Publication of AÑORANZAS / YEARNINGS: Cuban Women’s Poetry in Exile

 

If you would like to support the publication of this book, kindly support our crowdfuding effort on the indiegogo platform: 

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/book-publication-a-bilingual-anthology-of-poetry#/

Here are the details of the forthcoming publication:

AÑORANZAS / YEARNINGS: Cuban Women’s Poetry in Exile (1990-2021)

Selection, translations, notes and introduction by Indranil Chakravarty

 If you prefer to listen to a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v6E_qQllOg

I am an Indian writer and a professor of cinema who studied at the International Film School (EICTV) in Havana in the late 1980s. Over the past two years, I have been working on a book project that is purely a labour of love. It is a poetry anthology of Cuban women in exile over the past thirty years. It started as a small tribute to a few creative Cuban women whose lives I have followed over three decades but then the canvas expanded to include many other poets whom I did not know personally. It has taken me a lot of time and effort to select 105 poems by 23 poets in this collection. I have done the English translation of all the poems alongside notes and comments. However, the publication of this anthology has proved very difficult but now we have an Indian publisher with international distribution who is willing to publish provided we raise the funds to cover the basic cost of production. Hence this crowdfunding effort. 

All anthologies of Cuban poetry till date have been edited by Cubans. This anthology is a departure. It is edited and translated by a writer who is both an insider and an outsider, thus bringing a fresh perspective, perhaps a simultaneous critical distance and emotional connection for readers beyond the ambit of Cuba and Latin America. Its two time-markers are 1990 (the beginning of its ‘Periodo Especial’ that triggered large-scale migration) and 2021 (a moment of unprecedented large-scale uprisings on July 11). The poets in this collection left their home in the intervening years and even while they developed their professional careers abroad, continued to write poetry in their private moments by way of healing themselves, unable to return to their homeland.

While socialism has fallen apart everywhere else in the world, an authoritarian, repressive regime continues to rule in Cuba. Nothing is more revealing than intimate poetry to express the pain and anguish of thwarted lives and smothered creativity. All the poets in this collection grew up under that rule but left the country to find a more dignified life in exile.

Over the past 30 years, I have experienced from close quarters, the pain, the agony and alienation of many of these excellent poets, who have struggled to 'reboot' their lives in another country while still yearning for their homeland. Today, almost all of Cuba’s bright, sensitive, and cultivated women and men live outside the country and the poignancy of their yearning speaks to us about what it means to lose one’s homeland.

This collection seeks coherence by focussing on women and using specific time-markers that have framed a generation. I have also tried to find a connecting theme – yearning – in a broad existential sense. We hope you will support us to make this publication possible. This is a celebration of poetry and freedom in the most trying of circumstances. 

The 23 poets in this collection are:

Maria Cristina Fernandez/ Legna Rodríguez Iglesias/ Dermis Perez Leon/ Lizette Espinosa/ Zoe Valdes/ Eilyn Perez Amores / Gelsys Garcia/ Damaris Calderon/  Ena Columbie/  Yosie Crespo/  Ana Maria Pedroso /  Alessandra Molina / Eilyn Lombard Cabrera / Sonia Diaz Corrales / Maria Elena Hernandez Caballero / Maria Elena Peña de Prada/ Milena Rodriguez Gutierrez/ Odette Alonso Yodu / Lleny Diaz Valdivia / Kelly Martinez-Grandal/ Elizabeth Mirabal / Gleyvis Coro Montanet / Eva Maria Vergara.

Revisiting Fellini's "Amarcord" (1973)

Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973)[i] offers unique historical insight well before its time. Made in an autobiographical mode - the title literally means “I remember” - the film recounts the memories of growing up in the small Italian sea-town of Rimini in the backdrop of 1930s Fascist Italy. Following an episodic narrative structure (like most films of Fellini), the film teems with colourful characters, most of them being ordinary people, each with a story of its own to tell but the film is significantly without any single protagonist. While the characters live out their love, desire and fantasies in Rimini, one character stands out – a lawyer posing as the official historian of the municipality. Others are casually dressed but he is always impeccably, formally dressed and always addresses the camera (unlike others), eager to narrate the history of the small town by locating it in the grand tradition of the Roman Empire:

…The origins of this town are lost in the mists of time. In the Municipal Museum, there are stone implements…that date back to prehistoric times. I myself have found some graffiti of the Great Age on the walls of caves in Count Lovignano’s estate. Be that as it may, the first certain date is 268 BC, when this became a Roman colony… [Someone farts offscreen.] …The divine poets Dante, Pascoli and D’Annunzio and many others have sung praises to this land while numerous of its citizens have contributed greatly to the arts, science, religion and politics. [Someone farts again.]       

Not only is there a popular irreverence (expressed through scatological humour) towards the pompousness and absurdity of ‘official history’, the myriad lives affirm their existence, as it were, all of whom are part of that inclusive, utopian space of Fellini’s Rimini, far from the ramparts of Roman History.  Fellini is here, unselfconsciously and intuitively, doing postmodern history, displacing and subverting grander versions of History through sarcasm and irony and opening up the floodgates to innumerable micro-histories: his-story, her-story, histories. This is also the agenda at the heart of postcolonial historical practice.

When Rimini is enveloped by snow, the town historian in Amarcord, still under the spell of “monumental history”, rises to tell the ‘story’ again in grandiose terms:

This will go down as the Year of the Big Snow. Since the Ice Age, it never snowed so heavily in our town. It snowed in 1541, then in 1694...

By now, we know, the ‘historian’ is talking ‘baloney’. It is interesting that the only two characters in the film who talk directly to the camera are the town-idiot and the historian. The boys have to stop the historian by throwing snowballs at him.

---

Short Course on Philosophy in Film

Understanding Cinema: A Film Appreciation Course for Contemporary Living

COURSE OVERVIEW:

Though certain kinds of cinemas have greater visibility than others, there is a vast diversity in the films made around the world. The general character of Hollywood cinema, ‘Bollywood’ and its relationship with ‘Indian Cinema’, and concepts such as ‘independent’, ‘parallel’, ‘regional’ and ‘world’ cinemas would be understood as stepping-stones for celebrating cinema in relation to the cultures and contexts from which they emerge. The course will deepen one’s understanding of cinema and provide a richconceptual base that would enable the assimilation of all kinds of cinemas into one’s own life. 

INDRANIL CHAKRAVARTY was Professor of Film Appreciation & Screenplaywriting at Whistling Woods & Film & TV Institute of India. He graduated in Film Direction from International School of Film & TV in Havana. He has lectured at several universities in India and abroad. His book, The New Latin American Cinema is a reference text at several universities as also his latest publication which is a book in Spanish, Rediscovering Tagore. He has been on the jury of film festivals in Brazil, Mexico, Cuba and Spain and is currently the Director of the recently launched 2-year PG programme, ‘Film & New Media Production’, at Wilson College’s Mackichan Hall campus. Indranil has directed film projects for European Union and UNESCO and is currently developing the audiovisual curriculum for American high school students. He was also corporate trainer for UTV's World Movies channel. 

Dates:        

     

Aug 7, Friday, 5.30pm – 8.30pm: The Cinematic Form

Aug 8, Saturday, 11.00am – 4.30pm: Time & Space in Cinema

Aug 9, Friday, 11.00am – 4.30pm: Methods of Film Analysis

Course Fees: 

Rs.3500/- (incl taxes)

For Whom: 

Meant for anyone who is interested in understanding cinema deeply in order to enrich his/her life, irrespective of one's core discipline. And of course, it is meant for film & media students and industry professionals. 

Please register by 4^th August at: 

Somaiya Centre for Lifelong Learning,

2^nd Floor, Above Kitab Khana,

Flora Fountain, Fort, Mumbai - 400001

PLEASE REFER TO THE POSTER AND KINDLY FORWARD IT TO ANYONE YOU THINK WOULD BE INTERESTED. 

For admission please write to us at learn@somaiya.com or call  61702270

For course details, contact and application form, please refer to the Wilson College (Mumbai) website link:
http://www.wilsoncollege.edu/post-graduate.html#Post_graduate

Lecture on "Magic Realism in Latin American Literature"

Lecture summary:  Fiction lovers and literary critics around the world have been captivated by the haunting power of magic realist literature that has come out of Latin America since 1960s. While it has made publishing history by catapulting literature-in-translation into the bestseller lists, it has also made us question the artificial distinctions between high literature and popular culture. Spanish-language writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar & Jorge Luís Borges have become key reference points of contemporary world literature. This lecture will try to understand the distinctive features of magic realism where the fiesta of poetic metaphors, lyrical allegory and symbols are not a carnival of subjectivity but a rational analysis of a reality deformed by European culture and suffocated by American imperialism.

Hinduism versus Hindutva

With article 66A struck down, one can now reinvoke this brilliant, insightful and potentially explosive essay by Ashis Nandy titled "Hinduism versus Hindutva", written way back in 1991:http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Socissues/hindutva.html . It was extraordinarily perceptive for its time considering it was written before the Ayodhya riots and is as relevant now as it was 24 years later.

Hinduism Versus Hindutva
The Inevitability Of A Confrontation

Taken from:
Times of India, February 18, 1991.

By ASHIS NANDY

REBELLION against the secularist dogmas have broken out in many forms and in many places in the world. Some components of the environmental movement have mounted a savage attack on the secular worldview, the Christian church has helped to bring down the secular communist regimes in East Europe; religious leaders have played a significant role in the battle against autocracies in South Africa, Iran, Philippines, and in many. South American polities, and the growing concern with the survival of' cultures and dialogue of faiths has made religion as a pathway to the rediscovery of practical ethics in politics.

Sinking Secularism

The decline of secularism in India has been accompanied by less admirable results. The language of secularism here has been taken over by hard-eyed, thin-lipped practitioners of ethnic politics convinced that it will give them respectability and access to state power. However, the decline has also opened up one serious possibility. Hinduism and Hindutva now stand face to face, not yet ready to confront each other, but aware that the confrontation will have to come some day. It is my belief that it will be a struggle unto death.

Speaking pessimistically, Hindutva will be the end of Hinduism. Hinduism is the faith by which a majority of Indians still live. Hindutva is the ideology of a part of the upper-caste, lower-middle class Indians, though it has now spread to large parts of the urban middle classes. The ideology is an attack on Hinduism and an attempt to protect the flanks of a minority consciousness which the democratic process is threatening to corner.

The minority consciousness that Hindutva protects survives on anger. It is the anger of Indians who have uprooted themselves from their traditions, seduced by the promises offered by the modernization of indict, and who now feel abandoned. The process of seduction has included not only the promise of a good life but also the promise of a special political role for those having modern education and modern professional skills. With the demise of imperialism, modernization in India--particularly that subcategory of it which goes by the name of development--has failed to keep the promises.

Hindutva on this plane is the ideology of a section of the lower-middle class, living with the burning ambition of breaking into the upper echelons of modern India and yet fearful that they may be pushed into the ranks of the urban proletariat by the upper classes, not on ground substance, but of "style". For the believers in Hindutva , the pseudo - secularists represent those who have the style and now doing the pushing; the Muslims represent the fear of being proletarianised. Hence, the hostility to both. On this plane, the sources of Hindutva are no different from that of Islamic fundamentalism.

Hindutva, if it wins, might make Nepal the world's largest Hindu country. Hinduism will then survive not as a way of life or the faith of a majority of Indians. It will survive in pockets, cut off from the majority who will claim to live by it. It will also perhaps survive in odd places, outside Hinduism. Perhaps directly in Bali and some sections of the Sikhs and the Jains in India; less directly in aspects of Thai and Sri Lankan Buddhism, in the pre-imperial forms of Christianity in South India and, to the utter chagrin of many, in many strands of South Asian Islam.

That death of Hinduism in India will be celebrated by all votaries of Hindutva. For they have always been embarrassed and felt humiliated by Hinduism as it is. Hinduism, I repeat, is a faith and a way of life. Hindutva is an ideology for those whose Hinduism has worn off. Hindutva is built on the tenets of re-formed Hinduism of the nineteenth century. Reformed according to the reading of those who saw Hinduism as inferior to the Semitic creeds, in turn seen as well-bounded, monolithic, well-organized, masculine, and capable of sustaining the ideology of an imperial state.

Last Kick

Hindutva at this plane is Western imperialism's last frenzied kick at Hinduism. It is an ideology meant for the super-market of global mass culture where all religions are available in their consumable forms, neatly packaged for the buyers.

Speaking optimistically Hindutva has its geographical limits. It cannot spread easily beyond the boundaries of urban, semi-westernized India. It cannot penetrate southern India where Hinduism is more resilient, where it is more difficult to project on to the Muslim the feared and unacceptable parts of one's own self. Hindutva cannot survive for long even in rural north India where Hinduism is more self-confident and the citizens have not been fully brainwashed by the media to speak only the language of the state. Nor can it survive where the Hindus are willing to be themselves--proudly "backward" superstitious sanatanis rooted firmly in their svadharma and svabhava.

That is why the RSS considers its first task to be moral and physical "improvement" of the Hindus. It does not much like the so-called fallen, compromised Hindus presently available in the back-waters of Mother India. It loves only the Hindus who have been dead for at least one thousand years. If the RSS has its way, it will make every peasant in India wear khaki shorts. For its ideal Indian is the brown- skinned version of the colonial police sergeant, reading the Gita instead of the Bible.

That is why the late Nathuram Godse did not kill the modernist and "pseudo- secular" Jawaharlal Nehru but the 'arch-reactionary', 'anti-national' sanatani -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. After the murder, Nehru could only say that the killer was insane. The modernist Prime Minister found it too painful to confront the truth that Godse was sane, that he knew who was the real enemy of Hindutva.

To those who live in Hinduism Hindutva is one of those pathologies which periodically afflict a faith or a way of life, Hinduism has, over the centuries, handled many such pathologies; it still retains the capacity to handle one more. After all, has not the Hinduism coped for more than a century with the modern civilization, which Gandhi, used to call satanic? Hinduism, the argument goes, will eat up Hindutva once a sizable section of the semimodernized Hindus gives up as a lost cause the pathetic search for a psychological defense against the encroaching forces of the market the national security state, and the urban-industrial vision and, instead, confront the reality of these forces directly.

Whether you are a pessimist or an optimist, the choice is clear if you happen to live in India. It does not lie in a glib secularism hoping to supplant ancient faiths. It lies in alliance with formations that have risen in rebellion against the social forces and the ideologies of dominance that have spawned

Hindutva in the first place.

Many of these formations cut across cultures, faiths and state boundaries. The struggle for cultural survival has begun not only in India, but all over the world. In every case, it has also faced a sizable opinion within the community that the struggle must be given up, that pragmatism demands that the culture must adjust to the modern world by giving up its essence to become a part of global mass culture. However, cultures are turning out to be less obedient and docile than many social engineers thought.

Natural Death

Perhaps Hindutva too will die a natural death. But, then, many things that die in the colder climes in the course of a single winter survive in the tropics for years. May be the death of Hindutva will not be as natural as that of some other ideologies. Maybe, post-Gandhian Hinduism will have to take advantage of the democratic process to help Hindutva to die a slightly unnatural death. Perhaps that euthanasia will be called politics.

An open letter to the cast of ‘Khel,’ on their art of casting aside

I am uploading here a guest comment as a blog-post as it concerns a person - Prof. Shyama Prasad Ganguly - who is my close friend and co-author and also because it relates to questions of integrity in artistic production.  - Indranil

Dear lead pair: you made my eyes leak. A prominent English daily on March 3, 2014, carried a photo of that riveting Bengali play Khaila, scripted by the outstanding playwright Sisir Kumar Das, directed by the brilliant director Shamu  Ganguly. The photo, taken at one of the several stagings of Khaila in New Delhi years ago (produced by Bikalpa), repackages it here as ‘a scene from Khel,’ where ‘Khel’ is ‘A Play in Hindi….By Averee Chaurey and team, New Delhi.’ The problem with this is two-fold.

a) That it is untrue. (The image is a scene from the Bengali Khaila, and not the Hindi Khel, since Khel was yet to be staged at the time of this article).

b) That it is unethical. (To omit altogether the name and the role of the Director of the original play, of which this is but a translation).

That this team manages to expound on their abundant influences and inspirations that culminate in Khel, without a mention of the Director who's labor and artistry shaped the very characters that the Hindi version would be re-delivering – is jaw-dropping. It is jaw-dropping for reasons and concerns of ethics, honesty and integrity that will be self-evident to most artists. It is tear-inducing, however, for reasons that cannot even be described.

For days and weeks and months, and months together, the Director of the original Khaila reflected on the script in order to sculpt the characters of the elderly couple that are now playing Khel (game, if you like). The profoundly stirring script by Sisir Kumar Das met the immense work and thought invested by Shamu Ganguly in mounting the play that moved audiences. You will know best the painstaking emotional and physical mentoring that was involved in shaping the characters that you play in the Hindi Khel. Better than anyone else, you will know that this was accomplished over years, and over the course of some sixteen productions across India. Is it all a blur? Like looking through those hyperbolic, cloudy glasses that your character was made to wear in Khaila (an exemplary directorial touch in and of itself, where the old, lonely, desperate, neglected, mother deceives herself into believing that the glasses would correct her failing sight and pathetic life, knowing the whole time that it corrected nothing)? What is it that leads you to make such a colossal omission in presenting and announcing Khel?

Let us, for a moment, gloss over the most obvious purpose with which such omissions are usually made. Let’s pick another, more generous one; one that doesn’t entirely fracture my conviction in people and the human relationships that they are out to build through art. Could it be, perhaps, an over-identification with the theme of the play itself - the deplorable reality of parents, mentors, best cut off and forgotten? There couldn’t be a better way of doing poetic justice to the very plot of the play.

As I read about all the publicity of Khel – ‘a play by Averee Chaurey’ (a truth that only the imagination may grasp) - I cannot help but wonder what a visionary Sisir Kumar Das was, to nail down so precisely through his script this ever-shrinking space for human sentiments such as dignity, grace and gratefulness. Off-stage, you show it best.

Ritika

'Kick Like a Girl' : Panel Discussion

6 day Film Appreciation workshop

NEXT: Global Shorts Festival

'Next' is the generic name for a series of festivals that deal with youth film-making and gives us a good idea about next-generation film-making. Most of the films tend to come from well-known film schools around the world. The first edition is called 'Next: Global Shorts' (Mumbai, July, 2012) and will be followed by 'Next-Ibero-American Shorts' (Delhi, 2012) and 'Next: Indian Shorts' (across several cities of Europe and Latin America). The partners of every event keep changing though the curators remain the same.  

Get all the information here

'Rediscovering Tagore'

My book in Spanish, 'Redescubriendo a Tagore' (Amaranta, 2011) [Rediscovering Tagore] is now available online and ready to be delivered by courier to any place in the world. I am thankful to Uread.com for offering the reader such a generous discount:
http://www.uread.com/book/Redescubriendo%20a%20Tagore/9788192184319
Book release in Barcelona:

Book release at the Goa International Literary Festival, Dec 2011:

Reviews of the book can be found online at Nuevo Herald (Miami-based).
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.elnuevoherald.com%2F2012%2F01%2F22%2F1107038_redescubriendo-a-tagore-un-puente.html%23storylink%3Daddthis&h=LAQE7vLCdAQHSOQNXIDfaemoHDr8xb53TAh6coE8moXVyfg

To see photos of the 'Tagore in Spain' event:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tagore-en-Espa%C3%B1a/285648154795210?sk=photos

Review of our Tagore event in Costa Rica:
http://www.nacion.com/2011-10-09/Ancora/NotasSecundarias/Ancora2933816.aspx

The Future of Film & Media Education in India

In response to Paromita Vohra's write-up on Subhash Ghai and Whistling Woods in Mid-Day: 

Vohra’s logic is so sloppy that to deal with it comprehensively, one would need more space than what this forum allows. Though I have been a professor at WW since its inception, I am not its spokesperson by any means and I resolutely maintain my critical distance with it. However, certain things need to be pointed out. The state of film education in India is a serious matter that needs to be addressed with the right degree of seriousness and certainly not with flippant social analysis which trivializes the entire issue with mere claptrap. Vohra might get some cheap thrills out of ridiculing the “international” aspect of WWI but I bear witness to what the Dean of UCLA (one of the world’s leading film schools) had once said: “We do not have anything like this in the US”.  Having seen all major film schools in India from the inside (and several major film schools abroad), I have not come across any institution where curriculum issues and teaching methodologies are discussed and debated in detail for months on end and constantly updated by some of the best minds in the Indian film industry. Student responses are constantly assessed and courses are redesigned in almost every semester. Personally, I have never witnessed such positive energy, seriousness of purpose and academic rigour anywhere else, far less in our state-run film schools which are in a pathetic state of decay.  

At a time when the Indian state acknowledges its own failure in creating worthwhile institutions and is emulating successful ideas developed and implemented at WW (entrusting it to develop, for example, the CBSE curriculum), it is a fundamentally regressive mode of thinking that creates false oppositions of “state vs. private” (or legit subsidy vs. lusty profit) as if it was a good guy vs. bad guy encounter of a “Bollywood” thriller. At a time when India is on the verge of ushering in private universities to play a lead role in defining India’s intellectual future, individuals like Vohra need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the state’s role in enabling the creation of such institutions, which may often have to include generous land grants/subsidies without which it is impossible to make such educational ventures possible, specially  in a city like Bombay. In any case, the whole hoopla around the legitimacy of the land grant is based on a false premise. WW does not even own the land. It is convenient to ignore such small details. 

There are several things in WW that one would be critical about but the fact remains that rarely in India has one seen such an efficient set-up where everything seems to work with clockwork precision. What I personally consider extraordinary about Subhash Ghai’s achievement is not necessarily the films he has made but the fact that he has made WW grow beyond himself and if one looks closely, one would find that ALL the teachers who are moulding the “next-generation” filmmakers of the mainstream industry actually belong to the opposite camp of “parallel cinema”, thus imbibing students with a sensibility that can perhaps change the face of our cinema. In this regard, Ghai’s extraordinary dedication and sincerity takes on the dimension of some kind of “public service”. Add to this the fabulous infrastructure and the beautiful architecture! 

Far from being a rhetoric, the ‘international’ dimension in WWI is real in that there are several members of faculty, staff and students who are from abroad and the curriculum is not at all narrowly ‘Bollywood’. The overwhelming number of films that I personally show and analyse in my Film Appreciation classes are a far cry from what goes by the name of Bollywood. We have even shown extremely “mediocre” Indian documentaries and put them up for debate. Vora should be thankful for that.

The prohibitive fees is definitely the major talking point, always. However, the student profile seems to be changing gradually. They are not rich-kids always; many of them have inner-town middle-class backgrounds, empowered by loans at a time when Indian middle classes have consciously realized that education is their best investment.

It is fundamentally dishonest to ask WW to show results in terms of “stars” that it has churned out. It is common knowledge that hardly anyone makes an impact in the film industry in less than 15 years and WW’s first batch graduated only 4 years ago. A proper assessment can only be made at least a decade later but to dismiss all the significant achievements already accomplished, is to trivialize the debate about film/media education and the creative role of the private sector. Every film institute in the world, overtly or covertly, has a certain ideological stance (and agenda) with regard to mainstream industry. It is obvious that a film school located in the heart of the world’s biggest film industry would be resolutely industry-oriented like many film schools in US. It does not serve any purpose to resort to simplistic, prejudiced stereotypes that refuse to see the cultural battles that are being fought on daily basis by people who have chosen to be inside the bastion of commercial filmmaking with the hope of making it a bit more sensitive to the world around us.

Finally, I would leave Vohra with the thought to honestly ponder over whether she would go to a state-run subsidised hospital or go to any extent to avail the services of an efficiently-run but expensive private hospital, in case she is confronted with a severe cardiac arrest.  

Teaching Carpentier's 'The Lost Steps' (Los Pasos Perdidos)

I recently did a lecture series with a group of MA-M.Phil-Ph.D students of English Literature at a university in Mumbai (Bombay) where Alejo Carpentier's 'The Lost Steps' has recently been introduced as part of contemporary World Literature. Since I was told that students know nothing about Latin America, I had to start from basics. So I did the first session as an introduction to Latin American literature and the second lecture dealt more directly with the novel. I thought I might as well share this with others who might be interested. 

Lecture I: An Invitation to Latin American Literature

<<… The eccentricity of Latin America can be defined as a European eccentricity: I mean, it is another way of being Western. A non-European way. Both inside and outside the European tradition, the Latin American can see the West as a totality and not with the fatally provincial vision of the Italian or the German or the French or the English… >> Octavio Paz, Vuelta, no. 117, 1986

• New World and the Old: Engravings of Great Voyages (Historia Americae) inspired by Columbus’ extravagant accounts of the “exotic”  lands bear testimony to European ideas about the New World (see image at the end). “Discovery” vs invention (America was never discovered, it was invented by European imagination). These images enfolded them within the mythological vision of a Europe still emerging from the Middle Ages. The fantastical images of America -- “where men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders” [i]  -- found unscrupulous acceptance in Europe over a long period spanning several centuries. The explorers and later the ‘conquistadores’ used the exhilarating fantasies of the chivalry romances to express the marvels of the New World in the attempt to come to terms with the diversity and difference of America.
• Three mechanical inventions had changed “the whole face and state of things” (as per Francis Bacon)-- printing, gunpowder and the magnet  -- which permitted literature, conquest and navigation and let the Renaissance spirit flourish.  Indeed it can be said that the discovery of the New World  released the Renaissance imagination itself.

• The New World had been, since the Renaissance, a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories, landscapes and unusual experiences. For Europe (and later on, Anglo-Saxon America) “Latin” America represented one of its deepest and recurring images of the Other.

• The term "Latin" America was coined by the French in their imperialist zeal during the 19^th century. They opposed Latin to Anglo America to claim for political gain a historical and linguistic kinship with the regions recently freed from Spanish domination. The name has stuck although clearly many of the cultures in the region have no connection with the Roman Empire.

• Columbus’ diaries: “discovery” [ii] of America in 1492 initiated a long chain of unfortunate, violent events. Columbus’ genocide in Latin America. Indian population came down in 40 years (since Columbus’ arrival) from 3 million to 60,000 (2% of population). The Chroniclers (mostly clergymen who were witnesses). Most Spanish officials argued that that the indigenous people’s work in the silver mines was the contribution they had to pay in exchange for the ‘gift’ of being evangelised (converted to Christianity). [Readings from Columbus’ diaries attached, with highlighted sections.]

• Encounter of races; Carpentier considered the “discovery” to be the most important watershed in history; Neruda’s ‘Canto General’: ..’antes de la peluca, habian los rios. Los rios arteriales.’ (Before the wig, there were the rivers. The arterial rivers.)

• Fiction writers like Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez plunder the colonial record for stories, characters and situations. Ref: Autumn of the Patriarch, p34.  Octavio Paz has written a massive literary biography of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the 17^th century Mexican poet-nun. Also explore the pre-Columbian roots of Latin America.

• Colonial rule thus represented a definitive cultural rupture. Alienating the New World Man from pre-Columbian Man. Latin America eventually became the site of a creative cultural symbiosis, immensely rich with the possibilities of cross-fertilization. Most thinkers from the nineteenth century down to our own time have located the cultural specificity of Latin America to the incongruous amalgam of the continent. (diary, pp 11, 12, 15)

• Crisis of identity and the search for forms of authenticity become abiding concerns; masks and labyrinths are recurring metaphors;  private search for meaning and authentic personal language conflated with a larger continental quest for identity. Neruda’s invocation of The Heights of Macchu Picchu or Cesar Vallejo’s lamentation in Trilce  (“...between my where and my when / this crippled coming of age of man” )[iii] are moments when personal anguish moves to a broader vision of a suffering humanity.

• Art, society and history have become profoundly interlinked. Individual artist’s private search for meaning epitomizes the society’s search for a new, amorphous self-definition. Every work of art has consequently implied a certain social ideal even if it chooses to represent a deliberately alternative reality.

• Ban on reading and publishing of the novel during the Inquisition; reading became a sinful adventure; novels like DQ reached the New World concealed in the false bottoms of wine barrels; Chronicles got fictionalised because the novel was prohibited. “Revenge of the novel” led to “novelisation of the whole of life” – a world reconstructed and subverted by fantasy (Mario Vargas Llosa) Ever since then, the European tradition of the realist novel never took hold in LA. The novel remained a misfit. First novel: The Itching Parrot (1816, Mexico).

• Civilisation vs Barbarism: The turbulent excitement of political life in nineteenth century Latin America stood in sharp contrast to the dullness of much of its literature. Major debate revolved around notions of civilization (represented by Europe) and barbarism (savagery as represented by the chaos of traditional society).

• Independence from colonial rule and the birth of new republics ushered into a new era:  no more shadowboxing between European fashion and LA reality

• Uruguyan José Enrique Rodó hoped that “the noble and winged part of the spirit” would eventually rule over gross sensuality (Ariel, 1900), others like the Cuban José Martí declared in a celebrated essay called Nuestra America (“Our America”, 1886) that the “barbarians” had an authenticity and spontaneity which would finally be more valuable to the continent than the borrowed fineries of the “civilized” European. [1]

• While the traditionalists endorsed a reworking of the clerical civilization of Catholic Spain suitably adapted to the new republics in their post-colonial era, the liberals turned to the values of the French Enlightenment with its primacy of reason and equality before the law.

• Archetypal landscape: pampas  (the Prairies) as a place of barbarism but also the crucible of national identity. The gaucho (inhabitant of the pampas) became the primary agent of this landscape. In several countries with strong indigenous traditions, the liberal Creoles laid the foundation of a neo-classical “americanismo”  disclaiming the heritage of Spain by evoking an ideal vision of the Indian past. (indigineous novel).  Thus in every country, there emerged an archetypal, authentic son-of-the-soil and by transforming that figure into an ambivalent national symbol, artists and intellectuals temporarily crystallized the problem of national identity.

• “Cold America of the North” vs “the warm America of Spanish origin”; Mexican revolution & the flowering of lit after indep (mask metaphor): p 144 of King
• Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of The West (1918) was received with great fanfare because it suggested to them that  Latin Americans may soon leave behind their sense of inferiority to Europe.[iv]
• 1920s mark the emergence of the modern novel. “Creative cannibalism” in Brazil; 20s-30s: Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias drew on pre-Columbian traditions in order to explore myths and realities of the people, Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges asserted a self-confident cosmopolitanism and emphasised form and coherence in writing, Cuban Alejo Carpentier defined and explored the ‘magical realism’ of LA. 1950s- the ‘boom’.
• Literature of the ‘boom’ (“Latin Freakshow”): a US marketing term implying vigorous promotion; describes the increased consumption of cultural production in the 1960s. A readership emerges, the author becomes a brand name, a mark of quality; writers become superstars: Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Donoso, Isabel Allende, Manuel Puig, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, etc. Cuban revolution of 1959 remains a key point of reference: battlelines were drawn with regard to those in favour of it and those against it.
• Use of the baroque and Faulkner’s influence in Latin America: p139, 140 (Carlos Fuentes interview): ‘the great novelist of defeat in a country premised on success, success, success, all the way, a country that never learnt anything from defeat’
• GGM: The collision between a largely matriarchal oral tradition and an aristocratic, patriarchal written tradition is one of the fascinating aspects. Most of his novels are written from a point in time when everything has already happened. Read the famous first paragraph of 100 years of Solitude (note its complex tense– a Faulknerian ‘present’-ation of time - and a sentence from Autumn of the Patriarch). This type of narrative structure relates to the central issue of memory, personal and social, written and oral. The contagion of amnesia, in 100 years, arose from the local Indians, an oral community, whereas the cure is brought by Melquiades, the writing man.

• Definitions: MAGIC REALISM
It’s a mode, not a genre. The unreal happens as a part of reality, quite logically. It possesses often an allegorical quality as well as a sense of time and space contrary to normal perceptions.
Magical realism is a term used to capture the living contradictions of societies in the active process of underdevelopment and neocolonialism  although it originated in Weimar Germany where it referred to the mystery in the mundane. Alejo Carpentier used the term as "our marvellous American reality" in the '50s. "The fiesta of metaphors, of allegory, of symbols is not a carnival of subjectivity; it is the attempt at a rational analysis of a deformed reality, deformed by European culture and suffocated by American imperialism," said the brilliant Brazilian filmmaker, Glauber Rocha.
o        Magical realism differs from pure fantasy primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world with authentic descriptions of humans and society.  According to Angel Flores, magical realism involves the fusion of the real and the fantastic, or as he claims, "an amalgamation of realism and fantasy". 
• Surrealism and Magic realism: Frederic Jameson called MR “poetic transformation of the object world but a world in which the objects are also narrated”.
      Surrealism: Surrealism: A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that        attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by         fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter. +  An artistic           movement and an aesthetic philosophy that aims for the liberation of the mind by       emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the subconscious.
• Presence of the historical and the political below the surface of the narrative.
Magic realism writers express their view of a world fissured, distorted, and made incredible by cultural displacement. It marks a view from the fringes of European cultures and an interest in syncretism produced by colonialism. 

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[1] ‘Ariel’ is an allusion to Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’ where the master Prospero has two slaves: Ariel (winged part of the spirit) and Caliban who is base. Caliban is an anagram of Canibal, canib, carib, Caribbean. Tempest alludes to the ‘discovery’ of the Americas. Shakespeare created in the figure of Caliban, the other face of the nascent bourgeois world: “…I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour/ One thing or other, when thou dids’t not, savage, / Known thine own meaning, but would babble like / a thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes / With words that made them known.”  The attitude of the rebellious slave Caliban is thus: “ …You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid thee / For learning me your language.” (Act 1, Sc 2)

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[i]            “. . . travel’s history:

            Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

            Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,

            . . . And of the Cannibals that each other eat,

            The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

            Do grow beneath their shoulders.”

            (Act I, sc. iii, W. Shakespeare, Othello, 1605)

[ii]           Amerigo Vespucci’s reports (the Italian navigator from whom the continent got its name) encouraged Sir Thomas More to invent a vision of an ideal  society in his Utopia (1515). 

[iii]           “. . . entre mi donde y mi cuando

            esta mayoria inválida de hombre.”     Trilce, 1922         (Translation mine)

[iv]          “Spengler’s explanation of history in terms of cycles of cultural growth and degeneration enabled Carpentier to overcome his pessimism about the historical prospects for Latin America: if the loss of spirituality to which rationalist humanism appeared to lead was not an ineluctable destiny, then to approve the vitality of primitive cultures as the nativist writers had done, was not necessarily reactionary; for these local cultures could now be seen not as vestiges of the past but as the seeds of a new, specifically American culture in the making.”

            Edwin Williamson, ‘Coming to Terms with Modernity’ in John King. (ed.), Modern Latin             American Fiction : A Survey , London : Faber and Faber, 1987, p. 83.

Lecture II: Textual Analysis of Alejo Carpentier's 'The Lost Steps' (Los Pasos Perdidos, 1953)

• Carpentier’s voodoo experience; his protagonist is the Haitian shaman, Mackandal who has extraordinary seductive powers over his audience. Thus, he becomes the creator of identity for the black slaves. This is symptomatic of the new mood of nationalism that emerged in the 1920s. Such powerful storytellers employing techniques and material rooted in long standing popular traditions, could not fail to appeal to cultivated writers seeking to connect more fully to American realities.  Cultural nationalism thus combined with modernist experimentalism to create an autochthonous culture where tradition could be reconciled with modernity. Thus it became an occasion to reassess LA’s relation with Europe and it meant coming to terms with the modern culture of the Enlightenment. MR= Surrealist desire for psychic wholeness (rationalism of the Enlightenment had alienated Europeans from the life of the instinct, desire and imagination) + Haitian experience in 1943 (magic & religion, the repositories of authenticity and wholeness, were capable of intervening positively in history as vehicles of freedom) + reading of Spengler (explanation of history as cycles of cultural growth and degeneration helped him dispel his pessimism about LA’s future; also rise of Fascism).
• Disenchantment with surrealism (literary trick): “redeem the mind from the dead hand of rationality by unblocking once more the sources of the marvellous, the experience of which presupposes a faith.” …The marvellous in literature entailed a belief in the supernatural: those who do not believe in saints cannot heal themselves by the miracles of saints.” Carpentier thus took the novel out of the drawing rooms of Europe and thrust it in the deep wilderness of America, where it might recuperate the mythological powers of the epic and romance, those narrative forebears it had once destroyed through irony and burlesque in Europe. – source of the exuberance of modern LA fiction. By celebrating the supernatural and the miraculous, magical realism inevitably generated antinomies between faith and reason, imagination and intellect, nature and culture.
• THE LOST STEPS: AC’s “American cycle” of novels (Kingdom of this world – ‘49, The Lost Steps - 53, Explosion in a Cathedral –‘62); written in Venezuela during the dictatorship in Cuba; looked at his own life in Paris between the Wars; in 1947 travelled to the wild interior of the Gran Sabana. Realised the cultural significance of the “Forest”; next year travelled through the upper Orinoco river
• Background of AC: 1904-1980; studied architecture and music; family background in music; early childhood in a Cuban ranch, father was a cellist/architect, grandma worked with Cesar Frank; formation on European novels – Balzac, Zola, Flaubert; spoke Spanish with French accent; moved to Paris to become journalist (music critic) where he wrote elevated accounts of European salon and concert scene; popularised High Art in LA, sponsored first Picasso exhibition in LA, wrote librettos for classical composers; became a major radio personality playing classical music (1939-45); wrote “Music in Cuba” (1946) his first non-fiction masterpiece; prepared the ground for his novels; went to jail in Cuba and then moved to Paris; returned after 1959 Cuban Revolution, after which till his death, he was Cuban ambassador in Paris; personal journey symptomatic of the Latin American intellectual of the 1920s and 30s.
• The novel is a repudiation of Europe and the pretences of surrealism; Felt the need to free himself “from the grip of surrealism”; he felt that Europeans whored after a surrealism that they never understood as the Enlightenment had taken the magic out of their lives (with its emphasis on rationality) and yet this sensibility was fully formed among Afro-Cuban shamans. He hated himself for measuring LA with European yardstick; rise of Fascism made him lose the traditional LA respect for European civilization.Magic and religion – the repositories of  authenticity and wholeness -  were capable of intervening positively in history as vehicles of freedom.
• Title is an allusion to Andre Breton’s ‘Les Pas Perdus’ (the lost steps/ not lost)
• PLACE of the novel: Indeterminate, deliberately; Pan-Americanism
• NARRATOR of the novel: anonymous; relationship with Carpentier; narrator fails not tragically but inevitably; living by the metronome; doppelganger?; search for authenticity (travels to the roots of all life). Native vs authentic; novel of self-condemnation; AC avoids the narrator’s fate; King p91: Is AC lamenting the fate of the composer, or subtly mocking his folly in seeking refuge from history? No doubt, as the allusion to Don Quijote would suggest, he remained ambivalent, torn between heart and head.
• Use of capital letters: Forest, Time, Theatre, The Valley Where Time Stands Still, etc. Allegory?
• USE OF LANGUAGE: operatic, overblown, possibility of irony lurks behind every phrase; sonorous, complex prose style, ornately gilded like an altarpiece.
• MYTHS:  Book of Genesis & Fall (origins of the God’s chosen people, first book of the Hebrew Bible; Sisyphus (king condemned to roll the stone for eternity only to see it roll back the mountain), Odyssey (episodic quest structure), Don Quijote, Prometheus Unbound (217) – steals fire from Zeus and gives it to mortals and is then his liver is eaten every day by an eagle only to grow back the next day; Genevieve of Brabant 218 (the chaste wife falsely accused and repudiated), Deuteronomy: Traditionally seen as recording the words of God given to Moses; fifth book of the Hebrew Bible.
• THEMES: All stages of civilization can be witnessed in America in the present (possible to evade time) Read Paz’s passage in ‘Labyrinth of Solitude’, p11-12; p80: ‘the question of our origins is the central secret of our anxiety and anguish’. + p194 of Paz: we cannot dwell in the past but become contemporaries of all mankind. We have to live in our own epochs. He is a man seeking to recover that faith upon which the sense of the marvellous depends.
• If the Artist is bound to History, what is the place of the imagination in the unfolding of time? Once a magical consciousness came into contact with a rationalist one, the magic was condemned sooner or later to evaporate. But if the magical elements in the “marvellous real” were unsustainable, was it possible to salvage the sense of the spiritual and the transcendental?
• FOREST: Symbolism: ‘great theatre of the forest’; journey through space becomes journey through Time; celebrate Nature but rejects European hankering after ‘the natural man’. Positions men in nature against the mediocrity of pallid existentialists. In Europe this Forest can no longer be experienced – sanitised and erased several centuries ago.
• RUTH: decadence  5; wife to leading lady 8
• MOUCHE: contempt for shallow bohemianism (wild about primitive art); for them it is neither creative nor liberating but crude and reactionary. Mouche projectsthe writer’s own ANGER against his own self, his aesthetic detachment during the pre-war years. Lost Steps: AC’s own way of purging his own past.
• ROSARIO: Don Quijote reference; is this his Dulcinea of the New World? Rosario completes the opening sentence of DQ. She is the soul of Nature, the essence of womanhood, Rosario doesn’t pose any challenge to his male authority; she is lost.
• Read King: p 90

Readings from the novel:

Ruth’s decadence: 5, 7

Sterility: 6

Allusions 12, 33, 59, 80

Freedom: 16 (irony)

Backstory 21

Surrealism 24-25… 29

Wild about primitive arts 32

Seeing LA with European lenses 43

Living in different ages 51

Mouche 70

Three Wise Men of America 71

Discovery 77

Description of mountain journey 78

Rosario’s appearance 81

Bookburning 90

Father 95

9^th symphony boring 97

Bodily love 99

Recalling the chroniclers accounts 110-111

Authenticity and validity of primitivism 123

Butterfly rain: 133 + amphibious men 144

Rediscovery of the power of Christian myth: 135

Description of the dark power of the Forest: 138, 149

Example of Allegory: 141

El Dorado: 142 – 143

Rosario beats Mouche: 147, 149 (revenge of the authentic)

“We are the conquistadores” 158, 176, 177

Nature’s mimetism: 165

Rosario’s mystery: 173

Refinement of the savage: 173

Time travel: 178-179, 186, 187

Woman: 180

Sun entering the body: 197 – 198

Sisyphus: 198

Decision to stay + Ruth’s stage show: 244

Disenchantment with city life: 252

Against surrealism: 254