a territory where it is difficult to breathe freely not only, and sometimes not fundamentally, because of the assault of crime and other related issues. It is a more profound matter, which has to do with a deteriorated, and at certain moments toxic, spiritual and psychic relationship.
And it is not that the city has suffered this involution in a spontaneous manner. It has been years, very long years, during which few people took interest in her beyond the spot where they placed their feet but had not established roots. I fear the matter already overwhelms the very possibility of urban renovations or of a functional restatement of the problems. I suppose it is an issue of reestablishing the spirit, which does exist, of this city, which governments and citizens have submerged at the bottom of a bottomless pit.
{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, TalCual, 26 February 2007 }
Showing posts with label Joaquín Marta Sosa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joaquín Marta Sosa. Show all posts
10.11.2006
Las ciudades / Joaquín Marta Sosa
Cities
I dont know if cities are also men as Oswaldo Trejo affirmed, but since long ago it unsettles me to know what remains of them for us, of the ones we've visited throughout life, which are many and some of which weren't worth exploring.
It's as though a mist, like the one surrounding the city where I am now, were taking over each one and only a few spots were saved, and I'm not referring to those tourist draws like the famous Parisian tower or the clock in London.
These move away from us in that rational place within memory between the catalogue and the habitual. Rather, I speak of those spots where we've ended up without anyone's recommendation, without heading there, but which we found, or which probably found us, and already the stay acquired a different spirit.
Sometimes it's a pensive street.
Other times a plaza behind a corner of paving stones.
Sometimes a bar, a café, a lost restaurant on the bend of a river, or a person with whom we develop a conversation.
And everything changes and that's what we're left with as an indescribable spiritual balance. It's like those novels or movies whose plot, years later, we've almost forgotten, but whose vital fragrance, whose persuasive language, whose pleasant clime, always returns us once and again whenever anyone mentions that city.
Our city within any city we visit is not in the guidebooks or in the tourism offices. That's the path everyone has trod so often it already sounds hollow, like a cold and empty cavern. The city we appropriate for ourselves, or, more accurately, which appropriates us is what we find within her of that city we all dream and which we keep building piece by piece throughout our life, thanks to no more than eight or ten encounters. How it dawns on that damp street, the rumor of bakeries on a certain morning, the Lithuanian cellist on the stairs of that subway station, the strengthening of a love that was fading, the cranes nesting in the heights of evening, that unrepeatable banquet, the conversation with a stranger who illuminated you and who you never hear from again. Such are the true and foggy signs of the cities that transform one of the deep layers of the soul. The rest is the quotidian and the same, visible, dazzling, but ashen as soon as you leave. The other goes within you and is what makes men cities as well, each one in his or her own manner.
{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, TalCual, 9 October 2006 }
I dont know if cities are also men as Oswaldo Trejo affirmed, but since long ago it unsettles me to know what remains of them for us, of the ones we've visited throughout life, which are many and some of which weren't worth exploring.
It's as though a mist, like the one surrounding the city where I am now, were taking over each one and only a few spots were saved, and I'm not referring to those tourist draws like the famous Parisian tower or the clock in London.
These move away from us in that rational place within memory between the catalogue and the habitual. Rather, I speak of those spots where we've ended up without anyone's recommendation, without heading there, but which we found, or which probably found us, and already the stay acquired a different spirit.
Sometimes it's a pensive street.
Other times a plaza behind a corner of paving stones.
Sometimes a bar, a café, a lost restaurant on the bend of a river, or a person with whom we develop a conversation.
And everything changes and that's what we're left with as an indescribable spiritual balance. It's like those novels or movies whose plot, years later, we've almost forgotten, but whose vital fragrance, whose persuasive language, whose pleasant clime, always returns us once and again whenever anyone mentions that city.
Our city within any city we visit is not in the guidebooks or in the tourism offices. That's the path everyone has trod so often it already sounds hollow, like a cold and empty cavern. The city we appropriate for ourselves, or, more accurately, which appropriates us is what we find within her of that city we all dream and which we keep building piece by piece throughout our life, thanks to no more than eight or ten encounters. How it dawns on that damp street, the rumor of bakeries on a certain morning, the Lithuanian cellist on the stairs of that subway station, the strengthening of a love that was fading, the cranes nesting in the heights of evening, that unrepeatable banquet, the conversation with a stranger who illuminated you and who you never hear from again. Such are the true and foggy signs of the cities that transform one of the deep layers of the soul. The rest is the quotidian and the same, visible, dazzling, but ashen as soon as you leave. The other goes within you and is what makes men cities as well, each one in his or her own manner.
{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, TalCual, 9 October 2006 }
2.25.2005
Estado no, estrado sí / Joaquín Marta Sosa
State No, Dais Yes
One of the curiosities of the ideology that we'll refer to, with some anxiety, as being "of the left" is its idolatry of the State. Moreover, this praise is maintained intact today, as if nothing had occurred on our planet; to the point that recently, on the occasion of a debate about the left, the right and third ways, someone affirmed that the essential difference between the authentic left and any type of reforms (all—according to this person—decadent by definition) is the central importance that the authentic left holds as a fundamental piece. A piece without which it would be impossible to embark on any type of change that deserves to be called historic. In other words, the more State we have the more revolution exists.
In this panorama, it is evident that the steps which the supporters of an historic fracture are claiming to embark upon here, these steps don't seem to be disengaged from the most rancid form of ideology from that particular branch of the left. Since in this land as well it is being said that "our first necessity" is more State, more than even the Bolivarian "lights and morals." Regardless, the classics of revolutionary thought have been clear in regards to their understanding of the goals of history: it is about accomplishing the State's disappearance and eventual irrelevance, thanks to the birth of the "new man." Almost all the traditions associated with the aforementioned political movements have coincided in this idea. And the first item that history struggles to reproach us with is that there is no way to make something disappear if one embarks upon the path of strengthening that thing, which obviously holds true for the State. What's more, in all the cases where "leftism" successfully accomplishes its take-over of power, what it ends up favoring is the repressive entity of the State, as well as its subordination to instances of power that eat away at its ideas like parasites. This is the case whether the center becomes the only political party or the great leader, rather than the conjunction of its institutional measures.
The result is that one or another installs himself in a power centralized to an extreme, deforming the State with its police-military arm, which is essentially incapable of being efficient in any other function. This is a situation that is discovered when public funds become scarce and an exhausted and impossible economic model's entire skeleton creaks and falls apart. The Soviet and Chinese experiences are there to corroborate this fact. Neither a new institutionality nor a new society emerged from these two cases. Instead, the results were very predictable and even prematurely aged. Thus, the notion that the strengthening of the State is the mother of all priorities for an "authentic revolutionary" can only result in an insatiable stolidness when it comes time for reading the paths that history has taken.
So then, in Venezuela we have arrived at the second act of the same and aforementioned play. On the one hand, the functions and reaches of the State are amplified to the point of exasperation, including the worst of its roles, arbitrariness, since its essence is the power of fire, intimidation and repression.
And parallel to this situation, what truly fattens is omnipotent power based on the cult of personality of the great leader, through whose hands everything must pass and in whose arms lie any final decisions, whether in relation to trivial or transcendent matters. In this way, a State overburdened with tasks and, while its leader does not act, overburdened by paralysis ends up sinking without remission. That is to say, what we witness in actuality is its pronounced weakening, its dismantling which opens a space for vanity and the "At your command, sir." All of which are tenacious dissolvents of any attempt to build up a State.
So then, where do we stand? If a historical transformation requires a State with unbreakable strengths, why is it that the only thing being raised is the subordination to a cult of personality and servile loyalty? Why is it that, under the slogan "We need plenty of State for as much revolution as the masses want," what is being installed is a State that is so anemic that it serves neither a revolution nor any change whatsoever? Why is it that, instead, this anemic State is at the command of an arbitrary power that has invaded what little was left of the State, while it is cheapened and demolished? Our leaders dance within a paradox that is neither involuntary nor innocent. A dance for those who argue in favor of a powerful State while they unreasonably asphyxiate it within the convoluted infallibility of the great leader. A leader for whom the purpose of the State is reduced to being a dais from which he can pontificate without any moderation whatsoever.
When the curtain falls, Venezuela will be worse off than Spain: Franco's regime at least left behind a solid State. These national mandarins of ours, on the other hand, will leave us with a State so corroded that it won't even have enough money for its own funeral.
{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, El Nacional, 24 February 2005 }
One of the curiosities of the ideology that we'll refer to, with some anxiety, as being "of the left" is its idolatry of the State. Moreover, this praise is maintained intact today, as if nothing had occurred on our planet; to the point that recently, on the occasion of a debate about the left, the right and third ways, someone affirmed that the essential difference between the authentic left and any type of reforms (all—according to this person—decadent by definition) is the central importance that the authentic left holds as a fundamental piece. A piece without which it would be impossible to embark on any type of change that deserves to be called historic. In other words, the more State we have the more revolution exists.
In this panorama, it is evident that the steps which the supporters of an historic fracture are claiming to embark upon here, these steps don't seem to be disengaged from the most rancid form of ideology from that particular branch of the left. Since in this land as well it is being said that "our first necessity" is more State, more than even the Bolivarian "lights and morals." Regardless, the classics of revolutionary thought have been clear in regards to their understanding of the goals of history: it is about accomplishing the State's disappearance and eventual irrelevance, thanks to the birth of the "new man." Almost all the traditions associated with the aforementioned political movements have coincided in this idea. And the first item that history struggles to reproach us with is that there is no way to make something disappear if one embarks upon the path of strengthening that thing, which obviously holds true for the State. What's more, in all the cases where "leftism" successfully accomplishes its take-over of power, what it ends up favoring is the repressive entity of the State, as well as its subordination to instances of power that eat away at its ideas like parasites. This is the case whether the center becomes the only political party or the great leader, rather than the conjunction of its institutional measures.
The result is that one or another installs himself in a power centralized to an extreme, deforming the State with its police-military arm, which is essentially incapable of being efficient in any other function. This is a situation that is discovered when public funds become scarce and an exhausted and impossible economic model's entire skeleton creaks and falls apart. The Soviet and Chinese experiences are there to corroborate this fact. Neither a new institutionality nor a new society emerged from these two cases. Instead, the results were very predictable and even prematurely aged. Thus, the notion that the strengthening of the State is the mother of all priorities for an "authentic revolutionary" can only result in an insatiable stolidness when it comes time for reading the paths that history has taken.
So then, in Venezuela we have arrived at the second act of the same and aforementioned play. On the one hand, the functions and reaches of the State are amplified to the point of exasperation, including the worst of its roles, arbitrariness, since its essence is the power of fire, intimidation and repression.
And parallel to this situation, what truly fattens is omnipotent power based on the cult of personality of the great leader, through whose hands everything must pass and in whose arms lie any final decisions, whether in relation to trivial or transcendent matters. In this way, a State overburdened with tasks and, while its leader does not act, overburdened by paralysis ends up sinking without remission. That is to say, what we witness in actuality is its pronounced weakening, its dismantling which opens a space for vanity and the "At your command, sir." All of which are tenacious dissolvents of any attempt to build up a State.
So then, where do we stand? If a historical transformation requires a State with unbreakable strengths, why is it that the only thing being raised is the subordination to a cult of personality and servile loyalty? Why is it that, under the slogan "We need plenty of State for as much revolution as the masses want," what is being installed is a State that is so anemic that it serves neither a revolution nor any change whatsoever? Why is it that, instead, this anemic State is at the command of an arbitrary power that has invaded what little was left of the State, while it is cheapened and demolished? Our leaders dance within a paradox that is neither involuntary nor innocent. A dance for those who argue in favor of a powerful State while they unreasonably asphyxiate it within the convoluted infallibility of the great leader. A leader for whom the purpose of the State is reduced to being a dais from which he can pontificate without any moderation whatsoever.
When the curtain falls, Venezuela will be worse off than Spain: Franco's regime at least left behind a solid State. These national mandarins of ours, on the other hand, will leave us with a State so corroded that it won't even have enough money for its own funeral.
{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, El Nacional, 24 February 2005 }
10.29.2004
¿Entre dos fraudes? / Joaquín Marta Sosa
Between Two Frauds?
My friend writes to me perplexed.
He belongs to the left, in a way that doesn't allow any breach except for those friendships that are able to overcome the years and all distances.
He tells me in his letter: "The last great news I received was of the Venezuelan President's ratification. It seemed to me that with that act the left had gained a new and refurbished impulse.
Kerry, who should win in November, will understand this and he'll act with the prudence Bush has lacked, so as to see that Venezuela places itself once again at the vanguard of renewal and of the high leap over the conservative and retrograde walls that try to drown the Democratic candidate. But I just finished reading a long essay by Gabriel Jackson, an elegant leftist, regardless of what he writes about, a historical analyst celebrated like few are, as you know, because of his work on the Spanish civil war.
"The confusions I'm mired in are caused by that political and historical portrait that Jackson paints of the current American President, whose features are surprisingly similar to the descriptions of the Venezuelan President provided by anyone from the opposition. Let me get to the point.
Bush pulled his presidency out of the sleeve of an electoral fraud, which those responsible for denouncing, with all of its consequences, preferred to tip toe around. Because Americans would not be able to withstand such a blatant similarity to the most extreme Third World country ruled by the most stubborn of caudillos.
But no matter how you look at it, we have a President cooked up in the oven of an illegal operation of vote tallies. And now I'm reading a series of arguments about the lack of legal checks and balances in your referendum that is so long, that I'm starting to think that your President and ours might be fulfilling that saying that the biggest similarities exist between those who seem to be radically different from one another.
"But what's more, as I follow our election I realize that Bush's personality seems to coincide quite well with the deep-rooted desires of the average American, assailed as he feels by forces beyond his control and understanding. He's a President that creates out of himself an image of authority that's above the law, with a simplistic and direct discourse, that resorts to the most basic form of patriotism and to a fundamentalist religious redemption. Despite his poor performance and the fact that, according to Jackson, "he is the most incompetent President in the history if the United States," he still has an enormous chance of getting re-elected. The worst thing that could happen to us is for a fraudulent President to end up being electorally legitimized four years later, with an infamous track record but engorged with patriotism and promises for a strong hand in all matters, with no regard to what the laws or international institutions might decree. I've read the very same things about the Venezuelan President, who directs a very bad government which is nonetheless grandiloquent and patriotic in its rhetoric. Of course, I didn't pick up on these points earlier because his government had several decades of right-wing administrations behind it. But it seems to me that it's time for him to prove that a leftist government is good, not because it's on the left but because it governs better than a right-wing government. A government that does its job without sermons at the foot of statues that others topple (as I recently heard about), and without covering itself beneath the suspicious blanket of the past or beneath distinguished historical dates.
"One last thing. As you know, Bush and the entire horde of allies who sustain him use intimidation, they distill fear over all of us, they want to situate us within terror's region in order to easily subjugate us. And they don't merely disseminate and amplify the threats of terrorism. They also threaten us with trials, with laws, with applying repressions never seen before and with the surveillance of each person and each family's privacy.
I read that in Venezuela intimidation seems to be prevalent, that there are new political prisioners and exiles and that a new law curtailing free speech is about to be approved, as in any anti-democratic regime. All of this seems to be just as right-wing and reactionary as my own government's conduct. Is it true what our press is reporting about events in Venezuela, or are these lies? Because if they reflect the reality in any way, I tell you we could exchange Presidents without anyone noticing.
To end this, now Carter has denounced that in Florida, a state that could be crucial in the presidential election, they have excluded almost one hundred thousand people from the electoral registry, between Blacks and Latinos who are suspected of being leftists, and that the voting machines are not completely trustworthy.
I ask myself if we might be facing another fraud."
I was only able to answer: We too might be asking ourselves that same question within a few days.
{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, El Nacional, 28 October 2004 }
My friend writes to me perplexed.
He belongs to the left, in a way that doesn't allow any breach except for those friendships that are able to overcome the years and all distances.
He tells me in his letter: "The last great news I received was of the Venezuelan President's ratification. It seemed to me that with that act the left had gained a new and refurbished impulse.
Kerry, who should win in November, will understand this and he'll act with the prudence Bush has lacked, so as to see that Venezuela places itself once again at the vanguard of renewal and of the high leap over the conservative and retrograde walls that try to drown the Democratic candidate. But I just finished reading a long essay by Gabriel Jackson, an elegant leftist, regardless of what he writes about, a historical analyst celebrated like few are, as you know, because of his work on the Spanish civil war.
"The confusions I'm mired in are caused by that political and historical portrait that Jackson paints of the current American President, whose features are surprisingly similar to the descriptions of the Venezuelan President provided by anyone from the opposition. Let me get to the point.
Bush pulled his presidency out of the sleeve of an electoral fraud, which those responsible for denouncing, with all of its consequences, preferred to tip toe around. Because Americans would not be able to withstand such a blatant similarity to the most extreme Third World country ruled by the most stubborn of caudillos.
But no matter how you look at it, we have a President cooked up in the oven of an illegal operation of vote tallies. And now I'm reading a series of arguments about the lack of legal checks and balances in your referendum that is so long, that I'm starting to think that your President and ours might be fulfilling that saying that the biggest similarities exist between those who seem to be radically different from one another.
"But what's more, as I follow our election I realize that Bush's personality seems to coincide quite well with the deep-rooted desires of the average American, assailed as he feels by forces beyond his control and understanding. He's a President that creates out of himself an image of authority that's above the law, with a simplistic and direct discourse, that resorts to the most basic form of patriotism and to a fundamentalist religious redemption. Despite his poor performance and the fact that, according to Jackson, "he is the most incompetent President in the history if the United States," he still has an enormous chance of getting re-elected. The worst thing that could happen to us is for a fraudulent President to end up being electorally legitimized four years later, with an infamous track record but engorged with patriotism and promises for a strong hand in all matters, with no regard to what the laws or international institutions might decree. I've read the very same things about the Venezuelan President, who directs a very bad government which is nonetheless grandiloquent and patriotic in its rhetoric. Of course, I didn't pick up on these points earlier because his government had several decades of right-wing administrations behind it. But it seems to me that it's time for him to prove that a leftist government is good, not because it's on the left but because it governs better than a right-wing government. A government that does its job without sermons at the foot of statues that others topple (as I recently heard about), and without covering itself beneath the suspicious blanket of the past or beneath distinguished historical dates.
"One last thing. As you know, Bush and the entire horde of allies who sustain him use intimidation, they distill fear over all of us, they want to situate us within terror's region in order to easily subjugate us. And they don't merely disseminate and amplify the threats of terrorism. They also threaten us with trials, with laws, with applying repressions never seen before and with the surveillance of each person and each family's privacy.
I read that in Venezuela intimidation seems to be prevalent, that there are new political prisioners and exiles and that a new law curtailing free speech is about to be approved, as in any anti-democratic regime. All of this seems to be just as right-wing and reactionary as my own government's conduct. Is it true what our press is reporting about events in Venezuela, or are these lies? Because if they reflect the reality in any way, I tell you we could exchange Presidents without anyone noticing.
To end this, now Carter has denounced that in Florida, a state that could be crucial in the presidential election, they have excluded almost one hundred thousand people from the electoral registry, between Blacks and Latinos who are suspected of being leftists, and that the voting machines are not completely trustworthy.
I ask myself if we might be facing another fraud."
I was only able to answer: We too might be asking ourselves that same question within a few days.
{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, El Nacional, 28 October 2004 }
9.14.2004
Que no cesen las gotas de agua / Joaquín Marta Sosa
May the Drops of Water Remain Incessant
It isn’t easy to write with the persistent sensation that something, somewhere, has been stolen from you. But one has to continue because important things, which can never be taken from you, remain. For instance, that enormous social force that has proceeded to build itself throughout recent years, gaining momentum first with protests and now with the vehement necessity of reserving an alternative for the future. Because if anything has remained far from any hesitation, it has been the enormous weight of underdevelopment that trails the confirmed leader.
This was evident in the obscene and arbitrary use of all aspects of power throughout the recent referendum campaign, thanks to his mugging of state funds. This was manifested in the opportunistic and sectarian use of institutions, goods and accomplices.
It acquired a pathetic profile with the circumstantial invention of missions and missionaries, which in almost every case have been torrents of public funds whose highest percentage ends up in the pockets of a few, and rarely, except for the illusions of the desperate, among the necessities of the majority.
It is about the reverse represented in the private use of public powers, in other words, for sectarian ends; in the vampiristic use of public institutions which have gone from failing to becoming scarecrows; in the appropriation of the urgencies of the poor in order to give them bread crumbs with the hope that tomorrow they will become diamonds.
Such nature acquires shades of horror within its most extreme groups, who make aggression their preferred weapon. As if democracy had not been invented centuries ago to prevent people from murdering with that thief’s privilege, into which the demented defense of a political position has degenerated for some.
And it is about, no more and no less, resisting against that chain that intends to make us travel through an impossible time tunnel until we go as far back as possible. All in the name of the wretched of the earth, whom he dedicates himself to making more and more wretched while patting their backs and dedicating some discourse to them from above regarding their “dignity so often dishonored.” A dignity that is reduced to trills and sweet words from a balcony, while little is done to transform it into the right to grow in freedom, autonomy and a true quality of life.
Nothing new, then. All of it with an unbearable smell of mold and catacombs. But in the end, amid a series of advantages and arbitrary rules reminiscent of the worst slave master ways, he has been ratified. OK.
The road which has brought him and which has brought us up to this moment doesn't close at that curve on an August Sunday. He will continue to open it with his populist rake and with the idiotic cult of personality. We have to continue to open it with optimism, tenacity and a spirit open to times that have already become others, and not precisely thanks to the ratified, but instead, against his profoundly reactionary nature.
The road of the hundreds of thousands who have marked streets and highways and of the millions who have voted fearlessly for his removal, this road continues to demand of us that we go forth with our task firmly and democratically, without concessions to doubt or skepticism. Because, at the core, nothing is harder to knock down and nothing is easier to defeat than those who nourish their lights with anachronous winds that stir up the caverns. They nourish themselves off that which is already dead, off that which is capable of frightening or seducing but never inspiring.
Difficult times will likely haunt us. His model has no secrets: after each step he believes he has progressed, offers of reconciliation and humility rain down on us. In the end these offers are more volatile than smoke and more deceitful than promises of a paradise on earth. What actually returns, with sordid regularity, is the enraged intimidator, the harsh answer hovering over the disobedient, the relapse of denying everything possible from the dissident. And what he uses as his source of permanence is the despair and resignation of those who wander near the temptation of considering him undefeatable. Neither he nor anyone else is undefeatable. They pretend to change history and what happens is that history finishes them.
Insistent drops of water, falling on the same point of the pedestal, stubborn, until piercing through stone. Nothing is stronger that the weakness of water when its current flows incessantly, day and night. The small drops of water are the big ones, the true change-makers: when they join together they acquire the consistency of the unstoppable.
{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, El Nacional, 19 August 2004 }
It isn’t easy to write with the persistent sensation that something, somewhere, has been stolen from you. But one has to continue because important things, which can never be taken from you, remain. For instance, that enormous social force that has proceeded to build itself throughout recent years, gaining momentum first with protests and now with the vehement necessity of reserving an alternative for the future. Because if anything has remained far from any hesitation, it has been the enormous weight of underdevelopment that trails the confirmed leader.
This was evident in the obscene and arbitrary use of all aspects of power throughout the recent referendum campaign, thanks to his mugging of state funds. This was manifested in the opportunistic and sectarian use of institutions, goods and accomplices.
It acquired a pathetic profile with the circumstantial invention of missions and missionaries, which in almost every case have been torrents of public funds whose highest percentage ends up in the pockets of a few, and rarely, except for the illusions of the desperate, among the necessities of the majority.
It is about the reverse represented in the private use of public powers, in other words, for sectarian ends; in the vampiristic use of public institutions which have gone from failing to becoming scarecrows; in the appropriation of the urgencies of the poor in order to give them bread crumbs with the hope that tomorrow they will become diamonds.
Such nature acquires shades of horror within its most extreme groups, who make aggression their preferred weapon. As if democracy had not been invented centuries ago to prevent people from murdering with that thief’s privilege, into which the demented defense of a political position has degenerated for some.
And it is about, no more and no less, resisting against that chain that intends to make us travel through an impossible time tunnel until we go as far back as possible. All in the name of the wretched of the earth, whom he dedicates himself to making more and more wretched while patting their backs and dedicating some discourse to them from above regarding their “dignity so often dishonored.” A dignity that is reduced to trills and sweet words from a balcony, while little is done to transform it into the right to grow in freedom, autonomy and a true quality of life.
Nothing new, then. All of it with an unbearable smell of mold and catacombs. But in the end, amid a series of advantages and arbitrary rules reminiscent of the worst slave master ways, he has been ratified. OK.
The road which has brought him and which has brought us up to this moment doesn't close at that curve on an August Sunday. He will continue to open it with his populist rake and with the idiotic cult of personality. We have to continue to open it with optimism, tenacity and a spirit open to times that have already become others, and not precisely thanks to the ratified, but instead, against his profoundly reactionary nature.
The road of the hundreds of thousands who have marked streets and highways and of the millions who have voted fearlessly for his removal, this road continues to demand of us that we go forth with our task firmly and democratically, without concessions to doubt or skepticism. Because, at the core, nothing is harder to knock down and nothing is easier to defeat than those who nourish their lights with anachronous winds that stir up the caverns. They nourish themselves off that which is already dead, off that which is capable of frightening or seducing but never inspiring.
Difficult times will likely haunt us. His model has no secrets: after each step he believes he has progressed, offers of reconciliation and humility rain down on us. In the end these offers are more volatile than smoke and more deceitful than promises of a paradise on earth. What actually returns, with sordid regularity, is the enraged intimidator, the harsh answer hovering over the disobedient, the relapse of denying everything possible from the dissident. And what he uses as his source of permanence is the despair and resignation of those who wander near the temptation of considering him undefeatable. Neither he nor anyone else is undefeatable. They pretend to change history and what happens is that history finishes them.
Insistent drops of water, falling on the same point of the pedestal, stubborn, until piercing through stone. Nothing is stronger that the weakness of water when its current flows incessantly, day and night. The small drops of water are the big ones, the true change-makers: when they join together they acquire the consistency of the unstoppable.
{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, El Nacional, 19 August 2004 }
4.02.2004
Los poetas no fueron a Turiaca / Joaquín Marta Sosa
The Poets Did Not Visit Turiaca
More than twenty years have passed (twenty years is a long time, no matter what the tango might say) and the poet is slightly stooped, his legs give the impression they can barely support his body. But he remains the same self-absorbed person, affectionate in flashes, who listens to me as though he were scrutinizing each word with his serene eyes somewhat dimmed.
I tell him about Juan Carlos Zambrano, who was broken to pieces at a military camp, Turiaca, and in whose stomach the forensic doctors found human hair drenched in a kilogram of shit. I remind him that the same thing happened in his country and that it's always for the same reason, the regime's precarious loss of support.
"But the United States is conspiring here against the government," he tells me. "We're both too old," I allege, "to go around claiming the United States as the only reason for defending any government at random. I don't care what the American government thinks or plans in regards to Venezuela." He is not going to dictate my political morals, nor is he going to mark me along the line separating the acceptable from the detestable. "That argument," we look each other in the eyes, "already smells stale. One supports or opposes a government because of its actions, not because of the friends or enemies it might have."
"But the media," he replies, "are all in the opposition and they attack relentlessly."
"As they did with all the other administrations," I underline for him. "To a large degree, the media were responsible for the legitimization of the chavista coup against an administration that, like the current one, was democratically elected. And several very important newspapers and journalists were truly aligned with chavismo throughout its campaign for the presidency. And they tolerated the closure of Congress, the violation of the Constitution in place at the time, all within the pretext that only he could end the corruption and poverty caused by the political parties.
Corruption today is infinitely higher, and in regards to the political parties his own has been substituted by an appoint-ocracy. It's an old form of excessive and anti-democratic caudillismo, from which we've heard varied and horrible news throughout our national experience."
The poet looks at me, he remains silent. And I know that it's not that he agrees with me but that, instead, it must feel inappropriate to contradict me. After all, we haven't seen each other in twenty years. "And yet," he points out, "he has plenty of popular support." "Yes, that has never been denied," I say, "but today the opposition has more popular support. That's why, against all promises, he resorts to trickery in order to prevent a democratic referendum. This includes the current persecution against those who signed for the convocation of a referendum. With this referendum we all have rights, just as long as we have sworn loyalty to the government. Besides," I insist, "he has done nothing but enhance the ancient heritage of corruption and mismanagement, to which he has added a grim expansion of poverty. In this regard, he only exhibits a frightening disloyalty to the will of the people who elected him. Instead of into the future from a better present, he shoves them in a forced march toward the worst elements of our past."
He stops talking. I stop talking. Someone arrives to take him to another event.
"Well," he says in parting, "take care of yourself." He walks away between two ushers from the seemingly well-organized and efficient event. (I recommend its organizers be promoted to the highest posts in the administration, just to see if something improves, cultural affairs for instance.) The poets have been well-attended , in hotels available to very few people here. They have been generously paid, they have travelled first class.
Surely marvelous. But I wish this courtesy toward poetry were not reserved only for the faithful and for the foreigners who can be displayed like crown jewels. And I would like for a festival that aims to encompass the "world" to invite all the major Venezuelan poets, without requiring a political blood oath.
As I leave the hotel, I am thinking that the poets were not informed, nor was there a ceremony to take them out to Turiaca.
Here, the unarmed individual is murdered under orders from that military chief who has become an inaccessible darkness, thanks to the government's protection and complicity. A darkness perhaps reminiscent of Pinochet, although never of Góngora.
Meanwhile let us read Romeu, in whose caricatures someone says: "It seems odd to me when I encounter a leader who is not delusional, overbearing, ill-mannered and swollen like a globe." I don't even need to be here to know this.
Translator's note:
Joaquín Marta Sosa recently edited an anthology of Venezuelan poetry: Navegación de tres siglos (antología básica de la poesía venezolana 1826/2002), Caracas: Fundación Para La Cultura Urbana, 2003. The writer that Marta Sosa refers to in this essay is most likely the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, who was in Caracas last week to attend the Festival Mundial de Poesía. This government-funded festival and conference was organized by the poet Luis Alberto Crespo, a staunch chavista, who is the director of the Casa Nacional de las Letras Andrés Bello. Important Venezuelan poets such as Elizabeth Schön, Rafael Cadenas, Yolanda Pantin, Jacqueline Goldberg, Eugenio Montejo, and Patricia Guzmán (to name just a few) were not invited to attend the conference.
{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, El Nacional, 1 April 2004 }
More than twenty years have passed (twenty years is a long time, no matter what the tango might say) and the poet is slightly stooped, his legs give the impression they can barely support his body. But he remains the same self-absorbed person, affectionate in flashes, who listens to me as though he were scrutinizing each word with his serene eyes somewhat dimmed.
I tell him about Juan Carlos Zambrano, who was broken to pieces at a military camp, Turiaca, and in whose stomach the forensic doctors found human hair drenched in a kilogram of shit. I remind him that the same thing happened in his country and that it's always for the same reason, the regime's precarious loss of support.
"But the United States is conspiring here against the government," he tells me. "We're both too old," I allege, "to go around claiming the United States as the only reason for defending any government at random. I don't care what the American government thinks or plans in regards to Venezuela." He is not going to dictate my political morals, nor is he going to mark me along the line separating the acceptable from the detestable. "That argument," we look each other in the eyes, "already smells stale. One supports or opposes a government because of its actions, not because of the friends or enemies it might have."
"But the media," he replies, "are all in the opposition and they attack relentlessly."
"As they did with all the other administrations," I underline for him. "To a large degree, the media were responsible for the legitimization of the chavista coup against an administration that, like the current one, was democratically elected. And several very important newspapers and journalists were truly aligned with chavismo throughout its campaign for the presidency. And they tolerated the closure of Congress, the violation of the Constitution in place at the time, all within the pretext that only he could end the corruption and poverty caused by the political parties.
Corruption today is infinitely higher, and in regards to the political parties his own has been substituted by an appoint-ocracy. It's an old form of excessive and anti-democratic caudillismo, from which we've heard varied and horrible news throughout our national experience."
The poet looks at me, he remains silent. And I know that it's not that he agrees with me but that, instead, it must feel inappropriate to contradict me. After all, we haven't seen each other in twenty years. "And yet," he points out, "he has plenty of popular support." "Yes, that has never been denied," I say, "but today the opposition has more popular support. That's why, against all promises, he resorts to trickery in order to prevent a democratic referendum. This includes the current persecution against those who signed for the convocation of a referendum. With this referendum we all have rights, just as long as we have sworn loyalty to the government. Besides," I insist, "he has done nothing but enhance the ancient heritage of corruption and mismanagement, to which he has added a grim expansion of poverty. In this regard, he only exhibits a frightening disloyalty to the will of the people who elected him. Instead of into the future from a better present, he shoves them in a forced march toward the worst elements of our past."
He stops talking. I stop talking. Someone arrives to take him to another event.
"Well," he says in parting, "take care of yourself." He walks away between two ushers from the seemingly well-organized and efficient event. (I recommend its organizers be promoted to the highest posts in the administration, just to see if something improves, cultural affairs for instance.) The poets have been well-attended , in hotels available to very few people here. They have been generously paid, they have travelled first class.
Surely marvelous. But I wish this courtesy toward poetry were not reserved only for the faithful and for the foreigners who can be displayed like crown jewels. And I would like for a festival that aims to encompass the "world" to invite all the major Venezuelan poets, without requiring a political blood oath.
As I leave the hotel, I am thinking that the poets were not informed, nor was there a ceremony to take them out to Turiaca.
Here, the unarmed individual is murdered under orders from that military chief who has become an inaccessible darkness, thanks to the government's protection and complicity. A darkness perhaps reminiscent of Pinochet, although never of Góngora.
Meanwhile let us read Romeu, in whose caricatures someone says: "It seems odd to me when I encounter a leader who is not delusional, overbearing, ill-mannered and swollen like a globe." I don't even need to be here to know this.
Translator's note:
Joaquín Marta Sosa recently edited an anthology of Venezuelan poetry: Navegación de tres siglos (antología básica de la poesía venezolana 1826/2002), Caracas: Fundación Para La Cultura Urbana, 2003. The writer that Marta Sosa refers to in this essay is most likely the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, who was in Caracas last week to attend the Festival Mundial de Poesía. This government-funded festival and conference was organized by the poet Luis Alberto Crespo, a staunch chavista, who is the director of the Casa Nacional de las Letras Andrés Bello. Important Venezuelan poets such as Elizabeth Schön, Rafael Cadenas, Yolanda Pantin, Jacqueline Goldberg, Eugenio Montejo, and Patricia Guzmán (to name just a few) were not invited to attend the conference.
{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, El Nacional, 1 April 2004 }
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