Poetry and Oppresion [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

Poetry and oppression

Image:

https://havanatimes.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/12022018-PoesiaPort-Roberto-Fonseca-La-Prensa.jpg

In 2017, I was invited to participate in the thirteenth annual International Poetry Festival in Granada, Nicaragua. The festival, among the most well-known in the Americas, brought together over 160 poets from more than 60 countries who for five days recited poetry in plazas, cathedrals, schools, and from a platform along the route of the “Death and Poetry” carnival parade. Hundreds of people came out each night to absorb whatever poetry could offer—hope, refuge, pleasure, perhaps just a sweet distraction, most probably a sense of solidarity. They sat for hours on plastic chairs, listening to poetry (much of it in unfamiliar languages). Among them were families spanning three or four generations sharing paper cones of cut fresh fruit, vigoron (boiled yuca, pork rinds, coleslaw and pickled onions), fritos (fried plantains on a banana leaf, topped with grilled pork, beef or chicken), bunuelos (a version of doughnuts), or other local dishes purchased from vendors flanking the gathering. They too were listening. People did not shift attention to their cell phones if bored or disinterested.

One day during the festival a few of us hired a driver to take us to a butterfly preserve. On the way, the driver quoted lines from Rubén Darío, watching us in the review mirror, hoping, perhaps, that we would join him. I was ashamed I couldn’t. I remembered how in Izmir the Turkish hotel employee recited Hikmet at the first mention of poetry and how in Athens, as soon as he heard my husband and I were poets, the jewlery-maker broke into Cavafy and embraced us and then recited some more. This is the kind of work poetry can do. In Romania too, though perhaps decreasingly so, people of my parents’ generation will casually declaim entire poems by Eminescu. On the bus trip in Nicaragua, the fellow poet sitting next to me, the Honduran Rolando Kattan, recited “Autoportret” by the Romanian poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga (1895-1961): “Lucian Blaga e mut ca o lebada./ In patria sa/ zapada fapturii tine loc de cuvint…” I had not expected anyone beyond our national borders to know Blaga’s work, and definitely not by heart.

I do not mean to romanticize this, so forgive me if that’s how it comes through. Poetry is not food, no matter how fetching the metaphor is, and it’s not a substitute for opportunity, freedom, or other rights that help sustain one’s life, livelihood, or dignity. Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo are both poets, and a host of the world’s most beloved poets were/are deplorable as fellow humans. None of this escapes me.    

And there’s not a drop of nostalgia in my blood for the deprivations we, Romanians, experienced for a quarter century under Ceausescu’s despotic regime. (Well, I’m lying. I often find myself longing for the tyranny of no-single use, of having to return the empty glass jar or bottle in order to be able to purchase a full one.) As a guest of the Granada festival and as a tourist, I did not witness the escalating oppressiveness of the Ortega-Murillo regime, but could feel its presence.

 

I had never experienced the electrifying power of poetry as I did during that week in Nicaragua. The intensity reminded me how, as the situation worsened in the ‘80s in totalitarian Romania, poetry came to function as a touchstone for our humanity. When, in 1985/1986, a teacher risked losing his job, if not his freedom or life, by taking us (middle schoolers) to an unpublicized venue to hear poet Mircea Dinescu read poems that would soon place him under house arrest, I had little interest in poetry. I don’t remember the poems, but I will never forget the experience of listening (and trying the decode the political subtext), or the space of resistance listening created. Dinescu’s autographed “Rimbaud negustorul” (Rimbaud the merchant) that I slipped in the winter coat’s inside pocket on the way home did not make the rationed food lines the next day less interminable, but it fed daydreams, especially when rations ran out before my turn, and made me feel less isolated and slightly more human.  

It has become a cliché to state that democracy’s in severe jeopardy and autocracy’s on the way in when the freedoms of speech and press get curtailed. I’ll state it anyway: when you experience the cliché so intimately, you care a lot less about how you sound. In the absence of basic freedoms, poetry came to do the heavy lifting of keeping us sane. It also gave us means of preserving a modicum of dignity. Dissident writers became our consciousness, a stay against hopelessness. We turned to poetry for its potential for resistance and subversion, for its “aesopic” (Stefan Augustin Doinas) and cameleonic and mercurial qualities, for chances to laugh at ourselves (since we couldn’t openly laugh at the regime) and to endure, and make believe that we had mastered the art of “doublethink” (Orwell). It gave us the illusion that we might even be able to outsmart the regime. Fearing the resourcefulness of poets and their ‘collaborators’ (we, the readers), censors kept refreshing the list of banned words (some as innocuous as “balcony,” “coffee,” or “breasts”). Poetry kept them on their toes. And we Romanians kept poetry around like a life jacket. You did not have to be a poetry devotee to appreciate its power. You could listen and float, without sinking, at least for a while.

Due to the serious political crisis in Nicaragua, this year, like last year, the International Poetry Festival will take place only in virtual format, streamed through Facebook from Feb 20-Feb 25: https://www.facebook.com/FIPGNicaragua

On that, next.

 

Comments

[Kent Johnson]

This is a really nice post. Ah, Granada... I love Granada. (I worked in Nicaragua on two occasions, in 1980 for nine months as a literacy teacher in the national literacy campaign, shortly after the Sandinista Revolution, and the second time in 1983, as an Adult Education teacher for close to a year, in midst of the Contra war. Both times in the mountains of Matagalpa. And both times I made it to Granada for a few days after the teaching stints. This was long before the town became a favored U.S. expat destination. My first book is titled A Nation of Poets, which gathers selections from the working-class Talleres de Poesia the Ministry of Culture organized around the country. The book carries the most extensive interview ever done with the legendary poet Ernesto Cardenal, then Minister of Culture, on the cultural politics of the Sandinista Revolution, for those interested. The interview ended up causing a big hullabaloo in Mexico in 1985 when it was published in one of the major newspapers there. Octavio Paz was angered by Cardenal's comments and went off on him.)

[Mihaela Moscaliuc]

Kent, I am so glad to know about A Nation of Poets. I look forward to reading it. Thank you!