The first time I read Fabián Severo I was going from train to train on a trip through Buenos Aires Province. Malena, a Uruguayan friend of mine, had traveled to Uruguay with an assignment from me: to get her hands on Viralata. “Vira-what?” Malena asked. “Viralata. I’ve been told it’s a book written in Portuñol by a countryman of yours, from the border.” That was it. Malena made her trip and brought back the blue-faced book with a badge on the front reading “Premio Nacional de Literatura.” The novel, no more than one hundred fifty pages long, was written entirely in a language unknown to the literary world: Portuñol.
Portuñol, as a border phenomenon, was both revealing and stimulating to me, to say the least. Also revealing was the train journey I took with a group of Brazilian ladies when I learned that, in Portuguese, viralata was the word for a mongrel dog, a mutt. I identified with this because I myself was a sort of viralata in Buenos Aires. Well, not technically; I had come from Colombia on a grant to do my master’s in Argentina, I couldn’t complain about my living conditions, I lived in a studio apartment in the capital city and my only job was to study and get to know people. But migrating, even within the same continent, felt like a kind of orphanhood across distance. It was rather intimidating, but still, as the months passed by, dwelling in this new space became an illegible brand. Migrant. A sort of mixture, of being in-between, as Anzaldúa would say: in-between countries, families, traditions, ways of saying the same thing and naming other things. That’s when I thought viralata could be a middle name.
Viralata (Estuario Editora, 2018) struck me as a book from the future. A time when, entirely mixed together, we can understand each other at the edges, and nobody tries to define the ways we write as correct, incorrect, or acceptable. In Viralata, I found a border thick with artists with “Brazilianized” singing voices, who write with the structure of Portuñol but with interferences from Spanish. Ten hours by bus from the Retiro station to the Uruguayan city of Rivera, along the dividing line between Uruguay and Brazil, lay the frontier universe that gave us Fabián Severo, the author of the first novel written in Portuñol to receive a national prize for literature.
But what did it contain? What was the novel about? Many members of Montevideo’s literary scene were asking thsemselves the same question, and many people from the border also wanted to know. When the novel reached the border towns, it was harshly criticized by more traditional educators, defenders of linguistic “correctness” who rebuked Severo for, in their view, mocking them in his book, for writing as they spoke, “as if everyone spoke that way,” “as if they wrote that way.” Many border-dwellers who already felt the shame of bearing a “poorly spoken” language on their bodies, their experiences, and their identities felt the book was a joke at their expense. Others, however, did not. On the contrary, they identified with this novel that told of loss, a story woven out of the memories of Fabi and his mother in Artigas (the second largest city on said border), the story of a little boy who grows up and loses his mother due to the neglect of a social system that marginalized them for being from the border, for speaking Portuñol, for apparently being different from all other Uruguayans.
The border-dwellers were bearers of a language considered “low-quality,” not just in their everyday experience in Uruguay and Brazil, but also in the history of their wandering ancestors who had reached the region as enslaved people, smugglers, and workers of the land.
Portuñol was the mother tongue of many border artists: not a dialect or a case of diglossia, but their language, plain and simple. A language that was being born, and whose speakers were mistreated by the citizens of capital cities, as the formation of the independent states of South America in the early nineteenth century demanded that institutions work together to consolidate new national identities. Portuñol was a language penalized by Uruguay’s dictatorship, which violently condemned all those who spoke Portuguese or anything similar on Uruguayan soil. For artists, writing in Portuñol meant spending years writing in Spanish just to finally declare, “I’m tired. I feel better in my mother tongue.” Musicians suffered the same way, but there was a different kind of freedom in their orality.
The Portuñol language—or, rather, the Portuñol languages, given the wide variety of dialects that exist in the area—was not only the product of the interaction between populations trapped between two great empires disputing the border as an economic stepping stone from the Brazilian interior to the Río de la Plata. It was also the language of smugglers, of illegals; Portuñol, what’s more, bore the stamp of a trade language. When Portuguese landowners spoke Portuguese to their workers, what language were said workers supposed to answer in if they were on the Uruguayan side of the map? In the language that earned them their daily bread, which was, in this case, Portuguese.
Fabián and other border artists have written in their mother tongue and spoken of the border, of their neighbors, of the stories that their elders didn’t want to remember. They have sought, in the memories of peoples and territories, the footprints of their dead, their suffering, their rootless tree:
Mi historia impieza el día que la maestra nos enseñó el árbol de la familia de unos reye. En el pizarrón, dibujó los rey, despós los padre del rey y de la reina, los avo, y así siguió enllenando el pasado con gajos que se iban tan para atrás, que terminaban cerca de Dios.
Cuando yo pedí para mi madre que me ayudara completar el árbol con el nombre de los familiar, ella me miró raro y me disse que despós. Al rato, yo volví a pedir y ella que ahora no porque istaba haciendo cualquier bobada. Intonce, yo intendí y inventé mi árbol parecido al de los reye.
Para la maestra que corrigió mis deber, yo venía de un álamo completo y firme, que protegía los hueso de mi casa.
[My story starts the day the teacher showed us the family tree of some kings. On the chalkboard, she drew the kings, then the king and queen’s parents, their grandparents, and so she went on filling in the past with branches that went so far back they ended up close to God.
When I asked my mother to help me make a tree with the names of our family, she looked at me funny and told me later. Later on, I asked her again and she said not now because she was doing some other silly thing. Then I understood and I made up my own tree, like the one with the kings.
To the teacher who graded my homework, I would come from a full, strong poplar, one that protected the bones of my house.]
(Viralata, p. 11)
Thus begins Viralata, with a made-up poplar, a rootless, scattered tree, with a past silenced by the elders. There was something in their border memories they didn’t like to remember, and it was a product of the marginal space they had occupied in history, with the structural violences that affected their domestic and public lives. And there was an imbalance: at home, the border-dwellers spoke Portuñol, but in the plazas and public spaces they had no choice but to use Spanish.
This book, like the work of composers and musicians like Chito de Mello, Ernesto Díaz, and Yoni de Mello, lays bare open wounds and the stitches between languages. It reveals that all these bodies of work represent practices of communality.
In The Restless Dead, translated into English by Robin Myers, Cristina Rivera Garza refers to an interesting definition of this practice of communality that develops along borders:
The very definition of communality in relation to writing […] requires both exploration and definition. […] Authors engaged in this conversation have rightfully abandoned the notion of the individual and have in turn emphasized various practices of dis-identification as a basis for the production of alternative subjectivities, as Rancière argued. Here, being-in-common is a taut, dynamic, and ultimately unfinished process. (2013)
In his work, Fabián makes evident the practices of communality undertaken with others who speak the language, who are his neighbors, characters who constitute the universe in Portuñol. But he also appeals to the authors of the Uruguayan lettered tradition with whom, in a sort of collaborative imaginative process, he constructs his place, his border, his frontier of dust and earth.
Anzaldúa says of Chicanos, “When other races have given up their tongue, we’ve kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture” (2016). Portuñol has lived under the hammer blows of two linguistic histories that vie for authority over the words that belong to the border language: Portuguese and Spanish, the two “correct” languages that fight for ownership of the “correct” words, leaving out the groups that write in the interstices of language.
The border people, as smuggler communities, weave practices of communality not only in their contraband bonds of economic survival, but also in their bonds of artistic and textual solidarity. In the border artist of the north there coexist different languages in perpetual transformation; a contraband culture has formed his language, a culture of wanderers, an age-old tradition on foot:
Así nos hicieron. Una mitad de cada cosa, sin ser cosa intera nunca. Todos viralata como el cusco de los Quevedo. Cada uno trae una mitad mas no incontra nunca la otra metade. Viemo pra se ir, mientras cuchilamos en la vereda, isperando el milagre.
[That’s how they made us. Half of each, never the whole thing. All us viralatas like the Quevedos’ mutt. Every one of us has one half but never finds the other. We come so we can go, while we doze off on the porch, waiting for a miracle.]
(Viralata, p. 12)
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
