18 dic 2008
EOA2 Año 3: Les Misérables . Índice
Les Misérables
Diciembre 2008
Año 3 No. 2
Edición bilingue /Bilingual edition
Blanco y negro
Rodolfo Walsh
SAL, 1965
Esperanto
ENSAYO
Alberto Masferrer
De " El dinero maldito"
SAL, 1868-1932
ARTES VISUALES
Piero Manzoni
ITA, 1933-1963
Pienso, luego existo
Fotos en esta sección cortesía
Ciudad Imaginada
ESFOTO 08
Uncommon Senselessness
Bill O’Driscoll
Danza con ritmo, sin pasta y sin net…: Estrategias de inserción de lo local en lo global
Oswaldo Marchionda
VEN
Screw Wall Street
Jason Flores-Williams
Terrae-motus
ARTES VISUALES / CRI
Joaquín Rodríguez del Paso
NOVELA / GUA
Rodrigo Rey-Rosa
De “Caballeriza”
ARTES VISUALES / ALE
Anselm Kiefer
POESÍA / HON
Claudia S. Torres Laitano
“Mariposa Amarilla”
Diálogo de Bípedos
Margaret Atwood: Imbalances of obligation
Tom Gatti
ING
A walk on the wildside
Museo de Arte Popular
P-41 de Adrián
IX Premio Arte Joven 08
Convocatoria anual del Centro Cultural de España en El Salvador
Lo que el viento se llevó
Espacios de Libertad
Mayra Barraza / SAL
Premio Príncipe Claus a Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, Fundador y Director del Museo de
El espíritu de los tiempos
Rodrigo Peñalba / NIC
Review de Zeitgeist –el documental sobre tres monumentales mitos contemporáneos- aquí en fast forward.
Bloga 8
Como perder una patria
Talpajocote
Blog de Miguel Huezo Mixco
La religión de mi tiempo
El intruso
Blog de Javier Payeras
Postes
Talpajocote
Blog de María Tenorio
Calidad de vida
Caleidoscopio nocturno
Blog de Gabriel Otero
22/10/08
Los días del mundo
Blog de Luis Acebes Navarro
2004 en adelante
Analog
Blog de Rodrigo Peñalba
It´s only words
Artopia
Blog de John Perreault
Tiamina
Revuelta la palabra
Blog de Pablo Benítez
Al infinito y más allá
El sueño de Mariana
Buscando oro
The widow
Arte Acción
El circo
Capitalismo Bush
Rodolfo Walsh
Rodolfo Walsh
SAL, 1965
Desde los noventas Rodofo Walsh desarrolla una obra fotográfica que habla más de su acuciosa mirada -cual científico que estudia una extraña metamorfosis- que de su evidente experticia técnica. Su investigación nos revela una mordaz ironía que apunta -en esta serie en particular- hacia los simulacros culturales que componen la frágil identidad latinoamericana. Su obra fotográfica ha sido publicada en “Mapas Abiertos. Fotografía Latinoamericana 1992-
Les Misérables
Les Misérables
Ante la picada estrepitosa de las bolsas de valores en todo el mundo, que más pertinente que hablar desde el arte y la literatura sobre el dinero - esa moneda de cambio tan fugaz, como ilusoria.
Para ello (y siguiendo nuestra tradición de tomar títulos prestados ya sea de la literatura y/o del cine) titulamos este número con la conocida novela del siglo XIX de Víctor Hugo cuya narración de las vicisitudes de personajes de diversa índole durante 20 años, y su búsqueda de redención, habla elocuentemente en defensa de los oprimidos: todos aquellos que formamos parte de esa complicada red económica que se sacude cada vez que alguien estornuda en Wall Street.
Dinero, billetes, monedas, oro, amarillo, verde, trabajo, salarios, bienes, especulación, avaricia y codicia, riqueza, pobreza; cada quien establece sus parámetros al respecto y se ve obligado a formar parte o combatir sigilosamente las nuevas efigies de oro.
En este número, Rodolfo Walsh y Joaquín Rodríguez del Paso nos muestran las contradicciones de esa moneda de doble cara llamada turismo. Mientras, Alberto Masferrer, Piero Manzoni y Jason Flores-Williams nos señalan literalmente la especulación con mierda o mierda especulación que juega con los destinos de muchos sin importar las consecuencias. Rodrigo Rey-Rosa, en el fragmento de “Caballeriza” que presentamos aquí, nos recrea -con tanta claridad que duele mirar- ese paisaje humano aferrado al dinero con una mano y con la otra… a sus testículos. Al respecto, Margaret Atwood comenta en un tono delicado: “like one of those magician's tricks where somebody is waving a red handkerchief and while everybody's looking at it somebody else is stealing your wallet”. Y Anselm Kiefer nos recuerda en sus obras, cual heridas abiertas, aquellas ciudades de oro y poder convertidas en paja y ceniza.
Y sin embargo, la riqueza puede ser también otra. Puede ser como la mariposa amarilla en el poema Claudia Torres: “fleeting and distant”. O, como las pequeñas miniaturas de barro del Museo de Arte Popular presentadas en este número, que nos recuerdan de la belleza de las cosas sencillas y simples que da la vida.
Alberto Masferrer
ENSAYO
Alberto Masferrer
SAL, 1868-1932
De " El dinero maldito"
Alberto Masferrer (1968-1932) reunió en personalidad y trayectoria las actividades de maestro, periodista, ensayista, poeta y activista social. Se trata de uno de los pensadores salvadoreños más influyentes del siglo XX. Rompió con la tradicional actitud de los intelectuales de su tiempo que excluían a los trabajadores rurales y urbanos de los derechos de la ciudadanía. Su ensayo “El dinero maldito” es una denuncia de los efectos de la producción y comercialización de bebidas alcohólicas, que en esa época constituían una parte importante de los ingresos del estado salvadoreño.
La calle de la muerte
Esta calle en que vivo yo, debiera llamarse Calle de
Frente a mí, a una cuadra, está
Los domingos, desde muy mañana y todo el día, la vida enlaza esos tres antros en que el vicio, el crimen y el dolor se funden en una trinidad fatídica. Desde las siete de la mañana comienzan a pasar, viniendo del Volcán, labriegos jóvenes y viejos. Vienen a divertirse. Han trabajado toda la semana, curvados sobre el suelo, sembrando, podando, arando o escardando, para que el maíz, el arroz, el frijol y el plátano colmen nuestra mesa; para que las flores más bellas adornen nuestros búcaros; para que la leche y los huevos nos conforten y nutran; para que la vida, en toda forma, descienda de allá arriba, y venga, en ondas de salud y alegría, a reavivar las fuerzas decaídas de los que penamos y pecamos en la ciudad.
Han trabajado toda la semana esos labriegos, ellos y sus mujeres y sus hijos. Mientras ellos escardan o desmontan, la mujer y las hijas mayores lavan, remiendan y aplanchan, muelen y cocinan; vienen diariamente al mercado a vender flores y legumbres; y a llevar provisiones y medicinas; cosen la enagua y la camisa; cuidan de las gallinas y los cerdos; atienden al enfermo; van al río lejano, a traer el cántaro de agua para los menesteres urgentes. Ya noche, cansadas, fatigadas, caen pesadamente sobre el camastro o el tapesco, y duermen como troncos –si no hay niño pequeño que les desvele–, hasta que Venus, el apacible Nixtamalero, comienza a desvanecerse ante los blancores del alba.
Así es la vida en el Volcán, así se trabaja toda la semana. ¿Qué cosa más justa que bajar el domingo para descansar, para divertirse? Por eso, desde muy de mañana bajan los labriegos, limpios, endomingados, decidores, ligeros; dan una vuelta por la ciudad mientras se abre el estanco, y apenas éste despliega sus fauces, entran y beben. Un vaso tras otro, de pie, o apenas sentados en bancos miserables, beben el aguardiente, se embriagan, se embrutecen, pierden el sentido, se vuelven hoscos, agresivos, pendencieros, sacan las cuchillas y hieren. Hieren al compañero, al camarada, al amigo, a quien se les enfrente, a cualquiera. El aguardiente, el guaro de caña –el más hostil de los licores, en que un verdadero demonio se esconde, sediento de lucha y de sangre–, ofusca con sus vapores su rudo entendimiento y les impele a la riña y al crimen.
En breves horas, todo el trabajo de la semana es disipado. Si la mujer, con mimos o a escondidas, logró sustraer algunos reales; ya habrá siquiera para comenzar la semana. Si no, ella y las pobres muchachas corretearán el lunes, angustiadas, para encontrar el qué-comer, la medicina para el herido y los honorarios para el abogado, inflexible en la exigencia de los anticipos que han de cubrir los primeros gastos.
En breves horas, todo el bregar, todo el afán, todo el sudor de la semana, pasan, convertidos en dinero maldito, a la gaveta de la cantina. Con el mismo tesón e ímpetu con que trabajan la semana, así tragan veneno, un vaso tras otro, hasta que las piernas flaquean, la voz enronquece, las palabras se confunden y huyen, la mente se nubla, el corazón se encrespa, y la fiera surge de las profundidades del hombre, presta a desgarrar y a devorar.
Beben, beben más, siempre más. Primero son copas sencillas, espaciadas con risas y charlas; después son copas dobles; alternadas con abrazos y cantos, o promesas y lágrimas; después es la sed, la sed de licor, que no se apaga sino que se enciende cuanto más se bebe. Y entonces todo huye, todo se desvanece: la memoria, la atención, el juicio, el sentimiento del yo, el discernimiento del bien y del mal: es la locura, última forma de la embriaguez, que franquea el paso del hombre a la bestia, de la bestia a la fiera.
Y entonces, viene la sangre.
Piero Manzoni
ARTES VISUALES
Piero Manzoni
ITA, 1933-1963
"Mierda de artista n0 047" de Piero Manzoni, una lata de metal de
El término Arte Povera (voz italiana para "arte pobre") fue una tendencia de finales de los sesenta (posterior a Manzoni), cuyos creadores utilizaron materiales considerados 'pobres', de muy fácil obtención: como madera, hojas o rocas, placas de plomo o cristal, vegetales, telas, carbón o barro, o, también, de desecho y, por lo tanto, carentes de valor. En un esfuerzo por huir de la comercialización del objeto artístico, ocuparon el espacio y exigieron la intromisión del público provocando una reflexión entre el objeto y su forma, a través de la manipulación del material y la observación de sus cualidades específicas.
Bill O`Driscoll
Uncommon Senselessness
Bill O’Driscoll
Bill O'Driscoll is Arts & Entertainment Editor for the weekly Pittsburgh City Paper. Other publication credits in recent years include The Nation magazine. His reporting on the arts and other subjects has won numerous regional awards. Find more of his work, including his 'Program Notes' blog on the
The genocide that accompanied
If awareness of Guatemalan genocide is scant, it's not for lack of information. In the 1980s, at the height of the army's reign of terror, human-rights groups issued reports like Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder. Within three years of the war's end, two major reports, one of them by a United Nations truth commission, documented the extent of the horror. They identified the killings as genocide --the deliberate, systematic destruction of a racial or cultural group-- and laid the vast majority of the blame on the U.S.-backed Guatemalan military.
In 2002, the acclaimed Salvadoran novelist and journalist Horacio Castellanos Moya was in self-imposed exile in
Now, about two years after he moved to
Moya belongs to the new wave of his region's literature, and Senselessness has been reviewed in periodicals from Publisher's Weekly to The Village Voice, which called it "an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art."
Senselessness begins with a confession: "I am not complete in the mind." The line is a quotation. It's cited by the book's narrator --his shocked repetition of words spoken by another man, a survivor of genocide whose story he reads on the first day of his three-month proofreading assignment.
The sentence, he says,
dumbfounded me during my first incursion into those one thousand one hundred almost single-spaced printed pages ... I am not complete in the mind, I repeated to myself, stunned by the extent of mental perturbation experienced by the Cakchiquel man who had witnessed his family's murder, by the fact that this indigenous man was aware of the breakdown of his own psychic apparatus as a result of having watched, albeit wounded and powerless, as soldiers of his country's army scornfully and in cold blood chopped each of his four small children to pieces with machetes, then turned on his wife, the poor woman already in shock because she too had been forced to watch as the soldiers turned her small children into palpitating pieces of human flesh.
Yet, after first deciding that "it was the entire population of this country that was not complete in the mind," the editor realizes the diagnosis applies to him as well. After all, he is reading of these horrors in the palace of the archbishop in a Central American country which is never named (though it's clearly
The 142-page novel's tone and style --comically profane self-absorption and accusatory bile expressed in rambling sentences of 200 words or more-- reflects its essential dynamic: the narrator's struggle, by any means, to distance himself from a manuscript he insists he is editing only for the money.
Moya's narrator, who is never named, attempts to achieve this separation physically, with frequent breaks for beer in neighborhood cantinas. In his intermittent rages, he fumes over slights like not getting paid on time, even building revenge fantasies from the descriptions of brutality he's proofreading. He plunges into attempted seductions of young women, with raunchily funny results. But most intriguingly, he attempts to escape the report by sinking into his fascination with the very sentences spoken by the survivors of atrocity.
Struck by their odd syntax and vivid imagery --most of the testimony was either given in Spanish as a second language or translated from one of many Indian dialects-- he begins copying such sentences into a small notebook. He comes to regard the statements ("Because for me the sorrow is to not bury him myself," for example) as a kind of poetry. And he foists these aesthetic objects on others. "You're a poet, just listen to this beauty," he tells a friend: "Their clothes stayed sad ... The houses they were sad because no people were inside them ..."
At one point, the editor summons the words of an elderly man whose entire family had been murdered --"If I die, I know not who will bury me"-- to express his own anxiety over learning that a woman he's just bedded has a potentially violent boyfriend. The paranoia heightens his suspicions that retribution awaits anyone involved with the report: Certain he's a target, he eventually flees the city, and then
The narrator might be paranoid, but someone really might be out to get him. That possibly jealous boyfriend is after all a military man, in a country where political murder persists. Part of Moya's balancing act in Senselessness is to keep readers wondering which threats are imaginary and which are plausible. In an echo of real-life events, the novel ends with an e-mail from a friend in
Moya began to write Senselessness in
Senselessness "was written on a kind of impulse" --often in snatches in the notebook he carried around. He finished it the following year, in
Contemporary Guatemalan politics were forged in a CIA-led 1954 coup against Col. Jacobo Arbenz, whose land reforms threatened powerful agricultural interests. Repressive military regimes ruled for nearly the next half-century, with Guatemalan officers receiving training from the
The country is still rife with both political violence and street crime, and according to a May 2008 report by Human Rights Watch, "impunity remains the rule when it comes to human rights violations."
The U.N. truth commission's 1999 report, titled Memory of Silence, blamed the military for 90 percent of the killings.
Both Memory of Silence and the Archdiocese's Nunca más were meant to expose the truth so national healing could begin. Bishop Juan Gerardi, who shepherded Nunca más to completion, was murdered two days after its release.
The first-person testimony in Nunca más is wrenching. What we have seen has been terrible: burned corpses, women impaled and buried as if they were animals ready for the spit, all doubled up, and children massacred and carved up with machetes. The women too, murdered like Christ.
Senselessness is literature, not history. But its approach to genocide --a sort of black comedy orchestrated at arm's length from its source material, and even further from the killing itself-- might seem odd. This is, after all, an era of harrowing nonfiction accounts of mass atrocity.
In its own way, though, Senselessness asks readers simply to see. Its narrator, says Moya, "doesn't want to be there. ... He doesn't want to recognize that he is being affected not only by what he's reading, but by the whole situation in that suppressed society."
In
Some reviewers have found Senselessness to fall short. "It isn't clear whether [the editor's] aestheticizing of traumatic utterance is intended to inspire our wonder for the indigenous or our contempt for the narrator," wrote Harper's Magazine's John Leonard, in his review.
In an otherwise admiring review on the Web site readysteadybooks.com, Stephen Mitchelmore wonders whether Moya's brief treatment of the killings, like the fleeting excerpts of the survivors' testimony, lets readers off the hook. What if, Mitchelmore asks, rather than fleeing, the narrator had become "a witness for the witnesses"?
Others say Senselessness hits the mark. "This carefully arranged mix of many bits of testimony and a dearth of complete scenes [of brutality] gives the reader the impression of advancing into the dark, surrounded by a cemetery of voices portending terrors that will be fully realized toward the end of the book," wrote critic Mauro Javier Cardenas in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Perhaps Senselessness is best understood as writing that shares the experience of living in a world where mass killing is a fact of life. In his Village Voice review, Jed Lipinski wrote: "The process by which the victims' testimony gradually engulfs the narrator's consciousness is Senselessness' most impressive achievement... yet the tragedy of mass death is overcome by Moya's perverse sense of humor, as morbid and resilient as a laughing skull."
The late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, author of The Savage Detectives, once wrote that Moya had proved himself "the only writer of my generation that knows how to narrate the horror, the secret
Moya was born in
Moya's first novel, La diáspora, published in 1989, told a story of young Salvadorans growing disillusioned with leftist politics. It was written while he worked in journalism; in
Along with such writers as fellow Salvadoran Claudia Hernandez, Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and even Savage Detectives author Bolaño, Moya heralded a new wave of Latin American novelists. That newfound sensibility only grew stronger after Moya returned to
Moya had hoped post-war
In 1997, Moya published his third novel, El asco (Revulsion). Subtitled "Thomas Bernhard in
Anonymous death threats referencing El asco followed; strident Salvadoran nationalists revile the book to this day. But even as Moya fled his literary reputation grew.
"I would consider [Moya] one of the most important writers in the region today," says Misha Kokotovic, an associate professor at
As in Moya's earlier novels La diabla in el espejo (The She-Devil in the Mirror) and El arma en el hombre (The Weapon in the Man), the narratives are often first-person, suggesting the testimonio. Perhaps they even parody it: Those two novels, after all, are from the perspectives of a politically conservative upper-class woman and a demobilized death-squad soldier named "Robocop." But the works aren't apolitical; they simply denounce both official lies and free-market depredations in a sophisticated literary form, revealing an extreme disillusionment with both the violent realities of life in contemporary
Senselessness, says Kokotovic, "ends up finding a new way of criticizing the society about which it is written." It's a condemnation perhaps more appropriate to a cynical postwar atmosphere than earnest testimonios and human-rights reports. Yet at the same time, says Kokotovic, "The novel works to undermine its own cynicism, or that of the narrator."
"This book is like a wink, saying, 'Come on ... You can deal with this without being so serious,'" says Moya. He adds that his narrator's reaction is "[p]erhaps closer to the way in which common people deal with [atrocity] in those societies. Because you are not complaining every day. You have to live."
Senselessness might be even braver than many readers realize. Kokotovic notes that a key to the novel's blending of fiction and fact is the way the narrator, who's fled to Europe, repeats the last of the quotes he cites from the human-rights report: "We all know who the assassins are." In the novel's final pages, he's no longer savoring the aesthetics, but rather relaying the sentence's actual meaning. Moreover, he's doing it in a bar in
Moya is living here thanks to City of
Meanwhile, this past spring Moya taught a class in contemporary Latin American fiction at the
But the asylum program lasts two years. And Moya's two years are up, even if Henry Reese, the businessman who sponsors the program with partners including the Mattress Factory museum, won't just boot him from his North Side house.
One place he's not headed is
And for Moya, there is still the matter of how his former countrymen see him. On June 9 --the week he debuted Senselessness, at the reading in
To be sure, Moya has many supporters in
But Moya says that in 2004, when he left
Often, Moya says, he feels he has become a nonperson in his former homeland. The sentiment recalls the relative invisibility of the Guatemalan genocide whose echoes he conjures in Senselessness. It also suggests Moya's decision to not explicitly name the novel's setting. As he has learned in his years of exile, universality in fiction can be preferable to focusing on a part of the world that is easily overlooked. "I've been out of the region long enough to know that we almost don't exist."
Translation assistance by M.A. Vignovich. A version of this article first appeared in Pittsburgh City Paper.
