PEN 2010: Of Roots, Cliches, and the Imagination: Where Do We Write From?

  To start things off, a segment from the beginning of The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth by Alberto Ruy-Sánchez:

First Spiral: The Sleepwalker's Quest for a Voice

1. Dawn breaks, slowly . . . and it was as if the light were singing

It was in Mogador the hour when lovers rouse, their dreams still entangled between their legs, behind their eyes, in their mouths, filling their empty hands.

Between kisses they fall asleep again. The sea roars toward the sun, awakening them. But their eyes open deep within their dreams, where they love and delight each other, and also suffer at times.

It was in Mogador the hour when all the voices of the sea, the port, the streets, the plazas, the public baths, the beds, the cemeteries, and the wind entwine and tell stories.

May 1st, 2010: Labor Day. With protests over the latest in anti-immigration legislationin the U.S. occurring on the streets of New York, poetic protests against the banality of categorizing, cordoning off and otherwise sidelining works from Latin American writers resounded against the lacquered walls of the Instituto de Cervantes on East 49th Street in Manhattan on Saturday. With the likes of Rodrigo Fresán, Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, Martin Solares, Miguel Syjuco and Natasha Wimmer (moderator), called into question were the roots of the individual's writers works, the purpose of identity, the influence of the cosmopolitan lifestyle and international metropolis, the importance of nationality and language, and the uses (if any) of cliché. 

Through the grace and wit that only a poet and novelist of his stature could achieve, Alberto Ruy-Sánchez swept audience members up into his large palms and bathed them with fantastical imagery and challenging complications to the relationships between the "real" and the "imagined." In a very moving story, Ruy-Sánchez related an image he saw while traveling though the Sahara desert in Morocco. From afar, he had spotted a lone tree covered at the top by what he took to be vultures. His wife, pointing out the fraudulent vision of her husband, noted that it was not vultures but goats. Upon their approach, in fact the tree was covered with the carcasses of goats drying in the sun. Surreal to Alberto and his wife, yet utterly common to any Moroccan living in the area, the story related the importance of being able to locate the magical within the real, the real within the magical, in short of being able to open one's eyes and see with a wider lense, one more open to the realm of the lived dream. As so often has been the case, "Latin American" writers are all too often categorized under the label of "magical realism." To Ruy-Sánchez and the other panelists, this is a short-sighted move, one that denies the often blurred lines between "reality" and the "magical," denies the fact that at times, trees can be covered with goats. 

Explaining that the settings of his novels were at times criticized for, "not being Mexican enough," Ruy-Sánchez brought to the fore a common conflict that most writers on the panel continually encounter. Rodrigo Fresán, underlining the importance of overcoming the at times, constricting grip of birthplace and thus, nationality, stated: "I was born an Argentinian and want to die a writer." And in fact, this conflict of overcoming one's place of birth was something widely discussed by each of the panelists. For Miguel Syjuco, born in the Philippines ("the most Latinized country in Asia," Syjuco jokingly states), his homeland continues to exist within a schizophrenic lingual and cultural framework consisting of part Spanish, part American, and a part whereby many in the Philippines are attempting to look to before colonialism to reclaim some sense of the "authentic" Filipino. To stand on one's roots for Mr. Syjuco, therefore means a great deal to many in the Phillipines, to garner a semblance of a Filipino identity from the shards left in the wake of successive colonial experiences a worthy (and necessary) pursuit. In the words of Charlie Parker, Syjuco stated: "It takes a long time to play like yourself."

Martin Solares, explaining that his literary personality has been the result of a series of misunderstandings, related a number of comical yarns that kept the audience laughing and engaged. Solares, like Ruy-Sánchez, traveled a great deal in pursuit of his wife, eventually ending up in attendance at the Sorbonne in Paris. Noting that many of his jokes that worked quite well in Mexico no longer translated to French culture in Paris, Solares stated that literature was just the same, noting the specificity of literature to particular audiences. 

An interesting turn came at the end of the panel when Fresán spoke to the increasing tendency of people to read only that which they consider "reality." This belief that "fiction equals lies" (as one person had related to Fresán) is, in Ruy-Sánchez's point of view, the result of a long and complicated divide between the cultural children of the Protestant reform ("Americans") and the Baroque (many "Latin Americans"). Truth with a capital "T," in this view, has never been something that many in Latin America have stood by as fiercely or as often as their brothers and sisters to the North, and while this was interesting to ponder in relation to literature and magical realism, like most things I was left wanting of a more complicated and nuanced approach to this complex question. 

Cliché, the final topic the panel took up, was universally accepted as an important tool in getting across a lot of information quickly to a broad number of people. Cliché used in a great way, stated Fresán, is style, that way in which a writer naturally expresses his obsessions. From the familiar as expressed through cliché , it was also noted by Syjuco, readers can be transported from the familiar to the unfamiliar. On a somber note, Solares expressed fear for a growing tide of dangerous clichés, particularly in relation to Mexicans (soon to be the "most dangerous people on earth, the undesirables"), a comment which was not lost in the current state of contentious affairs surrounding the passage of Arizona's anti-immigration law. 

Overall, the panel was a relaxed yet thorough exploration of the complications surrounding nationality, how one writes and how later, one is framed and marketed by publishers and readers. The circuitous dance between "not Latin American enough" or "not Mexican/Argentinian enough" and "too Latin American/Mexican," seems largely dependent upon the mores of a readership and publishing community imbued with the latest political flavor towards the works of those from America's Southern neighbors and beyond. Transcended through travel and growing up and living in cosmopolitan cities such as Buenos Aires and Paris, the point as summed up by a quotation related by Fresán, was as follows: "I am everything I become." We are living collages, remnants of all that we have ever been, composed of all that which will may become. 

Listen to the Whole Panel Here: Audio of Event

Panelist's Bios (click on their names to go to their works):

Natasha Wimmer (moderator): the translator of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives,2666, and Antwerp. She has also translated fiction and nonfiction by Mario Vargas Llosa, Rodrigo Fresán, Laura Restrepo, Gabriel Zaid, and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. 

Rodrigo Fresán: born in Argentina and now lives in Barcelona. He is the author of eight books; Kensington Gardens was the first of these to be published in the United States. His new novel El Fondo del Cielo (The Bottom of the Sky) was published in 2009. His work has been translated into 15 languages.

Alberto Ruy-Sánchez: born in 1951. He is a fiction and nonfiction writer, poet, and essayist from Mexico City. He received his Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of Paris. His novels include: Los Nombres del Aire,Los Demonios de La Lengua, and Los Jardines Secretos de Mogador: Voces de Tierra. He has published widely in scholarly journals and is the author of several books of literary criticism, including Una introducción a Octavio Paz, which was a recipient of the Premio José Fuentes Mares. Since 1988, he has served as the editor-in-chief of Artes de México. In 2000, he was proclaimed Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2005, he received the honor of Gran Orden de Honor Nacional al Mérito Autoral in Mexico City.

Martin Solares: a young Mexican fiction writer and critic. He received the Efraín Huerta National Literary Award in 1998 for his short story “El Planeta Cloralex.” His first novel, Los Minuts Negros (The Black Minutes), was short-listed for the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize and has been published in Spanish, English, and German. He lives in Paris and is studying for his doctorate at La Sorbonne.

Miguel Syjuco: has a master’s degree from Columbia University and is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Born in 1976 into a political family in Manila, Syjuco later left the Philippines to become a writer. He received the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and the Philippines’ highest literary honor, the Palanca Award, for the unpublished manuscript of Ilustrado, which would become his first novel. He currently lives in Montreal. 

PEN 2010: Writing Inside, Writing OutsidePEN 2010: Toni Morrison and Marlene Van Niekerk in Conversation with K. Anthony Appiah