Artikel
January 13-20, 2004
Poets’ diaries: Nicolás Suescún
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18 januari 2006
Tomorrow, a new momentous week in my life will begin. Invited by the Winternachten Literature Festival in The Hague to talk about the Poetry Festival in Medellín and (maybe) read some of my poems, I will travel to Europe, where I have not been in decades, save for a few days in 1999 in the Scriobh Literary Festival in Sligo, Ireland. I am nervous because I will have to speak in public in English, something I have never done in my life. Since I am not very fluent speaking in public in Spanish and have not even spoken English in a very long time, I’ve written a few pages on the Medellín Festival and its relation to artistic freedom, which is the theme of my workshop and of a debate, for which I have also written a page to read, just in case I find myself at a loss for words. I’ve also translated more poems than I had for Sligo and completed a slim volume of 33 poems in English.
Wednesday, January 14
I succeed in boarding the plane – a few months ago I missed the one that should have taken me to Venezuela – and inmediately become the Kafkaesque character I am on my trips, mysteriously forced to be the opposite of what I am at home (a man able to move about intelligently, almost without asking questions and in an almost invisible manner) – an egocentric observer, that is to say, a non-observer – full of irrational fears, hypotheses based on the suspicious face of a passenger, tales that I make up all the time about things that could happen to me, like being somehow blamed for some failed terrorist plot, in which of course I had no part, to bomb the plane, for which I am arrested; in prison I have a long, interesting conversation with my cellmate.
After some two or three hours on the plane, I change the time on my watch. I know it’s six hours later in Europe, so I am at 20:00 but, more and more, also at 2:00 of the 15th. Here, in the air and flying, the relativity of time is very real.
Thursday, January 15
After the somewhat chaotic airport in Madrid, I arrive at the ultra-modern Amsterdam airport. In Madrid I followed people, and even so I had to ask my way several times; here, I just follow the signs. At the meeting point, I immediately spot the two young men who are waiting for me. They don’t have a sign, but our eyes cross. They explain to me that they recognized me from a picture they had.
On the road, the contrast with Bogotá’s traffic hits me inmediately: order, near silence, cleanliness. However, they warn me there may be traffic jams (I don’t say anything about our chaotic, polluting traffic with its ever present, long jams), and we never really stop, we’re just slowed off a bit. I ask them a lot of questions about news, recent and old – the killing of a teacher by a teenager, Fortuyn . . . He was not a racist, they say, he only wanted to stop the flow of foreigners into Holland.
We arrive at the hotel, where I am warmly received. I have dinner and go to the theater where the Festival takes place, which is a few blocks away. Tonight is a preview of a couple of hours but I only stay – I am very tired, I didn’t sleep on the plane – to hear a couple of participants. I don’t understand a word, but I realize that Dutch, well spoken, is beautiful. No language, I am aware once again, is ugly – as I often have heard said of Dutch and other languages – being the vehicle of expression perfected and used by a people to express the same feelings and ideas of all other peoples, with a peculiar music which is all its own.
Friday, January 16
After breakfast, conversation with Erik Menkveld, the poet who is going to present me. Mine is one of eight sub-programmes of one hour around the theme of “Artistic freedom.” I read my text on the Medellín Festival and with the help of Erik manage to sound spontaneous. I think I gave a fairly complete picture of that extraordinary poetic celebration, which has a great and justified reputation here. I only have time to read three or four poems.
In the afternoon, we have the debate on artistic freedom. The participants are Annerie van der Merwe, a publisher from South Africa, Prasanna Vithanage, a film director from Sri Lanka, Hasif Amini, a literary critic from Indonesia, María Lourdes Cortés, a film critic from Costa Rica, and three poets, Lasana M. Sekou, from St. Martin, Chirikure Chirikure from Zimbabwe, and me. It is very interesting to hear how language in some countries, religious intolerance in others, and nationalism in yet others, and poverty in all affect in a greater or lesser degree artistic freedom. I try to explain that the low cultural level in Colombia – caused by poverty and inequality – is the main obstacle to the exercise of my freedom of expression, because as I said in the page I wrote for the debate:
I go to the theater where there will be a varied programme. I only stay for the “Delphic saying” on the future of Africa by Antjie Krog, a South-African poet and journalist, who afterwards talks about the South-African Truth and Reconciliation committee with a brilliant Iranian poet and lawyer. She says that reconciliation is part of an old African tradition; he, that such a thing could never take place in a muslim country. Nor, I think, in my country, where guerrillas have lost all support from the people, their main business being kidnapping people or keeping watch over illicit crops owned by drug traffickers. I feel very tired, even sick. I go back to the hotel.
Saturday, January 17
I wake up late, have a quick breakfast and run to the Mauritshuis under a heavy rain. It is a wonderful small museum, with two Rembrandts, the last self-portrait, his face flabby, ravaged by the relentless passage of time, the look in his eyes as if already contemplating death, which was a few weeks away; the other is a great Portrait of an Elderly Man. But the picture that really bowled me over was the View of Delft by Vermeer. Such limpid, “true” light!
At night, the Delphic sayings of Tom Gilling, an Australian novelist, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, an American writer and journalist who has written about poor families in the Bronx. Gilling talks about the long and continuous presentation of Australia where fish fall from the sky (in a 19th-century account of the country) and where there are cannibal tribes. I identify with him; I feel how difficult it is to give an objective picture of my country free from all inventions about it.
Monday, January 19
Again I have a terrible night. It is pity I could not employ my time, these few hours I’ve been here, more profitably; on the other hand, I have really not felt well at all. However, it has been a very interesting experience, and there is still, this evening, a farewell dinner. In it I sit with a couple; he is Dutch, she is from Surinam. He tells me that Fortuyn was a racist and that there is racism in Holland. I think that they and my young escorts of the first day are right; nothing in this world is black and white. But still, and I think this Winternachten Festival shows it splendidly, no other country than Holland enjoys “the unlimited liberty of conscience,” which according to Bernard de Mandeville, “made that contemptible spot of earth so considerable among the powers of of Europe.” The author of The Fable of the Bees wrote this at the beginning of the 17th Century, but it is still true. No country is freer.
Tuesday, January 20
In the Madrid airport I feel myself again in the tropics: a sweltering atmosphere, the departure is delayed, first half an hour then an hour, but no one seems to know, and there is no place to sit in the waiting room . . .
Read more about Nicolás Suescún and his poetry on his Poetry International profile page.
“No country is freer,” writes Colombian poet Nicolás Suescún about the Netherlands, where he spent a week during the Winternachten Festival. “The low cultural level in Colombia – caused by poverty and inequality – is the main obstacle to the exercise of my freedom of expression.”
Tuesday, January 13Tomorrow, a new momentous week in my life will begin. Invited by the Winternachten Literature Festival in The Hague to talk about the Poetry Festival in Medellín and (maybe) read some of my poems, I will travel to Europe, where I have not been in decades, save for a few days in 1999 in the Scriobh Literary Festival in Sligo, Ireland. I am nervous because I will have to speak in public in English, something I have never done in my life. Since I am not very fluent speaking in public in Spanish and have not even spoken English in a very long time, I’ve written a few pages on the Medellín Festival and its relation to artistic freedom, which is the theme of my workshop and of a debate, for which I have also written a page to read, just in case I find myself at a loss for words. I’ve also translated more poems than I had for Sligo and completed a slim volume of 33 poems in English.
Wednesday, January 14
I succeed in boarding the plane – a few months ago I missed the one that should have taken me to Venezuela – and inmediately become the Kafkaesque character I am on my trips, mysteriously forced to be the opposite of what I am at home (a man able to move about intelligently, almost without asking questions and in an almost invisible manner) – an egocentric observer, that is to say, a non-observer – full of irrational fears, hypotheses based on the suspicious face of a passenger, tales that I make up all the time about things that could happen to me, like being somehow blamed for some failed terrorist plot, in which of course I had no part, to bomb the plane, for which I am arrested; in prison I have a long, interesting conversation with my cellmate.
After some two or three hours on the plane, I change the time on my watch. I know it’s six hours later in Europe, so I am at 20:00 but, more and more, also at 2:00 of the 15th. Here, in the air and flying, the relativity of time is very real.
Thursday, January 15
After the somewhat chaotic airport in Madrid, I arrive at the ultra-modern Amsterdam airport. In Madrid I followed people, and even so I had to ask my way several times; here, I just follow the signs. At the meeting point, I immediately spot the two young men who are waiting for me. They don’t have a sign, but our eyes cross. They explain to me that they recognized me from a picture they had.
On the road, the contrast with Bogotá’s traffic hits me inmediately: order, near silence, cleanliness. However, they warn me there may be traffic jams (I don’t say anything about our chaotic, polluting traffic with its ever present, long jams), and we never really stop, we’re just slowed off a bit. I ask them a lot of questions about news, recent and old – the killing of a teacher by a teenager, Fortuyn . . . He was not a racist, they say, he only wanted to stop the flow of foreigners into Holland.
We arrive at the hotel, where I am warmly received. I have dinner and go to the theater where the Festival takes place, which is a few blocks away. Tonight is a preview of a couple of hours but I only stay – I am very tired, I didn’t sleep on the plane – to hear a couple of participants. I don’t understand a word, but I realize that Dutch, well spoken, is beautiful. No language, I am aware once again, is ugly – as I often have heard said of Dutch and other languages – being the vehicle of expression perfected and used by a people to express the same feelings and ideas of all other peoples, with a peculiar music which is all its own.
Friday, January 16
After breakfast, conversation with Erik Menkveld, the poet who is going to present me. Mine is one of eight sub-programmes of one hour around the theme of “Artistic freedom.” I read my text on the Medellín Festival and with the help of Erik manage to sound spontaneous. I think I gave a fairly complete picture of that extraordinary poetic celebration, which has a great and justified reputation here. I only have time to read three or four poems.
In the afternoon, we have the debate on artistic freedom. The participants are Annerie van der Merwe, a publisher from South Africa, Prasanna Vithanage, a film director from Sri Lanka, Hasif Amini, a literary critic from Indonesia, María Lourdes Cortés, a film critic from Costa Rica, and three poets, Lasana M. Sekou, from St. Martin, Chirikure Chirikure from Zimbabwe, and me. It is very interesting to hear how language in some countries, religious intolerance in others, and nationalism in yet others, and poverty in all affect in a greater or lesser degree artistic freedom. I try to explain that the low cultural level in Colombia – caused by poverty and inequality – is the main obstacle to the exercise of my freedom of expression, because as I said in the page I wrote for the debate:
In all times and now in many countries they [poets] have been persecuted and repressed by tyrants, dictators and bigots. But they have gone on writing. They always hope that – or they write as if – their words will survive them. “Yes, I lie in the earth, moving my lips/ But what I shall say, every schoolchild will learn,” wrote Osip Mandelstam, victim of Stalin’s pervasive secret police, whose poems survived in the memory of his wife, Nadezha. But Mandelstam also wrote, in his first, fatal “Ode to Stalin:” “We live without sensing the country beneath us,/ At ten paces, our speech has no sound,” and this is what I feel in my country, which is not a dictatorship but just an imperfect democracy in an underdeveloped country.
I go to the theater where there will be a varied programme. I only stay for the “Delphic saying” on the future of Africa by Antjie Krog, a South-African poet and journalist, who afterwards talks about the South-African Truth and Reconciliation committee with a brilliant Iranian poet and lawyer. She says that reconciliation is part of an old African tradition; he, that such a thing could never take place in a muslim country. Nor, I think, in my country, where guerrillas have lost all support from the people, their main business being kidnapping people or keeping watch over illicit crops owned by drug traffickers. I feel very tired, even sick. I go back to the hotel.
Saturday, January 17
I wake up late, have a quick breakfast and run to the Mauritshuis under a heavy rain. It is a wonderful small museum, with two Rembrandts, the last self-portrait, his face flabby, ravaged by the relentless passage of time, the look in his eyes as if already contemplating death, which was a few weeks away; the other is a great Portrait of an Elderly Man. But the picture that really bowled me over was the View of Delft by Vermeer. Such limpid, “true” light!
At night, the Delphic sayings of Tom Gilling, an Australian novelist, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, an American writer and journalist who has written about poor families in the Bronx. Gilling talks about the long and continuous presentation of Australia where fish fall from the sky (in a 19th-century account of the country) and where there are cannibal tribes. I identify with him; I feel how difficult it is to give an objective picture of my country free from all inventions about it.
Monday, January 19
Again I have a terrible night. It is pity I could not employ my time, these few hours I’ve been here, more profitably; on the other hand, I have really not felt well at all. However, it has been a very interesting experience, and there is still, this evening, a farewell dinner. In it I sit with a couple; he is Dutch, she is from Surinam. He tells me that Fortuyn was a racist and that there is racism in Holland. I think that they and my young escorts of the first day are right; nothing in this world is black and white. But still, and I think this Winternachten Festival shows it splendidly, no other country than Holland enjoys “the unlimited liberty of conscience,” which according to Bernard de Mandeville, “made that contemptible spot of earth so considerable among the powers of of Europe.” The author of The Fable of the Bees wrote this at the beginning of the 17th Century, but it is still true. No country is freer.
Tuesday, January 20
In the Madrid airport I feel myself again in the tropics: a sweltering atmosphere, the departure is delayed, first half an hour then an hour, but no one seems to know, and there is no place to sit in the waiting room . . .
Read more about Nicolás Suescún and his poetry on his Poetry International profile page.
© Nicolás Suescún
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