IN SEARCH OF THE PRESENT

I begin with two words that all men have uttered since the dawn of humanity: thank you. The word gratitude has equivalents in every language and in each tongue the range of meanings is abundant. In the Romance languages this breadth spans the spiritual and the physical, from the divine grace conceded to men to save them from error and death, to the ****** grace of the dancing girl or the feline leaping through the undergrowth. Grace means pardon, forgiveness, favour, benefice, inspiration; it is a form of address, a pleasing style of speaking or painting, a gesture expressing politeness, and, in short, an act that reveals spiritual goodness. Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift. The person who receives it, the favoured one, is grateful for it; if he is not base, he expresses gratitude. That is what I am doing at this very moment with these weightless words. I hope my emotion compensates their weightlessness. If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement. And also an indefinable mixture of fear, respect and surprise at finding myself here before you, in this place which is the home of both Swedish learning and world literature.

Languages are vast realities that transcend those political and historical entities we call nations. The European languages we speak in the Americas illustrate this. The special position of our literatures when compared to those of England, Spain, Portugal and France depends precisely on this fundamental fact: they are literatures written in transplanted tongues. Languages are born and grow from the native soil, nourished by a common history. The European languages were rooted out from their native soil and their own tradition, and then planted in an unknown and unnamed world: they took root in the new lands and, as they grew within the societies of America, they were transformed. They are the same plant yet also a different plant. Our literatures did not passively accept the changing fortunes of the transplanted languages: they participated in the process and even accelerated it. They very soon ceased to be mere transatlantic reflections: at times they have been the negation of the literatures of Europe; more often, they have been a reply.

In spite of these oscillations the link has never been broken. My classics are those of my language and I consider myself to be a descendant of Lope and Quevedo, as any Spanish writer would ... yet I am not a Spaniard. I think that most writers of Spanish America, as well as those from the United States, Brazil and Canada, would say the same as regards the English, Portuguese and French traditions. To understand more clearly the special position of writers in the Americas, we should think of the dialogue maintained by Japanese, Chinese or Arabic writers with the different literatures of Europe. It is a dialogue that cuts across multiple languages and civilizations. Our dialogue, on the other hand, takes place within the same language. We are Europeans yet we are not Europeans. What are we then? It is difficult to define what we are, but our works speak for us.

In the field of literature, the great novelty of the present century has been the appearance of the American literatures. The first to appear was that of the English-speaking part and then, in the second half of the 20th Century, that of Latin America in its two great branches: Spanish America and Brazil. Although they are very different, these three literatures have one common feature: the conflict, which is more ideological than literary, between the cosmopolitan and nativist tendencies, between Europeanism and Americanism. What is the legacy of this dispute? The polemics have disappeared; what remain are the works. Apart from this general resemblance, the differences between the three literatures are multiple and profound. One of them belongs more to history than to literature: the development of Anglo-American literature coincides with the rise of the United States as a world power whereas the rise of our literature coincides with the political and social misfortunes and upheavals of our nations. This proves once more the limitations of social and historical determinism: the decline of empires and social disturbances sometimes coincide with moments of artistic and literary splendour. Li-Po and Tu Fu witnessed the fall of the Tang dynasty; Velázquez painted for Felipe IV; Seneca and Lucan were contemporaries and also victims of Nero. Other differences are of a literary nature and apply more to particular works than to the character of each literature. But can we say that literatures have a character? Do they possess a set of shared features that distinguish them from other literatures? I doubt it. A literature is not defined by some fanciful, intangible character; it is a society of unique works united by relations of opposition and affinity.

The first basic difference between Latin-American and Anglo-American literature lies in the diversity of their origins. Both begin as projections of Europe. The projection of an island in the case of North America; that of a peninsula in our case. Two regions that are geographically, historically and culturally eccentric. The origins of North America are in England and the Reformation; ours are in Spain, Portugal and the Counter-Reformation. For the case of Spanish America I should briefly mention what distinguishes Spain from other European countries, giving it a particularly original historical identity. Spain is no less eccentric than England but its eccentricity is of a different kind. The eccentricity of the English is insular and is characterized by isolation: an eccentricity that excludes. Hispanic eccentricity is peninsular and consists of the coexistence of different civilizations and different pasts: an inclusive eccentricity. In what would later be Catholic Spain, the Visigoths professed the heresy of Arianism, and we could also speak about the centuries of ******* by Arabic civilization, the influence of Jewish thought, the Reconquest, and other characteristic features.

Hispanic eccentricity is reproduced and multiplied in America, especially in those countries such as Mexico and Peru, where ancient and splendid civilizations had existed. In Mexico, the Spaniards encountered history as well as geography. That history is still alive: it is a present rather than a past. The temples and gods of pre-Columbian Mexico are a pile of ruins, but the spirit that breathed life into that world has not disappeared; it speaks to us in the hermetic language of myth, legend, forms of social coexistence, popular art, customs. Being a Mexican writer means listening to the voice of that present, that presence. Listening to it, speaking with it, deciphering it: expressing it ... After this brief digression we may be able to perceive the peculiar relation that simultaneously binds us to and separates us from the European tradition.

This consciousness of being separate is a constant feature of our spiritual history. Separation is sometimes experienced as a wound that marks an internal division, an anguished awareness that invites self-examination; at other times it appears as a challenge, a spur that incites us to action, to go forth and encounter others and the outside world. It is true that the feeling of separation is universal and not peculiar to Spanish Americans. It is born at the very moment of our birth: as we are wrenched from the Whole we fall into an alien land. This experience becomes a wound that never heals. It is the unfathomable depth of every man; all our ventures and exploits, all our acts and dreams, are bridges designed to overcome the separation and reunite us with the world and our fellow-beings. Each man's life and the collective history of mankind can thus be seen as attempts to reconstruct the original situation. An unfinished and endless cure for our divided condition. But it is not my intention to provide yet another description of this feeling. I am simply stressing the fact that for us this existential condition expresses itself in historical terms. It thus becomes an awareness of our history. How and when does this feeling appear and how is it transformed into consciousness? The reply to this double-edged question can be given in the form of a theory or a personal testimony. I prefer the latter: there are many theories and none is entirely convincing.

The feeling of separation is bound up with the oldest and vaguest of my memories: the first cry, the first scare. Like every child I built emotional bridges in the imagination to link me to the world and to other people. I lived in a town on the outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapidated house that had a jungle-like garden and a great room full of books. First games and first lessons. The garden soon became the centre of my world; the library, an enchanted cave. I used to read and play with my cousins and schoolmates. There was a fig tree, temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three ash trees, a nightshade, a pomegranate tree, wild grass and prickly plants that produced purple grazes. Adobe walls. Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sinbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present.

When was the spell broken? Gradually rather than suddenly. It is hard to accept being betrayed by a friend, deceived by the woman we love, or that the idea of freedom is the mask of a tyrant. What we call "finding out" is a slow and tricky process because we ourselves are the accomplices of our errors and deceptions. Nevertheless, I can remember fairly clearly an incident that was the first sign, although it was quickly forgotten. I must have been about six when one of my cousins who was a little older showed me a North American magazine with a photograph of soldiers marching along a huge avenue, probably in New York. "They've returned from the war" she said. This handful of words disturbed me, as if they foreshadowed the end of the world or the Second Coming of Christ. I vaguely knew that somewhere far away a war had ended a few years earlier and that the soldiers were marching to celebrate their victory. For me, that war had taken place in another time, not here and now. The photo refuted me. I felt literally dislodged from the present.

From that moment time began to fracture more and more. And there was a plurality of spaces. The experience repeated itself more and more frequently. Any piece of news, a harmless phrase, the headline in a newspaper: everything proved the outside world's existence and my own unreality. I felt that the world was splitting and that I did not inhabit the present. My present was disintegrating: real time was somewhere else. My time, the time of the garden, the fig tree, the games with friends, the drowsiness among the plants at three in the afternoon under the sun, a fig torn open (black and red like a live coal but one that is sweet and fresh): this was a fictitious time. In spite of what my senses told me, the time from over there, belonging to the others, was the real one, the time of the real present. I accepted the inevitable: I became an adult. That was how my expulsion from the present began.

It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality. For us, as Spanish Americans, the real present was not in our own countries: it was the time lived by others, by the English, the French and the Germans. It was the time of New York, Paris, London. We had to go and look for it and bring it back home. These years were also the years of my discovery of literature. I began writing poems. I did not know what made me write them: I was moved by an inner need that is difficult to define. Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.

What is modernity? First of all it is an ambiguous term: there are as many types of modernity as there are societies. Each has its own. The word's meaning is uncertain and arbitrary, like the name of the period that precedes it, the Middle Ages. If we are modern when compared to medieval times, are we perhaps the Middle Ages of a future modernity? Is a name that changes with time a real name? Modernity is a word in search of its meaning. Is it an idea, a mirage or a moment of history? Are we the children of modernity or its creators? Nobody knows for sure. It doesn't matter much: we follow it, we pursue it. For me at that time modernity was fused with the present or rather produced it: the present was its last supreme flower. My case is neither unique nor exceptional: from the Symbolist period, all modern poets have chased after that magnetic and elusive figure that fascinates them. Baudelaire was the first. He was also the first to touch her and discover that she is nothing but time that crumbles in one's hands. I am not going to relate my adventures in pursuit of modernity: they are not very different from those of other 20th-Century poets. Modernity has been a universal passion. Since 1850 she has been our goddess and our demoness. In recent years, there has been an attempt to exorcise her and there has been much talk of "postmodernism". But what is postmodernism if not an even more modern modernity?

For us, as Latin Americans, the search for poetic modernity runs historically parallel to the repeated attempts to modernize our countries. This tendency begins at the end of the 18th Century and includes Spain herself. The United States was born into modernity and by 1830 was already, as de Tocqueville observed, the womb of the future; we were born at a moment when Spain and Portugal were moving away from modernity. This is why there was frequent talk of "Europeanizing" our countries: the modern was outside and had to be imported. In Mexican history this process begins just before the War of Independence. Later it became a great ideological and political debate that passionately divided Mexican society during the 19th Century. One event was to call into question not the legitimacy of the reform movement but the way in which it had been implemented: the Mexican Revolution. Unlike its 20th-Century counterparts, the Mexican Revolution was not really the expression of a vaguely utopian ideology but rather the explosion of a reality that had been historically and psychologically repressed. It was not the work of a group of ideologists intent on introducing principles derived from a political theory; it was a popular uprising that unmasked what was hidden. For this very reason it was more of a revelation than a revolution. Mexico was searching for the present outside only to find it within, buried but alive. The search for modernity led

Real ignorant
Cuz society ignorant
Far from a repent
My sins is my amends
But then again
I see the spirits tacklin'.
Tryna break me in
With the demons hangin'
With Satan
But I denied gracefully faithfully
I let my foes see
The guns if you slow on they come
Up so don't run up
I'm finna erupt flows volcano
Strong as Cano mortal combat
Yeah I Sinbad cuz I never had
A dad in my life
My rhymes is life so bump
Haters who want me knifed
Back stabbers
But I dodged the daggers
Sip henny but don't stagger
Smooth as **** Jagger
Hate naggers don dada
Leavin' the haters with nada
I gotta lotta
Flows to go so check what's in store .yeah

Yeah like Frank I be
An American gangster
Far from a prankster
Free range entertainer
Watch me drain ya
Energy to those who
Mean nothing to me
At best they My mini'mes
I chill where the hustlers be
Totin' guns so My enemies
Flea tombstones received
Smokin' trees
So I have better oxygen to breathe
Stay away from me
If you ain't about gettin' monopoly
Or property
Money ain't a option to me
Been cuttin' corners since I was three
Gotta few dimes with me wifey
Material starting my own black imperial
Far from comical made in the slums
They said id amount to none
But I came out reigning as the victorious one

Above the bridge railing I stare down into the silently yawning, whirling throats; a whirling, centrifugal vortex-wheel drags me along, pulls me, and pulls! Balanced on a thin, snow-white blade, thus is he who was cast out into life! Gathering crumbs of breadcrumbs through a lifetime, Till Death, like a lawful chase, takes him! With narrowing eyes curiously fixed on me, the wan shadows of shipwrecked souls Past-remembering, meek shadows emerge from mire-thrown foam; Witnessing guardians of the possible that is!


As aerial-gymnast-samples, we may all thus balance the many certain possibilities; at another planned turn, veronal, foam of water, or poison is of no use - with conscious cowardice, human dignity confidently fails us! I stumble between reckless tumbles with purpose. I would even lie flat, like Sinbad, like a petty nobody, and probe the beating heart-******* of angelic ladies! May I remain in my falling, fallen life who I was: an eternal child in an arrogant adult world!


Thick and unsteady even now is the black, roiling stream. I feel that I have often run out of strength to face every trial like a murdering *******! The old Danube still murmurs and calls me to it! - Nowadays, the circus and the bustling ant-hill of the great world are so merged that the heart of the prodigal little man is always trembling, when he looks into the flashing, decaying Tomorrows with dignified and faltering eyes!

Well it's pretty cold over here,
my doubt makes it difficult to draw near,
revelling in the *** of the ruminate that I retch,
wondering why I want to stay a wretch,
heeding fables,
constantly unstable in many ways,
as I mule and bray away my days,
wasting time looking for a needle in the hay,
worried about wheat and chaff,
never about the rod and staff,
forgetting what the Miller said,
the ball is in your court,
stick to your field old sport.

I dined the dark with the swine,
as we crafted the mud and mocked the divine,
on lonely island we speak of filthy things,
the kind that should be kept private,
like pirates out for innocence,
we burn our idle incense,
looking for a pharaoh to harrow,
any Jack or sparrow,
hovering to find any hose here,
little loose rats into the water with the Pied Piper,
we **** the fishmonger with fear,
he was meant to guard his stock,
we bribe the shepherd as if he never heard,
meant to guard his flock,
he probably never cared.

Casting out our cunning lines,
telling them to enter in,
but never through the gate,
hoping they'll take the bait,
carrot and stick,
on to the slave ship,
men of clouded Eris,
forever luring sinbad.

Timon and Pumba said hakuna matata,
that option was to obvious for my ominous oblanganta,
the rooster crows when it sees the raven,
but we forget our roles when we're in a haven,
rafiki said look beyond what you see,
but I was in the desert and the thirst was real,
you could say that I was in my feels,
I chased the mirage,
missed the ever open oasis,
still thirsty,
it didn't lust.
listening to my logic,
ate the food on the palace plate,
who can relate?

My spider senses were webbed by the sandman as I drilled for digital  dopamine to derail my depression,
dusty roads laid in the distance as my discernment was damaged.
Now I'm afraid to have a dialogue because I'm no longer used to analogue,
fight fleeting.

I'm fed up of spinning in cycles,
gotta check my psyche like Nike,
can't bet on chance,
I need discipline unlike Mike.

Do you want more?
I scream encore,
wondering why I've become so numb,
why I've lost control,
walking the isle of isolation,
hiding from the groom,
even after all the light,
all I saw was gloom,
tossed by the wind and waves,  
I hide in the bush from Ned like Homer,
I could make a joke of this quagmire,
but I really feel like Gomer.
Sometimes you have to leave the cast if you feel like you'll remain half the man.

With all my getting I never understand,
I just peter in the storm,
hoping He will stretch out His mighty hand.

Hold up hold up
I see the world corrupt
Since
I took a sip of the potion
I gotta swole up
Mobs like Luciano
Sound the instrumental
Watch the vocals turn detrimental
Servin' peens
Lyrically dumpin'
Out my magazine
You who I be
Straight wizardy
Fools thought i was soft
But I was taught
Combat so now I sinbad
Chased afta things
I never had
I scarfaces like Brad feel the brass
If you wanna be put on
Your ***

The world is mine.....
The world is mine suckas
Rack up
My crew be thick don't slack up
The world is mine
Dollaz stack up
So check yoself
Before ya wacked up

Yosef the don
The only one
Puttin' suckas through pun
And stun
Any poems
I'm so deep you'll love em
They wanna keep me
Bound but I'm above em
Drowning competitions
So I shove em
Out the scene
Puffin nature's green
Still wear guess baggy jeans
I'm old school ghetto as
Rallo
Many claim leadership
But they just follow
Others after creeds
I been a soldier
So I know when ******* feeds
Greeds
Made from a ***** deeds
Romance without finance
Is a slim chance
Its stuck in a fire with the devils dance
Fools out with open hands
Reeady take a reprimand
But I stand strong even grippin'
The slim
Knockin out flakes the world is mine

The world is mine.....
The world is mine suckas
Rack up
My crew be thick don't slack up
The world is mine
Dollaz stack up
So check yoself
Before ya wacked up

Check it I ain't no joke
You see from the lyrics that smoke
And make any haters provoke
Got em in a choke hold
Rhymes is bold once the stories told
I create the crease n make em all fold
My styles wild funky tell me about oooo child
Things are gonna get brighter
Set the my dynasty so I can retire
Hot as a fire blazing through paragraph
Suckas didnt get the last laugh
Bombs flows like Baghdad
Clean as Sinbad and who dat?
Thought they rock the mic like me
I'm the punisher from the fifth demenision see
I got minds hypnotized by the time realize
I'll be over the horiz' on lyrics made for stunned
Make emcees run a marathon
Once they hear my machine gun
Of lyrics couldn't even clear it
The smog that is word to my unborn kids
Look what the lyrical arsenal did
Rippin' through stages battlin' any ages
Trap in cages
Of my mind concealed and confined
With the funky medina
Check your antidote
As i up the rap ranks cuz
I ain't no joke



Tongues punching a rhymes
Destined to be mine sound mind
Beat yours everytime through each and every line youll fine
The dopest not many could cope to this
Some say ludicrous others think of it as a diss
Mad cuz they girls blowing me a kiss
And they reminisce
All over me got the pete that's ready to rock who's gone top?
Me if setting the crop far from a slop
Make em like floor and watch me mop
Out competition one man commission
Hurry up yall come see what ya missin'
Jewelry glistening
Anointing pates likeit was a christening
Many wasnt listening
Crossem hang em up like crucifixion
While others in a smote just take notes
Cuz big yosef a rhymer n I ain't no joke

No poem after twenty-two

I'm no rimbaud

I'm ****** ******, A *** nation

I am the Sinbad

keep prayin', Feed the wall

Dream catcher made of spider eyes

nightmares all night long
...

alone in my bed

deamons scream in my head

...
thin white duke

all in black

when your times come

there is no going back

...

**** hello poetry if they don't like me

I don't like me too

looks not books

***** and boots

boys are on toys

nails
,

crosses

  &

bones

Bear feet; into the sand; trampling the sea shells
Some are crashing, jingling and tinkling as the silver bells
"Thou, why here?" I asked from a shell and peeped into the singing waves
It told, "We are from under the corals, ancient ships and the sea monster's cave

A singing pond, what a universe inside this blue?
No one can give a clue
She is listening to every story
Happy, joy, love but also sorry

She knows the man Sinbad, who sailed upon her days and nights; he watched the twilight of the dawn
She is heartbroken of Rose and Jack who watched her dolphins; hugging each other but now that love is gone
Also she is proud of the little mermaid with the amber cloudy hair who sacrificed life for the human prince
Her sound is high when she cries by seeing her fish who die by wrapping in strings

A giant travelling palace murdered all her turtles, dolphins and the whales and sent them to the land
Now, her family is coming to us; without their souls but a body floated to the sand
Oh her wish, will she recover soon?
So she will be lighted again as the crystal moon