A Conversation with Claribel Alegría by Abbie Fields
Claribel Alegría and her husband, Darwin “Bud” Flakoll.
Over the past months, I’ve watched the news regarding U.S. relations with Cuba with bated breath. In March, Minnesota Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives HR4645, the Travel Restriction Reform and Export Enhancement Act. Chairman of the Agricultural Committee, Peterson advocated agricultural trade with Cuba that would benefit Minnesota farmers and lessen hardships experienced in Cuba. He also advocated fewer restrictions on U.S. citizens wanting to visit the island.
Over the course of house debates and deals, the export and agricultural dimensions of the bill seem to have been put aside. Still, the travel restrictions look ripe for reform. This doesn’t mean no travel restrictions, but the idea is to roll back to a Clinton-era understanding of the rules. George W. Bush turned the heat up on Cuba; Obama may be finally turning it down. Not way down, but a start.
I’ve already got travel guides, history books, and other literature on Cuba lined up on my desk. I’ve begun planning. Why? Because visiting Cuba means taking the blinders off. Seeing Cuba means seeing the world in a radically different way.
I’ll let poet and essayist Claribel Alegría explain:
AF: You lived in Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Paris during the 1950s and early 1960s, which was where many of the writers who would become the most critically acclaimed of the Latin “boom” were living at the time. Writers such as Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Benedetti, and, of course, Neruda. Why do you think this was such a key moment for young Latin American writers?
CA: I think the Cuban Revolution had a lot to do with it, because when the Cuban Revolution won, lots of people from the United States, from Europe, from all over suddenly focused their eyes on Latin America. They were wonderful writers, but nobody had paid much attention to many of them. And there was a publishing house called Seix Barral in Barcelona, Spain, that had started publishing these writers, and that caused a sort of “boom.” So these writers are very well known in Spain and the rest of the countries of Latin America….
AF: Do you think the interest in these writers had something to do with political repression in their countries, or with living as political refugees or exiles? For instance, the writers who were in Paris in the early sixties.
CA: Yes, many of them were in exile because they couldn’t go back to their countries. Julio Cortázar, for instance, wasn’t in forced exile but he chose exile because he didn’t like the Peronistas [in Argentina], and so he went to Paris. When I met Vargas Llosa he was working at Agence France-Presse. It was dangerous for him in Peru at that time, I think. And for Mario Benedetti, it was far too dangerous to go back to Uruguay. So they were living in exile. I am talking about 1962 to 1966, before we went to Majorca….
AF: I know you do not consider your writing “political” as such – you have said that your political poems are not really political, but are rather poems of love to your country. Do you think that political events have motivated your writing?
CA: Let me tell you something. Before the Cuban Revolution – there’s that Cuban Revolution again! – I didn’t care about politics. I thought that writers couldn’t do anything about these dictators in Central America. I thought, What can we do with these military dictators and the U.S. government always helping them? Then the Cuban Revolution happened and I marveled at that. I thought if the Cubans can do it, why not Central Americans? At that time I was living in Paris, and I started thinking about 1932 in El Savador. I was only a child in ’32; I was seven years old, but I remember – a child’s memory is really something. And then I started talking about this, and it was Carlos Fuentes who told me I needed to write about it. But I had been a disciple of Juan Ramón Jiménez, who had taught me to work very hard in poetry – that was my genre – and I had no experience with prose. I’d always worked with poetry, all my life. And then Bud, who was a newspaperman, suggested we write it together. And that’s how Cenizas de Izalco (Ashes of Izalco) came about. And, yes, in Cenizas I was very focused on the fact that the people who would read the book would find out what had happened in Central America. The love story is incidental. We mostly wanted to transmit the historical event.
But when I said that my poems are poems of love, that is true too, because I never sit down to write a poem in order to denounce something. For that, I have prose, or the testimonials, or historical novels. However, I was hit really hard by the things that were happening in Central America, and those things filtered into my poetry, and so some people think they are political poems. I don’t care; it’s okay, whatever they think. I never wanted to commit my poetry in that way.
Claribel Alegría's interview was first published in Tin House no. 32.
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