2023-05-18 20:30:55
The doors of Santo Domingo are open for writers summoned from different countries, ours and other languages, because freedom begins in diversity, and those who join their voices in this country that, if one day knew the brutality of a bloody dictatorship , has managed, for decades now, to walk the path of freedom itself, and of democracy, a path that not a few, myself among them, aspire to follow in our own countries. Because if diversity and freedom are inseparable, literature and, once again, freedom are no less so.
In Latin America today, beyond the ideological distances, the struggle waged is between authoritarianism and democracy, that is, between oppression and freedom. And literature will always be on the side of freedom, and on the side of democracy.
Because oppression and dictatorship are the opposite of freedom and democracy, when these two sacramental words are reflected in the dark mirror that Saint Paul already spoke of in his Epistle to the Corinthians: “Now we see through a mirror, in the dark; but then we shall see face to face…”. Seeing words face to face without ties and without waning, rising in their free flight towards the truths, and towards the imagination, is what we writers want.
And freedom of speech also entails free journalism. The prison that José Rubén Zamora suffers in Guatemala, for revealing the truth of corruption and the closure to which he has been forced the newspaper, the newspaper that he directed, are facts that must be condemned and denounced with all the energy.
Centroamérica Cuenta is a literary festival born ten years ago in Nicaragua, and which the force of political circumstances, oppression and dictatorship, the dark mirror, forced into wandering; an exiled festival that seeks asylum, and generously finds it, as now among you, Dominican friends; and these are the paradoxes from which one always learns, the exile from Central America Cuenta has enriched it, has made it grow, has multiplied it.
More than a literary festival, this is a journey of permanent exploration, with one foot in Latin America, today in the Dominican Republic, and the other in Europe, with our annual parallel festival in Madrid, under the auspices of Casa de América. We learn as we walk, we grow as we walk, we add as we move forward.
The territory of the imagination is very vast. A vast imagination for a vast, complex, hallucinating, surprising, varied America, as the language in which we write is so varied. A single language with multiple registers on both sides of the Atlantic, that territory of La Mancha as Carlos Fuentes called it, the roads of Quixote open in multiple directions. A language that communicates to 500 million human beings, but which, at the same time, is the language in which we tell stories, in which we tell History, and with imagination, we tell reality, and we illuminate it.
Literature is a window that is always open, the best viewpoint to get closer to that moving mural that is our America. We don’t see so many times what we would like to see, justice, democracy, equality, equity, because there are still many iniquities, oppressions, violence, imbalances, deficiencies in the landscape. But there is also hope.
And we writers are witnesses of that illuminated and suffering landscape at the same time, and we are prosecution witnesses. Our job is to lift stones, as José Saramago said. It is not our fault if under those stones what we find so many times are monsters.
We take charge of the loads, we walk with them, we bear witness, we recreate reality, we build parallel realities and our privileged instrument to tell what we see is this vast language made to measure for a vast imagination.
The question of what literature is for is an idle question. Literature is not a liberal profession, from which to expect a fixed return, or a salary. Literature is a vital adventure for those who choose it as a trade, an adventure full of risks because the ethics of literature is the truth, and when telling the truth one always runs into dangers. It is a trade of lies loaded with truths, which tend to offend arbitrary power, bent on punishing words.
Literature does not offer answers, it opens questions, questions. Exhibit, reveal, record, when it is a true job. Literature allows us, when writing and reading, to be other and to be others, to discover realities, to use the power of imagination, to give majesty to history through stories, to be interpreters of History that will be remembered as told by the novelists. Because literature fixes memory. Literature writes history, and makes memory endure through imagination.
And it also opens us to the search to find ourselves, to find out who we are, to explore our multiple and diverse identity as Latin Americans. Peeking through the cracks and discovering ourselves, like in the museum in the Leon center, in Santiago, which we visited yesterday, an exhibition that explores what it means to be Dominican, and that we can generalize to all of us. Finding that we are multiple and diverse, and that is why we are identical.
We can write from the place where we were born, or from exile, if we are denied the right to live in the place where we were born. But the language and the imagination do not abandon us, and both are ways of recovering memory, and of preserving it.
We are the custodians of that memory, the memory of our peoples. Of his dreams, of his language, of his own imagination. The language is born from two aspects, from the anonymous people who do it every day, and from literary writing.
I, a writer to death, live because I write. I live in my language, which is my homeland, and I live in the language and in the memory of my people. No tyranny can take away the language in which I write, nor can it take away my belonging to the people who, from my childhood, have given life to my writing.
From them, from those Nicaraguans who are silent today because they are denied the word, and from those who, like me, live in exile, my writing is born, and it is going to give to them. And it is from them, because they exist, that I exist, and that is why I can be Latin American, and aspire to be universal.
Pedro Mir, the great Dominican poet, wrote in the poem There is a country in the world, on the man banished from his land, and I make his words my own:
“From the bottom of the night
I come to talk about a country.
Precisely
population poor.
But
it’s not that only.
Natural of the night I am the product of a trip.
give me time
courage
to make the song…”
This festival, which I proudly preside over, is the product of a journey. Today we stop here, owners of the hospitality that this country, yours, and ours now, offers us.
Thanks to the Dominican Republic, to the Dominicans and to the Dominicans. Thanks to the René del Risco Foundation, to Minerva, its president, for being part of this great cultural enterprise that we are inaugurating today, and to all the entities and institutions that have helped us make it possible. And thanks to Claudia Neira, and her small but magical team.
We will take advantage of that generous hospitality. Of the hospitality that the Dominican Republic offers us, and of the freedom that Dominicans, men and women, have conquered. Freedom, “one of the most precious gifts that heaven gave men”, according to the words of Our Lord Don Quixote.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
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