July 22, 2008, 4:50 pm
INTERVIEW WITH CRISTINA PERI ROSSI
author of State of Exile (City Lights)

Considered a leading light of the “Latin-American Boom” generation, Cristina Peri Rossi was forced to leave her country at the age of thirty-one when her work was banned and her life was threatened by a repressive military dictatorship. In 1972 she moved to Spain, where she still resides. Her most recent publication, State of Exile (City Lights) is a collection of poems that bear witness to political and economic exile and offer hope.

Conducted in May, 2008 by Graciela Trevisan
Translated into English by Graciela Trevisan

Graciela: At the beginning of your prologue to State of Exile you say, “If exile were not a terrible experience, it would be a literary genre. Or both things at the same time.” What can you say about exile as a literary genre that has produced such an enormous amount of fictional, testimonial and poetic literature, not only in Latin America but in many other parts of the world?

Cristina: Exile and Literature have a close relation. The Bible narrates the Jewish people’s diaspora. I quoted one fragment from it at the beginning of my novel The Ship of Fools, “and you shall not distress a stranger: for you know the heart of a stranger, since you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23,9) The foundational poem of Spanish literature is The Poem of Cid which narrates his exile. For ancient Greeks, the worst thing was death, and then, exile. Virgil was an exile, and so was Dante. Exile, banishment, emigration: big topics in all literatures, but also a deep metaphor, one of the most versatile symbols of universal art. To some degree, the writer is almost always an exile, even if she/he doesn’t move from her/his birthplace. Dostoievski had to flee Moscow because he couldn’t pay his debts. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal was censured and burned in a public square. Spanish literature during the Franco regime was that of exiles, like dissident literature from the Soviet Union was written outside the Soviet Union. Something similar is happening now with the best Chinese writers: they write outside of China to avoid censure. The writer’s place is usually that of criticizing the system, be this capitalism and the market dictatorship or the proletarian dictatorship. Art needs freedom of thought and expression, differently from human behavior that must follow some limits in order to facilitate a peaceful existence.

Graciela: What were the reasons that took you to publish the poems of State of Exile in 2003? Do you think that the wave of immigrants (political/economic/gender exiles) from Northern Africa into Spain and other European countries had to do with your decision?

Cristina: When I wrote those poems, between 1973 and 1974, I wouldn’t have been able to find a publisher in Spain: Franco was still there and my poems wouldn’t have passed censorship. Outside of Spain, in the Spanish speaking world, there were no publishers who would risk publishing them either. But there was also a personal, subjective reason: a sense of reserve. I felt that publishing those poems that were so painful was like exhibiting in public scars that after all, were less severe than those other victims had suffered. After all, with the sorrows an exile goes through, almost always she/he manages to save her/his life. I say, “almost always” because I have seen people going crazy in exile, getting sick, dying prematurely, having heart attacks or terrible depressions. When Latin American dictatorships fell, and the pain loosened, I thought that it was the moment to bring my poems to light. The pain in my poems then could be better tolerated.

It’s true that exile and immigration have a lot in common. I sometimes talk with immigrants and observe our shared feelings: a sense of uprootedness, of not belonging,

an ambiguity toward the adopted country. They are, however, in better objective conditions: they now have cellular phones to call their dear ones, they can get together in public without raising suspicions, they can obtain their residence or citizenship. Immigrants have an expectation: to return. They can do that. The exile cannot return, and this provokes much anguish. Now, once the dictatorship has fallen, the exile doesn’t always return. Because in a strict sense, there is no return: one cannot go back to the past.

Graciela: What are the positive changes that you have experienced because of exile, in terms of life experience, your identity, your ideas, relations, and emotions?

Cristina: I would be a robot or a stone if I wouldn’t have experienced any changes in 30 years. I think I am a little less romantic now than when I arrived in this country (Spain.) The change is not due to age, but to confronting a society much more pragmatic, more relativist than the society where I was born and raised. But I continue being extremely idealistic and romantic in this society too, where I have lived for 30 years. I have had the chance to contribute to the changes in Spanish society, from the rigidity and repression of the Franco era to the current social-democracy where laws I fought for, have been adopted, like gay marriage and positive reforms towards women. I have met many women who like me live an alternative life style, and we can share our rejection of machismo and patriarchy. I also believe that exile gave me the possibility to try my inner strength and my spirit for struggle. My books are published and read in Spain (they have been translated into several languages too,) and in these thirty years, I have loved, suffered, and tried to change the situation in a very active way. To learn how to turn suffering into something positive and creative is a necessary skill. I think this is a point Marilyn Buck and I share.

Graciela: Can you tell us an anecdote directly related to your experience of exile?

Cristina: My books are full of narrations and experiences of exile. I have transformed them into literature. Perhaps the one I have written and talked the least about is my second exile. In 1974, when Franco was still in power and the Uruguayan dictatorship had only one year, I had to renew my passport in Barcelona. The consulate of my country’s dictatorship told me that my passport’s renewal was denied, as well as my birth certificate or any other Uruguayan document. I didn’t have any Spanish documents either. Therefore, from that moment, I didn’t legally exist for any country. I was “without a country,” and the duty of any police officer in the world was to return me to my country of origin where I was wanted and my books had been banned as well any mention of my name. The Spanish police came to get me, and I fled to Paris. I had to cross the border without documents. We were four in a car leaving from Barcelona to the first French town after crossing the border: a Spanish couple and a Uruguayan friend. They all have current passports, except me. When we got to the border, we realized that there was a very strict control at the checkpoint. My friend then had an idea: since we were four, she decided that I showed my expired passport last. I knew I had very few possibilities to pass the checkpoint. Surely, the border guard would find out and would deport me directly to the Uruguayan prisons. The guard checked the other three passports first, and when he was about to check mine, he looked at the long row of cars waiting to cross the border and gave me back the passport without even opening it. I can say that I saved my life because there was so much traffic at the border.

Graciela: The rigidity of the gender binary, and the deconstruction and questioning of masculinity as a social, political and sexual power often appear in your books. What is the relation/connection between gender, sexuality and homoeroticism that you approach in your poetry and narrative, and the subject of exile?

Cristina: I will answer this question with a simile, so I don’t go to an ideological explanation that could take many essays. We are primates that in some moment developed. In Congo, there are communities of chimpanzees and bonobos, separated of course. The chimpanzees live in patriarchal groups that are machista and dominant. There are frequent acts of violence. In fact, there is nothing so close to a human being as a chimpanzee. They conspire, betray each other, steal, and if they can, kill each other. The females are submissive, and their main tasks are reproduction and search for food. The bonobos, on the other hand, live in matriarchal groups. There is no violence among them. They are cooperative, joyful, and resolve all conflicts by making love and caressing. When they are afraid or have a problem, the group tries to resolve it with caresses, licks and love.

This simile may look simple, but I believe the big changes that the history of humankind has had were provoked by women. In the Middle Ages, women in the courts of Midi and the south of France imposed music, poetry and the use of utensils. They softened the males who only knew how to fight, and they created the love courts. With this simile, I want to say that I trust that a feminization of the world could end violence.

Graciela: What can you say to readers in the United States who will read Estado de Exilio translated into English by Marilyn Buck?

posted by Dia Vergados

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December 30 , 2007

We thought this was an interesting article on the topic of the disappearance of public spaces. It's about Boston, and about gay bars, but its implications for San Francisco and all alternative spaces struck home for us...

LAST CALL
Why the gay bars of Boston are disappearing, and what it says about the future of city life
The Boston Globe
By Robert David Sullivan
Full article

THE FIRST THING I ever did to identify myself as a gay man - before coming out to a friend or relative, before putting a rainbow-flag pin on my jacket - was to walk into a gay bar. This was not so unusual in the early 1990s, when few gay men identified as such before they left high school. Some of us needed to walk around the block four or five times before finally pushing open a dimly lit, unmarked door.

At the time, there were plenty of dimly lit doors in Boston. The Napoleon Club was a piano bar near Park Square that attracted theater students and older men who left big tips on small glasses of red wine. A few blocks away, Luxor was a video bar for younger guys; nearby were Buddies (all ages) and Chaps, a dance club where dressing conservatively meant keeping your shirt on. In other parts of town, there were Sporters, a friendly Beacon Hill dive, and Playland, a Combat Zone bar known for its sketchy clientele, banged-up piano, and year-round Christmas lights. In all, there were 16 gay bars in Boston and Cambridge, according to Pink Pages directories from 1993 and 1994.

Today, that number has been cut to less than half. None of the bars I've mentioned are still in business, and most of the city's seven remaining gay-every-night bars have sparse customers for most of the week. (Lesbian bars were never numerous to begin with.) The gay population may have political clout and the right to marry in Massachusetts, but it has fewer and fewer public spaces to call its own.

The disappearance of places like Buddies and Chaps may sound like a problem limited to gay men, but it is part of a much larger trend reshaping American cities. As gay bars vanish, so go bookstores, diners, and all kinds of spaces that once allowed "blissful public congregation," as sociologist Ray Oldenburg described their function in his 1989 book "The Great Good Place."

In New York, the Jewish deli - a staple of the city's identity - has all but vanished. In the Boston area, many of Harvard Square's bookstores, Kenmore Square's student eateries, and myriad other places that guaranteed a diverse urban experience have closed their doors, replaced by a far more uniform lineup of bank branches, chain stores, and upscale restaurants.

This change is a serious challenge to the city, which has historically been defined by the breadth and variety of its street-level experience - and the wide diversity of people it threw together. "City air makes free," a saying that dates to medieval times, was a favorite of urban-studies pioneer Jane Jacobs. But as a wide range of gay bars dwindles to a handful of survivors - and the city's diners, indie bookstores, and dive bars yield to high rents and shifting patterns of commerce - that air is becoming the province of an increasingly narrow set of people.

Oldenburg calls public gathering spots a "third place" where we can temporarily step out of our household and workplace roles. Besides taverns, he cites drugstores (the kind with soda fountains), pool halls, and barber shops as examples. But if you were a gay man in the late 20th century, the place with all the qualities of an ideal third space was the gay bar.

For many closeted gays, bars were the only places where they could safely be themselves. They were also a nexus for political organizing and charitable work, they promoted safer-sex education after the onset of AIDS, and they served as a welcome mat for gay newcomers to a city.

****

When gays moved out of the shadows during the '70s, then began settling in certain areas of major cities (like the South End in Boston), gay bars evolved. Some became respected neighborhood institutions, offering meeting space to social groups, sponsoring softball teams and arts festivals, distributing condoms and health information, and buying ads in local newspapers. By the mid-1980s, they were a major force in turning Gay Pride holidays into citywide celebrations, sponsoring eye-catching parade floats and raucous block parties. But at the same time, larger trends in American life were massing that would soon sweep these bars away.

One was the rising price of urban real estate. Gay bars traditionally appeared in marginal neighborhoods, or in predominately gay neighborhoods, with cheap rents and accommodating (or indifferent) neighbors. As those areas have progressively been developed with high-end housing, bars have struggled to pay their rent, and neighborhood groups have been increasingly hostile toward anything that creates noise or attracts idlers. The same forces have stripped such neighborhoods of other iconic businesses, such as fringe theaters and free and low-admission art spaces.

*****

Gay bars are just one kind of business struggling to survive in what is, to use the phrase popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name, the age of "the long tail." That phrase refers to an economy in which the Internet can make even low-demand products profitable. Until the Internet, large cities offered the closest thing to a long tail economy. Thanks to Cambridge's concentration of intellectual shoppers, for instance, Harvard Square had stores full of the most obscure books, magazines, and records you could think of buying. The students in Kenmore Square kept cheap eateries, music clubs, and record stores alive; the South End's gay population once supported not just bars, but also inexpensive card-and-gift shops (such as Tommy Tish), a sex-toy shop with the feel of an old-fashioned general store (the Marquis de Sade), and a gay bookstore.

Now the classic example of a long tail business is online retailer Amazon.com, which stocks close to a million book titles - including more gay novels and intellectual books than any local store could offer. As long tail businesses migrate to the Internet, cities like Boston are being skinned alive.

Businesses like bookstores, video stores, and gay bars can no longer afford to occupy valuable real estate when their goods or services are more easily and cheaply delivered electronically. As these businesses disappear from Boston streets, they're usually replaced by more profitable land uses, such as office towers and high-end restaurants. The result is a variant of the "tragedy of the commons": Hotels, condo complexes, and other upscale businesses market themselves as part of a vibrant city, but they can also make it more difficult to maintain that vibrancy. (The ground floors of new office and housing buildings are often reserved for retail use, but CVS and other chain stores usually snap up the space.) These high-end businesses attract new residents and consumers to urban neighborhoods, but when they aren't balanced by other types of economic activity, the result can be a sterile streetscape rather than a diverse ecosystem.

This development would have disappointed William H. Whyte, the sociologist who may be rivaled only by Jane Jacobs in the cogency and passion of his arguments for active city life. Albert LaFarge, editor of "The Essential William H. Whyte," says that the ideal urban neighborhood from Whyte's point of view is fueled by "the intensity and unpredictability of different people using the same space for their own reasons, and often contradictory ones, but all respecting the goals of vibrancy and function."

If a place like the South End accommodates fewer and fewer of these reasons for a person to be there, says LaFarge, it not longer meets the definition of a successful urban neighborhood.

Gay neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco are reportedly undergoing the same transformation as in the South End, but there is at least one exception to this trend. In Philadelphia, the city has encouraged the development of its "Gayborhood," a nine-block part of downtown, by adding rainbow flags to street signs, and the city's tourism board has an aggressive campaign targeted at gay travelers. Jeff Guaracino of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. says that the Gayborhood provides "a very good economic return for the city. Businesses are making a profit there."

Making a profit, of course, isn't always the same as serving a community's needs. Gay bars seem to be doing well in resort areas such as Palm Springs and Provincetown, but they're more vacation party spots than true third spaces for locals.

The fate of the Jewish delicatessen in New York is a reminder that "theme park" gay bars would be no substitute for what we've lost in Boston. Thousands of delis have disappeared from New York since the 1930s. Many of the dozen or so survivors seem to be thriving, but the tourist-oriented Carnegie and Stage delis, with their long lines and rapid turnover of tables, don't bear much resemblance to the classic model. At a panel discussion called "Jewish Cuisine and the Evolution of the Jewish Deli," held this summer and reported on by The New York Times, food historian Joel Denker described the delis of the '50s and '60s as having "this sort of yeasty combination of intellectuals, writers, and leftists, sitting together over tea and cottage cheese and fruit, talking about the issues of the day."

Sitting and talking for hours at a time. Sadly, that's not considered an efficient use of space during today's supposed revival of city life. Boston's gay community is adapting to its scaled-down bar scene, but there's still a sense of something missing. There are probably more spiritual groups, youth programs, and health resources than ever in the gay community, but none of them really fit the definition of a third space where one can drop in and hang out. "There was a whole group of friends who I would only ever see at the Napoleon Club," says Rick Park, a Boston-based actor, "and when it closed, they all disappeared."

Read the full article on The Boston Globe site.

Posted by Dia Vergados

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