In 1969, Carlos Lleras tried to expel her from the country because of her statements about the takeover of the National University. / Zalamea family archive
Photo: Zalamea family archives
“Long before García Márquez crossed the borders, Marta Traba made herself heard” – Elena Poniatowska in “Marta Traba or the Leap into the Void”.
It is impossible to talk about Latin American art history without mentioning Marta Traba. Her work and pioneering perspective made her Colombia’s first female art critic. Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda affirmed that “criticism, as a constant activity, as an illuminating enthusiasm, finally had an active presence and a reasonable urgency in Marta Traba, far more vivid and inclusive than in her illustrious and unreal predecessors.” His proposal for a “multicultural worldview,” which found greater power in Latin American art than European or North American artistic expressions, was crucial to the spread of the continent’s art.
Hated or loved, Traba is considered the most important art critic of the 20th century, the Pope of Colombian art. Relentlessly in his work he pointed out that the critic’s “moral condition must be his honesty”, for this reason he challenged the “untouchable mediocrity” and asserted that the critical work should not have the slightest softness if it really is wanted to educate the public about true beauty and authentic artistic values. According to Poniatowska, his verdicts were feared as succinct and, above all, as unexpected. There has never been such a fresh and relaxed art critic.”
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But although she was considered an imposing woman, endowed with great strength of character and an extraordinary capacity for mobilization, despite her small stature, and who relentlessly questioned the role of intellectuals in society, she thought several times of giving up her work as an art critic. She wanted to be remembered as a writer. He loved the freedom that literature gave him, the opportunity to travel through these fantastical worlds of fiction and discover all delusions in the power of words. There was his greatest happiness.
Traba’s vocation as a writer was centered in two areas: art criticism and novel writing. In the critique, she expressed her intellectual strength as a cultural agitator and her need to reconcile the artist’s subjectivity with that of the audience. “Between what the artist reveals through his work and what is known to the public through his preferences, the critical mediation performs true intersubjective work,” he wrote in 1977 in the Papel Literario of the Caracas newspaper El Nacional. Marta assured that America is a continent of apologists, not critics. “Amid this spectacle of kneeling people pinning medals to one another, the need for criticism is palpable, almost painful.” But the written word, in its narrative worlds, was the true extension of his soul and his political ideas.
Through his essays he questioned nationalisms and the idea that it was possible to separate the work of art from its social context. As a critic, she disliked more than the lack of expertise, the pretentious and artificial nature of some proposals, but through literature she learned that it was possible to interpret the reality of countries, uncover their grievances and social concerns, and go a historical one testimony to its profound contradictions. Her feminist consciousness and her emancipatory vocation are reflected in several of her works. It deals with complex issues such as enforced disappearances and military dictatorships, the human sensual world, suicide, loss and social injustice, defeat, helplessness and loneliness. Juan Gustavo Cobo, in his essay entitled Marta, novelist, says: “The novel reaffirms his belief in the feminine as a means of reconstruction against the oppressive weight with which the men described here have distorted the lives of these women by infusing them their fanaticism”.
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Her raw material at the time of writing was the insightful vision she had developed as a keen observer and her own life experience. “In criticism and in the novel, I still think that expression is above all a poetic fact that can be confronted with reality; it is irreversible. In the novel, I found the words again and I unleashed them,” he confirmed for Montevideo Friday Magazine.
During her prolific writing career, she published seven novels, which confirm her interest in Latin American political reality as her attempt to unravel human nature and its symbolic world, as well as the mythical state of a continent “crossed by fear and improbability”. Her first novel, Las Ceremonies of Summer (Havana, 1966), a work dealing with female subjectivities, won the Casa de las Américas prize and is considered one of the best novels in Latin American literature. It was relaunched in 2021 by Editorial Firmamento from Madrid, Spain. A year later he published Los laberintos insolados (Barcelona, 1967), which was re-released in 2017. This was followed by La jugada del sixt día (Santiago de Chile, 1969); Homerica Latina (Bogotá, 1979), “a collection of moments that point to the heart of barbarism”, wrote her biographer Victoria Verlichak, describing the brutality of life for the dispossessed and the arrogance of the powerful”. In Conversation to the South (Mexico, 1981), written from exile in Washington, he addresses the subject of enforced disappearances in the dark night of military dictatorships, the overthrow of Salvador Allende, censorship and the circular rite of pain and resistance , Every week the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo perform. Two of his novels have been published posthumously: Anywhere (Bogotá, 1984), a work that describes the reality of Latin American exile in Europe, and Endless House (Montevideo, 1988), where he shows the social contexts of violence and repression. the complex inner house that we carry on our backs.
He also wrote two books of short stories: Pasó así (Montevideo, 1968) and De la mañana a la noche (Montevideo, published in 1986, three years after his death), as well as a volume of poetry, the first he published, Historia natural de La Joy (Buenos Aires, 1952). He also authored 22 volumes of history and art criticism, and nearly 1,200 essays and journalistic articles for newspapers and magazines, mostly on the continent. For Cobo Borda, what Julio Ortega envisioned for Latin American literature is present in Marta Traba’s narrative: “The new discourse of a political, critical sensibility and an imagination that challenges all repressive systems.” Particularly as a critic and novelist, Marta Traba has always emphasized Latino identity, for more than Argentina by birth or Colombian by love and adoption, she was deeply Latino. The whole continent flowed through his veins.
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Ever present in his life and work was the need to challenge traditional canons and established power, including in art, to forge what he called a “culture of resistance”. His literary work bears witness to this.
In 2001, the Argentine journalist and art critic Victoria Verlichak published the biography Marta Traba, a furious stubbornness, an essential work to know her contribution to Latin American culture and her literary heritage, one of the most outstanding in the female narrative of the continent. .