When I was little, I memorized part of a poem by Julio Cortázar that hung on my family’s desk. It was typewritten, on thin sheets of paper, with very marked letters and very black ink. I think my father copied it from a book that was already out of print, and we sometimes recited it together. In my memory I can still hear him speaking in a deep and slow voice. It was called “The Homeland.”
The poem is an attempt to pay tribute to Argentina with all its contradictions, hatreds and mistakes. An unredeemed love is confessed: “I love you, land sunk in the sea, fish belly up, / poor shadow of a land, full of winds, / full of monuments and horrors”, and almost tango “To be Argentinian is to be sad / to be Argentinian means to be far away. The poem ends with a climax, beyond resentments, fears and paradoxes, the author gives in to the bile of loving “from a distance, bitterly and in the night”.
I still like this poem. Maybe because it is more than an ode and a self-portrait emerges: the author loves in a shameful way, even though he himself knows that love for a nation or a flag is a big trap. With any luck, it will only disappoint you. As not one but several poets have said, perhaps the most benevolent solution is to stop grandstanding and accept that home is childhood and friends. We could also add a shared landscape, a language and the smell of what is cooked in the courtyards in summer. Who knows. Or maybe it’s best not to make odes to the countries. They will always contain more contradictions and more deaths than literature.
Many of us grew up wondering what connects us to a country beyond chance. If Cortázar defined Argentina as a fish with its belly up, as I recount in a book, for me it was a space in the sky for much of my childhood. Because my family and I traveled by plane every few years to visit family and friends, and I fell asleep as we soared into the pale blue and white of the clouds and sky on the journey, I mistook the flag’s color for the flag’s color for years Start color. from my plane. For me Argentina was like heaven.
I recently traveled again and was invited to speak at a literary festival. I started this journey with great fear: how would they accept a book that talks about a country since I was mostly a foreigner? I forgot that Argentina is such a self-obsessed country that there is nothing better for an Argentine than knowing that someone is talking about them. There is a strange pride in their constant questioning: How do they see us from there? And yet enormous generosity in dialogue. Even in their failures there is national pride.
These are turbulent times for a country with inflation at 138% and where four in 10 Argentines are poor. There is a candidate with a good chance of winning the presidency who talks to the spirits of his dogs and suggests that poor citizens should sell their organs. And despite the fact that the concept of helplessness has taken hold, citizens are filling cinemas and theaters and independent publishers are multiplying. Cultural vitality does not end in an extremely precarious situation that makes everyone faint.
This energy floods even the most unusual spaces. A few weeks ago I met the poet Santiago Sylvester and the artist Monica Zwaig during a conversation about exile in literature. Given the current political context, he expected the act to be somewhat serious. Finally, the number two of the La Libertad Avanza party, Victoria Villarruel, is a denier of state terrorism in Argentina. The three speakers were directly affected by the military dictatorship in one way or another. On the contrary, it was a lecture full of laughter and anecdotes. The room was full of light and excitement as he was able to describe with a certain humor the feeling of displacement, alienation and even the feeling of ridicule that comes from being more or less foreign, more or less European, more or less Argentine in one place or another. . I read contemporaries who spoke with humor about unthinkable things. I also discovered other ways of telling stories. That day, bundled up in our coats, we clinked glasses of beer and pizza as afternoon dawned on Corrientes Avenue. As for Cortázar, with the landscape of Tilcara in the afternoon, the fragrant Paraná, I could not help but miss that dialogue, that openness, that energy, whose synonym there is “miss”.
And then the music of my youth appeared. Luca Prodan, Sumo, his song La blonde tarada, which represents hypocrisy and superficiality, and the last verse “This is Argentina”. Whatever comes in the future, I feel like the culture will be there to handle it.
Lucia Lijtmaer She is a journalist and author. His latest book is Almost Nothing to Wear (Anagrama).
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