The following conversation hasn’t happened yet. On the day Osdany Morales and I had chosen to meet in New York for the launch of Lengua materna, an unforeseen event prevented me from keeping the appointment. My questions, however, left without me, and the answers arrived unexpectedly, resulting in a two-part dialogue that ended up being a perfect reflection of the liminality that characterizes Lengua materna: a hybrid text that narrates the Cuban destinies of “Cuban” characters who stubbornly walk the blurred line that separates reality from dream, the national from the universal, and the possible from the impossible. Enamored of the fragment, proud of its impertinence, Lengua materna is a mix of infinite lines in flight that, like this pending conversation, invite us to read, not in search of the certainty of what was, but desiring the power of what is yet to be. 

Irina Troconis: The title of the first chapter, “Lengua madre,” which is also the title of the collection, alludes to a sense of community and belonging that the remaining chapters seem to both confirm and destabilize. That double game is reflected in the cover image, which belongs to the photographic series Pending Memories by Cuban artist Adrián Fernández, in which we see a structure that both clashes with the landscape and completes it, in the characters of Lengua materna—all imperfectly Cuban—and in its style, which is not that of a traditional essay, instead combines the essay format with fiction, autofiction, biography, and autobiography, resulting in a sort of speculative nonfiction. Why did you choose to use this format? What does it allow you to say and do that any of the above genres, individually, does not?

Osdany Morales: A few days ago I received an anonymous package. Something as simple as the absence of a sender is useful for moving us to the horror genre and creating the discomfort of an unexpected gift. It didn’t have an apartment number either. I saw it in the entryway, and as soon as I read my name, I picked it up automatically as if it were something I had ordered; it wasn’t until I opened it that the fear began to rise up. You could describe it as a cigar box with an acrylic lid, which instead of cigars contained a miniature bookcase, empty, that you were supposed to fill with the books included in the package. And when you’re done putting everything in place, you close the lid and shake it until all the books fall out; then you can put them back again however you like or leave them as they are. It was an anxiety bookshelf; a name that I can now say with complete naturalness, but which at the time I was only able to define by googling the object I had in front of me. Who sent me an anxiety bookshelf anonymously? As our conversation grew closer, I thought of the gift as a possible definition of national literature: a bookshelf that you arrive at without looking for it, and the most intuitive thing you can do with the anguish of its existence is to shake, alter, and then abandon it in some other order. I still don’t know who sent it.

It’s also useful for genres. The essay strives to be transparent, to arrive at the final consequences of an idea, and to demonstrate the strategies by which it advances to achieve it (its bibliographical appendix is an invitation to its reliability). For its part, fiction tends toward opaqueness, because one of its desires is infinity, the illusion that the reader finishes the book and that reality continues to exist elsewhere; it’s infinite not because its story continues but because even if everything in it ends, even so, we’re not part of its world. Papyrus was a sequence of fictions that an essay seeped in among; here the materials reverse that proportion, that is, a book of essays in which a fiction appears. And, yes, Adrián Fernández’s work is magnificent. He achieves a perfect balance between fiction and essay, taking as essay the visibility of the national landscape, and fiction being the artifact assembled from other fragments that weren’t there, announcing something we can only imagine. The title of his series, Pending Memories, also adjusts to a literature where, like imperfect national readers, we accumulate several memories yet to be recalled.

I.T.: Thinking a bit more about the subject of the national, in the chapter “Punto de fuga” you quote an interview with Guillermo Cabrera Infante in which he responds to a question asked about his unexpected, according to the interviewer, inclination toward eighteenth-century satire, as follows: “Look, my friend, who knows what to expect from a Cuban writer, or any writer anywhere?” And then you write: “You can expect anything from Cabrera Infante, because he can do anything.” This moment when we ask ourselves about the Cuban, or the Cubanness of literature, or Cuban literature, reappears when you mention Severo Sarduy (who talks about “writing in Cuban”) and in your reflection on a certain national gestuality in the face of reading that makes this a reading “in glimpses.” My question is: How do you negotiate in Lengua materna the relationship between national literature and world literature (whose canon includes several of the writers you mention, such as Italo Calvino and Gustave Flaubert)? What do you think is expected today of a Cuban writer and Cuban literature?

O.M.: As readers, for us there was a superimposition of two maps: one that separated national literature from world literature, and another, added to this one, that defined a border of accessibility, non-existence, or visibility between local and foreign publications. National reading was delimited by these two noncoinciding cartographies. Being a Cuban author did not guarantee inhabiting both territories. Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban writer and his books were not available anywhere; Gabriel García Márquez was a foreign author and there was a local edition of almost all of his works. Thus, national authors could become as distant as if they were foreigners, and others were nationalized at the discretion of the state publishing houses. In preuniversity, along with the single copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, we’d also pass around Three Trapped Tigers and Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada, and read them simultaneously as both Cuban and foreign novels. Of those you mention, Flaubert was accessible in old editions, Calvino was more difficult to find. I think the phrase with which Cabrera Infante opens his interview for The Paris Review still holds true; when faced with a Cuban writer, it’s best not to know what to expect.

I.T.: The titles of the three sections that make up Lengua materna (“Duelo,” “Sueños,” and “Fuga”) lead us to think of a “between” (between people/characters, between realities, between spaces) that produces a certain spectrality that’s never resolved or exorcised and that at various moments permeates the exiled condition of the characters. What relation do you see between the spectral and exile? Between memory and exile? 

O.M.: Somewhat like the spectrality of not having had this conversation in person and now redoing it in writing, the past is ghostlike to the extent that it is no longer here and is still here. Exile allows us to see the ghost better, which we all have, but those who have not experienced that severing are perhaps more unprepared for its appearance; it would also be a mistake to consider that it’s the only past, that is, the only time that can establish a specter. In “Exilio e insomnio,” I think that’s the text you’re referring to, I was interested in reading how the dream, having become a problem of successive migrations, could acquire specific and contradictory forms. In Miami, Lydia Cabrera writes a book about her methods to teleport herself to Cuba on sleepless nights, a desire difficult to imagine today, where the same place returns to dreams in the genre of a nightmare with no way out. Do you dream that you’re in Venezuela?

I.T.: Perhaps I did during the first years I lived outside the country, but I don’t remember anymore. What I do know is that nowadays I only dream I am in Venezuela when I am in Venezuela: a result, I think, of Venezuelan bureaucratic violence that obsessively manufactures increasingly creative obstacles to prevent those of us who are outside the country from being  able (or wanting, or dreaming) to return. And even when I dream I’m in Venezuela, I do so in a mixture of languages, which takes away any illusion of belonging. Which brings me to the theme of translation, which has been central to all your work and appears here again. In “Tres traductores,” for example, you mention that to translate Spanish is to invent a plural language that turns readers into outsiders. What relationship do you see between translation and the mother tongue? Can such a language be translated? Is the mother tongue a plural language?

O.M.: As an expression, “mother tongue” acquires various meanings throughout the book. Sometimes it is textually a language, or its reflection in the translations made by Cuban writers; at other times it is the availability of a writing to be part of our experience as readers. I think, by giving the book that title, I was referring to the possibility of exploring national literature (the anxiety bookshelf) as a mother tongue. I have also thought about a language that does not pass through speech, but through the silence of reading, as a sound of sight, a familiarity with a register that exists only on the page and that we would reject in orality, a familiar silence in the letter, but a silence that we know as a language of origin. 

I.T.: Tell us a little about the archive, if not forgotten, at least peripheral, which serves as a trigger in several of the chapters and which includes remarkably diverse materials, such as the script of the film Vanishing Point and the first scientific book written in Cuba. How did you make that selection? Why include them as part of the creation of this hybrid genre? Did you leave anything out that you would have liked to include?

O.M.: Just like the repetition of Cuba in the flaps of Calvino’s books, Vanishing Point persists in Cabrera Infante’s flaps. They’re interstices where the book as an object ends and the writing remains in that outer limit that is the flap. The archive, as a less stable place than its institution, is also dispersed in those notes, waiting to be assimilated. My selection was based on reading from minute fragments: What could be behind the unexpected place of birth, the script that repeats itself passively in the author’s bio, behind a brief scene in a work apparently totally read, in the fate of secondary characters, in the resistant solutions of translations, in scientific or administrative books from centuries ago when the discourse loses its usefulness and becomes literature. I think everything I wanted to include is there. I was also looking for a balance that would save it from being a book about eccentric examples and instead make known books eccentric, in order to reread them.

I.T.: I think part of that gesture of making the known eccentric occurs through the play with the animal. In “Doce animales,” you say, “When an animal appears in literature […], we think we are attending a concert in its honor and we end up reading about our extinction.” In Lengua materna, many animals appear, in that chapter and in others where we read about dogs, mosquitoes, roosters, swallows, etc. What becomes extinct with the appearance of these animals? And, more generally, what role does the animal play in this text (in relation to, for example, language, translation, and the archive)?

O.M.: The animal is literature’s other because it cannot write; man could be the animal that writes. Because of this ambiguous quality, its inscriptions always create a resistant zone in which to project the limits of writing. With their appearances we become extinct, we quarantine ourselves, we mutate, we cease to be who we were. In the book, their presence describes a journey through national literature by way of the appearance of some beasts. And, in other cases, they push the essay to the fiction of the archive, following a note in the Havana press of the eighteenth century that records a nest of swallows, following the connection between Cuba and the parrot in a famous story by Flaubert.

I.T.: Finally, speaking of the relationship between Flaubert and George Sand, you ask the great question “for whom does one write?” Now I want to ask you the same question, thinking about this collection and how the hybrid genre you create in it may—or may not—create a reader who is also hybrid and impertinent (who does not belong totally or perfectly). 

O.M.: I’ll read the part where the question appears, with the hope that what I’ve written better resolves the impromptu answer: 

His friend, the writer George Sand, had pointed out to him the rationality of his fictions, the inability of the cruelties (the sense of humor) of realism to excite the reader. Flaubert wrote this story to prove the opposite. “I want to arouse pity, to make sensitive souls weep, being one such soul myself” (translated from the original French by F. Brown). 

But its reader dies before he finishes “A Simple Heart.” In the same letter where he shares the plot he details the burial; he remembers her weeping and the rain: “It resembled a chapter of one of her books.” 

The situation surreptitiously answers the renewable question: for whom does one write? The anecdote reflects the fleeting traits of the reader. Flaubert was writing the story for George Sand, but she dies before he finishes it; the writer could have stopped writing, put down the pen, said at this point, my friend has died and will never read “A Simple Heart,” why go on? However, he finishes it, knowing that she will not read it. He perfects it, even, because he’s sure that his reader, the only one who had considered his previous book, The Temptation of St. Anthony, a masterpiece, will not be attentive to his sentences. It could be said that he continues to write because if he doesn’t finish it, she would be deader for him…, but that is only the profile of an offering. To finish writing, according to the terms in which the writing of “A Simple Heart” is completed, is the guarantee that reading occurs elsewhere, in an unreachable place, that of our ghosts. Death and reading are not the same, but the dead and the reader are equally inaccessible, and that distance is only established when the writing is finished.

Translated by George Henson

Photo: Cuban writer Osdany Morales.