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Puerto Rico exhibits cultural muscle after the pandemic with a great congress of Latin American writers

2022-04-06T23:44:27.104Z


The island celebrates literature in Spanish in its first international call, which was attended by the Spanish Rosa Montero, the Colombian Pilar Quintana, the Cuban Karla Suárez and the Puerto Rican Mayra Santos-Febres


For three days, the autonomous municipality of Caguas, a town near San Juan de Puerto Rico, has become the capital of literature in Spanish.

After the parenthesis of the pandemic, a time when literature was a lifeline for millions of people, writers, booksellers and readers have met again, some for the first time in two years, to celebrate the communion of literature.

Some twenty authors from Peru, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Spain participate in the I International Congress of Writers that is being held on the island, to celebrate the word in Spanish and the profession of faith of its followers.

Quite a gesture on an island that has English as its co-official language -Puerto Rico is a Free Associated State of the United States-, but which feels, lives and dreams in Spanish.

The Spanish Rosa Montero, who has presented her latest novel,

The Danger of Being Sane

(Seix Barral), at the congress, underlined the common denominator of all the world's writers who have been, above all else, readers.

“For the first time in my life I couldn't read anything during the first 15 days of the pandemic, glued to television, to the news;

we were all left hanging, just waiting for the information.

But reading saves us.

Who has not felt less alone in life because of a book?

Reading is the great talisman of life”, Montero said this Tuesday in the first debate of the congress, an entertaining dialogue with her friend and her colleague Mayra Montero, which caused good laughter from the public.

“Reading is an experience of absolute solitude;

the reader thinks that he is the only reader on the face of the earth, and at the same time it is a fight against loneliness.

In that sense, it is a space for survival,” said Eduardo Lalo, one of the most notorious Puerto Rican writers;

a reflection that underlines the renewed meaning of reading: how it helped millions of people around the world to cope with confinement.

The black hole of the pandemic, which was on the verge, due to the outbreaks of the virus, of frustrating the meeting, has flown over the contest like a bad dream, those of which literature is also made.

"Everyone was willing to attend, there was a real desire to meet again after the pandemic," says Puerto Rican writer Helen Sampedro.

“After two years locked up,

Rosa Montero signs books during the congress in Caguas. Thais Llorca (EFE)

The two Monteros, who share a surname by chance, are clear, like hundreds of thousands of other writers in the world, about what they would choose if they had to choose between writing and reading: "Stop reading is instant death, it is living in a world without oxygen”, said Rosa Montero.

“Read, read everything I had at hand, without order or concert;

without guidance, with disorder, when I was a girl, it turned me into a writer,” said the author of Cuban origin, based in Puerto Rico.

"It is moving to see a people thirsty for culture," said William E. Miranda, mayor of Caguas, in the greeting.

"Confirm the importance of culture in our daily lives, not only in the case of writers, but also among students, teachers, booksellers."

The conference is dedicated to Norberto González, who developed the network of bookstores on the island, although today readers are saddened by the disappearance of so many.

“A writer is above all a super reader.

I can stop writing but not reading”, explained Lalo.

"One as a reader realizes what a text can do, there is no more transformative effect than reading."

The Rómulo Gallegos Award in 2013 for her novel

De Ella Simone

noted that “literary fiction is not a form of fantasy, but a deepening into reality, a delving into reality.

Fiction is a super reality: we readers know what the character does not know”, he explained, not without underlining the threatening problem of reading misunderstanding: readers who respond angrily because fiction does not fit what they expect, or their beliefs, as the case of a student in a literary creation course whose father, an evangelical pastor, protested the choice of a story with erotic content.

A complaint close to the excesses of political correctness that seeks to rewrite children's stories or dismisses authors for anachronisms.

Asking literature to confirm us, or agree with us, said the Puerto Rican author, is impossible, “because literature, like all artistic works,

The Puerto Rican writer Eduardo Lalo, during the inauguration of the congress.

Thais Llorca (EFE)

The scenario of the Congress is not accidental: a country punished by hurricanes, earthquakes and a political and financial crisis like Puerto Rico -officially part of the United States in administrative terms- that celebrates its identity around literature in Spanish.

The sponsorship of the Cervantes Institute, which does not have delegations in Spanish-speaking countries, is an indicator of the interest of the call.

As several participants pointed out, the role of the Spanish language in the construction of Puerto Rico's identity is defining.

“There is no better reason to write than to amend the page for others, to finish telling the story that others tell.

That of a society pierced by violence, including that of the harsh colonialism that we live in, which always supposes a usurpation of the word”, concluded Lalo.

On the stage of the Fine Arts Center of Caguas voices and diverse accents are mixed these days to reflect aspects of the Latin American reality, its most recent memory or the unfinished business of history: the participation of Cubans in the war in Angola, in the novel

The son of the hero

by Karla Suárez;

gender violence as the seed of all violence, including the violence of the FARC, but also that of the jungle, told by the Colombian novelist Pilar Quintana, who received the Alfaguara award in 2021 for her novel

De ella Los abismos

.

Race is also a silencing factor in Caribbean literature, written by Afro-descendants such as the Puerto Rican Mayra Santos-Febres (“in the race box of the [US] documents there is no one that represents me, that represents us Afro-Caribbeans or Afro-descendants”);

or, finally, the literary initiation, in a house without books, stimulated by the consumption of pious plays and porn, by the storyteller Valdez.

Without forgetting children's and youth literature -there are many schoolchildren among the public, very inquisitive- and the role and task of creative schools in the forge of an author.

Puerto Rico, as the protagonist of its own history, has not yet been able to explain itself.

Its authors, and those of the environment, try these days in the friendly orchard of Caguas.

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Source: elparis

All life articles on 2022-04-06

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