[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116621″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Fifty years ago today, the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla made a dramatic public confession at the Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba under the watchful eye of State Security agents.
In his auto-da-fe, Padilla denounced himself, his wife and several close friends as counterrevolutionaries.
The confession sent shockwaves around the world.
Two days earlier, Padilla had been released from a 36-day detention at Cuba’s State Security headquarters.
Padilla had fallen foul of the island’s authorities after his return from an extended stay in the Soviet Union, where he opened Cuba’s first press agency in Moscow and befriended dissident poets.
Padilla’s ritualised public penance sent ripples across the literary world while the Cuban government tried to use his “confessions” as proof of its right to imprison the poet.
Internationally, Padilla’s confession was seen as Cuba’s version of a Stalinist show trial – footage of the confession was suppressed by the authorities.
However, his supporters were conflicted. Index wrote at the time how the feeling began to grow that Padilla’s confession had been forced in some way and that perhaps he had been subjected to brainwashing techniques or possibly even torture.
“A majority of the original letter’s signatories seemed to share this view and signed another letter of protest against the whole affair while a minority accepted the confession at its face value and supported the government position. As a result, progressive left-wing literary circles were split in their assessment of the affair and this led to a series of charges and counter-charges that continued for many months,” we wrote.
Whatever the reason for his confession, it served as a harbinger of what was to follow: a period known as the Grey Five Years in which dozens of Cuban artists and writers were banished from public life.
The Cuban government’s treatment of Padilla made its protocol for handling intellectuals and artists visible and has since functioned as a warning to those that seek to challenge the primacy of state authority.
The passage of five decades means that Padilla’s public show of defiance has been largely forgotten internationally but the words he spoke retain their power even today.
Cuba’s government is once again cracking down again on a new generation of Cuban artists and intellectuals, portraying them as lackeys of foreign powers.
It is against this backdrop that Padilla’s words are again being spoken as part of Padilla’s Shadow, a project of MSI and 27N, which protest against state censorship of artistic freedom in the country.
Twenty Cuban intellectuals and artists, including Hamlet Lavastida and Cuban poets Néstor Díaz de Villegas and Katherine Bisquet , will today livestream a choral reading of Padilla’s confession under the direction of Cuban American artist Coco Fusco.
Many of the project’s participants have told Fusco that they are shocked by the text, that it has provoked bouts of anxiety, sleeplessness and nightmares.
Néstor Díaz de Villegas said, “In stark contrast to History Will Absolve Me, the self-defence speech that Fidel Castro gave in court in 1953, Heberto Padilla indicted history by incriminating himself with his auto-da-fe. His confession is the definitive comedy of errors of the Cuban Revolution.”
Hamlet Lavastida, who has designed the commemorative project, said, “Heberto Padilla’s confession represents the irruption of Sovietism in Cuban cultural life. In order to create ‘perfect literature’ it became necessary to purge from the creator everything that was antagonistic to the great disciplinary story of the State.
“Skepticism, disenchantment, cosmopolitanism and existentialism had to be extirpated. This form of cultural repression was undoubtedly and absolutely novel in the Latin American cosmos. Never before had State Communism been so effectively virulent within Latin American culture. This was its contribution, its regrettable contribution, one contribution that is ongoing.”
Katherine Bisquet said, “The confession is disturbing. It plunges you into a desolate time, not because of its vitality, because of its existential nullity.”
“Those words tell me emphatically that we have had to stop feeling everything we could feel, which is to say we had to fake madness in order to survive the real induced madness, the madness from which we do not return.”
When drawings being scribbled,
colours dripping red,
words being silenced,
thoughts being limited,
lives turn to nothing,
can you touch pain with politics?
Can you perceive pain with your beliefs?
Lives smeared with blood,
your loved ones lying on the ground
lifeless…
Can you hold on to reason,
and when fear like dark clouds
leaks within everyone,
and when fear feeds more fears
and when fear swells hatred
with its giant steps,
can you cure desperation with laws?
When walls are being built again
for the sake of freedom and security,
with violence and blood,
can you create peace with concepts,
when a person without blinking an eye
can kill another person,
when another can glorify death
for the sake of religion?
The moment you declare
you believe,
if the world stops turning,
if reasoning,
sensibility,
sensitivity,
goes blind against beliefs
and even a pen could be perceived as a weapon,
how can thoughts be free?
What would expressing yourself mean?
Poets, we all agree, are terribly misunderstood and undervalued. If it were not for poets, how would we know what things were like other things. How would we live! How would we love! How would we die! They are a priestly class, helping us to mark out our minutes with prayers in pentameter.
But as with any priestly class, they deal in mystery. And demands to decode that mystery are heretical.
This is certainly the impression one would get judging from the reaction to Jeremy Paxman’s comments on poetry and public engagement this week.
Launching the shortlist for the Forward Prizes for poetry, the judging panel of which he chaired, Paxman, with a nod and a wink so heavy that he would have been in serious trouble if the wind changed, suggested that contemporary poetry had “connived in its own irrelevance” by failing to engage with the everyday lives of “ordinary people”. “It’s the general public that poets have to start engaging with,” said Paxman. “And that, I’m, sure, is why the people at Forward said ‘will you join the judging panel’”.
Translation: “The people at Forward knew that me saying something even slightly controversial about poetry would get their prize column inches, and I’m happy to oblige.”
Paxman went on to suggest, whimsically, a public inquisition where poets would explain their work to members of the public, rather than just to other poets.
Frankly, good on Paxman for recognising his use to the Forward Prize. That is not to say he is an man with little to say about poetry; indeed, he’s contributed greatly to the cause of poetry by wheeling out his “Jeremy Paxman” act free of charge for it. He was also, of course, in very careful to praise contemporary poetry and the marvellous books he’d read as a judge.
But that praise was as naught to some poets, who instead chose to pick up on his idea of a people’s panel to judge poetry, and his naughty use of the word “inquisition”.
For people who deal mostly in metaphor, the poets who rose to the bait took the Newsnight presenter’s words remarkably literally.
Todd Swift, a poetry publisher who runs the Eyewear Imprint, wrote that an inquisition was “a strange thing to ask for in an anti-clerical democracy – the idea of burning unrepentant poets at the stake after torturing them is only barely witty in a world where in many many nations, poets really are tortured and silenced.”
Oh Todd. He didn’t mean an actual inquisition.
Swift goes on to say, with an apparent lack of irony that would have horrified the more famous poet of his name: “Only in middle-class (upper class?) London could a white man think interrogating and potentially killing poets was a clever and useful corrective trope. It smacks of easy intellectual arrogance. I find many journalists despise, or fear, or dislike poetry, mainly because poetry is the best-written and most compressed form of language, and is smarter than journalism.”
You tell those journos and their easy intellectual arrogance, Todd!
Swift finishes off by saying “it becomes clear [Paxman] didn’t really read any of the 175 books he was meant to judge”, a statement that is almost certainly defamatory, as any journalist would have told him if he’d asked.
George Szirtes, a poet well respected by his peers, went down a slightly different route. Szirtes, a refugee from the Soviet tanks that rolled over his native Hungary in 1956, compared Paxman’s suggestion to Stalin’s demands for socialist realism from the USSR’s artists.
Szirtes makes some good points writing for the Guardian, but unfortunately they all follow from a sly trick he plays writing that Paxman’s fanciful inquisition would be a place where “poets would be required to explain themselves and, presumably, answer for their failure to be simpler.”
That “presumably” appears to give Szirtes a license to put words in Paxman’s mouth. Suggesting people explain their work is not at all the same as demanding it be simpler, merely that they be capable of (and interested in) talking about their work to non poets.
As another poet, Katy Evans-Bush, put it, writing about the furious condemnations of Paxman on Facebook (Facebook is where poets go to fight; no one is quite sure why). “Heaven forfend that someone from the wider world should look into your ‘cave of making’, see your ‘pellety nest’, and remark on it. ”
This all matters because poetry matters. Poetry is where we learn to play with words, to deal in metaphor, wordplay, the non-literal, the non-prosaic. How often have you heard someone say they’re “not into” or “don’t get” poetry. It’s frustrating, but poets should see that as a challenge, rather than turning in on themselves. That’s not a call to dumb down; it’s a call to act up. When you’re egged on to do so, it’s simply not enough to cry “Stalin!” and retreat further. That’s exactly the hyperbole and self regard that puts people off. If you care about an art form, you should want people to know about it. Otherwise it is youv-vnot Jeremy Paxman or the Forward prize or anyone else – who is censoring poetry.
