The Caribbean, like modern Hellas, a handful of close cultures surrounded by shared seas, is still my home. Now I live in New York, which in some of its parts, but especially in some moments, is an extension of the Caribbean, that is, a dynasty of rhythm as a way of organizing life. Rhythm is the use of ‘the effective word’, a term coined by Léopold Senghor in mixed deviation from Flaubert’s ‘the right word’. I want to believe that the quest for this compass, the training of the ear as the organ that carries out the inner gaze, will enable me to fight and overcome the state of exile as a mere state of defenselessness, as this is the first way in is what exile appears to us. .
The connection between the Caribbean and the classical world of the West has accompanied me since I found in La isla que repeta, Antonio Benítez Rojo’s important book, the description of our territories as a group of meta-archipelagos. The parallelism is drawn by him, not by me, although it is already mine. We are peoples of the sea, and the very kinship we wished to establish with the sea, the gateway to and from the other, will define our specific form of government and our poetics of the world.
I come from a country that has transformed the sea that surrounds it, each of its peaks, shallows, shores and bays, into the prelude to a cemetery, into the valley of tears that we don’t always cross in search of the promised can land. . With our backs to the water, its meandering currents and mysteries numerous, we have lived smothered on a piece of land, ignoring or depriving ourselves of this verse from Lezama, which I now remember: “Breeze that holds the secret of the two waves.” , / the cold of the dew on the skin…/ and the detachment of the body from another nailed body”. We despised the sea, and the sea took its revenge on us, swallowing us up and cornering us.
At this point, I think the comparison is self-explanatory. Anchored in the Peloponnese, Sparta makes our same mistake. It is also a terrestrial, militarized, paranoid state with perpetually closed borders, whose sons are chiefly preparing for war, guided by the Oral Law of Lycurgus, which is to the Lacedaemonians what Fidel Castro was to the Cubans. But unlike Sparta, we still have the written word, and this story of resistance, of the will to write, of captured memory is, or should be, our passport to survival.
The abstract universalism of the West, let us now call Edouard Glissant, transformed the Battle of Thermopylae into a child prodigy of heroism, an individual feat sufficient in itself, the touch of grace which the Spartan warriors matched the imposing Persian troops of Xerxes I. We can almost say that every ideology finds in the past the examples that confirm it, and that Thermopylae is therefore, detached from any other concurrent event or minimal context of the Second Medical War, either a totalitarian or a neoliberal adventure seems to be a good dose of sacrifice and nationalistic messianism, which is the direct link between the two perversions.
However, what really saves the Hellenic world is not the episode commanded by Leonidas, but the Battle of Salamis, which, as we know, consists of a maritime confrontation led by a people who not only were not separated from the sea, but had made it the sea to his partner, which is why the sea sided with him at the right time to defeat a vastly superior naval force. That city is Athens, of course, coming to teach us a simple lesson that we haven’t really learned yet. Without the sea there is no democracy, salvation or collective history.
Through what comes out of the sea, but mainly what the sea hides, I can then articulate the three most important lessons that Glissant, a dear and old friend I discovered in Havana, in a compilation of Casa de las Américas left for me called El discurso antillano, and with whom I later forged even closer ties in Mexico City, where I bought the volume Faulkner, Mississippi at a second-hand stand.
The first of these lessons is linked to the concepts of “poetics of opacity” and “politics of relationship,” categories which I have seen manifested before me and which I will use in a forthcoming book chronicle entitled Los Intruders. There I tell the story of the San Isidro movement, a group of artists, mostly Afro-Cubans, who have bravely stood up to Castro’s police power in Havana in recent years.
The second lesson concerns the path, I don’t know whether political or historical, of the baroque aesthetics. In Glissant’s words, it is a magnificence that acts as a rejection or unconscious defense against the processes of assimilation or imitation. Lezama defines it more or less similarly when he speaks of the baroque as a “spirit of counter-conquest”.
Finally, and despite the importance of these two points, the third lesson is perhaps the most extraordinary, as brief as it is poignant. It goes like this: as a writer, as a Caribbean subject, but above all as a commoner, you have to stay supportive and lonely. I still cringe a little at the power and euphonious grace of this idea, which I so badly deserved. In this way, hopefully as supportive as it is lonely, I accept this award and celebrate it with deep emotion and gratitude.
This text was read by the author after winning the Carbet Prize from the Foundation created by Edouard Glissant for his book “Los caídos” (Sixth Floor Publishing House, 2018).