The doors of Santo Domingo are open to writers summoned from different countries, from ours and from other languages, because in diversity freedom begins, and those who join their voices in this country that, if one day knew the brutality of a bloodthirsty dictatorship, has managed, for decades, to walk the path of freedom itself, and democracy, a path that not a few, myself among them, aspire to travel in our own countries. Because if diversity and freedom are inseparable, no less so are literature, and, again, freedom.
In Latin America today, beyond ideological distances, the struggle 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.
Because oppression and dictatorship are the opposite of freedom and democracy, when these two sacramental words are reflected in the dark mirror of which St. Paul already spoke in his Epistle to the Corinthians: "Now we see through a mirror, in darkness; but then we shall see face to face..." To see words face to face without ties and without diminishment, to rise in their free flight towards truths, and towards imagination, is what we writers intend.
And freedom of speech also entails free journalism. The imprisonment suffered by José Rubén Zamora in Guatemala, for revealing the truth of corruption and the closure to which elPeriódico, the newspaper he directed, has been forced, are facts that must be condemned and denounced with all energy.
Centroamérica Cuenta is a literary festival born ten years ago in Nicaragua, and to which the force of political circumstances, oppression and dictatorship, the dark mirror, forced errancy; an exiled festival that seeks asylum, and finds it generously, as now among you, Dominican friends; and these are the paradoxes from which one always learns, the exile of Central America Account has enriched it, has made it grow, has multiplied it.
More than a literary festival, this is a journey of permanent exploration, with one foot in Latin America, today in the Dominican Republic, and the other in Europe, with our annual parallel festival in Madrid, under the eaves of the Casa de América. We learn as we walk, we grow as we walk, we add as we advance.
The territory of imagination is very vast. A vast imagination for a vast, complex, amazing, surprising, varied America, as the language in which we write is so varied. A single language of multiple registers on both sides of the Atlantic, that territory of La Mancha as Carlos Fuentes called it, the paths of Don Quixote opened by multiple directions. A language that communicates to 500 million human beings, but that, at the same time, is the language in which we tell stories, in which we tell history, and with imagination, we tell reality, and we illuminate it.
Literature is an always open window, the best of viewpoints to approach that moving mural that is our America. We do not see so many times what we would like to see, justice, democracy, equality, equity, because there are still in the landscape many iniquities, oppressions, violence, imbalances, deficiencies. But there is also hope.
And we writers are witnesses of that landscape illuminated and suffering at the same time, and we are witnesses of prosecution. Our job is to lift stones, as José Saramago said. It is not our fault if under those stones what we find so many times are monsters.
We take charge of the burdens, we walk with them, we bear witness, we recreate reality, we build parallel realities and our privileged instrument to tell what we see is this vast language tailored to a vast imagination.
The question of what literature is for is an idle question. Literature is not a liberal profession, from which to expect a fixed return, or a salary. Literature is a vital adventure for those who choose it as a profession, an adventure full of risks because the ethics of literature is the truth, and in telling the truth there are always dangers. It is a trade of lies loaded with truths, which often offend arbitrary power, bent on punishing words.
Literature does not offer answers, it opens questions, it questions. It exhibits, reveals, leaves a record, when it is a true trade. Literature allows us, in writing and reading, to be other and to be others, to discover realities, to use the power of imagination, to give majesty to history through stories, to be interpreters of history that will be remembered as novelists tell it. Because literature fixes memory. Literature writes history, and makes memory endure through imagination.
And it also opens us to the search to find ourselves, to find out who we are, to explore our multiple diverse identity as Latin Americans. Look through the cracks and discover, as in the museum of the Leon center, in Santiago, which we visited yesterday, an exhibition that explores what it means to be Dominican, and that we can generalize to all of us. Finding that we are multiple and diverse, and that is why we are identical.
We can write from the place where we were born, or from exile, if we are denied the right to live in the place where we were born. But language and imagination do not abandon us, and both are ways of recovering memory, and preserving it.
We are the custodians of that memory, the memory of our peoples. Of their dreams, of their language, of their own imagination. The language is born from two aspects, from the anonymous people who make it every day, and from literary writing.
I, a writer until 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 in which I write, nor can it take away my belonging to the people who, from my childhood, give life to my writing.
From them, from those Nicaraguans today in silence because they are denied the word, and from those who, like me, live in exile, my writing is born, and it will give to them. And from them, because they exist, is that I exist, and I can therefore be Latin American, and aspire to be universal.
Pedro Mir, the great Dominican poet, wrote in the poem There is a country in the world, about the man banished from his land, and I make his words my own:
"Coming from the bottom of the night
I come to talk about a country.
Precisely
poor population.
But
It's not just that.
Natural of the night I am the product of a trip.
Give me time
courage
to make the song..."
This festival, which I proudly preside, is the product of a journey. Today we stop here, owners of the hospitality that this country, yours, and ours now too, offers us.
Thank you to the Dominican Republic, Dominicans and Dominicans. Thanks to the René del Risco Foundation, to Minerva, its president, for being part of this great cultural enterprise that we inaugurate today, and to all the entities and institutions that have helped us make it possible. And thanks to Claudia Neira, and her small but magical team.
We will take advantage of that 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 gave to men", according to the words of Our Lord Don Quixote.
Speech given by Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez, director of the Centroamérica Cuenta festival, at the inauguration of the literary event on Wednesday, May 17, 2023 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.