An Identification With the Other
Excerpt from En El Secadero De Almas / In The Drying Shed Of Souls (2019), an anthology of poetry from Cuba’s Generation Zero, translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Nuñez
#FromTheArchive: This excerpt by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Nuñez was originally published as the introduction to En El Secadero De Almas / In the Drying Shed of Souls (The Operating System, 2019).
This collection is a Spanish-English Dual Language anthology featuring selections from Cuba’s “Generation Zero,” including Luis Yuseff, Isaily Pérez González, Javier Marimón Miyares, Leymen Pérez García, Marcelo Morales Cintero, Oscar Cruz, Liuvan Herrera Carpio, Jamila Medina Ríos, Moisés Mayán Fernández, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, and Sergio García Zamora.
It is available to download now on the Open Access Library.
In a recent interview, the renowned Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski, declared that in his country, “poetry killed communism.” We don’t bring this up to question his position and experience. We are more interested in calling attention to the fact that the situation of Cuban poets is actually quite different from that of those poets who lived through Europe’s “real socialism.” In other words, thinking in terms of dissident intellectual versus official intellectual doesn’t really work in the case of Cuba, where most poets want to escape such a reductive binary and, ultimately, be independent.
It’s not a cliché by any means to declare that few times in its history has Cuban poetry been more varied, innovative, critical, and attractive than it is right now. And an undeniable part of it is what has been written by the so-called Generation Zero (Generación Cero), poets born after 1970 and who begin publishing after 2000. It’s a numerous group, as the title of their most complete anthology illustrates, La isla en versos: Cien poetas cubanos [The Island in Verse: One Hundred Cuban poets] (2011 and 2013). In fact, our selection was compiled having read over sixty books, tens of anthologies, and numerous journals and magazines. Indeed, the only way to truly do justice to this poetry is to offer up book-length anthologies; our aim in these pages is to be the first to simply introduce it to English-speaking readers.
Elsewhere we’ve defended the notion that Cuban poetry was revolutionary before the Revolution. It continued to be in the midst of profound transformations that took place on the island beginning in 1959, despite revolutionary power’s paradoxical mistrust of it. It still is after the Revolution’s decline, which arose in the nineties. It’s revolutionary not because it’s neo-romantic, neo-realist (much less socialist-realist), colloquial, or neo-baroque; but because it renounces solipsism, the differentiation of the other, and it does so in diverse ways, with notable creative freedom.
Generation Zero is no exception. The work presented here reaffirms Cuba’s long, rich tradition of dialogic poetry, which finds its identity through the identification with the other, and is marked by tensions between commitment and autonomy, dialogue and creativity, continuity and rupture. It is poetry with vast experience in the representations of subordinations (nation, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality) in order to subvert them, that has consciously participated in both social and cultural transformations, that has drawn closer to popular language and culture, and that has decolonized itself in content and in form.
This brilliance has shown through in the midst of the dismal social situation that has crisscrossed the island since the start of the nineties. The fall of European socialism meant Cuba lost 85 percent of its trade, sparking the deepest economic crisis in its history. Daily life became hell: lines, rationing, hunger, panhandling, prostitution, crime. The solution for many Cubans was summed up in two verbs: resolver and inventar (roughly translated as “getting by any way you can”), without necessarily respecting any ethical principle. Hundreds of thousands emigrated to the United States or wherever they could.
Generation Zero was forced to grow up under these kind of circumstances, with no opportunities or future. And its poetry embodies the crisis in countless ways, directly or indirectly. Like in Oscar Cruz’s work, it focuses on new social marginality with severity, but also tenderness. It offers us its poetic antihero, its difficult relationship with community, its acknowledgement of life and writing as a struggle. This critical view of reality is, as Isaily Pérez González, Lymen Pérez, and Liuvan Herrera Carpio reveal, sometimes hopeless, and yet always based on an identification with the other.
The themes here are also pensive, with notable intellectual depth. Like in the case of Marcelo Morales Cintero, poetic writing becomes fundamentally thought. Not philosophy, not ethics, not politics, but interaction between reason and feeling. In this interpellation of reality, at all its levels, edges blur, categories like objective and subjective, private and public, stop making sense. What binds the poetic subject to the other, to otherness, is love, transcending family or sex.
Another constant is the ambivalent positioning before both cultural and political tradition. On the one hand, Luis Yussef’s lyrical hero is positive, identifies politically, but in cultural terms. His understanding of geography and history goes far beyond national borders, but the universal can show up in a local coffeehouse, become part of bitter daily life. On the other, as in the case of Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, there’s a negative discourse of difference, unafraid of being openly political.
A major standout of this poetry is the way it represents the feminine condition. In this regard, Jamila Medina Ríos’ work offers a soaring level of poetic elaboration. There are no inhibitions here, moving beyond traditional feminism and timeworn lists of women’s body parts, to give voice to sexualities that challenges the norm. With indisputable grace and personality, Rodríguez Iglesias’ poetry takes all this on as well, reluctant to make one single concession, with pleasure and suffering to the very end. González Pérez’s poetry challenges too, but in its own way, with a more subtle exploration of the difficulties of Cuban reality experienced through the lens of gender.
Themes intertwine, appear and later disappear, like in our own minds, our own lives. Ultimately, this poetry expresses a critical consciousness, growing from childhood roots, not forgetting to be self-critical or limited to the personal. In this way, it challenges every ideology, whether it be idealist or materialist, rightist or leftist. What comes to the fore is a rejection of solipsism and an affirmation of the invention of reality, a dialogue unwilling to sell out to populism or the market, and the need for a participative reader.
This thematic boldness, never seen before in Cuban poetry, is complemented by no less daring work with language. In what seems to be a generational trademark, Sergio García Zamora alternates between prose poems, –since they lend themselves well to reflection–, and neo-Avant-Garde verse poems, because of the intentional distribution of the text on the page, and the abandoning of upper-case letters and punctuation. Pérez, Morales, Herrera Carpio, Medina Ríos and Rodríguez Iglesias do the same. There is a search for another mode of expression, just like with all self-respecting poetry.
Indeed, here there is a wide range of styles. While Yussef uses an expanding verse, capable of representing different planes of reality at once, Javier Marimón Miyares opts for a synthetic, neo-baroque verse where the hyperbaton rules. And while for Morales the poem stops being a unit of poetic writing, giving up that place to the book, and verse draws carefully, elegantly closer to prose, in Cruz what prevails is a poetry that moves toward the colloquial and song. In each case, language is refined, cultured and at the same time popular, and the rhythm that distinguishes it as poetry is preserved.
Still, these days, no one expects this kind of poetry from a Cuban, not in literary circles in the Spanish-speaking world, on the left or the right, not in North American academic and creative writing circles either. And perhaps that’s why it hasn’t received the attention it deserves.
For the former, it’s because the poetry isn’t communicative, and instead welcomes an active reader who participates in the creation of meaning. Cuban poetry has had to confront, above all in the seventies, neo-Stalinist aesthetic standards, which demanded, among other things, “reaching the people,” being clear and direct. This is precisely one of the paradigms of the so-called “poetry of experience,” which prevails in Spain today, with offshoots in Latin America, especially among the contemporaries of Generation Zero, the self-designated “poets of uncertainty.” By contrast, the young poets selected here are very well aware, from historical experience, of the danger of making aesthetic concessions in the name of coherence and transparency, and, as such, they defend poetry’s integrity.
For the latter, it’s because the poetry isn’t exotic enough, doesn’t explicitly focus on the difficult material and spiritual situation Cuba has lived through ever since the fall of European socialism and the disintegration of the USSR. Contemporary Cuban poetry isn’t subject to the market like narrative is, and so it’s not forced to speak of opportunistic bureaucrats, prostitutes with college degrees, blackouts and endless lines, the splendor of the black market. Indeed, the crisis experienced on the island is well-represented in these pages, but without making any concessions to exoticism. There’s a critical perspective, a profound uneasiness, but no absolute opposition, no automatic negation. Instead, the negation of the negation is what comes to the fore, the need for a social alternative, but not anticommunism, not a call for the return of capitalism.
The most notable exclusion of these poets appears in the anthology El canon abierto: Última poesía en español [The Open Canon: New Poetry in Spanish] edited by Remedios Sánchez García, selected by Anthony L. Geist, and published by Visor, the most prestigious poetry press in Spain, in 2015. The back cover reads, “nearly two hundred researchers from more than one hundred universities (Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, and Princeton, among them) have chosen the most relevant poets in the Spanish language born after 1970.” Among the forty selected, not one is from Cuba; in fact, in the “Full List of Cited Poets,” which includes one hundred twenty-two authors, just one Cuban is mentioned.
Yet, though they are relatively isolated, whether it be because of extremely limited access to the Internet or the difficulties of traveling off the island, these poets aren’t behind the times at all, on the contrary, they are at the forefront of poetry being written anywhere in the world. Here there’s no trace of superficiality, no fear of emotional complexity or intellectual density, of formal rigor or experimentation. It’s poetry open to reality and the most diverse forms of representation. The authors know that intellectuals participate in society through their cultural production.
In short, the critique these poets make of present day Cuban society and culture not only transcends the Cuban government’s version of the facts but also platitudes about anticommunism, making such a critique more profound. It’s possible because it carries with it an understanding of poetry’s essential function as a counter-ideology. If all ideologies base their discourse on making the artificial seem natural, poetry denaturalizes our perception of the world; it considers everything as if it were for the first time. This it where poetry derives its political force from, just as it does its explicit or implicit challenging of power, its ability to change life.
Víctor Rodríguez Nuñez (Havana, 1955) is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers. Over 40 collections of his poetry appear throughout Latin America and Europe, and he has been the recipient of major awards all over the Spanish-speaking world, including, in 2015, the coveted Loewe Prize, the highest honor an unpublished book of poetry can receive in the region. He has compiled three anthologies that define his poetic generation, as well as another of 20th century Cuban poetry, La poesía del siglo XX en Cuba (2011). He has brought out various critical editions, introductions, and essays on Spanish American poets. He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is currently Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.
Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator, literary critic, and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her publications include book-length collections by Jorgenrique Adoum, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Victor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many others. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is the Associate Editor for Action Books and the Poetry in Translation Editor at the Kenyon Review. She resides in Ohio, where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College. Follow Katherine M. Hedeen @kmhedeen on IG.
