The Words that Failed: Italo Calvino on Che

Republished from Outside the Town of Malbork.

This text of Italo Calvino was written on 15 October 1967 in Paris, the day of his 44th birthday. It was first published in Spanish in 1968 on the Cuban magazine ‘Casa de las Americas’. The original Italian version was published in Italy 30 years after, in 1998 on the number 1 issue of the magazine “Che” of the Che Guevara Italian Foundation.

Translation by El Aïd El Othmani Nabil.

Whatever I have tried to write to express my admiration for Ernesto Che Guevara for how he lived and how he died, it all seemed out of tone. I feel his smile that beams back at me, full of irony and commiseration. Here I am, sitting in my studio, amongst my books, in the feint peace and prosperity of Europe, dedicating a brief interval of my work to writing, without any risk, about a man who has willingly assumed all the risks, who hasn’t accepted the fiction of a temporary peace, a man who asked of himself and of others the maximum spirit of sacrifice, convinced as he was, that every sacrifice spared today would be paid for tomorrow with an even greater sum of sacrifices.

Guevara recalls for us the absolute gravity of everything that regarded the revolution and the future of the world, a radically critical view of every act whose purpose was to put in place our consciences. In that sense he will stay at the center of our discussion and our thoughts, as much alive yesterday, as today when dead.

It is a presence that doesn’t ask of us any superficial consensus nor formal tribute; that would be equivalent to misunderstanding, minimizing the extreme rigor of his lesson. The “line of the Che” demands much of men, it demands much whether as a method of struggle or as a perspective of the society that was to be born out of this struggle. In front of so much coherence and courage in carrying to the ultimate consequences an idea and a life, let us ourselves be modest and sincere, conscious of what the “line of the Che” means–a radical transformation not only of society but above all that of “human nature”, beginning with ourselves–and aware of what separates us from putting it into practice.

The discussion of Guevara with all those who approached him, the long discussion of his brief life (discussion-action, discussion without ever abandoning the rifle), will not be interrupted by his death, it will continue to flow. Even for an occasional and unknown interlocutor (that could have been me, in a group of invitees, an afternoon of 1964, at his Ministry of Industry office) meeting him couldn’t remain a marginal episode. The discussions that count, are those that continue albeit silently in thought.

In my mind, the discussion with Che has continued for all these years, and the more time passed, the more he has been right.

Even today, dying while putting in motion a never ending struggle, he continues, always, to be right.

“We Live in an Age of Migration”: Interview with Michael Ondaatje

TAMPA, Florida, US, Aug 23, 2007. Inter Press Service, – Celebrated Canadian writer and poet Michael Ondaatje recently published “Divisadero”, his first novel in seven years.

“Divisadero,” like most of Ondaatje’s books, tells the stories of several characters in which wider events occur that affect them all, but none realise it at the time. The book is named after a street in San Francisco, California, where one of the characters lives.

Ondaatje, 66, was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to a family of Dutch, Portuguese, Sinhalese and Tamil descent. At age 11, he moved with his mother to England. When he was 19, he moved to Canada and three years later, in 1965, he became a Canadian citizen.

For the past 37 years, he has lived in Toronto, where for many years he taught English literature at York University.

Ondaatje’s unique style avoids the usual straightforward narrative method favoured by many U.S. reading audiences, using a historical framework of actual events and seemingly plopping his characters down into these settings. Like the late Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, who is quoted in “Divisadero”, Ondaatje has in many ways reimagined the entire concept of fiction writing.

Although “Divisadero” is his 20th published book, he is most famous for his 1992 Booker Prize-winning tome “The English Patient.” That book was made into a film that was nominated for 12 Academy Awards in 1996, winning nine, including the Best Picture Oscar.

In “The English Patient”, Ondaatje created the most memorable doomed man-woman romantic relationship since the fictional Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles in Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair” (1951) — the mysterious Hungarian explorer Count Lazlo De Almasy and the enchanting Katherine Clifton.

Ondaatje spoke with IPS correspondent Mark Weisenmiller about the primary themes that recur in his writings, his book “Divisadero,” which is scheduled to be published in Britain in September, and other topics.

IPS: Three things that permeate your writing are human rights, identity and migration. Is this purposeful or does it come about unconsciously?

Michael Ondaatje: It’s pretty unconscious. When I sit down to write a book, I try to take in the environment of where the characters are, where they’re set. We do live in an age of migration. In Toronto, eight out of 10 people are here due to migration. So all of these things are something that takes place in our daily lives.

IPS: Another theme that can be detected in your work is the virtual erasing of national borders. Again, is this purposeful or done subconsciously during the writing and editing process?

MO: I think it’s more conscious. In something like “The English Patient,” this came about halfway in the writing of the book. When I’m writing a book, I like the characters to be immersed in their environment and let that affect them in different ways.

IPS: Before “Divisadero,” your last published novel was “Anil’s Ghost” in 2000. Why did seven years pass before the publication of the two novels? Is there anything going on in the world today that made you think 2007 would be a good time to publish a novel?

MO: Oh no, no, no. First I’m a pretty slow writer. I did the book with Walter Murch, the film editor, which was a series of conversations that I had with him. [Murch edited the "The English Patient," among other movies. Ondaatje is referring to his 2002 book "The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film"]. I’m very much interested in how one prunes a book, or film, or dance, and gets some sort of final result. That book took two years. But really I’m simply a slow writer.

IPS: “Divisadero,” like “The English Patient” and other books of yours, has numerous characters taking divergent and parallel paths. One reviewer for the New Yorker commented about “Divisadero”: “He is trying to change the medium.” Is that true?

MO: No, not really. I really don’t have that kind of plan. I don’t have any kind of campaign. I love fiction and I love traditional fiction writing, but I don’t believe that every book has to be something written by Jane Austen out of the 19th century. I don’t believe that there’s just one way to write a novel.

IPS: Do you like simple, straightforward narrative books?

MO: (Laughing) I love them! I don’t find my books that complicated, but I know that there are people who do. A book I’m reading now is Nevil Shute’s “No Highway,” which is a traditional narrative book, and I love it.

IPS: Do you believe that your own personal unique multi-ethnicity is an asset in your work?

MO: Yeah, I think I’m lucky that way, with both an Asian and North American way of living and looking at the world. People don’t have a single way of looking at the world and I think that’s good. In “The English Patient,” the character of Caravaggio has a different opinion than the patient or the character of Kip.

IPS: Do you feel that your background gives you a deeper understanding of human rights issues?

MO: Anyone can be aware of that. What’s happening in Sri Lanka [where there has been an intermittent civil war since 1983 between the government and a separatist Tamil rebel group] is well known. You don’t have to be from there, or from Asia, to know what is going on over there. It’s not just human rights too. Anyone can have an awareness of not just political problems, but social problems, no matter where they live in the world.

IPS: Do you believe that your characters have a firm sense of their identity?

MO: I don’t think so. I don’t think that they think about it. I just don’t believe that people do that. So the characters in my books don’t do that either.

IPS: How does the migration of your characters within the stories fit into the overall scheme of your writing? Does the sense of home, and actually owning and having a house, play an important part in both your personal and professional life?

MO: I think that any writer, every writer wants a base where you’re at. You want both a firm sense of where you are, but also want a sense of adventure.

IPS: Every fall, before the announcement of the honorees of the Nobel Prize for Literature, you are mentioned by literary critics as a possible recipient, as well as your fellow Canadian writers Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. Do you pay attention to all of this talk and second, being a Canadian citizen, would you feel just as proud if Atwood or Munro got the coveted award, rather than yourself?

MO: I know lots of writers who should be getting it (the Nobel Prize for Literature). Richard Ford, Alice Munro… there are plenty of writers out there who deserve it, but haven’t gotten it. But no, I don’t think about it.

Rediscovering Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral

By Daniela Estrada, IPS, August 27, 2007

SANTIAGO, Aug 27 (IPS) – A treasure trove of poems, letters and personal effects of Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, which have lain untouched for 50 years, have been donated to the Chilean state and may contribute to a revaluation of the work of the first Latin American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ana María Cuneo, who has a doctorate in literature from the University of Chile and has written books on Mistral, said that the unpublished material that has been discovered will boost interest in the poet’s life and work, and set aside the stereotypes and morbid curiosity surrounding her life.

Luis Vargas Saavedra, who has carried out research into Mistral’s life, agrees. “People hardly know her, they have barely read her, even cultured people in Chile. The puerile version of her work that has been taught in schools is to blame,” he complained.

“Now, thanks to the press, we can see a pre-revival happening. This is the key time to spread her work in full,” Vargas Saavedra, an academic at the Catholic University of Chile, told IPS.

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, whose pseudonym was Gabriela Mistral, was looking for nothing less than “the meaning of existence” in her work, Cuneo said.

Mistral’s papers spent 50 years in the hands of her friend and executor, Doris Dana, in the United States, and then passed to Dana’s niece, Doris Atkinson. On Aug. 15 they arrived at the Chilean embassy in Washington from the house in Massachusetts where they had been sealed and carefully stored for so long.

There are 105 boxes of books, unpublished manuscripts, letters, photographs and other belongings of the Chilean poet, who was born Apr. 7, 1889 in the city of Vicuña in the north-central region of Coquimbo, and who died of cancer on Jan. 10, 1957 in New York. Her remains were repatriated shortly after her death and today are buried in the town of Montegrande, in Coquimbo.

This marks “the beginning of the rediscovery of Gabriela Mistral, as we approach the bicentennial (the celebration in 2010 of 200 years of independence in Chile)” said Minister of Culture Paulina Urrutia, commenting on the handover of Mistral’s legacy to the Chilean embassy in the U.S.

Mistral, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, was a schoolteacher with a fine career as an educationist, in Chile and abroad. She wrote for national and Latin American newspapers, and in 1932 became a consul, which took her travelling around the world.

She published four volumes of poetry: Desolación (1922), Ternura (1924), Tala (1938) and Lagar (1954). Poema de Chile (1967) and Lagar II (1992) were published posthumously, and Cuneo worked on the latter publication. Among her prose, “Lecturas para mujeres” (Readings for Women – 1923) stands out.

When Dana died in November 2006, the material passed to her niece, Atkinson, who decided to give it to the Chilean state, specifically to the Directorate of Libraries, Archives and Museums (DIBAM), on certain conditions.

The books and manuscripts are to be kept in the Chilean National Library, which is to microfilm and digitise all the documents and distribute them to the University of Chile, the Catholic University and La Serena University, as well as to the U.S. Library of Congress and the Organisation of American States.

The Franciscan Order in Chile is to receive rights and royalties from part of Mistral’s work, and will safeguard three objects of value to her: one of three leatherbound volumes of the Bible, the brooch she wore when she accepted the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, and two crucifixes thought to be hers.

Although the authorities have not specified a date, it is estimated that the Mistral legacy could arrive in Chile in the second half of 2008. While the paperwork for taking the collection out of the U.S. is being completed, the legacy will be classified by the conservator and head of special collections of the Chilean National Library, Pedro Pablo Zegers.

At present Vargas Saavedra is in Chile, studying the microfilms he made during the eight days he was able to examine the documents in Massachusetts, where he worked with U.S. expert Elizabeth Horan, who is about to publish a biography of Mistral.

Atkinson has authorised him and the Catholic University to publish the Spanish version of the complete works and the unpublished poems. Vargas Saavedra also intends to edit Mistral’s prolific prose works and letters, where her views on education and political thinking shine.

The newspaper El Mercurio has already printed some of the unpublished poems examined by Vargas Saavedra. After reading these samples of the revelations to come, Cuneo said that they would not cause a 180-degree shift in how the poet is appreciated, as they are about “the same questions and sensibilities Mistral had shown before, but enriched.”

“For now, I’m transcribing the unpublished works and tracing the evolution of Gabriela Mistral’s poetry, which progresses after 1940 to a rhythmic colloquialism and to a simplicity that I would call classical, in contrast with her inherently baroque style of the 1930s,” said Vargas Saavedra.

He pointed out that Horan has come to the conclusion that Mistral did not have a lesbian relationship with Dana, as has often been speculated, but instead viewed her as a daughter.

Horan has also dispatched doubts about the paternity of Juan Miguel Godoy, better known as Yin Yin, Mistral’s nephew whom she adopted as her son. Yin Yin committed suicide in Brazil, in 1943, at the age of 18.

The copious number of letters received, and others not sent, by Mistral shed light on her contacts with great contemporaries, such as Thomas Mann, Jacques Maritain, Aldous Huxley, Carson McCullers, Miguel de Unamuno, and Gregorio Marañón, Vargas Saavedra said.

More details are also revealed about her travels to Germany and North Africa, and her life in Portugal, he said.

The fact that Atkinson explicitly asked the Chilean government that the material be used for educational and cultural purposes, and that travelling exhibitions be arranged, raises hopes that the poet’s legacy will be used appropriately.

But according to the experts, plenty of work is needed to achieve this. “If the state, through the ministries of education and culture, present children and young people with the best of her work, selecting poems that illustrate its richness, tenderness, intensity, drama, folklore, pan-Americanism and religious feeling, then they will come to understand why she was awarded the Nobel Prize,” Vargas Saavedra said.

Rolando Manzano, head of the Mistral Centre at the La Serena University, told IPS that the public excitement and anticipation generated by the recent events had accelerated the work of the regional board formed to create the “Gabriela Mistral heritage route.”

The educational, cultural and tourist-oriented heritage route, announced by President Michelle Bachelet on May 21, is planned to open around 2010, to coincide with Chile’s bicentennial.

“The main thing is that her poetry and prose be read, explained and assimilated, because the humanistic and neoplatonic thinking of this woman of genius offers immensely important guidelines for Chile and for the world,” said Vargas Saavedra. (END/2007)

Doris Lessing: writing against and for

By Susan Watkins*, OpenDemocracy.net October 12, 2007.

At the end of the second world war, Doris Lessing made the long boat trip to London from southern Africa with the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, in her suitcase. Returning from what was at that time the British colony of Southern Rhodesia to a place that her white-settler parents called “home” was a disturbing experience that made her reflect on what it really means to be “English”. In the memoir/essay, In Pursuit of the English, that describes her first few months in England, she casts an outsider’s eye on white working-class culture in 1950s London. That exile’s perspective on the world around her has been important throughout her writing career; she has made it her business to challenge some of the social conventions and cultural norms that we live by and to refuse – sometimes to the chagrin of her admirers – easy and familiar political affiliations.

In the 1950s, Lessing was one of the few women writers associated with the “angry young men” literary-political tendency. She was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and has often spoken (increasingly wryly) about the impact of communism on her early thinking – particularly during her last years in southern Africa, where in her milieu the local party was the only organisation dedicated to ending white rule. Her departure from the party was a traumatic experience that she admits made it difficult to engage in other political and cultural movements with the same energy.

A different journey

Since that early period of radical political commitment, Doris Lessing has always been reluctant to be associated with high-profile or fashionable public causes. Yet she has been “taken up” by first one and then another movement: socialism, feminism and anti-psychiatry among them. It was The Golden Notebook that led to her adoption as a (somewhat reluctant) sister by second-wave feminism. The novel has been described as “the first tampax in world literature” for its frank treatment of female sexuality and domestic labour and its attempt to define what it means to be a “free woman”. However, the novel’s achievements have as much to do with the attempt to think beyond realism as a way of writing and grapple with the structural complexities necessitated by the heroine’s writer’s block and emotional breakdown.

The Golden Notebook was undoubtedly a significant breakthrough for Lessing personally and for fiction more generally. The acclaim it received also became for her something of a burden: she lamented the fact that critics often seemed to want her to write the same novel over and over again. Instead, her work in in the 1970s and 1980s developed in very different directions that confounded the expectations of both her readers and the literary establishment. Her five-volume sequence of science-fiction novels, Canopus in Argos: Archives, was widely disliked, although it may well have found her a fresh audience. In 1983, she initiated one of the best-known hoaxes in literary history, publishing the first of two novels that used a pseudonym (Jane Somers) as a “test” to see if anyone would recognise her authorship.

These ventures provoked disappointment and misunderstanding, though in a larger perspective they reveal the same preoccupations – with outsider status and colonial displacement – as does her earlier fiction, even if their frameworks of power (inter-planetary conquest, personal autonomy, ownership of identity) are subversive in different ways.

Lessing’s move into science fiction and the hoax can also be understood as part of her broader attempt to resist what she saw as regressive developments in the literary culture: what was even then becoming the increasingly commercial and niche-market-driven publishing and book-selling industry, and the snobbish distinctions that critics offered between “serious” fiction and “lowbrow” genre novels.

A border exploration

It was also in the 1980s, against the background of continuing violence in Northern Ireland and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that Lessing tackled the subject of terrorism. The Good Terrorist portrays the unsympathetic (despite the title) Alice Mellings as a figure whose attachment to a minor leftwing group of social misfits leads to her estrangement from her family and gradual involvement in militant activity, culminating in a bomb attack that causes civilian injuries. The clever manipulation of the reader’s feelings about Alice’s actions allows Lessing to address a difficult subject in ways that bear revisiting in the current global political climate.

Indeed, Lessing often appears to write about things before they actually happen; this apparently “predictive” quality in her work has frequently led to her being labelled a “prophet” or “seer”. In the 1990s, well before it was the hot topic it has become, she began writing about climate change; in Mara and Dann, for example, she vividly imagined the impact of a second ice-age. Her long-term interest in Sufism , the mystical branch of Islam (reflected in her championing of the work of Idries Shah, for example) may suggest that in her later years she has recovered a belief in the relevance of a grander “world vision” or (more modestly) a “way” to follow.

In the past, critical opinion has often been equivocal about Lessing on the grounds that it does not consider her to be a stylist. Readers and reviewers have expressed dismay at some of her recent work, particularly The Cleft, with its apparently clumsy representation of a human pre-history peopled exclusively by parthenogenetic females who appear to endorse every female gender stereotype going. What is often missed is Lessing’s interest in experimenting with genre and narrative perspective. The Cleft, after all, is narrated by a Roman historian, who himself makes assumptions about empire and gender.

The award of the Nobel prize for literature recognises that some of Doris Lessing’s most interesting work has involved writing along the borderlines between realism, fantasy and science fiction; she makes as much use as she can of the potential for shrinking and then increasing the distance between the reader, narrator and character of a novel. Her continued interest in the borders and limits of concepts and ways of writing suggests that the exiled, outsider view apparent on her arrival in England has been the defining quality of her life’s work.

Susan Watkins is principal lecturer in English at the School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, where her main teaching interests are in 20th-century women’s fiction and feminist theory.

She is a founder member of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Network, and was academic coordinator of the second international Doris Lessing conference, held in July 2007