Mario Vargas Llosa
Texas —A man died. Not in Texas. Somewhere else.
Last night I dreamt about writing his obituary. Maybe because we talked about reading obituaries in class as a genre of writing. My aunts often read daily obituaries. I did not know this was odd. They like to keep up to date with Death. In my dream, a beloved appeared. We met in Italy. In real life. Not in the dream. In the dream, we sat in lounge chairs by a pool and talked about how how Mario Vargas Llosa died. Leaves fell around us. In real life we sat by a pool and looked out at olive orchards. I don’t think we even spoke at that moment. The realities blur together.
Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a book called Death in the Andes. I read it first more than 15 years ago. It was a book an ex of mine had on the bookshelf, which I read during my time of unemployment. This was 2009, still in the recession. I wondered why Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez had a falling out. I have had many falling outs since then. I am having more of them now. So it is common for me to offer the perspective that sometimes, it is okay to be the villain. I do not see that being the case for Mario Vargas Llosa.
How does one go from writing about corruption to a right-wing conservative politician? What do I remember about him? He ran for president in 1990, when I was in 7th grade. I was just reading Interview with a Vampire then. Fujimora beat him. I am not Peruvian, so it is not for me to determine or speak about those histories... I just wanted to write about obituaries.
Like many Latin American writers, he was a journalist. But then he later became a citizen of Spain and wrote columns for a Spanish newspaper. Is this my version of a column? Perhaps.
Vargas Llosa also advocated for a certain occupier. He was part of the so-called Latin American boom and won a Nobel Prize late in his life. I do not believe the artist and art can be separated. Ghassan Kanafani and Refaat Alareer lived and wrote what they believed. Why not us? Why should we be cowards?
MVL was once identified as a leftist but turned toward authoritarianism and neoliberalism. MVL famously said that “feminism is the staunchest enemy of literature.” He supported Bolsonaro. Some speculate the turn happened after Castro imprisoned a poet. MVL was also a former president of PEN in the late 70s. This man admired Margaret Thatcher. He also famously sent her flowers.
In a New Yorker article, Graciela Mochkofsky quoted the Peruvian writer Gabriela Weiner: “[she] told me, ‘I open his books and see racism and patriarchy all over.” She added, ‘His heroes stand out for their individualism and are agents of progress against the Andean, communal, and Indigenous world, which has always been seen from his perspective as backward and archaic.’”
So it was always there. And I think back to the pishtaco in Death in the Andes. So, we arrive at the true culprit: modernity. I define modernity as an apparatus of empire.
Yesterday, a poet comrade and i were discussing how much we have to unlearn. how do we avoid becoming like MVL?
Some say that the failure of Latin American democracy deflated MVL.
anarchism has allowed me to think outside of state structures. So I argue that faith and comradeship can keep us steady. That’s why I think a beloved appeared in the dream. To remind me that love for the land, for each other, that to cultivate relationships, can ground us. Interpersonal connections can stand against capitalism, which values the individual and property.
As a friend recently told me: “you keep me sane and settled.”
Glissant offers us opacity and complexity in determining these relations. Sylvia Wynter unsettles modernity and the universal experience. Wynter offers us that “the role of the writer/critic (which will be generalised to the role of the intellectual), should be to disenchant the dominant cultural model, to re-enchant with a "new world view," to take us, as Greg Thomas signals, "beyond." That is, beyond our present Western ontology” (Eudell and Allen).
MVL never got that memo. I hope authoritarianism dies with him. I hope we continue to write obituaries of the empire.