heavy shadows and deaths dancing
on points of ice and Nordic spears.
To the beat of drums of boiling metal,
you emptied rhymes over the sleeping irons.
Brief question in November about a dead man
Today: day of the dead.
I wonder what spirits my grandfather
Paulino Saravia Choquehuanca
is drinking underground?
to the beat of what music will his bones break?
under what silences of moss and dried flowers?
July 17, 1994
I have died of memory,
pierced by the iron,
the lead of forgetting
the nails of old images:
an officer inciting us, a diploma
for our brave sacrifice.
A chola shot in the forehead,
a dog with a crown of intestines,
a street where the stones
bleed out human salt.
For a long time
I have been living these deaths.
Colonel Muñoz,
blessed be the worms that guard you.
Major Trifón Echalar, don’t you wake up some nights
with your throat filled with blood?
Captain Almaraz, mestizo steeped in hatred
are you still bullying your company
of ninety terrified boys?
Lieutenant Torres, does the patria exist?
what is this rag we swear allegiance to?
what patria do we use to justify ourselves?
The Salt of the South
Salt of tears,
salt of rage,
salt of love with skin unscathed,
salt of Sunday and chicken chanka.
The Illimani,
is it salt, is it sugar?
or is it only a solemn cloud,
barely clad in stone
to give weight to our dreams?
Sal…_____________________________Salt
salir…____________________________depart
ir…_________________________________go
irse…_____________________________leave
ser…________________________________be
Sur…_____________________________South
leave from these lives
sun that dawns south
drying the night, drinking the shadow,
drinking sun that leaves behind
the salt of its steps
on the crust of this earth.
In the south salt
is fire and lies
it is wrath and paths
it is desire and screams
it is crying and decrees
it is oblivion and entrails
it is living and leaving
it is death and word.
Brief reflection on the art of being Bolivian at four in the afternoon in Montreal on a Sixth of August
The wood is golden, like brown skin in the August sun.
The hours drink the afternoon
as it hangs its clouds and birds
out on the balcony.
It is August and I should feel patriotic,
tricolour and Bolivian.
I wait.
It might rain.
In Paris they drink wine at the Embassy
and a secretary says on the phone:
“just one thing… it’s almost over” (you better not come)
To be Bolivian in August in Paris is to drink some singani,
run into some zampoña-wielding Andeans in the Odeon metro
to want to cry a little
and feel dry
like a river of burning stones
dreaming of some rain.
To be Bolivian in Washington
is to eat salteñas around ten
near the Ballston subway,
dance cuecas at night,
get drunk and feel like you’d die
to see Cala Cala again
and then sleep
under an alka seltzer moon.
The afternoon in Montreal
waves shirts and the ties with their fetishes
turn augural with starch.
In a hotel tonight
someone will sing at the top of their lungs a frog anthem,
and some will sit down and say nothing,
furious to be so boliches.
Then there will be chicharrón, beer
(imagined paceña)
and somewhere
someone will invent illegal chuños,
disguised locotos.
Perhaps to be Bolivian
is a matter of stomach.
To be Bolivian is to be a believing devil
eating fricassee
an anxious brown-skinned man, a melancholy Pepino.
Four in the afternoon
a forced time to want to feel Bolivian.
A little.
Approach to nostalgia
I look for another sky behind this sky when the air,
the first air, runs between my fingers again
coming down from the mountains.
I would turn this chest into a profane, beautiful, emphatic drum
“You’re a philosopher,”
Too much hard labour and not enough food.
“Philosopher,” the mestizo said to himself
on an Altiplano pierced by quenas and blood
soaking through a simple land
where bones become roots.
Horn,
pututu on the mountain, the one that terrifies those who believe
this is an ailing people.
Admire this beautiful jaw, the poetic traitor serpent,
that not of river or water, not of salt or tin
but of verse and Garcilaso,
of fog, swords and blazons
hides more than it shows and stills more than it sings.
This tongue, rustling softly, doesn’t know—poor thing—
(nor does the mestizo, son of philosohistory and the assault
on the flesh)
that underneath our learned skin,
—brown fish, blinded by so much salt—
there is another tongue, that of a world captured
by force of palace, grammar and good governance.
Sustained by the false rib of an armed Adam,
we awake as flashing devils, with oil-bearing mouth
and a sterile mineshaft, extending into the infinite void,
hanging between our legs.
¡Indio! You must insult yourself.
“That’s what I’ve always told you!”
Cueca danced in August by Doña Memoria and Don Colononel, with bullet accompaniment
Who cares about the dead?
Who cares about
the wind split by an August of bullets?
They came for him on a Thursday.
At Regiment Bolívar de Viacha, they beat my father
hard on the knees with a metal pipe, until
butterflies came out of his wounds and his children’s
faces floated in the air singing parts of Christmas carols.
It was Saturday when his colonel stars struck
and crushed the lips and skull of my cousin,
so close and so removed; photographs fell on the ground
invisible ones his brain had stored from so many birthdays,
of chairos and Sundays and lunch. No one could find
his missing eye. It has remained
in the air, floating in our memory.
&nb
sp; In August they killed a teacher. He was found
with books in his intestines and on his lips agonizing
verses that will never return to Quebec.
He died kissing the stones, looking at this earth
and though already stiff, they kicked on and broke
the silence of his ribs, the dreamers.
On a Monday, de facto knives gutted an
Indian. Searching for gold, or perhaps silver, but they only found
a corn huayño waiting for the carnival of the year.
The chiwankos cried a golden yaraví,
but the colononel didn’t understand he was setting on fire
among the Natives of Tolata the fertility of the earth.
When the fourteen bodies fell
somewhere in a cemetery whose name
no one cares to remember,
the colononel ate his boots, licked
his sated sex and became general
and the fourteen bodies, with eyes wide open,
their voices hoarse from so much screaming
cried flowers and candles
and turned off the night.
Who cares about the dead?
One hundred years of oblivion shine in the pupils
of the great General Hugo Banzer Suárez
and his useless artifices
of democratic vegetables.
Who cares about the dead?
Who cares
if his excellency
the post-candidate
former president,
neo-democrat made of cheese and military fang
has already presided
over the valley of death?
Long live democracy!
Death to the dead!
Eulogy to the photograph, the raincoat and the absent hat
To whom?
Who will be with me when a comet passes by?
Who will help me work the forge of words?
Not the snow captured in my bones.
Who with the blood and the oil
and the radical veins of the old people at the hour
of the main corner?
Not the black thorn of the naked vine.
This sun,
dry, primary knot
who does it belong to?
Not to the steps of Jaime Sáenz,
not to the beard
or to the migrant hat.
And the numb liquor?
And the paint brushes at dawn?
Where the fervour
of the seer reader
of leaves and misfortunes?
Who with crazy Borda?
Not the frozen pupil
of many a fallen star.
Morenada Dancers
(Dosage: your visual ingestion must be accompanied by the rhythm of a morenada or, if appropriate, by a saya yungueña)
Masks, long feathers as the morning clears,
fireworks, stones, people, dancers...
dance of the slaves! (and yet they’re not slaves).
Splendid drum,
burnished indigenous morenada
in which mirrors and rattles tremble in one arm
with blind memories of black Africans and chains.
(Bones at the bottom of the centuries,
in the shipwrecked night of the planks,
breathing brine the Yoruba piled down below,
sowing the deep-sea trenches with panthers and spells
in the womb of the Atlantic fish.)
Did they speak Spanish, Portuguese, German or English, those mouths that still chain, all of them nights from other regions, all of them peopled by bronzes and whips, imaginary nights blooming now in the steps and rhythm of indigenous people dancing now in the Andes, on the quiet waves of a sea of height and straw?
Their bodies are filled
with rhythms and spells
miner’s boots,
abarcas and rooted heels?
This is a morenada! Morenada of indigenous people and mestizos with dreams of black Africans who were dreaming of spirits, birds, lions and rivers where time pours its infinite flow before the final wreck.
They are gods, more than gods, Orishas no longer of the
__element of Heraclitus
but of absences in the air, Oludumare, Yemoja
veins of milk and thunder sunk under the earth
where no one comes by to draw blood from the seam
only Tío does, they say, but that’s another rhythm and
__another erected god.
Be they gods, sad or slaves,
that’s the dream of the black Africans of the Niger
of the waters asleep at the bottom
dreaming now a dream of salt
in which they are Indians, they are dust
dream that it’s tomorrow, the rattles are clattering
and they are dancing an Andean morenada.
There are masks, long feathers,
costumes, fireworks and bands.
Dance of black Africans! (yet they are not black Africans).
First variation on an imagined encounter with Tarijan music
“Porque van diez años
que dejé mi tierra.
La gente me mira
con ojos de ausencia.”
“Because ten years have passed
since I left my country.
People look at me
With the eyes of absence.”
“Don’t say
you don’t remember me,” I will say to you.
By the first ice-cream seller,
don Alonso de Mendoza watches us
captain of stone and peninsula.
Time is the sabre of silence.
Under Calle Potosí the imprisoned river runs,
the devalued throat of the centuries.
La Paz under a government of
burning flies,
San Francisco of the broken faith
the cholas in the silpancho trench.
You don’t remember that gate, on Evaristo Valle,
the hallway at midnight,
where my hands,
blind fireflies
with urgent veins,
populated the constellation of your shoulders
and your modesty
fell asleep in my wild tenderness?
What will I say to you?
I know.
Here is my photo (a blot of stamp and ink).
A bad photographer,
a passport, sea salt.
Our incomplete farewell and hurried old age
No? Doesn’t ring a bell?
What do you mean?
You don’t know me?
But if it’s me!
no?
Ah! well, I’m sorry for the confusion,
I just thought you were…
To the happy few that rule volibia
(Also known as the government, the elite, the bourgeoisie, the rosca, the thieves, the milicos, the gringos’ bootlickers, the oligarchs, the mafia, etc., etc., etc.)
Scab, puddle of important frogs
with a green, English-speaking beamgod
apes, elegant decadent cows
with a kleptocratic thirst burning
in their bellies bursting flags.
Ah, paisanos bovinos y livianos
important men with wallets
almost american the bolivians
who lick as modest as an appendix
the rifles, decrees and laws
the civil architects use to steal.
Their thanta viceroy democracy
&n
bsp; box, paper, pencils
so easy to plunder, like saying yes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alejandro Saravia was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and lives in Montreal, where he works as a journalist. Saravia is the author of eight volumes of poetry. His trilingual (French-Spanish-English) poetry collection Lettres de Nootka (2008) has been studied in various Canadian universities. His most recent book of poems is L’homme polyphonique (2014). Saravia has given readings at the Havana Festival of Poetry and Art, the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal, and the Rhythm and Colour Festival at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
María José Giménez is co-director of the Apostles Review in Montreal and assistant translation editor for Anomaly (formerly known as Drunken Boat). A poet and translator, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Endowment. Born and raised in Venezuela, María José studied at universities in the United States and Canada, and currently lives in western Massachusetts.
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