Where do the themes, the inspirations, the expressions in your literary work come from: the subconscious, your dreams, memory, reality as it is, or is the basis of your writing much more complicated?
Well, dreams, the unconscious, memory, reality in itself, are sufficiently complicated so that one stops wanting to look elsewhere. Never mind if we take into account that we mix all of these things with certain reflections on writing and the politico-literary canon from the place one comes from, and top it all off with plain neurosis. So, it's best not to look for further complications. With these things, in fact with less, it is possible to do plenty.
You cultivate minimalist, pure poetry, expression - a 100% concentration of sense and sounds, without any supplementary words or sentences. Do you refine this process gradually, or directly work in this way? Of course, I'm thinking here about Portrait de A. Hooper et Son Epouse.
In general, each of my texts, be it prose or poetry, is a unity in itself, which is to say that each operates in a different key, or has been written in a different way. Portrait of A. Hooper and His Wife was a game-a joke-on the Cuban poetic tradition, which because it ‘grew' at the margins of the ‘great vanguard experiences' is overly repressive in and of itself. At the same time, it was a kind of homage (an absurd homage if you like) paid to a few fragments of Bernhard's ouvre, above all on those machine-like, or repetitive, zones we find in books like Yes, Gargoyles, Wittgenstein's Nephew, or Frost. It was also a reflection on power, on the alliances that grow up between delirium and power in a given individual or a given ‘mass'. For these reasons, I tried not only to write an ironic and ‘vertical' poem, but I tried to do so in the coldest, most distant way possible... so that by this means the caricature, the caricature that in itself is the philosopher, would be left there frozen, like a cockroach on an iceberg. Unfortunately, this move, and the irony it implies, was poorly understood when I wrote it.
Besides this long poem, in your book of poetry translated in French and published by Farrago, there is your well-known poem, Mao. How did you write this poem and why Mao?
This poem is based on actual events. In the 1960's, during the Cultural Revolution in China, there was a famine. It was one of the worst famines ever within the ‘Asian Giant'. And Mao, who at the time was in the midst of one of his great moments of delirium, decided that the cause of the disaster wasn't his mad economic policies, which today seems obvious, but rather the sparrows, which according to Mao ate the grains of rice. So he decreed that they be killed. To this end, he deployed snipers and entire armies to stalk the little birds throughout the country. In Cuba, I saw photographs of the snipers and of mountains of dead sparrows in what appeared to be a large field of rice. All of this, combined with a reflection on power itself and how power is produced, made the poem come out like it did: as a mixture of elegy and comedy, if it's possible to think of it in this way.
It is obvious that your life is quite complicated and not very easy. Do you think that one day you will benefit from these difficult years? As a writer-in-exile, there may be certain priorities: to receive literary awards, to be translated in other languages, to be invited to many conferences or festivals, etc. As the Croatian writer, Dubravka Ugresic, says, "the media likes heroes" and a writer-in-exile is always a media hero. How do you see your status as a writer?
I see my status as that of a mouse, forever afraid of being crushed by the apparatus of power. I don't believe in heroes or in any kind of heroism - which basically means I'm a bad fan of Hollywood. A person who lives forever hidden away among the chatter of little public lunches, or strikes poses for newspapers, is not a hero. Actually, they are the opposite. They become a kind of Good Soldier Schweik and all of a sudden lose their bearings. On another note, if there were heroes under a totalitarian regime, it would not be those who leave, but rather those who stay, who have to continue suffering the disaster.
In an interview, you said that in exile you actually became a writer. Does it mean that in exile, or on a long trip, a writer has time, space and liberty (or biographical distance) to think about himself, to browse through his past and his life, so that he can transform his experiences into literature? In your own literature, you write very rarely (or never?) about yourself.
Yes, though not as an absolute principle. There have been great writers who have had the lucidity to establish a distance from their lives or their personal fictions without having to leave where they are, without having to ‘get away'. A fine example is Kant, who never left Königsberg, that tiny city in eastern Prussia. Yet he wrote the most lucid and intelligent books about liberty that exist today. Another is Lezama, a Cuban. With the exception of a couple of insignificant trips out of Havana, he lived as a recluse in his house for seventy years, among the dust of his books and the "dust" of his "madness" (or his fat), which in the end were nearly the same thing.
Your prose book, Trip to China, is a great Lonely Planet fiction about outer and inner China, full of lucid, caricatured and tragi-comic references to its roads, lanterns, cotton ticks, war museums, highways, airport etc. Can your book also be called Trip to Cuba? What was the motive to write this kind of fictional non-fiction?
I was motivated by the same things that had motivated previous texts of mine: a reflection on literature, genres, what is left in or out of certain experiences, tradition... Almost all my books are based on this ‘dialectic', on this obsession with limits and how difference is produced; not only literary difference, but also politics in literature (if we assume politics to be precisely akin to the strategies a writer puts to work in a given moment, a type of amnesia of conscience that always produces some piece of a text's amazon).
It would be best not to read this as a trip to Cuba, mainly because it's not even a real trip to China, in a biographical sense. Rather, it's a trip to certain concepts: to the occident and its poor understanding of The Other; into the relationship between caricature and power; into my head. But it's not a trip to any geographical place, to any reality. For me, China is just a hole...
Who is the prototype of your ideal reader? Does it exist?
No, I don't believe in an ideal reader, or in a writer. This reader would have to have a marriage of disgust and pleasure akin to mine, a similar upbringing, including the same friends. Perhaps even a certain degree of perversion in common. But if this reader existed, they would only affirm that they were worthless to me. The most important thing is to have someone who can read you from the perspective of their difference, their prejudices, and their share of power, as Nietzsche liked to say. In this difference (and in this sharing) are gathered the one-two-three of reading.
Do you believe in the statement that your language is your country?
No. A country is too abstract and senseless compared with language, which for me is one of the most concrete and complex things a writer possesses, as Beckett well knew. Perhaps it's the only thing a writer possesses.
Extracted from
Interview With Carlos A. Aguilera
by Lidija Dimkovska
Translated from Spanish by Todd Ramón Ochoa
To read more:
