Eduardo Subirats (ES): Dear Angel. I find myself in a paradoxical situation: I want to interview you. However, I am not your interviewer. I am your Academic Advisor. By interviewing you, I am subverting the ethical norms of our already corporate “Humanities” department. Even worse, I am attempting to parody the current hierarchical and authoritarian codes that institutionally define the relationship between the Director of your Dissertation and the PhD Candidate. Every day, I have to permanently confront the administrative treatment of our graduate students as immature-subaltern subjects in our Department of Spanish and Portuguese. The metaphor of “maturity” in English or Spanish is sexual and vegetative (you can eat a fruit when it is mature). But immaturity as defined by Kant in his essay about Aufklärung, in his programmatic manifesto about the ethical and political content of an enlightened society in the sense defined by the word “Enlightenment” (for which by the way, there is no Hispanic version except the poor Christian adaptation of the mystical Islamic and Jewish concepts of splendor and divine illumination), and is pronounced “Unmundigkeit.” This word literally means the absence of “Mund” or mouth. Immaturity becomes the very impossibility, professionally imposed, of being recognized as a human existence endowed with a mouth in a literal and ontological way. The absence of speech covers the totality of the person and his temporal-spatial situation, in other words, historical and cosmological.
I refer here to the right to speak, in its ontological and existential meaning, in opposition to the scholastic discourses, carefully controlled by the administrators of corporate learning and its corresponding empty intellectual jargons…
But I enjoy taking controversial positions. Since I met you eight years ago in a graduate seminar that I don’t remember, I have humbly followed your steps and your intellectual, literary and personal growth. I have recognized in you a profound wisdom that lies in these processes of real transformation. I have also been aware of the turbulence that you have undergone, both physically and spiritually. I have also witnessed your periods of tempestuous creativity and observed the administrative repulsion of your spiritual liberty, perpetrated by my own colleagues. But today I express to you my gratitude and great admiration for everything I have learned from you along this voyage.
But enough of anecdotes. You are a writer. You are an intellectual, you were a Jesuit, and an initiate in the religion of Santeria, and also decided to enter the kingdom of Academia. You officially incorporated yourself in an academic project of investigation under the title “On Animalization” at New York University. During this time, you contracted HIV and this reality transformed your life and your way of understanding the world. You have been marginalized by those same academics that pretended and pretend to support you. You decided to abandon your doctoral thesis project because it was extremely academic and intellectually unchallenging, and you have embraced instead a different literary and intellectual project that is more ambitious, but more creative. But let us start our conversation somewhere.
Your second novel, Don’t Let Me End Up Alone and Empty (published in Spanish as No quiero quedarme sola y vacia by Editorial Isla Negra, 2006) narrates the miseries of a Puerto Rican homosexual in the city of New York. Your writing style is neither fictional, nor realistic. The language you use in your novel is parodic, humorous, and frequently borders on the sarcastic and scandalous. You expose at least two problems that are relevant to the modern world in which we live today, to avoid using a more rigorous concept: First, the loneliness, social marginalization and existential misery that accompanies homosexuality, and at the same time, the persecution and economic exploitation through an economic system that has also collapsed this nation and the entire world. Your bitter ironies, your honesty, and your bravery are characteristics that are seldom found in the already commercialized intellectual life of today. They are found even less in the academic mega machines. Could you comment to our audience on your ideas, projects and feelings, both human and literary (in an age of an infra-human commercial literary world) that exist in your novel?
***
For me, the place of enunciation is a place of abstraction, and all meditation is a process of self-editing. On the eve of the Swine Flu Pandemic, I am enlightened by four languages: Spanish, English, Yoruba and Spanglish. I am accompanied by the following intimate girl-friends: Poverty and Venereal Diseases, three religious traditions (Catholicism, Santeria and Spiritism), three ways of looking at the world: the Spanish, the American, and the Yoruba; two nations: Puerto Rico and the United States; the gay life; four confrontations with violence (animalization, homophobia, 9/11 and academic censorship); two novels (La patografia and Don’t Let Me End Up Alone and Empty); two sources of enormous mental pleasure: literature and music; two teachers: Eduardo Subirats and Diamela Eltit; two sources of enormous physical pleasure: sex and drugs; many dogs and many Bitches; lots of rage—it is for me almost an aesthetic--, and of course, a spiritual cocktail comprised of St. Ignatius Loyola, the Goddess Oya and the Riverside Church, which help me keep my addictions at undetectable levels.
***
This conversation should be accompanied by the following playlist of mostly American classical music:
1. Gustavo Dudammel. Álbum Fiesta: “Sensemayá” y “Danzón 2”.
2. Heitor Villalobos. “Bachianas Brazileiras” e “Invocaçao em defesa da Patria”.
3. Stephen Hough. “My Favorite Things”.
4. George Gershwin. “Concerto in F” y “Rhapsody in Blue”.
5. Astor Piazzolla. “Le Grand Tango”.
6. Joaquín Rodrigo. “Concierto de Aranjuez”.
7. Frank Sinatra. “New York, New York”.
***
An honest reflection about the experience of the Ibero-American diasporas will inevitably lead us, from its origins, to hit an enormous multi-lingual wall. I will provide some examples: the rudimentary Spanish of Christopher Columbus, and the African Diaspora and an indigenous population that even to this day preserve their linguistic roots despite four pedagogical centuries oriented towards eliminating and uprooting them culturally, spiritually and linguistically, an entire American continent for whom Spanish is a language among many others, the Spanglish of the Hispanic communities of the United States, and the experience of an Iberian peninsula that is the cradle of many languages, but that historically has given primacy to only two (Spanish and Portuguese). The academic discipline of “Hispanism” would enormously enrich itself if it could assume this complexity as its ontological and epistemological base, and if it would understand that, because of this, our discipline cannot be oriented just to one language, or only one geographical or imaginary region, or towards the discourse of only one social class, or towards the preference of a small group of ideologies or ways of thinking, or towards only one kind of mysticism (we should remind the reader that, before the conquest of America, Spain was a fructiferous center where the three Abrahamic Faiths lived side by side and interacted, but that Spain violently expelled the Jews and the Arabs from its soil and that even to this day they are practically excluded from its literary national foundation), or towards the study of only one continent, and that the discipline must always be inclusive and comparatist in nature, considering that Hispania has always been one and many.
On the subject of the Swine flu face masks: The images that arrive from the outbreak in Mexico City provoke in me three visceral fears: the first one has to do with HIV. Knowing the incompetence and bureaucratic laziness that our Latin American Governments have historically demonstrated to combat the HIV-AIDS epidemic, and which I have experienced in my own flesh because I am an HIV-positive writer, I am afraid that in the next pandemic a lot of people are going to die. The second fear is more sinister. I call it Noah’s syndrome: Having survived the AIDS epidemic and having lost so many dear friends to that flood, I do not think I can stomach another pandemic. Therefore, I want to be one of the first ones to go. You see, like Noah, I don’t want to end up naked and drunk. Therefore, every day I send emails to my friends in Mexico City, especially Miriam Morales, Patricia Mazon and Luis Martin Ulloa. This obsession keeps me glued to the TV and I need them to write me back. The third fear activates historical forces within my subconscious and I get mad and repulsed: the flu masks over the mouths of millions of Mexicans remind me of the disclaimer over my own mouth on the cover of my second novel that the editor put there to cover his ass, and of the numerous times I have been asked to shut up. The images are clear: The next pandemic will have to do with the control of the mouth and with those who are authorized to speak to the press, such as the president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon and his government officials (white Mexican men of obvious European descent), extremely well dressed and with their hair perfectly groomed, and repeated by their emissary Jorge Ramos and the press of Univision, as the officials assume emergency powers (this expression always reminds me of Senator Palpatine of Star Wars), while they repetitively promise medications and vaccines to the population of poor Mexican Indian and mestizos, but only cover their mouths with blue masks, and order them to stay in their homes while overcrowded clinics have to close because they are unable to handle the sick.
This reminds me of the first seminar I took with you about Postmodernism, this course made a profound impression on me as an intellectual, not only because of the many intellectuals that we read and studied in the class (Jameson, Horkheimer, Adorno, Debord), but also because of their many proposals. The ones that I remember most are Lyotard’s and his infamous “language games”: Global warming is not a language game, the AIDS pandemic is not a language game, 9/11 is not either, nor is the war against terror or the bombing of Bagdad, nor were the televised threats of “shock and awe”, nor is the proliferation of atomic weapons. However, all of these crises generate a multimillion dollar industry of international conferences and congresses in expensive hotels, and luxurious trips for all the activists and defenders of every just cause imaginable, and produce a tsunami of language games that always end up in resolutions, conferences and round tables, town hall meetings and TV spots, and rounds of applause, flavored here and there by carefully controlled manifestations with tear gas and water hosing, and to which all of us have already grown accustomed, and with wild announcements and claims that promise access to drugs for all the Africans infected with the HIV virus before 2009, the cessation of deforestation of the Amazon and of forest reserves that exist only on UN maps, the end of global warming; accompanied by the most vulgar examples given by the very two leaders of Mexico and the US: Barack Obama and Felipe Calderon. The former promises the heaven and the skies while at the same time sinking the United States in the biggest federal multi-trillion dollar deficit that the world has ever seen and that the United States will never be able to repay, printing dollars like they are confetti, and carefully hiding behind a mediatic-messianic veil of racial and politically correct smiles. The latter makes wild promises to overthrow the drug cartels in his country (with one of the most openly corrupt governments that the western world has ever seen) and to stop the spread of the Swine Flu virus (with one of the most miserable and inefficient health care systems that the third world has ever produced). Both presidents hyper-grow their governments into the largest bureaucratic and inefficient governments that the history of humanity has ever witnessed.
Who do these leaders think they can fool?
ES: The Academy, the mega-machine of academic formation, in its double meaning, military and educational, of the verb “to form”, and your experience with the North American Academia in NYU, an Academy that is incapable of responding in a reflexive way when confronted with the collapse of the current world order. What do you think?
Back to the subject of mouth masks: I viscerally hate academic submission. And especially the one that academic Hispanists practice. And specifically the ones that I have witnessed at NYU and the University of Puerto Rico. And I agree with a Spanish Poet, ignored and unknown by all of our prestigious Ibero-American Departments, Jose Manuel Caballero Bonald: “Great Literature has always been written by the disobedient.” And it is precisely here where my problems start. They start with a permanent irritation that bothers me as a reaction towards all imposition, by whomever, and especially that which is practiced through language and through the teaching of Literature. And even more, when the teaching of Spanish and Spanish Literature is plagued by ignorance and prejudices.
Let’s take a look, as a starting point, at the hallmark of our department:
a. “The hallmark of our department is its trans-Atlantic and inter-American focus.” What African literatures are studied in our department? What Spanish Literature, or Portuguese, or Mexican, or Puerto Rican, or Dominican, or Colombian, or Peruvian, or Venezuelan, or Central American, or literature from the Latino Communities in the United States is studied in our department? Except for the privileged place granted to the literatures of Cuba, Argentina and Chile, what literature from other Latin American countries is studied extensively in our department?
b. “We bridge traditional divides between Spain and Spanish America; between North and South America; between Portugal, Brazil and Africa; and between Spanish America and Brazil, in order to rethink historical, literary and linguistic boundaries from new perspectives.” What does our faculty teach about Africa? What graduate course is offered at our department about the literatures or languages from North America, Portugal or Africa? What academic expertise can our faculty or students demonstrate about the Latino Communities in the United States?
c. “Thus our endeavor is essentially comparatist in nature, as it must be in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.” I will mention here a list of sonorous concepts and I will ask, what do they mean, how are they taught, how are they brought to praxis and how are they considered in the current intellectual reflection that is supposed to exist in our department: history, literature, linguistic, latin-americanist, philosophy, modernity, transatlantic, Spanish?
Both the Spanish and the Portuguese colonization provoked, not only the expulsion of the Jews and Arabs from the Peninsula, and the physical and spiritual annihilation of the indigenous civilizations that were encountered in America, but also the destruction of vast African civilizations, the cruel trans-Atlantic trade of entire populations, the separation of families, the slavery of millions of persons, and a systematic genocide and extermination, backed by the Catholic Church, that simply has no parallel in the history of humanity. That’s how the foundations of modern global capitalism were established. Today, this system is celebrated everywhere with the use of sonorous but historically empty concepts such as transculturation, globalization, multi-culturalism, and hybridism.
Canonical Cocktail against AIDS: The list of readings for the Ph D in Spanish Literature at NYU provoked in me such a stupor and total boredom that I ended up in state of intensive intellectual repulsion, laughter, and pure shock. Four years have passed and I am still slowly recuperating from it. My in-monde-logic system is on the floor. My verbal load is up the roof. The diagnosis is grim: Academically Acquired Intellectual Deficiency Syndrome (AAIDS) that I combat with a literary cocktail that consists exclusively of the following pills: Reynaldo Arenas, Miguel de Cervantes, Julio Cortazar, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jose Eustacio Rivera, Mario de Andrade, Jose Lezama Lima, Clarice Lispector, Virgilio Pinera, Augusto Roa Bastos, Juan Rulfo y Severo Sarduy: Nothing else! And whoever wants to study creative writing with me better drink this cocktail first. The rest of the Spanish and Latin American Canon should be thrown in the trash can, starting with Borges and ending up with such boring and stupid writers as Saramago, Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa y Arturo Perez Reverte. When are they finally going to die so that they can stop writing? Let them collect dust in the minds of Hispanic Academics. We have to throw a Molotov cocktail into the literature of Bolaño and his living imitators and devotees, and explode the crack generation: Volpi, Paz Soldan, Fuguet, and all their comrades; a whole bunch of fools. Let them bore Alfaguara readers to death! And about Puerto Rican literature: I DO NOT TOLERATE IT. A new class of literary inhibitors has to be developed to combat the spread of Latino Writers in the United States.
But who cares about this reading list anymore? Who gives a damn about literature for that matter? Who gives a FUCK about Latin American and Spanish writers anymore? This PhD reading list was abandoned many years ago, like the teaching of the Spanish language was abandoned, as well as the teaching of High Literature as a reading corpus for the cultural and literary formation of students. In our department no one is capable of systematically reading anything, the autonomy of the literary text is not respected, and there are no real instruments for the analysis of anything. The word canon does not exist in our academic language, not because they want to open the possibility to a multiplicity of literatures, but because they want to eliminate literature, by equating a Lezama or a Sarduy with a Restrepo and a Fuguet because they are all texts. What lunatic can conceive and promote such idiocies?
***
Dicenteredness and de-focalization are intentional, as verbal and writing expressions of academic and intellectual dissent: I am pregnant with the most bitter wisdom: I belong to a long lineage of writers and artists who have been animalized, colonized, sexiled even from themselves, penetrated, infected and censored: positives, radically promiscuous, poor, illegitimate children of unknown fathers, medical refugees, effeminates, degenerates and dis-gendered, invaded and inhabited by trillions of microbes and viruses, and all of us with our hopes shattered. That is why we share a common frustration, a common irritation, a common disobedience and internal limit: The spiritual, intellectual and political failure caused by cultures, traditions and institutions that, in one way or another, have rejected us and failed us.
ES: However?
However, I am accompanied by the goddess Oya: Cloudy skies always provoke in me a state of intellectual and creative trance where I assume her attributes. The wind caresses my face and lifts me up. She is the warrior goddess who selected me as her son. The goddess of the Niger River, she is associated with St. Teresa of Avila or with the Blessed Mother Candelaria. Oya-Yansan is the goddess of death, of hurricane winds, of drastic change, of lighting and red wine. She has all the jewelry, she is pretentious, she is the real queen of the dynasty of the powerful children of Odduduwa, who helped the young king Shango to ascend to power and solidify one of the most powerful empires that have ever existed upon the face of this earth. She is also the goddess of madness. She lives in the shattering of glass, in fissures, and in the tearing of cloth. When she comes down, she comes down with a machete opening the path for radical change, for progress, for new concepts and new thoughts, for new ways of looking at things, for innovation. Oya is the goddess of disobedience. Of dissent. Of dissent as descent. And that is how I want to be. In her honor I intentionally stand on the verge of huge precipices, of catastrophes, of contrariness. Realizing that the same hurricane, the same goddess who loves me so much, at any moment can push me off the cliff. But like her, I smile and I search the young and the strong who are still agitated and who still dream, to initiate them in the language of richness, of sovereignty, of beauty and of power. She is I, and I am She. There is nothing that I abhor more than ignorance, than ugliness, than humility and cowardliness. That is why I always assume the postures of radical and total change. I posit myself beyond the limits that are even impossible to be uttered yet. I erupt fire from my mouth. Jecuajei. Destructive and chaotic, but transforming, without me, progress cannot occur. I open the gates so I can scream. Precipitating me, manifesting me.
In other words, my intellectual discharge is category five: I am constantly reorganizing my own literary, spiritual, and artistic project as if I were a tornado: I attempt to destroy ignorance, imbecility, and all kinds of censorship and self censorship, and all the efforts that pretend to make uniform and to subdue the minds of the people, understanding, that all these processes are extremely violent and that they leave profound physical, psychological, linguistic and spiritual wounds. In my own case, I can only do it by becoming a hurricane and absorbing the frustration caused in me by a Latin American Literature that has served me for nothing because it was originated precisely under a civilizatory colonial project profoundly Catholic and machista, contrary to every fiber of my being, by a crowd of literary parrots, mostly homophobes, who reject everything that I am or represent, by a literary canon formulated by a Spanish and Latin American wealthy class, whose cultural expressions are superficial, and irrelevant, and exclusionary of everyone who does not think like them, or who does not serve their same god, totally miserable and incapable of providing anything positive to the condition in which the world finds today, and that even to this day, they exert strong institutional powers to exclude, eliminate and silence my literature and the few things that I write and say.
I cannot do more.
Intensifying myself, materializing myself, manifesting myself, precipitating myself.
And when my storm is over, what? I assure you: my intensity and frequency will grow.
Only blood will calm my divinity.
Only the calm that arrives with the humidity after the storm produces intense pleasure in me …
***
censorship. [Latin cēnsor, Roman censor, from cēnsēre, to assess.] 1. counterintelligence achieved by banning or deleting any information of value to the enemy. 2. deleting parts of publications, correspondence or theatrical performance. 3. the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor. The use of state or group power to control freedom of expression, such as by passing laws to prevent media from being published or propagated. 4. the act or process of examining and removing obscene or otherwise objectionable material; the act of expurgating. 5. The action of suppressing in whole or in part something that is considered politically or morally objectionable. Letters written by Japanese Canadians were opened, read and in many cases pieces were blacked out or cut out. 6. This is the activity of looking carefully at published material (books, films) and removing parts which are thought to be offensive or, often, politically dangerous.
expropriate. 1. To deprive of possession: they expropriated the property owners who lived in the path of the new highway. 2. To transfer (another's property) to oneself.
ES: Right now, if you speak the way you do, in other words, freely, creatively, your tongue will be cut off with academic scissors. If you dare to speak outside the conventional script of the lettered clerics nobody will pay attention to you. The only thing that can be spoken in the academy is that which has already been codified. Is this the reason why they try to crush your novel about a homosexual in New York City who deals with daily intellectual loneliness and misery and is tortured by credit agencies? Why do you think your second novel aroused such an aggressive reaction in Puerto Rico, where they attempted to destroy the edition? And why do you think that a University and a Department of Literature that exhibit so much interest in and support of gay and queer themes and causes, have ignored and censored your intellectual position?
Here I offer my version of the facts: A small group of professors from the University of Puerto Rico did not like the open criticism of the Puerto Rican Academy that I presented in my novel, nor did they like my parodies of their friends and the gay academics of Puerto Rico. Then, they called the Editor of Isla Negra and intimidated him. And he, reacting under fear, removed my novel from bookstores on the second day that they had been on the shelves for sale. Furthermore, he threatened me with destroying the complete edition of the novel, if we did not modify certain paragraphs. Then, I had no other alternative but to hire a lawyer and threaten to take him to court.
How can I understand such a violent act? If removing your novels from bookstores is not censorship, I do not know what is. If threatening me with cutting 250 novels, after I had spent an entire morning at Libreria Magica signing all of them, is not censorship, I do not know what is. If to put a red disclaimer on the cover of the novel to excuse the editor from the responsibility of having published the novel is not censorship, then tell me what is. If threatening me over lunch with never supporting me, nor ever helping me to promote my novel nor to help me get a job at the university, like the threats Prof. Ruben Rios Avila issued to me over lunch in Santurce, if that is not censorship, I do not know what is.
But I underestimated the power of censorship and the unequal forces that it unleashed: Besides the fact that the threats of cutting my novel in half almost makes me insane; and that practically I had to steal it from Libreria Magica because I was afraid that it was not going to survive—thank God that the owner of the bookstore gave me 20 copies so that I did not have to commit a crime; my novel has not had a “normal” launching like other books and has never been critiqued in the major newspapers of Puerto Rico, nor have I had the opportunity to present it in the bookstores of Puerto Rico. If this is not censorship, what is? And because censorship is a weapon of violence, you know that you have been the victim of violence and of a silencing act when you hate everybody and you have to shoot everyone down and you cannot control yourself: That is what violence does.
Then it was the expropriation of the novel, because the editor did not ever imagine that there were international rights that protected my novel: in the case of Puerto Rico, two copyright laws, the Puerto Rican laws and the laws from the UNESCO, which explicitly prohibit the destruction of the works of an artist without his consent. But censorship was when these gay Puerto Rican academics, hiding behind telephone calls, intimidated the editor of Isla Negra to such a degree that he removed the novels from bookstores and only put them back after I took him to court.
So, there we go: Besides the obvious fact that the editor has no balls, it is evident that he did not read the novel before he sent it to the press. Puerto Rico does not have a group of editors in the style of those at the beginning of the XX century in the United States, where an editor carefully read the manuscripts he was to print and knew a lot about literature and was interested in quality rather than sales. Puerto Rican editors are, functionally, small investors associated with small printing presses, and with small mafias of intellectuals where no one who does not think like them can enter. In other words, the Hispanic literary formation has short-circuited the capacity of these editors to be able to identify alternative literary talents who do not conform to the norms established by the editorial markets, or by the Hispanic formation, or by the small micro elites that reign in the universities.
On the one hand, the Puerto Rican editors publish for the consumption of their personal academic friends, so that their books get assigned to literature classes in the university. On the other hand, the big editorial houses of Spain and Latin America are searching for the lowest common denominator that could guarantee them sales, and their focus is not precisely good literature, because good literature does not automatically transform itself into good monetary sales. On top of this, independent nations have their own cultural mechanisms for promoting their own artists and writers as national exports for the literary consumption of the rest of the world. But any literature that can adjust itself to these market demands, or that comes from a colony, or that does not have a country nor a language like the Latino literature of the United States is doomed to be left out.
But I no longer respect them. I direct my criticism directly at them. The censorship and the silence that these academic and cowardly faggots from the Puerto Rican academy exerted upon me, is the reason why I am accusing them here. I would like to take them out of the closet by force. But you know what: I am not going to share my fame with them. Impoverished by their lack of real critical tools, of thinking and dialogue, these queer academics from Puerto Rico have lent their own minds to stupid postmodernist crap, when their country is stagnant. They are intellectuals incapable of contributing to the public debate or to the embitterment of their country. You know why? Because they were always cowards. Because they never came out of the closet. Because the academic formation of Hispanic Studies colonized their minds and carefully encaged them in a closet of specialists. Because they were trained to be Spanish teachers in the United States. The discipline of Hispanic Studies and the North American Academy has relegated them to be mere administrators of ignorance, Spanish teachers whose forced function is to entertain a North American audience in congresses, but not to teach ideas, nor is it to create or produce new knowledge that could help their own country or the world, nor can they be intellectuals in the public sphere because their postmodern academic specialization has turned them into mere spectators incapable of facing the difficulties that the world is undergoing.
You only have to take a glance at the stupidities that they write and how they speak to get a sense of the small mentality of queer postmo that prevents them from understanding the reality in which the rest of the world lives. It is another way of balkanizing knowledge.
Furthermore, these academic bureaucrats who have promoted the expropriation or censorship of a novel do not deserve to be a part of the Liberal Arts. They belong to the Spanish inquisition. To the granting of imprimaturs. They do not deserve to be called men/women of letters.
ES: Are they hybrid-subaltern grammatologists, stars of the Cultural Studies scene or post-intellectuals of the pre-packaged multicultural studies, like Warhol Campbell soups?
They are not even Pollocks, these academics are jokes on bad taste. Everyone, including myself, can be an object of parody, especially those who, by virtue of constructing their academic careers, not upon knowledge, but upon modeling in Literary Saloons, not upon teaching, but upon the manipulation of unintelligible jargons, not upon the advancement of knowledge, but upon networking and behind the scenes university politics; have contributed nothing to the advancement of their own countries and cultures. Shame on them!
ES: Is a writer a scribe? Is he an amalgam of inter-textual productions? Can a poem and a telephone directory be placed at the same level just because they are both texts?
The word Lantern is very similar to the root of the word Literature. The craft of the writer is represented in the Tarot Cards by the card number nine of the Major Arcana, that of the Hermit. He is standing up in the midst of darkness, in a desert landscape, and he is illumined by a lantern whose source of light is the Star of David. In times of catastrophe, of darkness, of boredom and of incomprehension, we should direct our reflection towards this card. All good literature should be illumined with the following rays:
First, it should show the way and should lead humanity towards its most beautiful ideas and dreams. This can be done directly (didactic, ideological), indirectly (testimonial, or when a monstrous aspect of humanity is narrated), or via discovery (when an unknown aspect of reality is revealed).
Second, it should provide an excess of meaning by operating in the sphere of the sublime and, evoking African wisdom, by helping us digest reality, no matter how painful that reality may be, but filtering it via the beautiful. This can be achieved via poetics, or via the mastery of language and form, or via the musicality of words, or via innovation, by providing an excess of new metaphors and symbols to humanity.
Third, it should entertain and should combat boredom, in other words, good literature must be pleasurable.
Fourth, disobey. It should always find what cannot be said. Dissent, dissenter. When a path is closed, it must have the capacity to open a new one. Good writing is always an act of resistance, especially the one of classifications. It should resist established formats, especially those imposed by Academia and by the editorial markets. But to be able to disobey, it must know well the literary tradition that forms us as readers.
Fifth, it should have the capacity to operate at different levels of the mind by providing an excess of meaning, because this will secure that the reader will come back over and over again to the text, plus it will secure multiple readers.
Sixth, it should blind. It should be so intense, that it should blind everyone who dares to look at it directly. Because in the end, the educated reader searches for intensity.
The Hermit is an old man. He retires from the world to write but he comes back to the world. He has to have lived a lot. He should know the world closely. More than write, he has to read. He has to know. The author has to incarnate his own themes and characters.
Good literature must always be a shining star. Its brilliance will be produced by the fusion of cultural forces, psychic, spiritual and sometimes opposed, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, and the author has to position him/herself in the solitude of his/her writing to be able to inhabit the spaces of trance (because at the end, the hermit is a mystic): trance as a spiritual and ideological duel, as a medium of his/her own characters, as the last state at the time close to death, as altered conscious states, as drug-induced trances, even as madness, and as an expression of the most critical and decisive moments that his/her own culture undergoes. Trance as trance-formation in opposition to Logos and Logic.
ES: You are dangerous! No wonder the Department of Spanish and Portuguese wants to get rid of you! They don’t even grant you access to the Library… the prudent Masters of the Department! But in any event, what is this business of creative writing? How can we transform a discipline that every day is more bureaucratic in a Spanish department where no one is capable of distinguishing between tragedy and comedy, between literature and fiction, between myth and text in sublime creation, in magnificent poesies? Witchcraft or farce?
The only professor in the creative writing program of the Spanish Department at NYU who has proved herself internationally as writer, as an artist and as a proven professor of creative writing, and who possesses the intellectual and editorial credentials to provide creative writing workshops, and the only one who deserves the title of “prominent Latin American writer” (this is the only objective that you can find in the website), is the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit. The others are second-class writers. And I must add, irrelevant, boring, and completely unknown, who have not even been published by significant editorial houses. In other words, they are amateurs. The writing of these women has not been submitted to rigorous public criticism nor to the rigorous scrutiny of other colleagues, professors, literary critics or specialists; in other words, nobody reads them.
When some future writers that are in that program ask me for help, I innocently ask them the following questions: Why don’t you submit to the same rigorous criticism of the novels and poems of these creative writing professors? What intellectual credentials, of writing and of the editorial markets, do these women have, except for Diamela Eltit, that authorize them to be creative writing professors? Or even a more basic question: Have you read what they have written? What have they written that entitles them to be classified as prominent writers? What significant contributions have these women made to the field of literature? What are the objectives of this program? For what market are they preparing their students? What kind of writer do they intend to produce?
I suspect that these creative writing programs provide an opportunity to all these language professors of second rank in our departments to teach literature courses that are not courses of Spanish language to first and second year for North American students. This is because, in our department, as in many other across the United States, there exists an entire faculty who, because they do not have tenure and because they are working under miserable contracts and unjust salaries that are not enough to live on, and because they cannot teach graduate courses, their careers are left to rot by assigning them to teach the verb ser after they have acquired their PhDs. Then, these creative writing classes become consolation prizes for them.
Who do these women pretend to fool? Who can think of studying creative writing with these municipal guards?
After having taught and proposed creative writing programs at the University of Puerto Rico, and after having many students who are writers that still search for me in private, I have developed a “sweet and sour” relationship with this kind of program. For me, a creative writing program must offer, as a minimum, the development of the following objectives:
The first one has to do with the development of the mastery of the techniques of writing, a mastery of the basic tools that every writer must master in order to write well. I refer here to a class of basic writing engineering that will ensure proficiency in essential areas such as plot, character development, dialogues, arch, climax, etc.
The second has to do with the development of the aesthetic sensibilities of each student. And this I learned from my creative writing teacher, Diamela Eltit, and it can be achieved with reading classic texts, related to the topics and genre that the author is manipulating individually, both literary and theoretical readings, and that seek to enrich the intellectual sensibilities of the author so that he can establish a deeper and complex conversation with his own literary tradition. This dialogue can be established only with people who have read a LOT and with teachers who one admires, not because of the positions they may hold, but because of what they have written, and who seek to help the student to navigate that immense cesspool of “books that you must read.”
The third has to do with polishing what the student has already written. It consists of sharing his/her own work with other students and colleagues to develop an attitude of openness to the criticism of other readers, so that he can fine-tune his critical skills, because all manuscripts can be improved before they go to the press.
The fourth is practical, but is not less important, and it has to do with the exposure to the world of publishing, with encounters with editors, literary agents, etc. How do you build a literary career? That sort of thing.
The creative writing program at the Spanish Department at NYU possesses none of these objectives, and they can all be achieved without having to complete Master’s in creative writing.
Finally, I am extremely concerned with the vigilance of the creative writing process that is exerted by professors who are literary critics or mere language teachers.
ES: Don’t you think that the synthesis of post-structuralist literary criticism and the conditions imposed by a global industry of fiction can result in a grammatological global machine? An absolute lettered city?
All of us who have already experienced the market of higher education know that a Master’s in creative writing in Spanish is worth absolutely nothing, it is not even good for finding a decent tenure track job, nor does it guarantee that the graduate can write well, thus, what is it good for? It serves to separate, once and for all, literature from literary criticism. It serves to ensure that only those who study literary criticism will receive PhDs and therefore, will have a chance at the better jobs with tenure. It also serves, to judge from the mediocre professors that have been selected at NYU to teach these classes, to relegate young creative writers to a status of second class within the discipline, providing them with an education and formation that is mediocre and by maintaining them permanently under a relationship of tutelage. And it also serves to provide rich Latin American students with an expensive vacation in the city of New York, clocked under the rubric of creative writing. These masters are a kind of “boarding schools” for journalists and amateur writers, but not for serious writers.
Many years ago I read a cartoon in the New Yorker that revealed the state of affairs: An old couple was sitting in their living room, and one was telling the other: All the novels I have read lately have been produced in creative writing programs. This comic points towards the professionalization of the creative process which runs the risk of producing pre-formatted novels in mass, not precisely bad, but highly predictable, flat, photocopies one of the other. And this concerns me.
ES: But you are not a nihilist. Do you propose something?
I propose a furious aesthetic of rage, revindicating it as a divine virtue to be able to maintain a certain level of sanity, accompanied by multiple endings ( I am the impetuous Niger River that ends in the mayor delta of Africa, and I am formed by streams, lagoons, garbage, rapids, swamps, mangroves, marshes, and many animals):
STREAMS. All esquizophrenic writing is esquizo-prophetic: Like the homeless woman in the South Bronx in Angels in America, when Hannah asks her how can she get to Brooklyn, the woman responds: “In the new century, I think we will all be insane”: The planet will warm and Puerto Rico will continue to be irrelevant to the global order and eventually all its coastal cities will be submerged. The next pandemic will kill twenty percent of the population. The horrendous legacy of Latin Americans to the world will be the creation of the Amazon desert. They will burn and cut everything in their path. They will destroy the forest and will kill all its animals. A nuclear bomb will go off unexpectedly and that will launch a new World War. South America and Africa will become two continental shanty towns (take a tour of the Niger so you can witness with your own eyes how a Goddess, how a beautiful river has been converted into an infernal ecological dump by Shell and other Oil Corporations). The next terrorist attack on the United States will be more destructive than 9/11. In other words: Simultaneously, memory will be enhanced and erased, and the future of our past will enhance humans into borgs. The twenty first century will be defined by faith relations rather than race relations, by the threat of terrorism rather than the threat of Communism, by the real threat of global warming, the destruction of the tropical forests around the globe, one unstoppable pandemic, and by nuclear and biological war; and all these prophesies are not language games.
LAGOONS. Besides all the lagoons I have encountered in everything I described above, NYU has been for me a place without limits. I associate NYU with pleasure (I had many sexual encounters at the King Juan Carlos Center, in Washington Square Park, I have had sex with myself even in the offices of some professors). I had sex there with anyone I could have it with (I even had sex with students and professors). Also, the most potent drugs in the city of New York can be found in NYU dorms (my students bought them for me or my dealer delivered them to me at the King Juan Carlos). I was so high while I was doing my graduate studies, that there are entire semesters that I don’t remember anything and the best part is that I got As in those classes. I also associate NYU with profound love: while I was there I was diagnosed HIV positive and it was precisely the director of the King Juan Carlos, professor Jim Fernandez, who helped me survive that crisis. We cried together. He helped me get through the crisis. He accompanied me all those weeks and we cried together like two children while he designed medical plans to combat my disease. I will never forget that. That is a true friend (all teaching is not done in the classroom). And I learned how to debate. The intellectual mafia at NYU has a long standing tradition of a radical left and it should always return to that tradition, especially, because it was the only university of the United States that was bombed during 9/11.
MANGROVES. I am a mangrove with spiritual roots through which I absorb all my addictions, that are many, and through which I hold myself in place so that the waves of the sea do not carry me away. The root of all my failures has been alcohol, marihuana, crystal meth, poppers, promiscuous sex always with drugs, and obsessions of every kind that produce in me a state of mental insanity that I can only combat with a spiritual cocktail of higher powers. My root branches are God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Blessed Mother, the Buddha, St. Ignatius Loyola, my novice master, the Goddess Oya and my God-Father, Zarabanda, my Spiritual Protectors, my God Mother who is dead but still helps me, CMA and my Sponsor, the evangelists from the Crystal Cathedral, the Tarot Cards, the Riverside Church and its pastors, and everyone who can help me stay sober and alive today. In other words, if evil forces have entered your life, here is a prayer for you: may this day, this hour, this moment // bring rest in You // that through You in me // I may live // sober and free // proclaiming how You save me // this day, this hour, this breath.
THE AFRICAN QUEEN. An inflatable plastic raft is sinking in the middle of the delta, where I am Katherine Hepburn, screaming and pointing with my umbrella: “CAPTAINS OF THE CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAMS AND SPANISH DEPARTMENTS OF THE UNITED STATES: I PROPOSE A TOTALLY NEW CURRICULAR MATRIX FOR A CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM, THE MOST CREATIVE POSSIBLE, WHERE THE INVITED FACULTY WILL BE COMPRISED OF EXCONVICTS, DRUG ADDICTS, PROSTITUTES AND FACULTY WITH TATTOOS, CHAIN SMOKERS AND DRUG TRAFFICKERS, PROFESSORS WITH SYPHILLIS AND WITH AIDS, A LEARNED FACULTY FROM THE UNDERGROUND TO TRAP THE MOST TIMID AND TEPID YOUNG WRITERS FROM LATIN AMERICA AND, WITH MARIHUANA INCENSE AND PRACTICAL EXCERCISES OF AFRO AMERICAN, NAHUATL, SPANGLISH, QUECHUA AND PATUA WRITING; EXORCISE THE FORMATION THEY HAVE ACQUIRED IN MASTERS OF SPANISH CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAMS FROM AROUND THE UNITED STATES, WHERE THE SONGS OF SOLOMON, THE CATHOLIC SACRAMENTS AND THE READINGS OF THE CATHOLIC MYSTICS AND THE SPANISH SUBMISSION ARE ENCOURAGED AND TAUGHT (LIKE SAN JUAN DE LA CRUZ AND ST. TERESA DE AVAILA), BECAUSE THERE AIN’T NOTHING SO COMPLICATED AS THE INSIDE OF A TORPEDO.”
QUEER RAPIDS. This conversation critically examines the transformation of Spanish and Creative Writing Programs into Community Centers for the Prevention of (Sex/Intellect)ually Transmitted Diseases. It challenges the very concept of postmodern queer discourse, and the fate of academic subjectivity and the empty Hispanic baroque by proposing serenity as an alternative to the tragic discourses of the LGBTQ Pan Latin; through a close examination of the works of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. By comparing the proliferation of Spanish and Portuguese Programs with the rise of HIV in communities of color, or by contrasting the politics of Spanish Departments with the policies of such Pharmaceutical Giants as Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline, or by uncovering Latin American faculties as viral infections; a case can be made for the promotion of literary safe intercourse, the distribution of intellectual prophylaxis – free of charge --, the Patagonian Lesboerotic Homo Sacer as a new trope for the formation of a Trans-Atlantic-Ibero-American identity, and the abstinence from Latino writing as a powerful means of stopping the spread of Magic Realism, Cultural Sarcoma and the Spanish Flu. Finally, unable to communicate, let alone to collaborate, the end of the literary pandemic is announced, by the intentional substitution of the works of Cervantes Saavedra with the writing achievements of the Yugoslavian Philosopher Songorocosongo, carefully safeguarding the very possibility of Latin American Studies Departments with maneuvers and approaches to Borges and Lorca via intellectual abracadabras such as Alain Badiou and Emanuel Levinas.
SWAMPS. Because I am a writer living with HIV-AIDS and on Social Security and Medicaid, I have no patience with Latin American academics and writers who expect me to remain cool and calm as they play their ridiculous academic games. Therefore, I present to you a rather vulgar work in progress, a treatment for a movie that I am floating around to literary agents and editors, entitled Who’s Afraid of Frigidette Van Dyke? And that will be published post-mortem by either Alfaguara or Mondadory, and it is a conversation between two liquor ridden queer Puerto Rican academics inside an ugly apartment in New York City. Elizabeth Taylor is played by me. The convocation is issued by the president of the MLA, the dying professor Frigidette Van Dyke. A Pentecostal secretary writes the convocation by emails in Holy Tongues of Fire and in the name of “Graduate Committees.” Doctor Van Dyke is accompanied by masculine biker-looking feminists, her former graduate students unable to speak, deaf and dumb, but with PhDs. A Puerto Rican line of academic cadavers, queer, effeminate, kneeling, dead, and with their heads covered, after having paid their dues of membership to the MLA and LASA, they are brought kneeling in front of the board of the MLA at a Hotel in Las Vegas. Doris Sommer is in charge of their makeup. In an unexpected twist, a committee comprised of female directors of Latin American Departments in the United States, and tele-directed from Patagonia by none other than Nelly Richard, Beatriz Sarlo and Josefina Ludmer, they put their black plastic gloves on and, without Crisco, with their weak tits hanging and with their armpits unshaved, they push their fists into the asses of the Puerto Rican queer Academics, in the middle of a literary panel entitled: “Imperial Visions: Oxymoronic Sexual Sovereignty of the Pan Latin Diaspora.” Then, something unexpected happens (it is a baroque scene, clinical and kitsch): the pain is so strong and the pleasure so intense and the arms of those queer Latin Americanists so thick, that all the Puerto Rican cadavers resurrect, they piss and shit on themselves, some of them, especially the faggots from Comp Lit become pregnant, others fly and land, comically, in Rio Piedras, Brooklyn and Chile, one of them becomes a follower of Levinas and has to wear Pampers, another one starts dancing Hip-Hop among wild flowers, some of them start reciting Zizek and Walter Benjamin. Then, in a final fight, the academic choir of Puerto Rican dykes bring out dying Professor Van Dyke in a bed: You see, she has to be kept ALIVE at all costs, on life support, because she is the only one who will secure their positions, she is the only one who can promote whatever they write without reading them, she is the only one who can teach them and lead them, and they bring her out, yes, in a wheel chair, with an IV and an oxygen mask they drag her so that she can lead their doctoral dissertations, so that she can invite them to congresses, she can write letters of recommendation, she can give them fellowships and scholarships. But to be honest with you, of all these characters, she is the only one who does not exist.
MARSHES. Marismas sounds like maricas and like miasmas, and therefore, I am not going to imitate Liza Minnelli, no, no, no, I am too old and too wise for that, and she is still alive. That has been done before and I want to become a legend. Plus I have to treat her with the respect that she is entitled to because we are both Divas. Instead, I will finish this literary interview my way, in a state of trance, channeling Malcolm X: “Don’t let anybody who is oppressing you ever lay the ground rules. Don’t go by their games, don’t play the game by their rules. Let them know now that this is a new game, and we’ve got some new rules…” Therefore, I propose a literature of Trance-formation with Frank Sinatra, on Broadway, because yes, I am a very good writer and I am not dissatisfied with anything I have written so far. I am a number one, king of my hill, top of the heap, king of the news, and all this fuss about Latin American Studies, all this fuss about Spanish Departments, all this fuss about Creative Writing Programs en Español is just that, little town blues, and yes, I have made it here, and I can and I will make it anywhere, so I am going to let him take it away:
Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today
I want to be a part of it - New York, New York
These vagabond shoes, are longing to stray
Right through the very heart of it - New York, New York
I wanna wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep
to find I’m king of the hill- top of the heap
These little town blues are melting away
I’ll make a brand new start of it - in old New York
If you can make it there, You’ll make it anywhere
It’s up to you - New York, New York
New York, New York
I want to wake up in a city that never sleeps
And find I’m a number one top of the list, king of the hill
Cream of the crop, king of the news
These little town blues, are melting away
I’m gonna make a brand new start of it – right there in old New York
And if I can make it there, I’m gonna make it anywhere
It´s up to you - New York, New York
English translation of the Spanglish original by Angel Lozada
