Modern Argentine Poetry: Exile, Displacement, Migration

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Modern Argentine Poetry

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

David Frier (University of Leeds)

Lisa Shaw (University of Liverpool)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Rob Stone (Swansea University)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Catherine Davies (University of Nottingham)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Modern

Argentine Poetry

Ben Bollig

CARDIFF

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2011

© Ben Bollig, 2011

First reprint, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-7083-2355-7

eISBN: 978-1-78316-469-1

The right of Ben Bollig to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Los Glaciares National Park, Argentina © MARKA/Alamy

Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Exile and Argentine Poetry

1   On Exile and Not-Belonging in the Work of Alejandra Pizarnik

2   Towards a Montonero Poetics? Or, The Melancholy Exile of Juan Gelman?

3   Exile and Cynicism in the Verse of Osvaldo Lamborghini

4   Néstor Perlongher: Sexual Exile, Migration and Nomadism

5   Cristian Aliaga: Internal Exile and Cultural Activism in Contemporary Patagonia

6   Migration and Cultural Activism in the Poetry of Washington Cucurto

Conclusion

Bibliography

Series Editors’ Foreword

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superceded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of cultural production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the University of Leeds for funding a number of research visits and conference trips, and a year’s research leave in 2009–10, during which time much of the writing and revision of this work was completed. I am grateful to the British Academy for funding a conference trip to the American Comparative Literature Association meeting, Puebla, in April 2007, and a research trip to Buenos Aires in December 2008. I am also most grateful to the Society of Authors, who presented me with a K. Blundell award to undertake a research trip to Buenos Aires in 2009.

A preliminary version of chapter 1 was presented as part of the research seminar series of the University of Leeds Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies; I am grateful to colleagues for their comments and suggestions. A shorter version was also presented at the ACLA meeting, Puebla, April 2007. In Buenos Aires, December 2008, I was able to discuss this work with staff and students at the Universidad de San Andrés. I presented versions of chapter 2 at the Jornadas Andinas de Literatura Latinoamericana 2008, Santiago de Chile, and at the Latin American Studies Association Conference 2009, Rio de Janeiro, and am grateful to panellists and audience members who offered comments. Early research for chapter 3 was conducted with the assistance of teaching relief at the University of Westminster. The University of Westminster also funded a trip to the Midwest Modern Language Association Conference 2005, at which an early short version of the chapter was presented. Parts of chapter 4 appeared in an earlier form in both my University of London Ph.D. thesis (2003) and my book, Néstor Perlongher: The Poetic Search for an Argentine Marginal Voice (University of Wales Press, 2008), and in an article, ‘Exiles and Nomads: Perlongher in Brazil’ (Hispanic Research Journal, 7.4 (2006)). It was initially presented in a shorter form at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies/Queen Mary University of London conference, ‘Exile and Migration from/to Portuguese-speaking Countries’, 2004. An earlier version of chapter 5 was presented at the II Simposio Internacional Poéticas de la Resistencia, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, in April 2009. An earlier version of chapter 6 was presented at the ACLA meeting, April 2010, New Orleans and at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in November 2010.

This work would be greatly impoverished were it not for the generosity of the following individuals in allowing works to be reproduced: Cristian Aliaga, Washington Cucurto, Sergio Raimondi, Tamara Kamenszain, Elvira Lamborghini and Roberto Echavarren (who is responsible for Perlongher’s literary estate). I am also grateful to Miriam Pizarnik de Nesis for her kind help.

A very great many individuals have helped me along the way with suggestions, advice and corrections. To list them risks oversights, but the following all deserve my thanks: my colleagues and erstwhile colleagues at the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Philip Derbyshire, Jens Andermann, Catherine Boyle, Lorraine Leu, John Kraniauskas, David M. J. Wood and Nathalia Jabur; at Leeds, my colleagues Paul Garner, David Frier, Thea Pitman, Richard Cleminson, Karen Charlesworth, Stuart Green, Manuel Barcia Paz, Stuart Taberner and Gill Gray (and many others), as well as Cara Levey (who also compiled the index) and the students who took my courses on Southern Cone poetry, whose ability to defy the expectations of those who would instrumentalise and bureaucratise education at the service of ever-greater commercialisation was always heartening; at Lancaster, my friend and colleague Cornelia Gräbner; at Westminster, Celia Szusterman; Daniel Waissbein for his generous comments and criticisms; in Argentina, Cristian Aliaga, Jorge Boccanera, Arturo Carrera, Tamara Kamenszain, Florencia Garramuño, Álvaro Fernández Bravo, Miguel Balaguer, all at Eloísa Cartonera, the staff of the Casa de la Poesía de Buenos Aires and the staff of the Museo del Puerto and the Ferrowhite Centre in Bahía Blanca, especially Pedro Caballero (his marvellous blog is http://archivocaballero.blogspot.com/); in São Paulo, Luciana di Leone; at UCL, Jason Wilson; at Birkbeck, William Rowe, José Bellido, Constanza Ceresa and Alethia Alfonso; at Bristol, Thomas Muhr; at Edinburgh, Fiona Mackintosh and her colleagues; Anxo Rabuñal, publisher of Teatro proletario de cámara, helped with permissions; and at Santiago de Compostela, Arturo Casas, Irís Cochón, María Rabade and their colleagues. Chris Perriam and his colleagues at the Manchester Spanish and Portuguese Series commented on some of the translations of Aliaga’s poems.

None of this would have been possible without the unstinting and at times inexplicable support of my partner, Lizzie, and the enthusiastic comments of my son, Ruben.

All errors and omissions are, I should add, no one’s fault but mine.

Introduction: Exile and Argentine Poetry

The epic poem El gaucho Martín Fierro (1872), perhaps the founding poetic text of Argentine literature, was written, noted its author José Hernández in a letter to his publisher (1999: 33), to alleviate ‘el fastidio de la vida de hotel’ (the tedium of hotel life)¹ of his brief exile.² Throughout Argentina’s history, authors and important political figures, such as Presidents Domingo Sarmiento and Juan Perón and the writer Julio Cortázar, to name but three, have lived and written in exile. Exile is both a vital theme and a practical condition for Argentine letters. Conversely, as a country that in its modern history has welcomed mass immigration and political exiles from Europe and the rest of Latin America, contemporary Argentina is a nation shaped by the work of immigrants.³ This introduction sets out to address four questions: why study exile in Argentine poetry; what do I mean by ‘exile’; what is to be analysed herein; and how is that analysis to be undertaken?

There has been in recent years something of a boom in the study of exile and migration in Latin America and specifically Argentina, with the publication of a number of works and collections that deal with diaspora in general (Bullock and Paik, 2008); political exile (Jensen, 1998); economic migration (Aruj, 2004); migration to Argentina (Novick, 2008); specific exiled and migrant communities in Argentina and Latin America (Moya, 1998; Baily and Míguez, 2003; Hu-DeHart, 2009); the contribution of Spanish Republican exiles to the development of Argentine literature (Zambrano, 2006); the links between literature and exile (Ortega, 2007); psychoanalytic studies (Leon and Rebecca Grinberg, 1989⁴); the relationship between immigration and discourses of sexual deviancy (Salessi, 2000); the so-called second generation of exiles (Luján Leiva, 2008); and even a recent exhibition in Buenos Aires, curated by Néstor García Canclini, entitled ‘Extranjerosen la tecnologíayen la cultura’ (Foreigners in technology and culture) (see Friera, 2009).

Argentina was, for much of its history, a country that received mass migrations and expelled individuals. However, from the late 1950s, with dictatorship and economic downturn, Argentine began to lose population through mass migration. The 1960s were marked by the emigration of intellectuals and professionals, the ‘fuga de cerebros’, or ‘brain-drain’, as it was known. Despite a brief rise in the inflow of exiles from neighbouring countries, particularly Paraguay, Chile and Uruguay, suffering dictatorships in the period 1973–6, increased political violence in the 1970s led to an upsurge in the number of political exiles, with a large exodus from 1976 onwards. Exiles tended to be representatives of middle and upper sectors, and there were fewer working-class exiles, although these are statistically more present in the list of those disappeared by the dictatorship (Franco, 2008: 70). For many, exile was seen as both emblematic of a political defeat and as the loss of a political project (Boccanera, 1999: 12), and indeed writers have used the optic of mourning to refer to the situation of those in exile after 1976 (20). Although the return to democracy in 1983 was accompanied by the enthusiastic return of many exiles (Aruj, 2004: 28), the 1980s and 90s witnessed a further ‘brain-drain’. In the early 2000s, a great number of Argentines sought to leave to Europe, gaining passports and visas by virtue of having European grandparents, and completing a migratory circuit back to the continent their families left.

In spite of the importance of exile in the history of Argentina, and in particular in the history of Argentine literature, there are few studies that have focused specifically on the different versions of exile described and taken in Argentine poetry. Few poets are represented in Cymerman’s survey (1993), even those whose work would seem a certain fit for the models proposed, for example his notion of the ‘cultural ghetto’ of the provinces (526), which would seem almost necessarily to imply inclusion for Juan L. Ortiz. Juan Gelman’s poetry warrants the briefest of mentions; that of the Uruguayan author, Mario Benedetti, who appears in the study as a prose writer, does not.

Exile, displacement and migration have played such an important role in recent Argentine writing that a series of polemics can be traced. One of the most informative sketches of the critical debates around exile and writing during the last dictatorship can be found in the work of Silvina Jensen (1998). Although Jensen is mainly interested in the sociology of the Argentine exile community in Catalonia (some 3–4,000 in 1980 (39)), focusing on those granted asylum for political reasons in the 1970s and early 1980s, she is able to highlight key moments in the debate, including the football World Cup in 1978 and the Malvinas conflict in 1982, alongside a series of different and competing interpretations of exile. Both ‘those who stayed’ and ‘those who went’ held mutual suspicions: that those who stayed were in some way complicit with the regime, for example; or that those who went were not only committing an act of desertion, but also enjoying a privileged, cosseted time away from the hardships and struggles of their own country (103).

There were a number of exchanges or polemics in this debate: Heker–Cortázar (1978); Terragno–Bayer (1980–1); and Bayer–Gregorich (1982–3). Julio Cortázar did not regard himself as an exile, feeling that his distance from Argentina was not the result of any compulsion or violence, and political themes only really enter his works in the 1970s. Nevertheless, he found himself from 1974 onwards unwelcome in the country, with his works largely prohibited or censored (Cortázar, 1984: 17). Many of the sentiments he expressed on exile are shared with other writers of the left; exile was ‘an opportunity for self-examination’ (in Weiss, 2003: 93), and he proposed, rather than a negative conception of exile as loss and defeat, a ‘positive’ or ‘affirmative’ notion of exile (Cortázar, 1984: 41), in which the ‘diaspora’ could become an ‘agora’ (40), and in which the intellectual would be obliged to support ‘all intelligent forms of combat’ (21). It was also his assertion that a ‘cultural genocide’ (18) had occurred in Argentina, that young writers’ careers had been snuffed out and original or challenging works could no longer emerge. In 1978, Liliana Heker responded to this depiction of Argentina as victim of a cultural genocide by insisting on the artificiality of the divide between exiles and non-exiles, on the continued existence of opposition culture and politics in Argentina, and drawing attention to the more fortunate circumstances that Cortázar was able to enjoy in Paris. In doing so, Jensen argues, Heker, despite being politically opposed to the dictatorship and by no means one of the many mainstream writers condemning the ‘anti-Argentine’ comments coming from overseas (1998: 105), inadvertently fell into the discursive trap of the dictatorship’s portrayal of unpatriotic writers seeking an easy life overseas, living comfortable lives under the wings of the enemies of the patria, a ‘gilded exile’ (107) to use the expression strongly criticised by Boccanera (1999: 22). While Cortázar insisted on the ‘monstrous reach of the Argentine dictatorship’, Heker ‘defended the place of creation under the dictatorship’ (Jensen, 1998: 107).

The second moment in the polemic over exile had the curious characteristic of being waged between two writers who were both in exile. Rodolfo Terragno, who was then in Mexico, and Osvaldo Bayer, resident in West Berlin, conducted an exchange in the review Controversia (Jensen, 1998: 108). Bayer had already found controversy in 1979–80 in West Germany, when a text on the ‘image of Federal Germany from a Latin American perspective’, which he had been invited to present at a state-sponsored colloquium on contemporary Latin America, was rejected by a government official for its striking criticism of German complicity in the Argentine massacre. After Bayer’s invitation to the event was withdrawn, the text circulated widely and was published alongside Juan Gelman’s collection of poems, Bajo la lluvia ajena (Bayer, 2009). While for Terragno exile was largely the preserve of a lucky few, particularly the intellectual middle classes, and the real victims were those being tortured and/or murdered by the military, Bayer insisted on the ‘castigo, tragedia y drama’ (punishment, tragedy and drama) (108–9) of exile. The exchange of articles and letters continued for some months, Terragno insisting on the class-specificity of exile, Bayer insisting on exile as a possible basis for renewed political struggle.

In 1983 Bayer engaged in another polemic, this time with Luis Gregorich. Bayer denied the distinction drawn by some between an ‘internal’ and ‘external’ exile, instead trying to draw a line between victims and victimisers, and between those who were not prepared to negotiate with the military over issues such as the fate of the disappeared and mishandling of the Malvinas campaign, and those who were (110), and with this implying a degree of complicity between those who had remained in Argentina and the military. Gregorich responded by insisting in an article in Clarín that the only Argentine author of importance who had left was Cortázar and that, furthermore, his exile did not date from the most recent dictatorship. Bayer went on to engage in a further, somewhat heated, exchange with Ernesto Sábato, whom he described as an opportunist and a ‘besamanos’ (handkisser, toady) (Boccanera, 1999: 77).

Jensen, enjoying the benefit of historical distance, is able to view with dispassion a series of polemics that were at times bitter and personal, as Humberto Costantini notes in an interview with Boccanera (1999: 197–8). Jensen follows Beatriz Sarlo in stressing that there is no direct reading available of either exile or non-exile as essentially political, oppositional or complicit. She stresses that exile or non-exile were, after all, survival strategies in a time of political danger and confusion (1998: 111).⁵ A variety of motivations led Argentines to leave the country; the migratory tendency that had existed at least since the 1960s was intensified by a combination of institutional breakdown, social persecution, and violation of human rights (249), as well as economic factors. Although all sectors are found in the Argentine diaspora, statistically professionals and the technically skilled are more greatly represented (252). Exile stood, by its very existence, as a denunciation of the military, and furthermore many exiles worked to define their departure in political and ethical terms, to become some of the most prominent international voices in denouncing the crimes of the military (260–1).⁶

Exile and Latin American literature

Exile has a strong relationship with literature in Latin America. As González and Treece note, writing in 1992, ‘the linked experiences of exile and struggle shape the poetry and song of the last decade’ (1992: 341). For Jason Weiss, in his study of the role of Paris in the careers of Spanish-American authors, ‘Spanish-American literature in particular was made possible by exile’ (2003: 2). Cymerman, in a survey of Latin American works written in exile between 1970 and 1990, notes that Argentine writers paid a particularly high price in terms of forced exit from the country of their birth (1993: 524).

In the case of the Southern Cone, many of its most important writers have reflected on political exile and writing, in particular those of the left, such as Eduardo Galeano and Mario Benedetti, the latter coining the term ‘desexilio’. Benedetti, who was exiled from Uruguay, first in Argentina and then in Spain, has been an influential writer on exile, and his model of a traumatic and painful yet potentially productive political exile has exercised great bearing on many of the debates; he wrote that, ‘the best antidote to the frustration, resentment, and other plagues of exile was to feel useful in whichever host society luck would have it we live in’ (1984: 10).⁷

Amy Kaminsky (1999) offers a meditation on exile and its aftermath as represented in recent writing from Latin America. Kaminsky demonstrates restraint in her approach to the titular term, warning against the ‘evacuation of meaning’ that may take place when ‘exile’ comes to stand for, in her example, general ‘cultural disenfranchisement’; we must, she asserts, be aware of the ‘suffering caused by literal displacement’ (xi). Exile in Kaminsky’s definition is ‘always coerced’ and ‘voluntary’ exile is an oxymoron (9). ‘Inner exile’ or ‘insilio’ is better thought of in terms of danger, fear and self-censorship (10). Kaminsky assesses a number of related phenomena, including Rosi Braidotti’s ‘nomadism’ and Gloria Andalzúa’s ‘border theory’, which for her differ from exile in lacking coercion. She notes that the experience of exile is crossed by the coordinates of gender and class (15); there may be vast empirical differences between the exiles of a poor woman writer, for example, and a wealthy man, or between exiles with dependent family or without. The decision to identify oneself as an exile, or not, may also be anything but simple. Kaminsky notes that ‘embracing exile identity presupposes some sense of what one is exiled from, that there is exile. But it does not necessarily follow that there was another identity just as strong, the identity of the self as a national subject within the nation’ (34, italics in original).

Even the most cursory comparison between the positions taken by the authors under examination here would demonstrate this to be true. Kaminsky’s work, although focusing much less on poetry than my own, and with a further emphasis on questions of return, is a useful reminder of the conflict that exists between the metaphoricity and the materiality, or the literariness and the literalness, of exile. Indeed, the tendency to expand the theme of exile to become ever-more encompassing is illustrated by two recent collections. Silvia Molloy and Mariano Siskind speak of a ‘poetics of distance’ in their 2006 volume, allowing them at once to concentrate on questions of national belonging and identity, and to highlight the creative contribution of a whole series of displacements, exiles and voyages, in sum, ‘the traumatic and liberating experience of distance’ and its ‘ganancia trágica’ (tragic gains) (11). Also of note is the recent intervention by Julio Ortega in his introduction to a collection of essays on exile and literature. Ortega, drawing on Ernest Renan’s theories of the nation, argues that ‘el sujeto moderno se define por su lugar en el exilio’ (the modern subject is defined by her place in exile) (2007: 13). Exile, for Ortega, is not only the defining characteristic of modernity, but is, furthermore, la conciencia internacional de las nacionalidades hispánicas’ (the international consciousness of Hispanic nationalities) (13). Ortega quotes from Edward Said, arguing that ‘modern art identifies with exile’ (19) and that the migrant is the first inhabitant of the twenty-first century (18). Ortega notes that the term ‘exilio’ is considered by etymologists as rare in Spanish before 1939, being a Gallicism to which were previously preferred terms such as ‘destierro’. Ortega’s conception of exile, despite acknowledging the pain and trauma entailed – ‘el luto’, he calls it, with reference to Juan Gelman’s poetry (22) – becomes an even more positive version of Said’s artistic exile (as outlined below): ‘exiles have conceived, above all, new creative and dynamic spaces, able to broaden society’s critical consciousness, moral sensibility, and political progress (avanzada)’ (20–1). Ortega’s assessment is most optimistic, in particular given the insertion of the phrase ‘sobre todo’ before the achievements of exile; in his conclusion, Ortega goes even further, arguing that in the writing of

eloquent exiles [...] language is not traumatic [...] migrants are no longer mere subalterns or victims and become agents in new foundings and inventions, at times parodic and satirical but, against all the endemic crises, their new agencies are as creative as they are truthful. (24)

To imbue the position of the exiled writer automatically with such enormous resources of creativity and truth seems to me a great step to take.

Similarly, in her study of ‘transitional’ art in Latin American, particularly Argentina and Chile, Francine Masiello highlights the importance of exile in the work of writers such as Juan Gelman, Maria Negroni and others. Masiello credits poetry with great importance in the dictatorship and post-dictatorship eras, given its ability to speak ‘from places unauthorised by the state and [...] in defiance of massification’ and its rebellion against the usefulness of language (223–4). Translation and citation become a means by which writers remind themselves of their ‘exile from any original language’ while at the same time tracing for themselves a literary tradition (146–7). Yet, regardless of the nomadism that can be encountered in the work of writers such as Perlongher and Gelman, Masiello’s assessment tends to overlook a very specific set of political engagements that can be encountered and analysed through close contextual reading of their poems.

The tendency for the term ‘exile’ to come to include a great variety of experiences may have its origins in a political fact of Latin American life. As Rowe and Whitfield note, not only is exile a ‘constant condition of Latin American experience’, but also, under dictatorships, the word shed its specific legal application, as in the exile of Romeo from Verona for killing a man in a duel (a legally