Writing and Exile

 In beginning with these words, I wish to express my gratitude to the General University Council and to Dr. Ricardo Villanueva Lomeli, the University of Guadalajara’s rector, for awarding me this honorary doctorate, a singular distinction that I receive with joy and pride. I also don’t want to move on without recalling with great emotion that friend of so many years, Raul Padilla Lopez, who forged the great stature this house of studies enjoys, and who, I’m sure, is present with us in this activity and accompanying my words.

Some time ago, by chance, I discovered the keys to my Managua home in the lining of a suitcase. I’d tucked them into the pocket there as always, that morning when Tulita and I left for the [Managua] airport, without knowing that once we stepped out and closed the door, we’d never again cross that threshold.

Upon holding those keys in my hands again, I remembered the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 by decree of the Catholic kings; and whose descendants for centuries conserved in Salonika, in Istanbul, in Jerusalem, the keys to their ancestral homes. I also recalled the story told by Manuel Vicent about an amber trader who found himself in an Istanbul marketplace: “He had made several trips to Spain with the key to a door that appeared only in his dreams. The door didn’t exist, but he thought that perhaps the lock might be in the hands of some secondhand dealer.” Finally, “among the trinkets at an auction run by a gypsy from Plascencia, Spain, he found a rusty lock from the fifteenth century which his key fit, and it worked perfectly.” And he said: “This is how destiny opens and closes.”

A harbored key opens and closes destiny, and an open suitcase also signifies the uncertainties and hopes for destiny that weigh on those in exile: the uncertainty, sorrow, nostalgia, hope, that mark the impossibility of returning to the land of one’s birth.

When we left Managua that May morning, now three years ago, each one of us took, as always, just one suitcase. Those suitcases remain unclosed. The syndrome of the open suitcase denounces the exile, who can’t resign themself to staying, and is always waiting to return. Being in transit is to find yourself always waiting to return.

In the words of Bertolt Brecht from his [1937] poem: “Thoughts about the duration of exile:”

“Don’t hammer any nails into the wall,
just toss your jacket on a chair.
Is it worth worrying over four days?
Tomorrow, you’ll return.

Don’t bother watering the sapling.
Why plant another tree?
Before it grows as tall as a step,
you’ll gladly leave this place.

Pull your hat down when passing people.
Why leaf through a foreign grammar?
The news that calls you home
will come in a language you know...”

While the nail is never hammered into the wall, the exile’s life becomes a mix of anxiety, misfortunes, and gratifications. Kindness crosses path with incomprehension. Empathy with misunderstandings. In San Martin the good, San Martin the evil,” a brief treatise by Gregorio Marañon [1887–1960] on the exile of Argentine liberator General Jose de San Martin, he speaks of the poignancy of the insignificant in the life of the exile. “Things that are generally of no importance in one’s own country acquire a rare relevance in the foreign land, beginning with the bureaucratic stairs that must be climbed each day.”

When the suitcase is closed entirely, it’s because the ties have loosened, leaving the distant country adrift in the fog, lost forever, and not to be recovered except in dreams and in memory, where it becomes an image in which reality, desire and imagination all mix together.

In the recurring dream I dream in my apartment on Madrid’s Atocha Ring Road, I see myself entering the town where I was born, riding in an open car. I drive through the streets with people clustered in their doorways; I pass the home of my childhood, where my parents are also standing in the doorway, but I can’t get down to embrace them because the vehicle I’m moving in won’t stop. It becomes late, it’s going to get dark; but I think that when I finish my tour, I’ll have time to go back and reunite with them at the supper hour, when my father has closed the doors to his grocery store on the plaza.

Or – in another dream, Valencia Street, near the Atocha roundabout, which gives onto the Lavapies Plaza, suddenly turns into the plaza in my town, where there’s noise of celebration, with music and Roman candles, like the Saints’ days of my childhood, when the traveling carousel I evoke in The Golden Horse would be set up right in front of my father’s store. “My memory is a strange city, where Frankfort’s Birdsong Street leads to Soho and to Mile Road,” states the protagonist of Initiation to Love, a novel by Oscar Milosz; or as in Julio Cortazar’s 62. A Model Kit, a city that leads to one city and another, where “it could perhaps be Paris; it could perhaps be Tell or Calac; in an Oslo beer parlor; one of us even ended up going from the city to a bed in Barcelona..”

Banishment is “that backwards-looking dream that memory insists on, which floats like a cloud, but is more tenacious,” Victor Hugo says in During exile, when he was forced to flee from France due to the tyranny of “Little Napoleon,” as he called Luis Napoleon Bonaparte, and while banished to the Isle of Guernsey in the Channel Islands wrote Los Miserables.

The secret police memo dated December 3, 1851, that forced Hugo into exile stated: “Today at six pm on the dot, 25,000 Francs will be offered to anyone who arrests or kills Hugo. You know where he is. Don’t let him escape under any pretext.”

The contemptible power structure sets a price on the head of writers, prohibits the circulation of their works, puts them in jail, condemns them to exile. There’s an insurmountable conflict between the free word – without which the majesty of a literary work isn’t possible – and the official discourse, monotonous and servile. There’s a price to be paid for the free word, when the power of the dictatorships want only silence, lies or flattery.

Beyond nostalgias, or the images that “dreams (that master of representations) habitually dress in shadows during their theater on the beloved winds,” literature is a dangerous career when it confronts the excesses of power of tyrannies that never stop feeling threatened by words. That power, exercised with cruelties and excesses, has a stone face and is opposed to truths and invention, to humor and to laughter, which are the qualities of Cervantes.

Ovid was banished by the Emperor Augusto to the most desolate confines of the Roman Empire, on the rocky shores of the Black Sea at Tomis: “There, where there’s nothing more than cold, enemies, and sea water that freezes into tight ice,” because his poems, or his irreverence, or his opinions – something that will never more be known – offended Cesar. And he’d have to die far away, afflicted by the calamities, in the solitude of ostracism.

Seneca, banished by Claudius from Corsica following Caligula’s death, was sent to another desolate spot among stones and weeds, but had better luck than Ovid and was eventually able to return. He wrote:

“Neither bread nor water,
Not even a funeral pyre,
Only two things here:
Exile, and an exile.”

Exile, from the Latin ex solum. Take out of the soil. Banish. Like pulling up a plant by its roots. To pine. When someone is sent into exile, the plan is to convert them into a stranger in their own land, estranged from their lives and their memories. And if it’s a writer, their world will become those memories.

“Like the rotting ship being devoured by the invisible woodworm; like the cliffs eroded by the sea water; like the abandoned iron attacked by caustic rust; and like the shelved book devoured by moths,” Ovid says of himself in his poetry collection Sorrows. Because even from those distant lands, he continued writing, a calling he never renounces. Instead, the need to write is then exacerbated, as if one owes the words, or owes their life to the words.

The art of loving, another of his major works, was prohibited and removed from the public libraries. Seeing his words forbidden and his land forever distant, was, as he himself said, “like being carried to the tomb, without having died.”

In Latin America, there’s always been a high price to pay for the free word. The sound of rifle shots, to drown the words. The silence of the jails. The clandestine cemeteries. Death, disappearance, jail, exile.

Haroldo Conti, abducted and disappeared at the hands of General Videla’s dictatorship in Argentina in 1976; Rodolfo Walsh, assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1977 by the same dictatorship after publishing his “Open letter of a writer to the Military Junta,” in which he denounced “the most profound terror Argentine society has ever known… fifteen thousand missing, ten thousand prisoners, four thousand dead, tens of thousands of exiles are the naked numbers of that terror.”

Romulo Gallegos, author of Doña Barbara, was exiled twice – first under the dictatorship of Juan Vincent Gomez, and later under the dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jimenez, after the president of Venezuela was deposed in 1948.

That [Venezuelan] president had lasted only nine months in office, the same nine months that short story writer Juan Bosch lasted. First exiled from the Dominican Republic by the dictatorship of Generalisimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, Bosch was elected president after Trujillo’s death, only to be defeated by the Trujillo soldiers in 1963, and sent once more into exile.

In 1946, Pablo Neruda supported the candidacy of Gabriel Gonzalez Videla in Chile and became involved in his electoral campaign. Nonetheless, once in power, that candidate ordered him persecuted, and in 1948 Neruda had to flee over the mountain range to Argentina.

Augusto Monterroso and Luis Cardoza y Aragon, exiled by the Guatemalan dictatorship of Castillo Armas following the 1954 overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz, remained living permanently in Mexico, which has always been a generous land of refuge.

Exile Augusto Roa Bastos spent 30 years in Buenos Aires, while in his native Paraguay dictator Alfredo Stroessner reigned. Also exiled were Juan Carlos Onetti and Mario Benedetti, in the wake of the [1973] military coup in Uruguay.

Argentine Antonio di Benedetto spent six years in Madrid after being jailed, tortured, and subjected to a simulated firing squad execution by the henchmen of the Argentine military dictatorship.

Argentine poet Juan Gelman – his son murdered by the same dictatorship, his daughter-in-law abducted and taken to Uruguay, where she gave birth to a baby girl who he was finally able to locate many long years later – sings better than anyone else the desolate song of exile:

“Bones that have given fire to so much love,
Exiles from the south, without home or number,
Now undone by so many broken dreams,
Fatigue distracts their soul”

"

Exiled from Cuba, Reinaldo Arenas, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Severo Sarduy; and from today’s Venezuela, so many writers and artists that form an immense and intense diaspora.

Then there’s Juan Ramon Jimenez, Maria Zambrano, Pedro Salinas, Rosa Chacel, Rafael Aberti, Max Aub, Luis Cemuda… Exiled Spanish Republicans, who wove their voices into the warp of twentieth century American culture, together with filmmakers, actors, journalists, intellectuals, scientists – an unparalleled and enriching transfer from the shores of the land of La Mancha to this other shore, principally Mexico, where welcoming them in was the government policy of then-President Lazaro Cardenas.

Neither Machado, nor Unamuno, nor Jorge Semprun, also banished, ever reached the American shores. Machado died on Spain’s doorstep; and Unamuno remained “at the portals of Spain like its doorman,” according to his words, where from his place of exile in Hendaya [southwestern France] he could at least hear the church bells of Irun [in Spain].

Hence, I belong to that long tradition of those who pay a price for their words, twice facing a warrant for arrest, and twice forced into exile – first in my youth by a family dictatorship, and many years later, by another family dictatorship.

But there’s something that no one can ever exile me from, and that’s from my own language. Because my language for writing realities and for creating imaginary worlds is a tongue that knows no frontiers.

There are languages that are imprisoned within one country; languages that end at the borders. I don’t know what it’s like to live in one of those closed verbal spaces. That sentiment that your voice can be heard only nearby, but not from far away.

To have one’s language taken from you by force. Sandor Marais felt that he had died when his books – which at that time could only be read in Hungarian – were banned in his homeland. They took away his voice as punishment. Not only could no one read his works on the other side of the border, not even in Poland or Austria where they hadn’t been translated, but now he couldn’t be read in his own country either. As if he didn’t exist. And, now left without a tongue, he took his own life in exile.

Nicaragua is a country that’s smaller than Sandor Maris’ Hungary, and that’s why his story intrigues and terrifies me – that possibility that no one could hear me beyond my own borders; or of being left at some moment without a language. The limbo of the words, or its inferno.

But I, with my mother tongue, traverse an entire continent, cross the sea, and can always be heard. And although my books are forbidden in Nicaragua, the clandestine bypaths of the social networks allow them to reach my compatriot readers. Just as happened long ago with the books inscribed in the inquisition’s blacklists, but which traversed the borders anyway, as contraband, on muleback, or were slipped past the Custom’s offices hidden in barrels of wine or bacon.

That’s the reason words are so feared. Because they have sharp edges, because they challenge, because they can’t be cowed. Because they’re the expression of liberty itself. Because they contradict the official word, challenge the narrative concocted by the propaganda machines.

Last week, Madrid’s Casa de America, dedicated its 2024 Author and their Works Week to me, with the participation of editors, translators, literary critics and writer friends. The session closed with a dialogue I held with poet Luis Garcia Montero, this year’s winner of the Carlos Fuentes Prize for literary creation in the Spanish language.

I said something at that time that I repeat now, since it seems the time is approaching when you must ask yourself about the way you’d want to be remembered. Without hesitation, I answer that before all else, I’d want to be remembered as a writer, although I’ve walked some different paths in this life, following the maxim of Roman playwright Terence in his piece The Self-Tormentor: “nothing human is alien to me.”

A writer who lent himself to public life for a time, because the matter of a revolution imposed on me the need to perform a political role. But never, in any sense, a politician lent to literature. And as a writer who once inserted into the bowels of power, learned about power.

From the very day it’s taken on, power begins to degrade the ideals that gave it breath.  It’s a living being and responds to the laws of life, as all that is born, grows and dies. Those ideals that in the beginning were whole in all their romantic virtue, immediately lose something when transformed into laws, writes Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago; and when those laws are applied, they’ve already lost a lot more of that original virtue.

Writing has been my life’s passion since I was six years old and drew stories in chalk on the floor of my father’s grocery store in Masatepe – from one side of the floor to the other, in the open space between the display windows and the counters. While the original Mercedes Alborada from my [1995] novel Baile de Mascaras [“Dance of Masks”] followed along behind me, erasing with her mop those annals of chalk where there were captive princesses, heroes who flew and inter-planetary monsters; and sometimes the dance pair that adorned the store also entered my stories – that life-sized cardboard poster of a gentleman in a tuxedo and a lady with swirling skirts that stood in one of the shop windows, courtesy of Glostura hair-cream.

If they should come to remember me as a politician rather than a writer, they’d be remembering wrong, because I’m now convinced that I was a bad politician, first of all because I wasn’t made for the persistence of the office. I may fail in my first attempt to write the chapter of a novel, and delete everything I’ve written in order to begin anew, fighting tooth and nail with the words that at times can be so hard to dominate; but I was never a political figure of the kind that are capable of erasing not only a chapter of their lives, but their entire past, and substitute it for another with more glory and less misery. Or to invent visions of themselves in battles where they never participated.

Because there are two ways of lying: one that illuminates the dark with true words, and another that vilifies the diaphanous with false words. In a novel, the lies seek to create plausible alternatives within reality, as one way of seeking the truth. The lies in a discourse of proselytization seek to deform and cover up reality, in a malicious attempt to deceive. And behind those lies hide corruption and crime.

If one day I entered into politics, it was because, in addition to being involved in a revolution – that word now so strange and distant, and so depreciated – I was young, part of a rebellious generation that wanted to change the world. And many of that generation gave their lives in the service of those dreams of change, from the streets of Paris to the Tlatelolco Plaza [in Mexico]; from Kent University to the jungles of Central America. We were realists, because we demanded the impossible.

At that age, I was convinced that, by overthrowing the foreign-imposed Somoza dictatorship, and through ethical action, the reality of misery and backwardness in my country could be changed, where the poor were the wretched of the earth, just as they continue being now. For the same reasons I believed that reality could be changed in books through imagination.

Action and imagination. Change the world in fiction and change it in reality. One and the other have been for me the ethical ways to alter reality. There’s an ethic at work, when an ideal lies behind the action. When interest for the rest is placed above one’s own self-interest. When, as Adela Cortina indicated just yesterday, in this auditorium during the Julio Cortazar Chair lecture, there’s compassion in the middle, which means moving towards the other, putting yourself in their place. The one next to you, who is your neighbor.

Today, I know that the reality couldn’t be changed, and the tyranny that I fought then mutated into another worse tyranny. Mea culpa. What can you do, the dreams of reason give birth to monsters. The utopias become dystopias.

But “it doesn’t matter that the arrow doesn’t reach the target… since what’s important is the flight, the trajectory, the impulse /the stretch of air passed through in its ascent / the darkness that’s dislodged when it stabs vibrant /into the expanse of nothingness,” as the unforgettable Emilio Pacheco writes.

Nevertheless, reality can be changed and challenged in books, and writing is therefore my calling forever. Because in politics, which I left long ago, one grows old. In contrast, in literature, there’s no advanced age. An old man, obsolete but still in power, becomes grotesque, a monstrosity useful only as a literary character. A writer, on the contrary, can die writing, without ever becoming pathetic, as long as they can hold the favor of their protective goddesses – memory and imagination.

For that same reason, literature is a road without end, transcending the life of the writer themself. In looking for an answer to the question why one writes, it’s hard to hit the mark if you’re seeking one sole answer. Because the reasons for writing are multiple. You write out of necessity; if you can live without writing, you’re not a true writer. You write for pleasure; whoever claims that the writer suffers is also not a true writer. And you also write to transcend life itself with words. One day, someone takes down a book from the shelf of an old library. They wipe off the dust, open it, read a page, a paragraph, perhaps just one line. The words have come back to life. They were there, waiting; they awaken. They have transcended.

But I also want to be remembered as a writer who never turned out the light while writing, and who always kept the window open to the noises and rumors of the world, to the abnormalities of oppression and injustice, the violences of tyrannical power.

With politics, I’m left, like Voltaire, with a taste for being a man of the public; the one who always wants to offer an opinion, as long as there are problems to have opinions about. That critical spirit which will never keep me far from debate. A taste for tolerance, and a disillusionment with eternal ideas and inviolable beliefs, a distrust of truths said to last forever.

And I keep a window open also on compassion and grace, pain and joy, just as Alonso Quijano [Don Quijote] when he put on his leather shield and crowned himself with the golden helmet of illusion. A devoted scribe of the hopes and dreams of little beings, as Chekhov used to say, those beings that populate the universe of Joseph Roth. Laughing at them and laughing with them; laughing at myself before laughing at anyone else, as my aunts and uncles taught me in the circle that took place every afternoon in my father’s grocery store, when they held their ritual gathering before crossing the street and ascending the steps to the church to play at the religious events. All of them poor musicians who made up the Ramirez orchestra, with my grandfather at the head.

A musical paternal grandfather, chapel master of the parish church, composer of waltzes and Requiem Masses. A maternal grandfather who was a positivist liberal, a Protestant, a mechanic, a chemist, and a woodworker; with his hands he made the oak table with its broad surface and legs carved with graceful, faceless caryatids where I used to write in Managua. I’m the product of that dual current. Imagination and rigor. Lined paper and sandpaper. The arc of the violin and the carpenter’s chisel. The music of the words, and the steady beat of the hammer.

And here I close. After I was tried for treason to the homeland and stripped of my Nicaraguan citizenship. Banished, denationalized. My name was erased from all the records, as in the nightmares of Kafka’s world. And they even annulled my law degree. Their design was to leave me without a country and without a university.

For that reason, dear rector, when you called me from Madrid, to tell me that the University of Guadalajara would be awarding me this honorary doctorate, it only confirmed to me that this house of studies was my alma mater, as I’ve known for so many years, since I entered it for the first time through the doorway of the International Book Fair that Raul Padilla opened for me in 1991, over thirty years ago. More than a foster home – a home of my own.

Today, the University of Guadalajara has returned to me the academic title that the dictatorship’s repression had taken away from me. I speak to you, then, from the seat of my university, the University of Guadalajara, wearing the academic robes that confirm to me I’m one of your children.

Thank you very much.

This article was published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Times. To get the most relevant news from our English coverage delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Dispatch.