Poetry in Times of Oppression/Virtual Poetry fest in honor of Ernesto Cardenal
As I mentioned in yesterday’s posting, for the second year in a row, the International Poetry Festival of Granada, Nicaragua, now in its 16th edition, will take place only in virtual format. As they announced the cancellation of the ‘physical’ event, the organizers explained that the current political situation in Nicaragua creates “no favorable environment for any festive activity.” According to the Human Rights Watch 2018 World Report, “Ortega’s government has aggressively dismantled all institutional checks on presidential power,” which has allowed his government “to commit egregious abuses against critics and opponents with complete impunity.” (https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/nicaragua). The same document reports that “a crackdown by national police and armed pro-government groups in 2018 left 300 dead, over 2,000 injured, and hundreds arbitrarily arrested and prosecuted.” The numbers quoted by other sources are even higher.
In the January 22/24 issue of Confidencial, writer and Festival board member Gioconda Belli declared that at this time the people of Nicaragua are in mourning for the deaths, dissapearances, and imprisonment of those voicing dissent. In this “jailhouse atmosphere” of repression and harassment, “the only poetry that fits,” Belli wrote, “is that of protest.” (https://confidencial.com.ni/the-daniel-ortegas-regime-ties-to-hijack-poetry-festival-in-nicaragua/). She also suggested that a celebration like that of previous years would be an affront to Nicaraguan people’s suffering. In past festivals, poetry events were interspersed with local music and dance, and integrated also into a day-long, spectacular carnival/traditional masquerade that celebrated life and death, and which always included a ritualized “burying” of a particular evil such “intolerance,” “hatred,” or “violence.” (Photos from the 9th edition of festival & carnival: https://designyoutrust.com/2013/02/the-ix-international-festival-of-poetry-in-granada-city/
This year’s virtual festival will be honoring Ernesto Cardenal, one of Latin America’s most revered literary and revolutionary figures. Poets from around the world will be read a poem in his honor and the event will be streamed through Facebook from Feb 20-Feb 25. You may watch it at https://www.facebook.com/FIPGNicaragua
Cardenal was born in Granada in 1925. On January 20, he turned 95. Active in the Sandinista revolution that ousted Anastasio Somoza in July 1979, Cardenal served afterwards as the Minister of Culture, but gradually broke away from the Sandinista government, becoming an increasingly outspoken critic of the current Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his authoritarian rule. A prolific writer who has authored over forty poetry collections and whose work has been translated into dozens of languages, Cardenal has occupied, over the years, ideological positions that have at times stirred controversy. He has been hailed or criticized for being an iconoclast, a visionary, a mystic, a Marxist, and a leader of the liberation theology movement. In his writings, whether addressing injustice, corruption, greed, the world’s transient beauty, or love, he documents and witnesses with eloquence and urgency, often by bringing religion, politics, and science in conversation with one another.
Priest, writer, translator, sculptor, diplomat/politician, social activist, Cardenal founded both a spiritual/religious commune (Solintiname, on Lake Nicaragua) and a cultural foundation (Casa de los Tres Mundos, in Granada, where I met him briefly in 2017). He was declared person non grata by Samoza for seeking justice, ‘suspended’ by Pope John Paul II for being political, and reviled by politicians for prizing integrity.
I don’t see Cardenal as a poet of contradictions (as I may seem to suggest above), but of human plenitude. I admire his reverence for, and commitment to, the earth and the cosmos—a commitment reflected also in what he has called his work’s “exteriorismo” (which translates, in simplified terms, into a preference for direct observation instead of metaphorical articulation). Robin Bower argues, in an appraisal of Cardenal’s work (“Remembering things past: Reading history, writing memory, and the poetics of agency in Ernesto Cardenal”), that critics have often rushed to assign his work to reductive categories, and suggests that we look instead at how in Cardenal’s body of work “the denunciatory, the religious, and the epic are all part of a self-reflexive poetics grounded in a conviction of the transformative power of poetry itself in its capacity to refashion memory, subject, and society.”
Poetry as diplomacy, communion, individual and communal transformation--
Cardenal writes about pre-Columbian history or the U.S. imperialist interventions in Central American history (see, for instance, “La Hora 0” / “Zero Hour,” with its “trucks and trucks loaded with crates of arms/all marked U.S.A., MADE in U.S.A.,/arms to catch more prisoners, to hunt down books,/to steal five pesos from Juan Potosme”—tr. Donald D. Walsh) with the same frankness with which he celebrates bodies and stars or, as in “Zoológico de Iquitos” / “The Zoological Garden of Iquitos,” a Peruvian zoo’s “Amazonian animals”—"the great leopard in repose/ (…) / the papagayo birds draped in flags of color/the sloth with terrifying yet weak claws / (…) / the ecstatic tortoises, each on its own rock/the elastic otter.”
This poem takes its time honoring each imprisoned creature, then shifts the tenderness toward the “nine-year-old Indian guide” who
picked up from the ground an immense
red petal
that had fallen from a tree
and said to me:
‘Touch it; it’s as smooth as the leopard’s coat,’
and, indeed, it was as smooth as
the silky fur with quadrilateral spots
that we did not touch. (tr. David Draper Clark and Cesar Ferreira)
Protest poetry or politically-engaged poetry can feel like the only poetry ‘fit’ for certain times, absolutely. The months before and for many months after the U.S. 2016 presidential election, I did not write at all because I felt I needed to --and wanted to, and couldn’t--write only about what was happening. (Since then, a number of poets have confessed to similar experiences.) However, re-reading Cardenal’s work I was reminded that poems do not have to engage with politics or current events in order to do significant work and to benefit us during historical and political crises. I thought also of Neruda’s view of poetry as “an act of peace,” and how the metaphor itself posited writing as an engagement with conflict, and how it also conferred poetry-making the status of a political act. While not writing, I translated. In 2016 I was translating from the Romanian a collection of poems by our contemporary Liliana Ursu—Clay and Star, published this past fall by Etruscan Press (https://etruscanpress.org/shop/clay-and-star/). These were not poems of protest. They were not, by most measurements, even slightly political. Further, Ursu, like Cardenal, is a religious person, which I am not, and her poetry is deeply spiritual, while my own is anything but. One thing that had attracted me to her poems, I realized then, was precisely that they provided me, in disconsolate times, with possibilities for accessing hope where I saw none, and beauty when my own work could no longer contain it. This was not escapist poetry, but poetry that insisted that I learn to renew hope in our common humanity, and that helped me recharge emotionally and spiritually. I had also grown up in a political system (Ceausescu’s dictatorial regime) in which religious practices were akin to acts of dissent, so Ursu’s monasteries, nuns, and monks stood, if not close to God, at least far away from daily corruption and repression.
Though ostensibly radically different, Ursu’s and Cardenal’s works converge to engage each other. To honor “El Padre” Ernesto Cardenal, I will end with a poem Ursu dedicated to Thomas Merton--the scholar, poet, and monk under whose tutelage Cardenal lived in the Trappist monastery at Gethsemani (Kentucky) between 1957-1965.
Liliana Ursu (tr. Mihaela Moscaliuc)
The one who leaves few footprints in the snow
To Thomas Merton
He splits wood,
leaves few footprints in the snow—
their life shorter than that of the small
pine tree fire
above which he warms his hands
before dovetailing
the icon frames—
before taking back to his hut an ice cube,
water he’ll use at twilight
to make coffee,
its black eye—sole indulgence,
its fragrant eye—sole gratification.
He leaves few footprints in the snow
and they’re quickly erased by birds
for whom he sows wheat and crumbs
under the window where he reads the Psalms.
Kentucky, Abbey of Gethsemani, January 21, 2000
