The doors of Santo Domingo are open to writers summoned from different countries, our language and others, because freedom begins in diversity, and those who join their voice in this country, that if one day there will be the brutality of a bloody dictatorship, would have managed to walk the path of freedom itself and democracy for decades, a path that quite a few, including myself, want to tread in our own countries. For if diversity and freedom are inextricably linked, then literature and, in turn, freedom are no less so.
In Latin America today, beyond ideological distances, the struggle is being waged between authoritarianism and democracy, that is, between oppression and freedom. And literature will always be on the side of freedom and on the side of democracy.
For oppression and dictatorship are the opposite of freedom and democracy when these two sacramental words are reflected in the dark mirror of which Saint Paul spoke already in his Epistle to the Corinthians: “Now we see through a mirror into the darkness; but then we will see each other face to face…”. We writers want to see words face to face, without attachments and without ceasing to soar in their free flight to truths and imagination.
And freedom of expression also includes free journalism. The imprisonment suffered by José Rubén Zamora in Guatemala for exposing the truth about corruption and the forced closure of the newspaper he runs, elPeriódico, are facts that must be condemned and denounced with the utmost severity.
Centroamérica Cuenta is a literary festival created ten years ago in Nicaragua that has misled the power of political circumstances, oppression and dictatorship, the dark mirror; a festival in exile that seeks asylum and finds it generous, as now among you, Dominican friends; and these are the paradoxes from which one always learns: the exile from Central America Cuenta enriched it, made it grow, multiplied it.
More than a literary festival, this is a journey of constant exploration, with one foot in Latin America, now in the Dominican Republic, and the other in Europe, with our annual parallel festival in Madrid, under the auspices of Casa de América. We learn as we go, we grow as we go, we add as we go forward.
The territory of the imagination is very wide. A huge fantasy for a vast, complex, hallucinating, surprising and diverse America, given that the language we write in is so diverse. A single language with multiple registers on both sides of the Atlantic, the territory of La Mancha as Carlos Fuentes called it, the ways of Don Quixote opened in multiple directions. A language that communicates to 500 million people, but which is at the same time the language in which we tell stories, in which we tell history and with the imagination we tell and illuminate reality.
Literature is an ever-open window, the best vantage point to get closer to this moving mural that is our America. We don’t often see what we would like to see: justice, democracy, equality, justice, because there are still many injustices, oppressions, violence, imbalances and flaws in the landscape. But there is also hope.
And we writers are at the same time witnesses to this illuminated and suffering landscape, and we are witnesses to the prosecution. Our job is to lift stones, as José Saramago said. It’s not our fault if we find monsters under these stones so often.
We take responsibility for our burdens, we walk with them, we bear witness, we recreate reality, we build parallel realities, and our privileged vehicle for saying what we see is this vast language, tailored for a vast imagination .
The question of what literature is for is an idle question. Literature is not a liberal profession from which one can expect a fixed return or salary. Literature is, for those who choose it as a profession, a vital adventure, an adventure full of risks, because the ethics of literature is truth, and telling the truth always runs into danger. It is a trade of lies full of truths that tends to hurt arbitrary power that seeks punitive words.
Literature doesn’t offer answers, it raises questions, questions. Exhibit, reveal, record if it’s a real job. Literature enables us to write and read differently and to be others, to discover realities, to harness the power of imagination, to give majesty to history through stories, and to be interpreters of history remembered as it is it is told by the novelists. Because literature fixes memory. Literature makes history and preserves memory through imagination.
And it also opens us to the search for ourselves, to find out who we are, to explore our diverse and diverse identity as Latin Americans. Peering through the cracks and discovering ourselves, like in the museum in the center of León in Santiago that we visited yesterday, an exhibition that explores what it means to be Dominican and that we can transfer to all of us. We realize that we are diverse and diverse and therefore identical.
We can write from the place where we were born or from exile if we are denied the right to live where we were born. But language and imagination do not fail us, and both are ways to restore and preserve memory.
We are the keepers of this memory, the memory of our peoples. About his dreams, about his language, about his own imagination. Language arises from two aspects: from the anonymous people who use it every day and from literary writing.
I, a writer to death, live because I write. I live in my language, which is my homeland, and I live in the language and memory of my people. No tyranny can take away the language I write in, nor can it take away my belonging to the people who have inspired my writing since childhood.
From them, from the Nicaraguans who are silent today because they are not allowed to speak, and from those who, like me, live in exile, my writing came about and it will give them something. And from them, because they exist, I live, and therefore I can be Latin American and strive to be universal.
Pedro Mir, the great Dominican poet, wrote about the man who was expelled from his land in the poem There Is a Country in the World, and I take his words as my own:
“From the deepest night
I come to speak about a country.
Exactly
population poor.
But
it’s not just that.
Of course I am the product of a journey at night.
give me time
courage
to make the song…”
This festival, which I proudly preside over, is the result of a journey. Today we stop here, owners of the hospitality that this land, your land and ours, offers us.
Thank you to the Dominican Republic, to the Dominicans and to the Dominicans. Thank you to the René del Risco Foundation, to Minerva, its President, for being part of this great cultural enterprise that we are opening today, and to all the bodies and institutions that have helped us to make this possible. And many thanks to Claudia Neira and her small but fine team.
We will take advantage of this generous hospitality. Of the hospitality that the Dominican Republic offers us and of the freedom that Dominicans, men and women, have conquered. Freedom, “one of the most precious gifts that heaven has bestowed on mankind”, in the words of our Lord Don Quixote.
Speech by the Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramirez, Director of the Festival Centroamérica Cuenta, at the opening of the literary event on Wednesday, May 17, 2023 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
All the culture that goes with it awaits you here.
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