Conference Papers
Used Paper Writers
Francisco Lopez-Sacha
| Francisco Lopez-Sacha |
Dear Sir or Madam will
you read my book,
It took me years to
write it will you take
a look.Beatles,
Paperback writer
The first area of conflict for the Cuban writer is the paper. Paper to take notes, to write projects, to make drafts, paper for handwriting, for the originals, for printing proofs, paper for editing a book. Bond paper, with its typical rolling sound when it runs through the typewriter or in the process of printing. French paper, onion paper, prepared from rags, wood, or other fibrous materials. Bright white, pure snow white spotless paper of which we lack since e lot of years ago. Never it was enough in our hands, even before the golden times of Cuban editing period around the 60s and 80s. We have been always used to the lack of it. This was natural for us when we write on the back sides of used sheets of paper. And that is the way we do it, in silence, page by page, with the fear of not knowing if our book will be published because it is too long, or complex far an edition, or if it has photos, illustrations or maps that will be difficult or very expensive to print.
That is the way Cuban writers work, in our own Guttemberg galaxy, with a specific and at the same time invisible limit, but with the need to put in words the life, that life that we live or the one which we dream of. That is why even though we lack paper we are in no lack of literature.
It is interesting that this contradiction does not lead us to apathy or suicide (paper suicide, of course) or to intellectual and artistic suicide. From somewhere, from a deep and emotive inside part of our souls, we get the necessary energy for writing. And we write, write and write in such a way that the number of new writers is bigger each day in our country. We have more magazines than nine years ego, when we were less. Now we have more writers meetings, workshops and editors, more literary prizes, more scholarships and more diffusion. Those are the magic arts of a movement that doesn’t stop even in the center of a crisis, a movement that has expanded and that can’t be restrained even by such great difficulties.
A lot of us have to work yet in other employments or occupations to guarantee our food and Iiving needs. We cannot live yet from the authors’ payments, but at least we have the chance and the possibility to write for art and not for the market. We have the opportunity to experiment with forms, issues, stiles. To choose our own road, to accept or deny traditions. One of the greatest conquests of our times in Cuba, is to reflect the transparency of our intentions as an artist and a public comprehension. We can be, and we are, moderns, postmoderns, traditionals, heretics, iconoclasts, orthodoxes, bucolicus or metaphysics, rockers, fakes, violents, exquisites, or any other denomination that has not been invented yet, simply because we have a reader public and an audience, a culture and an identity. "There is not literature where there is lack of essence”. And to fallow with Marti's words, expressions or literature have been gained in so many years that now we have an essence, a nation and a sense to live in common.
Cuban literature has demonstrated that art and masterpieces are possible even in the midst of the most difficult conditions inside a country: war, blockade, economical crisis or lack of paper. There w have the page. of JosŽ Marti’s War Diary, that anticipated a lot of new forms and stiles of the new spainamerican narrative of this century, written day by day, in the nights, under a candle light during the first days of our independence war against Spain in 1895. There is the Juli‡n del Casal poetry, artificer of modernism, written at the edge of misery. There are the Poveda and Boti poems written in the darkness of a province or the verses of Mart’nez Villena written on the border between jail and death. There is JosŽ Lezama Lima's Paradiso written during 20 years in the shadow in a silent way, sitting on a rocking chair of his home in Trocadero street in Havana. There we have the Nicol‡s GuillŽn poetry, the Virgilio Pinera theater, Fernando Ort’z, Cintio Vitier, Fern‡ndez Retamar's essays, the Rine Leal critics, the Alejo Carpentier, Soler Puig, Abilio EstŽvez, Miguel Barnet novels, the Ambrosio Fornet and Graziella Pogolotti works, the Ezequiel Vieta, Ant—n Arrufet and Reinaldo Montero’s experiments, the Lino No(...) Calvo, Eliseo Diego, Heras Le—n or Sanel Paz short stories, texts that anticipate and propose a non-idyllic view of our reality. And there we have a lot of more books, written without thinking in the market, or in profits payments or force correlations, or in past or present difficulties that could have stopped us from being a continuity in time. And this is another area of conflict, one that surges from reality and grows in contradiction with the spirit, that intends to restrain art in its endless questioning, and it is not a result of a policy or economy model, but a struggle with the demons of life and imagination.
Maybe the major conflict that we face today is the fact that we possess a literature that has gained its own freedom to struggle in that field. A literature that has overcome the isolation, the blockade, the aesthetics and ideological norms, the thinking of inside and outside of schools and literary chapels. A literature that has overcome the incomprehensions of circumstantial limits of a cultural policy or the adverse situation of our own economy, a literature that continues rising in its diversity, in its beauty intentions and in its questioning right in the middle of a crisis that - even though we have been able to detain in the printing field thanks to the efforts of our cultural institutions - is unable yet to guarantee the authentic diffusion of our work.
This is the second level of our conflict. It is limiting the Cuban literature boom that is beginning to develop at a national and international level. In principle, all culture is ours. If before, thanks to the Revolution that created a reading public, and a printing industry, as well as a national net of libraries, we have published in Cuba writers as Thomas Mann, August Strindberg, Marcel Proust, Kafka, Musil, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Orwell, Faulkner, Hemmingway, Soyinka, Cesaire, Mishima, Cort‡zar, Pablo Neruda, Garc’a M‡rquez and Borges and a lot more writers of that time, right now we need that same space in order to diffuse new writers from any latitude, in order to introduce our new writers and to rescue all of our work of national culture, now dispersed all through the world. I don’t like solemn phrases, but this is a cyclopean task for our culture, restrained by the economic re-adjustment of our country that is a victim of a terrible blockade directly or indirectly imposed by the United States of America government as never before. It compels us to compete in the world market with centrifugal forces that not always judge the quality of literature for its publishing, but only its possibility of becoming profitable merchandise when on the market.
To write in Cuba today means to accept that challenge. It means to develop a kind of literature that has to open its own road in order to protect author rights, to promote its work, remake the editing industry, establish interchanges of editions, attract the reader and diffuse and promote books and the reader’s public participation. It means to continue working here with the conscience of our freedom and the limits imposed by our time.
Fortunately, we have e true literary art, a quality boom in short stories, in novels, poetry, and in drama, a fabulous tradition and the demand of an educated reading public that understands and moves us forward. We are not alone because we also have the solidarity and the help of hundreds of institutions like this one. A lot of writers, editors, publishers, critics begin to know our work and have the intention to divulge it. We are not suffering and we are not going to suffer the sadness that John Lennon describes in the lyrics of his unforgettable song: the pain of the artist obliged to sell, to mutilate or to remake his work in order to satisfy the requirements of those who pay the money. We are not going to get through the experience and the sadness of that paperback writer, even though we have and will continue writing on the back side of used paper.
Havana, February 28, 1998.
Francisco Lopez-Sacha