To Emily
The fact that life and politics are not inevitably coextensive is demonstrated by the fact that the former proliferates beyond the order established by the latter. Perhaps the unforeseen ways in which life proliferates reveal, sooner or later, the ineffectiveness of politics in its claim to interpret and order social practices and to produce the values that justify them. Life, says Agamben, is not in itself political, and can increase and extend beyond the city, that is, beyond the existing order and agreements, and can, on the contrary, take on unexpected forms that exceed the spaces administered by the law. That beyond that escapes the conjunctural order of politics points to the point of non-coincidence between politics and life.
With regard to politics, life does not obey. Instead, it disregards or confuses. This can be recorded by the language of poetry, even that which arose in the heat of the absolute time of revolution, where life seems to be incorporated into the politicization of all that exists. Such is the case with the poetry of Nicaraguan guerrilla poet Leonel Rugama (1949-1970), (killed in combat by the National Guard during the insurrection against the Somoza dictatorship), where we find, in the midst of poetry inscribed in the symbolic economy of collective emancipation, certain weak and hitherto neglected areas that turn the traditional motifs of political poetry upside down through unexpected breaks within the revolutionary project of meaning.
In a few poems within Rugama’s already scarce poetic output (a martyr at a very early age, author of a few but influential poems), we can detect a singular point in his poetry that potentially throws him out of the poetic-political project to which he subscribed, which to a certain extent disrupts the interpretation that the poet himself consciously sought and that commentators have not hesitated to point out, closing the reading of his works under the expectations of militant poetry. Based on at least a couple of poems from his only posthumous book, I suggest that it is possible to open this book in another way, by reading against the grain of the demands for salvation, encouraging a careful reading of the areas where his poetry weakens by neglecting communitarian calls or opens up to the exploration of other forms of social existence that allow us to rethink ways of meeting and associating within the political field; simultaneously exposing certain ways of withdrawing from the social order that has been politicized based on sacrificial models of citizenship.
Like Maine de Biran (1766-1824) in his New Essays on Anthropology, Rugama’s poetry seems to sketch the idea of a self that is always “distinct from all sensations received from outside,” which therefore remains wandering and unknown within its community, at a distance from the situation, in the face of which he undertakes escapes to place himself beyond the reach of political definitions, thus safeguarding areas of secrecy for life, a certain intimacy that escapes consciousness—as Maine de Biran himself would say—refusing to appear in the space of public approval and evicting all prescriptive political drama.
Although his poems are part of the Redemptorist revolutionary tradition that privileges identity performance and the anti-imperialist expression typical of committed poetry, it is possible to trace in his poems what Carlo Ginzburg called the “uncontrolled voices” of the text, that which in language precedes the consolidation of consciousness or ideology, and which remains in a residual way in poetic language. If we pay attention for the first time to this background, which is not guided by the urgencies of the moment, we will find clues through which the poet explores a way of becoming a stranger to himself, through writing that outlines an unprecedented departure from the principles of his own militancy. I am referring to those small gestures in his work that have the potential to dismantle (and expand) his political project, as if from certain interior angles of his writing a sign emerged that breaks down the fabric of his committed work, shaped in the heat of the aesthetic regime sponsored by the politicization of the literary field since the Cuban revolution of 1959.
The poems I am referring to could displace the privileged place of politics in the understanding of the texts, to make way for other signs of non-politicized life, with the potential to disrupt the archive of “necessary” statements and take the militant conception of writing out of frame. They are suspended gestures that remain outside of History. The unread in Rugama’s poetry. The sketch of a project that points to more complex routes in its approach to the idea of community and communism. These are poems or gestures that inhibit the constitution of the violent affective plots that politics often fabricates to impose the sacrificial order through which it stabilizes itself.
A poem from 1969 illuminates the question of clandestine life about which, as Agamben suggests, “it is never possible to possess anything other than derisory documents.” It outlines an intimacy that is undetectable and difficult to document; a loneliness that is difficult to reconcile with the movement of the collective, which is why Rugama’s poem to which I refer represents a crisis of community in the hyper-politicized context of armed struggle. The poem Biography outlines the experience of a subject invisible to his own community, with verses such as the following: “His name never appeared / on the old school toilet charts. / When he left the classroom for good / no one noticed his absence.” This poem explores the impossibility of integrating into the fabric of mutual recognition from an exteriority. Unlike other poems by Rugama, it does not posit the process of recognition as a possibility for community.
The potential of the aforementioned poem lies in testing the moral commitment of the community or, perhaps, in questioning the error of all communitarianism, which, according to Helmuth Plessner, would be the pursuit of definitive equilibrium, the identification of the community around an ideal that captures it in a transcendent infinity.
By falling into the hiatus of incommunication pointed out by the poem, the chain of recognition loses consistency, in what can be read as the impossibility of political subjectivation, which leads to reflection on the processes of social disengagement, perhaps as natural as the desire for the collective.
It is a wandering in the community, the outline of an interruption of reciprocity or a probable experience of non-relationship; a pause to rethink human bonds. The poem also exhibits the possibility that not all members of the community have been marked historically or politically in the same and only way.
In another poem called Epitaph, Rugama returns to the idea of the inadequacy of recognition and the impossibility of appearing before the other. If Biography complicated the biographical record and described the course of a life according to the sequence of events not lived (or not perceived by the community), Epitaph recounts the unsatisfied search for the other: “Here lie / the mortal remains / of the one who in life / searched without relief / one / by / one / for your face / on all / the city buses.”
In what seems like a failed love poem, I perceive the unpredictable movement of wandering subjects in the city, the solitary establishment of the subject based on the search and not the encounter. The movement of a contingent community of strangers who do not follow the path of political struggle, but rather traverse the territory of the city according to the rhythm of their desires, without ever meeting. From this arises the idea of a community of strangers who move in small groups through urban space.
The rising and falling of public transportation in search of an unfindable face accentuates the contradictory rhythm of the bodies. Unlike Rugama’s most memorable social poems, there is no consecration of the encounter here, but rather an emphasis on the unsolvable search. The poem also exposes the futility of a face, because in the city, full of flows, no face is enough for relief. The need for the other remains, once again, unsatisfied, suggesting that the search for a face is infinite.
Epitaph is the confirmation of a search, not an encounter; the incessant tracing of a singular experience that finds no place in orderly symbolization or in the principles of social cohesion; a subject who remains lost in his community, and is therefore freed from being sanctioned by the tyranny of values, and is driven to roam the city for reasons other than the identification of the enemy.
Both Biography and Epitaph problematize the concept of identity and revolve around imperceptible and unwitnessed life, unlike Rugama’s other poems, which operate in favor of the construction of a national, redemptive, and communitarian community.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. Autorretrato en el estudio. Adriana Hidalgo, Buenos Aires, 2019.
De Biran, Maine. Nuevos ensayos de antropología. Ediciones Sígueme, Salamanca, 2014.
Ginzburg, Carlo. El hilo y las huellas. Lo verdadero, lo falso, lo ficticio. FCE, México, 2010.
Plessner, Helmuth. Límites de la comunidad: Crítica al radicalismo social. Siruela, Madrid, 2012.
Rugama, Leonel. La tierra es un satélite de la luna. Biblioteca Nacional de Nicaragua “Rubén Darío”, 2019.
