INTERNATIONAL POETRY FESTIVAL MEDELLIN 2013

Les Wicks and Jacinta Le Plastrier
Notes from Medellín, Colombia

1 August 2013

Since it began 23 years ago, the Internacional de Poesía de Medellín has grown to become a major poetry festival in the world, in a country riven by 50 years of civil war. This year’s Festival (6-13 July) coincided with a new round of peace talks in Havana between the Colombian Government and FARC, and FARC rebels reportedly fighting security forces in the mountains. The Festival featured Australian poet Les Wicks, who reports on his experience below. The Festival has also ‘grown’ up alongside seismic changes for the city of Medellín, Colombian’s second-largest and once described as the ‘most violent city in the world’ (Time, 1988), due to its brutal cocaine drug-cartel culture. This year, in February, it was nominated instead as the ‘World Capital’ of innovation, by the Wall Street Journal and the Urban Life Institute, following civic projects aimed at radically improving life and security for its citizens – and its reputation.

At the same time, a UN report condemned the city for being among the most unequal in the world, due to ongoing murders, ‘disappearances’, unemployment and criminal gang warfare. The Festival was started two years before the killing of drug-cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar in 1993 by Colombian National Police, and three years before the publication of Colombian-born author and film-maker Fernando Vallejo’s well-known novel, La virgen de los sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins) – which spawned a new genre of novel known as narcorrealismo, narcotrendismo or la novella sicaresca, fiction drawing on the violent themes of the drug trade. Vallejo was born in Medellín but has lived in Mexico since 1971, and renounced his Colombian nationality in 2007 (becoming Mexican), citing his political dissent in a public letter. The Festival, which this year expressly endorsed support for the current Havana talks, was conceived by its founders to be an initiative of peace, a form of cultural resistance, and in 2006 was awarded the prestigious ‘Right Livelihood Award’, a prelude and alternative to the Nobel Peace Prize. (JLP)

Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold at the Teatro Carlos Vieco | image by Sara Marín

Daz(zl)ed

Okay. Around 5000 people were gathered in the generous heat of this amphitheatre, holding events from the 23rd Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín. A diverse crowd from children to seniors chattered animatedly amongst themselves as vendors moved along the rows selling popcorn and Coca-Cola. Television cameras fidgeted at the hem of the stage, broadcast lighting came on as sound techs stroked their dials. For an Australian poet, the crowd and attention seemed inexplicable – this was a poetry reading.

Colombia has been a nation at war with itself for 50 years. The toll of death and displacement is staggering. There are currently talks ‘underway’, there always seems to be talks underway. Twenty-three years ago some poets got the idea of responding to a culture of violence with poetry. The Festival was born. For an Australian – with our marginalised poetics – this notion might seem something like fighting fire with feathers. But in Latin America, as has been the case with other territories with long histories of war and civil dissent, political foment has often seen poetry and poets championed – and read – by the masses. Poetry considered relevant, and powerful, as a tool of revolution.

Early on, expecting perhaps only hundreds to attend, the organisers found public interest overwhelming and the nine-day event has grown to become a major fixture in the city’s calendar and the largest poetry festival in the world. It is attended by fervent audiences, and has inspired and supported a number of other new poetry festivals around the world. This year there were to be a total of 220 readings involving 66 poets from 41 countries. Venues are mostly in Medellín but there was a solid program of forays into other centres. I am this year’s Australian guest. It’s fundamentally important that we have a presence at gatherings like these. The Australia Council Literature Board covered the airfare while Macquarie University organised my Spanish translation with Judith Mendoza–White. Vastly appreciated further translation came from Raphael Patiño Góez and George Leogena. I have always argued that for our poetry in Australia to ‘work’, we need commitment, clear planning and sustained effort/support over time. This Colombian festival took off from its first year. Does this mean we have to change, back home, a people?

That amphitheatre – Teatro Al Aire Libre Carlos Vieco – was the site of the opening reading. The range of voices reading from the stage were astonishing; Lorna Shaughnessy (Northern Ireland) quietly shared the pain of internal conflict with Vietnamese-born Nguyen Phan Que Mai. Sainkho Namtchylak (Tuva) performed her famous throat-based work. Thiago de Mello, a grandfather of Colombian poetry, had the crowd screaming for more. It amiably forgave my woeful Spanish, seemed to enjoy the English versions of my poems, and loved the Spanish ones read by theatre director Wilson Zapata, who was to be my reader throughout the Festival. Later, as I was exiting the toilets, I was bailed up by an eager Colombian who wanted to show off his skills on the didgeridoo he had purchased in Ecuador. The tunnels under the stage became tunnels within my head as fellow urinators quietly smiled.

The days that followed were a crazy blend of intense multicultural dialogue, hugs and photos. Around 100 people came to the reading the next day in the working-class suburb of Carrera. That was the hall’s capacity. People were turned away. The workshop group hosting this event was celebrating its 20th year, and we all know how hard it is to sustain voluntary organisations over time.

Monday, a group of us flew to Apartado, a smaller city of around 180,000, for another capacity audience of 200 with my translations read by Mark Vender, an Australian living there, who is the convener of the city’s writers’ group. Tuesday saw a ‘disappointment’ with our first non-full house, a mere 65 people. Wednesday saw a mildly hair-raising 3 ½-hour trip across the mountains to Ciudad Bolivar. Thursday, Friday, reading, reading – the level of engagement with art across society in Colombia is simply remarkable. Vender told me he’d travelled the world and everywhere else seems to be sinking into a sediment of monocultural, consumerist tepidity. To him, only the people of Colombia (and maybe Brazil) appear content to be going their own way. That way is a long stretch short of perfect – there were gunshots last night outside the hotel. Colombia has critical problems. But it is definitely special.

It was also deeply energising to immerse myself further in the poetics of South and Latin America, which were obviously numerically dominant in the line-up. With the expected influence of Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz, the New Baroque still exploring new territories – here was a body of work that was mostly vigorous, linguistically and emotionally robust, whilst profoundly engaging with their readers.

Other impressive poets: Tanure Ojaide, Josaphat-Robert Large, Javier Bello, Marra PL Lanot, K Satchidanandan, Maram Al-Masri, Moya Cannon, Ingrid Fichtner, Magnus William-Olsson, Gedour Kristny, Lidija Dimkovska and Tiziana Cera Rosco.

An Australian is invited most years to this festival. It is a pinnacle of a poetic life, professionally demanding and wholly satisfying. Today, as I write, is the closing ceremony (4pm-midnight) where all poetry guests will read one piece. The usual attendance for this final day is around 15,000. Breakfast was laconic – a lack of sleep and a regime of daily appearances has left us wrecked’n’ready. So … (LW)

ON ALBERT CAMUS, ALGERIA AND POLITICS

Published this week, an article examining Albert Camus's final writings,

at The Wheeler Centre's 'Dailies' webpage:

Exile and Silence: On Albert Camus, Algeria and Politics

By Jacinta Le Plastrier

When Albert Camus died, he had been sidelined by his fellow left-wing intellectuals for his opposition to Algerian independence and his condemnation of Stalin’s gulags. Fifty-five years later, writes Jacinta Le Plastrier, his stance on both issues has withstood the assault of time far better than his contemporaries.

And the long overdue release of his final book, Algerian Chronicles, translated into English for the first time, reveals the fault-lines of Camus’s approach to his birth-country, in passionate reportage that spans the 1930s through to the 1950s.

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Albert Camus published the final book of his lifetime, Algerian Chronicles, in Paris in 1958. The great writer’s final work – his own selection of his deeply haunted articles on his birth-country Algeria and the question of its independence − was met by an almost complete critical silence. That silence continued to reverberate following his early death two years later.

The reason for this public disdain was twofold. Camus had been traumatically sidelined by other European-based left-wing hommes engages such as Jean-Paul Sartre, not just for his opposition to Algerian independence, but for his condemnation of Stalin’s gulags.

Fifty-five years later, Camus’s passionate discourse − and his almost solitary intellectual and activist stance, on both issues − has withstood the assault of time far better than his contemporaries. In the light of this, the long-overdue, full English translation of Algerian Chronicles is presciently relevant.

‘Dismissed or disdained in 1958, Algerian Chronicles has a new life in 2013, a half-century after the independence Camus so feared,’ writes editor Alice Kaplan in her introduction to this new edition. ‘The book’s critique of the dead end of terrorism − the word appears repeatedly, with respect to both sides of the conflict − its insistence on a multiplicity of cultures; its resistance to fundamentalisms, are as meaningful in contemporary Algeria as in London or New York. Camus’s refusal of violence speaks to Algerians still recovering from the civil war of the 1990s – “the dirty wars”, or “black decade” that resulted in an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths.’

In Algerian Chronicles, which gathers his reportage on his birth-country from the 1930s to the 1950s, Camus meshes the machinery of journalistic ‘on-the-grounds’ reportage with what would become his literary hallmark: an austere styling of language whose results are both exquisite and intensely humane.

In the book’s first series, Camus describes the ‘misery’ of the mountain-based Kabyle community, which had suffered a cruel famine in 1939. He writes, ‘The reader will have seen, at least, that misery here is not just a word or a theme for meditation. It exists. It cries out in desperation. What have we done about it, and do we have the right to avert our eyes? I am not sure that anyone will understand.’

Eighteen months after Algerian Chronicles was published – breaking Camus’s self-imposed, almost-complete public silence of 29 months on Algeria – the writer was dead. He died, aged 46, in an auto accident, alongside his publisher Michel Gallimard, who was driving the car.

The final words of his preface to Chronicles, characterised by his customary astringent order, would become valedictory: ‘This is my testimony, and I shall have nothing more to say.’

The absence of the book’s English publication until now speaks to the terrible sentence of silence that was then imposed on this work. This may surprise those who have grown up familiar with his famous writings, such as The Stranger and The Plague.

Camus’s final few years were lived in a form of exile, from both the country of his birth and his Paris-based community of writer-activists. This was despite his being awarded the Nobel Prize laureateship in 1957 − the second-youngest writer after Kipling to have received it.

Camus was denounced within the Algerian milieu, by both colonialists and members of the independence movement. When he last visited Algiers, in 1956, to helm talks discussing a possible French−Algerian solution to the country’s civil conflict, ultracolonialists in the crowd called for his death.

In Chronicles, Camus writes: ‘I know from experience that to say these things today is to venture into a no-man’s-land between hostile armies. It is to preach the folly of war as bullets fly. Bloodshed may sometimes lead to progress, but more often it brings only greater barbarity and misery.’

For 20 years, Camus maintained a consistent approach to Algeria, supporting full reparation for the Algerians and formal reforms that granted equality to both Algerians and French-Algerians (while maintaining a French-based government). His views had led to a virtual ‘exile’ when, following his articles on the ‘misery’ of Kabyle for a left-wing Algerian newspaper, Camus was blacklisted by the French government. He was forced to move to Paris in order to earn a livelihood. Camus’s stance on Algeria, then, was a long and chronically solitary one.

While waging that public silence, broken only by his Nobel speech and a single published letter to Encounter magazine, Camus is estimated to have personally intervened, via private letters of plea to French President René Coty, in 150 cases where Algerians were condemned to die after being charged for participation in pro-independence activities. He did not save all their lives, but he did save a number. Camus intimated, in press interviews around the Nobel Prize, that he had acted on behalf of the Algerian cause in ways that were not known. He did not reveal explicit details of his actions though. His silence, says Kaplan, was being read as ‘a metonymy for cowardice’.

Kaplan is clear about the fault-lines of Camus’s approach to the Algerian issue. When he returned to the country in 1956, the place was unfamiliar after his long ‘exile’. The post-colonial academe attacked his representation of Arab characters. I read Chronicles close on the heels of Camus’s final, incomplete, semi-autobiographical novel, The First Man (published in English in 1995, one year after France). The novel, which narrates his impoverished yet sunlit childhood in Algiers, is evidence that Camus’s own blood, and its Algerian spawning, pulses intimately within the lines of his reportage. Camus also came from the disentitled: he was born into the dirt-poorest pied noir community of Algiers. His father died in the first year of Camus’s life, in World War I and on French soil. This was the household of Camus’s childhood and adolescence: a mother, deaf, almost mute, and illiterate; an uncle, intellectually disabled; and his grandmother, domineering, tyrannical.

Camus described his motivation on the Algerian issue during the presentation in Algiers in 1956. ‘I thought it possible, and even considered it my duty, to come before you to issue a simple appeal to your humanity, which in one respect at least might be able to calm tempers and bring together a majority of Algerians, both French and Arab, without asking them to relinquish any of their convictions … Let me say first − and I cannot emphasize this enough − that by its nature the appeal falls outside the realm of politics …’

‘I am only here under the pressure of the situation and the way I sometimes conceive of my profession as a writer.’

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Algerian Chronicles, ed. Alice Kaplan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, is published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2013).

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based writer, poet and editor. She is blog editor at Cordite Poetry Review, publisher at John Leonard Press, and is presently a Hot Desk Fellow at the Wheeler Centre. She blogs at www.jacintaleplastrierofficial.blogspot.com.

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TOPICS:

• HIGHLIGHTS
• ALBERT CAMUS
• POLITICS
• WRITING
• REPORTAGE

POSTED:

31 July 2013

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