This week, an exhibition honouring an iconic poet resonates with contemporary social movements in Peru, and a play causes quite the stir in Bulgaria. Read on to find out more!
Xiao Yue Shan, reporting from Peru
At the Casa de la Literatura Peruana (House of Peruvian Literature), space has appropriately been made for a poet who never wavered in his conviction of literature’s physical presence. Alejandro Romualdo (1926-2008) was a key figure of the Generación del 50—a Peruvian literary movement dedicated to a social ars poetica that would address daily realities and further political agency, formed amidst the dictatorship of Manuel Odría. Though few beyond the country will have knowledge of the power and continual influence of Romualdo’s works (which are regrettably yet to appear in English), this new exhibition, ‘Alejandro Romualdo: En la extensión de la palabra (in the extension of the word)’, firmly establishes the poet’s legacy, multiplicity, and role in shaping the Peruvian poetic landscape. Moving through not only his written works but his prolific activities as a graphic designer, humorist, cartoonist, and revolutionary, the brief but wide-ranging collection reveals a writer deeply embedded in the consciousness of his country.
‘The extension of the word’ is the title of Romualdo’s 1974 collection, which saw its writer interrogating poetry’s materialism for what more it could give to a world that demands a continuously evolving application of language. Working with concrete poetics, polyphonic constructions, and techniques of montage, Romualdo equalised the blank space of the page to the air—that which is both a separation and a link. In this era, he conceptualised the poetic form as a space where disparate or even antithetical ideas are held in a closed frame, thereby demonstrating the mind’s capacity to travel back and forth between them, uniting them as a single conceivable reality. Distance is relative in these poems, something easily breached by a long vowel sound or a dangling, dismembered line.
As an exhibition designed to be accessible to the public, the displays expertly balance Romualdo’s more abstract theories with his sense of play. The poet’s caricatures and political cartoons gave further dimension to the communality necessary for political writers, acknowledging that humour and an incisive jab might prove more inciting than an experimental text. Audio and video also played their respective roles in expanding presence, and there was even a particularly delightful curtained room, which gave way to a flickering lunar film reel and star-studded ceiling, with segments from a celestial collection, El movimiento y el sueño, inscribed onto the wall.
When the exhibition opened last month, the spectre of Alejandro Romualdo awoke to a nation that has witnessed a tremendous wave of social uprising since the impeachment and arrest of past president Pedro Castillo in 2022—who was charged with conspiracy and rebellion after clashing continually with Congress over his Marxist platform. Taking his place was vice president Dina Boluarte, whose regime quickly realigned itself with the right, and who has since been accused of accepting bribes, participating in organised crime, and ordering indiscriminately violent repressions—making her ‘the world’s least popular president’) and leading to the greatest wave of social mobilisation in the last twenty years. Uniting wide swathes of the population, unionists and students with indigenous peoples and victims of rising crime, protests and strikes have continued to present day.
Romualdo, propelled by a love for country that was inseparable from love of its peoples, took all the tools available to him in combatting oppression; as one must do the same today, it is necessary to visit and reinhabit the works of those who fought before. Today, one sees in Romualdo’s corpus an artist who always sought to mediate individual desire with en masse momentum, postulating the social arena as an endlessly flowing body of signs, ideas, and meanings—to understand where ‘oneness’ can expand and motion in solidarity, to envision how a grand act is seeded by a great many individuals, to see that poetry is not only meant to express a voice but to be a voice for others. As the citizens of Peru continue the journey towards justice and representation, his words come to mind:
Ya sé que tú no puedes comprender por qué
Por qué me emociona una cosa tan “común” como una huelga:Una huelga es más honda que un espejo,
Una huelga es más pura que un vaso de agua.
Una huelga refleja mil deseos y privaciones,
Largos años de sufrimiento,
De pan frío,
De lecho frío.
Una huelga clama una sed infinita,
Una infinita sed de justicia.
‘Alejandro Romualdo: En la extensión de la palabra’ will run until April 2025; unhappily, it will be the last of its kind, at least for the forseeable future. In the latest resolution recently issued by Peru’s Ministry of Education, all future exhibitions at the Casa will be subject to review by the government body. Perhaps soon, Lima will not see such clear declarations for liberation along these grand walls.
Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria
If you had told me a year ago that I would be writing a dispatch as bizarre as this one, I would have certainly been amused but not quite convinced. To the surprise of many in Bulgaria, however, the Union of Bulgarian Writers has recently published an official statement condemning the play Arms and the Man (based on George Bernard Shaw’s text), directed by John Malkovich and expected to start running soon at the National Theatre. The Union’s Governing Board called the performance ‘an insult to the Bulgarian people’, urging the relevant authorities to take action and not ‘wash their hands with the hypocritical excuse that their legal intervention would be interpreted as “censorship” and infringement of “creative freedom”‘.
Arms and the Man is set in a small Bulgarian town, near the Dragoman Pass, at the end of the Serbo-Bulgarian War (1885). In her commentary on the matter, writer Antonia Antonova clarifies that ‘what obviously gets on the nerves of the Board . . . is the playwright’s irony towards his characters. For example, Major Petkoff explains that bathing is dangerous, while his wife is a typical peasant woman aspiring to come across as a Viennese aristocrat, and she even possesses military discipline, unlike the male protagonists’. Others, including literary critic and poet Amelia Licheva, went on to second the position.
Naturally, John Malkovich has also defended his choice. In an interview for the television channel bTV, he said: ‘It is my understanding that some people here claim the play mocks the Bulgarians and the Serbo-Bulgarian war. Neither is true. Arms and the Man is about pretension, about false idealism. It is actually an anti-war play. George Bernard Shaw wrote many plays to state his opposition to war. I am a bit perplexed that people think I would come to Bulgaria to make fun of the Bulgarians. I just haven’t put on a play here before. This one is really satirical, funny, and ultimately quite romantic.’
Hopefully, the saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity will prove right in this case as well. I, for one, cannot wait to see the play.
*****
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