“WHISPERINGS IN THE LONG ROAD AHEAD”,

An answer by Silvio Rodriguez

Belén Gopegui • Spain

A CubaNews translation by Ana Portela.

Edited by Walter Lippmann

http://www.lajiribilla.cu/2005/n217_07/217_20.html

The majority of the words composed by Silvio Rodríguez, I think, are clear proof of the possibility of singing about politics poetically.

Because of a course we are preparing called Literature and Conspiracy where we use some of his words, I took the liberty of questioning the author about his manner of writing.

The answer of Silvio Rodríguez was especially relevant to understand the keys to artistic creation and, also, its insertion in a revolutionary environment. It is a text whose interest surpasses the modest objectives of the course. For that reason, I asked him permission to publish it. I also include the question that can orient the reader.
    Belén Gopegui, Madrid

Question: I would like to know how you go about doing a political song – all are to some degree, but those that are more.

One example: I would like to know how you begin your part of the “Canción de la Columna Juvenil del Centenario” (Youth Centennial Column Song) with that description of the end of the festivity, the city still lit up and using the personal form “tu”: “don’t say no, that you are …” Is there then a deliberate will to avoid political language that can seem spent or is it merely the subject that leads you to look on it that way? Undoubtedly, sometimes thinking about something seriously, you manage to avoid the obvious images but even so, you have to start somewhere: where did you start thinking?
 

I think there is a certain purposefulness in a lot of your words and I am not referring only of how to write politically indirectly but, also, talking about things inserting an image between them and the vision that already exists.
 

I know that I am asking the impossible, asking you to tell me how you build, what narrators have called, tone. In the case of poets, I don’t know what you would call it. But, perhaps there is a part that can be told and, in any case, I would like you to tell me what it means to deal poetically with the political.
 

Answer: Actually, no one asks those things and I’ll try to put in words what is usually spontaneous.
 

First, I should tell you the part I composed in the “Canción para la Columna Juvenil del Centenario” is up to “¿Qué puede valer más?” (What can be worth more)? The author of the next words is Pablo Milanés, as well as the music and the voice interpreting them. At the time we were part of the ICAIC Grupo de Experimentación Sonora (GES). Often the directors asked us to work the sound track together and that is why some songs were done by four hands and sometimes by six hands.

I don’t think that sharing the authorship changes what we do because Pablo and I were fully identified and moved by the sacrifice of those young workers that tried (and undoubtedly did)  to “turn this world around”. We were so compatible that to write the songs, at times, all we had to do was remember a tonality. With that clue, we would all go home and compose our own part. Later we would meet and study which would be better to begin with and which to end with. Then we linked the pieces and that was it. We never did retouching.

Youth Centennial Column Song
 

While the city

is lit up still at four

and there is somewhere I find you

—   a simple place

a small place —

don’t say no,

because you’re saying no to paradise;

I know where light is a lantern

and dreams a diversion

—   the only diversion —.

I know that right now,

while any song is sung,

there is combat there.

What is going to pay for soil absorption of blood?

What gold is not dream gold weighing thus?

What can be more?

What pays for that sweat, the time that passes?

What time are they paying?: that of your lives.

What life is bleeding from the wound

Or turning this earth at once!

When the sun at eleven

splits the center of honor,

when slogans and goals

call for the execution wall,

when from dark to dark

talk about action

you have the word:

I am modestly silent.

What pays for that sweat, the time that passes?

What time are they paying?: that of your lives.

What life is bleeding from the wound

Or turning this earth at once!

 
Listen to the CJC song (real audio)

After clearing up about the authorship I’ll return to the specifics you ask me for, to the form I have used for the poetic treatment of the political subject. And now, if you’ll allow me, I would like to deal with the perspective, to help you see it from some of my texts.

Before writing songs, I was growing to be a man during the first decade of the Cuban revolution, during the 60s. I could explain that I received ethical notions at the same time as aesthetical ones and had a very participatory adolescence while I read fiercely about the human and the divine. The day the revolution triumphed I was 12 years old and at that age a cousin recruited me to the Socialist Youth. Some months later I was immersed in the pre-university students' struggles and went from house to house asking for canned food for the entrenched milicianos because of the first attacks and acts of sabotage. In 1961, at the age of 14, I was one of the 100 thousand young people who joined the literacy force, who left the cities for life in the open. I chose to work in the illiteracy campaign in the area of the Escambray Sierra, where the class struggle was very violent. The army of teachers to which I belonged gave up its first martyr: a brigadista the same age as me, called Manuel Ascunce, who was tortured and killed by the bandits. Shortly after that was the counterrevolutionary invasion in Playa Giron, boosted by the U.S. administration. I became a miliciano the first day of the landing and my generation, forged with to the previous one, continued to give its blood. One day we realized that we were no longer children and that any one of us could be among the dead the following morning.
 

At 15, I was drawing cartoon stories for the weekly, Mella, official organ of the Young Communist Union. At 17, I was called for military service in the Revolutionary Armed Forces, for three years. Because of my previous experience as an illustrator and graphic designer, half my military life was spent in the specialized command for defense propaganda.
 

Perhaps direct political work, at such an early age, immunized me, at least a bit, against its effects. Perhaps the saturation of the recourse made me think again from a more human perspective, less rigidly. Perhaps it made me aware of what was propaganda when I had to choose a word for a song to prevent, at all costs, to make it appear like it. Even so I couldn’t, nor wanted to betray my principles nor apart from what I thought correct. Then, I had to work against set phrases, against the trodden path, against obvious formulas that sounded like leaflets and not like literature. Because that is what it all was about: I wanted my language to be poetic, not political, although the commitment with my country and with my time would lead me to more urgent content.

The work I did with films, between 1970 and 1975 is a good example of work I did for the immediate moment while searching for a literary (and musical) language that would give its “own life” to the work. At the time I did many commissioned songs, although I never accepted work that did not motivate me, that already implied an accompanying empathy. “Canción de la CJC” is from that time and was written for a documentary. In that particular case there are, also, some elements outside the artistic field – political-historical – that can help understand of why I used the words about the Columna like I did and, even, the music. I hope I’m not extending myself too much.
 

In 1970, the Columna Juvenil del Centenario documentary by Miguel Torres, was not an idealistic image of the Youth Column. Instead it assumed a testimonial role of our reality, seen from an extra-official point of view. The Cuban press focused on a showy triumphalism (naiveté) of the campaign which the young were waging in Camagüey province. But that black and white film, with hand-held camera, showed adolescents in ragged clothing, sleeping in the open, emaciated by the scarcity of food and the hard work, as protagonists who, at the same time, expressed themselves with firmness and impressive will. But the more complete view of reality contradicted some areas of ideological direction that preferred a simply epocal view, without going into depth that would bring to light the contradictions of the dramatic reality we were living through. That way of seeing things in the Cuban superstructure had its nucleus in artists, authors and even fawning writers in two with the harsh Soviet songs of the Second World War. But the Cuban film world, as well as the majority of the troubadours, was more apart from that allegedly orthodox country, at once boringly solemn, antiquated.
 

These were the circumstances and I opposed the official version when I wrote the song. But what I have said was not all. At the time there was a certain ideological phobia of rock, something like an infantile leftist disease, as Vladimir Ilyich said. This reached Kafka-esque levels, searching for rock cells in the music of composers, There was a list with qualifications and censures for suspected compasses. After certain problems, a group of young musicians and I had the luck to find refuge for this music in ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Art and Film Industry). There I had my way, rock and rolling with revolutionary words that the dogmatists of culture had to swallow, Since the weekly ICAIC newsreel and films used our music, it was our way of contributing to sweeping away the prejudices that existed against rock.

That is why “Canción de la CJC” and others have a rock beat that, of course, gave us fame for being trouble-making kids.

Then, when I would sit down to write, I had to be aware of several fronts of confrontation: that which was from a Marti and socialist country 90 miles from the empire; those other domestic clashes mentioned that presupposed a revolutionary dissidence; and, to top it all off, I had to take on the implacable intimate front against which there was no excuse and which demanded that I be a better person and artist.

With most of the songs I wrote, those that were not commissioned, but just because I thought of them, the process has been very similar. When I did “Te doy una canción” (I give you a song) I went from the personal to the collective so naturally like it is when you walk along with your partner, kissing, to a meeting of compañeros. It’s just the same man and same woman; nothing has to be sewed up and if the relations established, private and public, are honest, then, in truth, one should be seen as the continuation of the other, since we dress the same skin to love and defend what we believe in. Perhaps the clothing, utensils, paraphernalia change. Perhaps that is why a march is better for combat and a bolero better for being in love.

Perhaps others can find an easy way of explaining how they reach “the pitch” of what they write. For me it is very difficult because my processes have never had a method. Also, because that “pitch” can be a fundamental finding to such an extent that, at times, it seems to dispute the importance of the issue. I am far from being a defender of a certain form, but if we admit that one way is the key to a door…how can we ignore acknowledging what corresponds? What moves me, and what I want to write, tends to be right in front of me, like for anyone else, but until I find the form, I am crippled. Sometimes this process of searching has taken years. It has been another way of arriving at songs, that could be a settling, like a sort of long and secret learning process, that opens up the right words or "pitch” as you call it. That has happened to me. For example with “Rabo de Nube” (Twister) that is also somewhat of a political song.

I was born in a rural zone where the campesinos call the tornado a raboenube. I was always fascinated by this metaphor of the people and vampire that I am (chupa-ideas) I tried the subject many times. Once I almost thought I had finished the text but it was so obvious and manipulating that it killed the transparency of the symbol. Many years later, in Mexico City, on a quiet afternoon, the song appeared to me as it is now, with relatively little effort as if it was already done in a hidden corner of my head. The only explanation I find is that it was an idea I discovered since infancy, simply as a child: I am not making myself out as naïve, but it was a state of innocence.
 

So I guess I was on target in that song. And, therefore, I should leave each to find its own road to reach what is wanted. The only technique in this case I could explain is that the process should not be confused to putting within our reach what we want to have. That – at least in my case – doesn’t work. Probably there are states of sensitivity and routes to reach them that are strictly personal. I don’t know why, but I am a bit embarrassed to reveal that I am one of those – in some way – who believe in the unattainable or, in fact, not transferable. 
 

I don’t want to leave mentioning some maestros that have always taught us good forms of political poetry: Brecht, Hikmet, Josef, Vallejo. Even Rimbaud who made an antiwar call with that poem he entitled “El durmiente del valle” (The sleeper in the valley). And what about Miguel Hernández or Pablo Neruda? Know that these two together with Brecht and Maiakovsky are explicit and direct, that there message is not as biased you want to see now. But reading them you may learn what was forbidden to me. Why forbid it? Because I was a citizen of a victorious revolution and founded a new society whose contents became a part of daily life. In other words, to lighten the embarrassing irons to make them more bearable, capable of being in the peoples pockets. Because, some way, my reality screamed out at me, whisperings in the long road ahead.

Silvio Rodríguez




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