There is a passage of ¨Estrella distante¨ (Distant Star), the compulsive novel by Roberto Bolaño, where it appears a logic of literary evolution that could be perfectly used by Cuban letters. It is the passage where Raoul Delorme , founder of the sect or movement of the Barbarian Writers recommends the method for shaping a new literature. This was achieved through a very curious way: defecating on the pages by Stendhal, blowing your nose with the pages by Victor Hugo , masturbating and spilling semen on the pages by Gautier and Banville, throwing up on the pages by Daudet, urinating on pages by Lamartine, making cuts yourself with razor blades and splattering blood on the pages by Balzac or Maupassant. In the end, subjecting the books to a degradation process that Delorme called “humanization”.
The writer as defiler, literally. Raoul Delorme knew that when writing ¨La afición a escribir, ¨a book made up of glimpses, endnotes, a patchwork that seems to be taken from that terrible locked room that reading is; an apocryphal book on the art of literary desecration.
But the issue goes beyond that. Let us imagine, for a moment, that we wrote that book in Cuba, with parts of various National Literature Awards. Imagine our contemporary literature as one of those departments full of mangled bodies , dirt and odor. The poet Oscar Cruz (OC, from now on) should be read from that room. It is possible that the secret of his style to lie there: in the mutilation of Cuban literature. Because tradition is a ring that does absolutely nothing but become you an invisible maniac, the shadow of Tolkien. At least, that is what is shown in the three volumes of the History of Cuban literature: to be immortal, you must die first.
( Another way to understand this quickly is to go to a bookstore in Cuba, buy any book of essays, read a page at random or, if you are really brave, read the whole book. Through this operation you will be able to verify that the majority of our literary critics are like archaeologists: their only problem is the dating and classification of remains: vertebrae, ribs, torsos, etc., from the bottom of the libraries, converted into digging fields and, yes, some of them are necrophiles, anything that distract them from the fact of having to read the writers under forty.)
If there is an author who faces in Cuba, brandishing ax and chainsaw, the demons of our tradition, that is undoubtedly OC. ¨La Maestranza¨ (Union Publishing House, 2013 ) is a book erected upon the death certificates of ¨Origines¨ group, the Cuban dream team. Amputating Lezama, Cintio, Marruz. Crippling the “Bella National Poetry”, the high society. Because our writers are too committed to memory. The memory understood not as a battlefield, but rather as a Jurassic Park . Like if contemporary Cuban literature to be a wreath dedicated to a collective pantheon, full of martyrs. La Maestranza begins with that unbearable truth. So, you should read it on an empty stomach if possible.
( Warning: From this point on, some poems in the book are misunderstood, so the readers may prefer to stop here and return to this column once finishing their own reading of the poetry book.)
La Maestranza came to me as a subversive book, as a book that presents an intimate relationship with discomfort, negativity, with inadequacy. There is something testimonial there: the poems by the conspirator, dissident, by those thinking that the national literature was too much like Dorian Gray: it suddenly gets older everything that did not do it and must have done it during life. It is a strangely belligerent poetry. It is possible that OC´s need to ram the tradition to come from there; to beat up all those writers on horseback pointing to the future and refusing to admit that they are part of a past that has little or nothing to do with this literary present. La Maestranza is a great ring.
While watching a fight between Antonio Margarito and Many Pacquiao, I receive poetry lessons.
Each blow is a poem […] each poem carries bruises, twists, cuts.
” The poem as a fighting fest.” Even the amatory poem. And believe me: not many can emulate OC´s moral immunodeficiency within the theme park of contemporary Cuban poetry (which has been widely influenced by councilism and self-help).
He hit her one, two, three times with the belt and she laughed. He shook her one, two, three times and she laughed again.
“So far all is going well, but I want to start by fours.”
Eroticism metastasizing. Because one thing is clear: we have not known reading all instructions for the use of that rabid toy that intimacy is within OC´s poetry. And there is a poem about that in La Maestranza: “La derrota” (Defeat), which is not included on any top ten, but mine:
“You do not kill yourself for the love of a woman,” Cesare Pavese wrote in his diary, as a farewell, after calling several hookers. “You may kill yourself because love, any love, reveals you your nakedness, your misery and your nothing.” Hours later he committed suicide in the same room where he cried. W hat really matters is perhaps that, neither the world nor the whores remember it.
All this and much more making the house specialty: “narrating” Santiago de Cuba, yes, but in slow motion. It is enough to say that the Santiago of La Maestranza looks like a macro and total version of the TV series Under the Dome, a wet dream by Orwell with “literary NATO forces”, training farms, “hard lessons including: / rigorous study of Lezama´s work, / Guillen´s sonnets and elegies “, “great writers lecturing / with thread shirts “,”kind of lyric poems written by poets of the Senate.”Put it this way: Pedro Juan Gutiérrez would never intend to profit from it. There is not a dirty Trilogy of Santiago de Cuba. Santiago is not Technicolor.
In his last days, according to Fresán, Roberto Bolaño joked about the idea of making an anthology of new Latin American literature entitled Invasion, and fall in the chosen ones as if it were a combat unit: “A very few but skilled ninja commands, some few marines, and the rest … to the Red Cross “. I have no doubt that OC belongs to the first caste. And his poems are about assault and landing. Because according to David Foster Wallace: “the task of good writing is to provide calm to disturbed people and disturb those who are calmed.”
But you, reader, what does La Maestranza provoke you?
