It was a day at the FIL to talk about exiles, distances, literatures born far from home, about gaps through which winter enters. Sergio Ramírez received the honorary doctorate from the University of Guadalajara, and began his speech by remembering the keys to his house in Managua, which he left three years ago pushed by the dictator Ortegawhich took away his Nicaraguan nationality. He found them, the keys, recently in the lining of a suitcase. «I remembered then, when I had them, the Jews of Sefarad banished in 1492 from Spain by decree of the Catholic kings, and whose descendants, centuries later, keep in Thessaloniki, in Istanbul, in Jerusalem, the keys to the houses of their ancestors» , said. And he told a story that he told Manuel Vincent A decade ago, that of an amber merchant who traveled through Spain with the key to a door that only existed in his dreams. One day, among the junk of a gypsy from Plasencia, he found a rusty lock from the 15th century in which his key fit and worked perfectly. “This is how destiny opens and closes,” he said.
Exile suspends time, it leaves open not a door but a hope. In ‘Meditations on the Duration of Exile’, Bertolt Brecht wrote: «Don’t put any nails in the wall, / throw your jacket on a chair. / Is four days worth worrying about? / Tomorrow you will return. Gioconda Belli, who participated in a panel called A one-way ticketassured that she did have a return ticket, but she couldn’t use it, because when it was her turn to return they were already retaliating against people like her. Now he does not have a Nicaraguan passport. And yet… «Nicaragua is a country so small that it is portable. No one will ever be able to tear it from my heart.
Karina Sainz Borgo was born in 1982 in Venezuela, which was then a democratic and rich country where many went to find a life. “I grew up with a festive and beautiful vision of immigration,” he said. Then he experienced the collapse of everything, the violence, death not as an exception but as something familiar. He left in 2006, like so many others. He hasn’t returned for twelve years. «I took my one-way ticket unconsciously, to put distance. Now my country hurts me with the same intensity with which I use it. I am unable to relate to him in a healthy way. And that’s what literature is for, for problems. “I only return to Venezuela in my nightmares and in my books,” he said. And he mentioned Kurkov: “In Russia they hate him and in Ukraine they look down on him because he is not patriotic enough.”
There is a long list of displaced, exiled writers who perhaps form an imaginary and painful homeland. And I could start, why not, with Ovidto whom he emperor Augustus He sent Tomis, “where there is nothing but cold, enemies and sea water that freezes into tight ice.” He had no better luck Senecabanished by Claudius to Corsica, a place where at that time there were only two things: exile and an exile. Sergio Ramirez traced the contours of that impossible nation of illustrious unfortunates who suffered the attacks of power: Haroldo Conti, Rodolfo Walsh, Rómulo Gallegos, Juan Bosch, Augusto Monterroso, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Roa Bastos, Juan Carlos Onetti, Mario Benedetti, Juan Gelman, Juan Ramón Jiménez, María Zambrano, Pedro Salinas, Rosa Chacel, Luis Cernuda… «I belong to that long tradition of those who pay a price for his words, twice under prison order, and twice forced into exile, first in my youth by a family dictatorship, and so many years later, by another family dictatorship. But there is something that no one can ever exile me from, and it is my own language,” he asserted.
«We are all migrants here», ventured Karina Sainz Borgo: «Human beings have an amazing capacity to draw borders: we are migrants in our own city, in our own family, in our work. A poet who becomes a novelist will be asked: and what are you doing here? You always have to go through a kind of suburb where someone has to give you a passport: you are not correct enough, you are not left-wing enough, you are not social democratic enough, you are not feminist enough, you are not tall enough …All this produces a feeling of errancy and desertion that is crushing me. And he said goodbye quoting Borges: «They left me value. “I wasn’t brave.” Oh.
#human #animal #draws #boundaries
