To the legendary Cuban artist Micah Carpentier, death was a matter of indifference. Bearing witness to what was arguably civilization's most violent century, to Carpentier personal agency, mortality and fate were at best peripheral to his avid and engaged imagination.
What interested Carpentier above all else was poetry. A close confidante of Nicolás Guillén whose literary experiments with wordplay and collage closely paralleled his own explorations of pastiche and appropriation, Carpentier's stoic impassivity was a premeditated posture obviating his involvement with political controversy.
In an ironic twist of fate, it was precisely this lack of public engagement that brought his work to the attention of the Cuban political bureaucracy.
In 1971, after returning to Havana after a short lecture tour in southern Spain, Carpentier was visited by the notorious Illyés twins, László and Guillermo. These justly feared functionaries of the Ministerio de la Cultura Cubano could ruin one's life with one quick phone call. They had never before taken an interest in Carpentier whose rarified aesthetics and conceptual convolutions were hardly seen as threatening to the Party apparatus and its interests.
They came to warn him against publishing a European edition of his Diario de un Soñador sin Pagar, a collection of intimate pensées that were appearing regularly in the Cuban literary journal El Correo and had recently been anthologized by Prensa Revolucionaria.
On the face of it, the demand seemed absurd since most of the columns were clever set pieces on subjects ranging from caring for house plants in tropical climates to interfamilial recipe disputes regarding dishes like trajaditas dulces de platano and boliche.
It turned out that he had run afoul of the State censors with a couple of essays included in a chapter called "Paucities" (Escasez). In them Carpentier made hilarious observations on the island's lack of operable door bells, the Cuban preference for Russian over Spanish baptismal names, and the coarse textures of the homeland's national toilet paper.
It was said that Fidel himself, goosed into spasms of violent laughter would soil his fatigues and drool like an St. Bernard while reading Carperntier's work.
The twins put it to him this way:
"You write about our scarcities without complaint or gravitas. You accept our flaws and our shortcomings with gracious good humor. You who are an international intellectual celebrity and a glittering luminary among the educated elites. You travel widely and you live in a spacious flat. We would be much happier if you could pose as a degenerate dissident malcontent. If you wrote with greater bitterness and a stronger sense of grievance you would gain greater credibility among our enemies and we in turn could boast of our benevolence, our tolerance and our abundant personal freedoms."
Maldito comunismo!
No wonder Carpentier spent the last decade of his life making simple sketches on Chinese take-out boxes.
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| Micah Carpentier, Santiago de Cuba, 1971 |
What interested Carpentier above all else was poetry. A close confidante of Nicolás Guillén whose literary experiments with wordplay and collage closely paralleled his own explorations of pastiche and appropriation, Carpentier's stoic impassivity was a premeditated posture obviating his involvement with political controversy.
 |
| From Notebook 134.67, Micah Carpentier. (Courtesy of Universidad Combray, Las Palmas) |
In an ironic twist of fate, it was precisely this lack of public engagement that brought his work to the attention of the Cuban political bureaucracy.
In 1971, after returning to Havana after a short lecture tour in southern Spain, Carpentier was visited by the notorious Illyés twins, László and Guillermo. These justly feared functionaries of the Ministerio de la Cultura Cubano could ruin one's life with one quick phone call. They had never before taken an interest in Carpentier whose rarified aesthetics and conceptual convolutions were hardly seen as threatening to the Party apparatus and its interests.
They came to warn him against publishing a European edition of his Diario de un Soñador sin Pagar, a collection of intimate pensées that were appearing regularly in the Cuban literary journal El Correo and had recently been anthologized by Prensa Revolucionaria.
On the face of it, the demand seemed absurd since most of the columns were clever set pieces on subjects ranging from caring for house plants in tropical climates to interfamilial recipe disputes regarding dishes like trajaditas dulces de platano and boliche.
It turned out that he had run afoul of the State censors with a couple of essays included in a chapter called "Paucities" (Escasez). In them Carpentier made hilarious observations on the island's lack of operable door bells, the Cuban preference for Russian over Spanish baptismal names, and the coarse textures of the homeland's national toilet paper.
It was said that Fidel himself, goosed into spasms of violent laughter would soil his fatigues and drool like an St. Bernard while reading Carperntier's work.
The twins put it to him this way:
"You write about our scarcities without complaint or gravitas. You accept our flaws and our shortcomings with gracious good humor. You who are an international intellectual celebrity and a glittering luminary among the educated elites. You travel widely and you live in a spacious flat. We would be much happier if you could pose as a degenerate dissident malcontent. If you wrote with greater bitterness and a stronger sense of grievance you would gain greater credibility among our enemies and we in turn could boast of our benevolence, our tolerance and our abundant personal freedoms."
Maldito comunismo!
No wonder Carpentier spent the last decade of his life making simple sketches on Chinese take-out boxes.
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