Lucia Cupertino
I recently became acquainted with the work of Ayumi Shibata, a Japanese-born artist who builds macrocosms and microcosms using the ancient washi paper craft. I was dazzled by this artwork, because she employs such a fragile material to build cities, landscapes, scenery that gradually come to inhabit space in a powerful and tangible way. To me, this art form seems to provide a visual dimension akin to the inner processes activated when a writer gives shape to a new literary reality.
Looking at Shibata’s works, I seemed to find the reality constructed by Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities as well as the green world of Jean Giono’s the Man Who Planted Trees, the restlessness of Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations poems, the wisdom of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet or the visionary dimension of Blake’s Songs of Experience. It even evokes Agota Kristof’s witty voice in The Notebook Trilogy and in more recent works, the washi craft works seem to embody the pulsating journey of the heart undertaken by Mexican poet Irma Pineda in her book Red Desire. And this has happened perhaps because one of the primordial characteristics of Literature is to forge new worlds by drawing on two important materials: reality and imagination.
World Literature, even with all its considerable internal diversity in terms of currents and outcomes, continues to provide a universal voice starting from the particular point of view. From images that have settled in the writer’s mind a unique new world may come into being, especially in the best of case scenario when the imagination and skill of the writer combine to produce a classic.
As I said, in addition to imagination, it is essential to turn our gaze to reality, to the historical context in which the work is set, to the challenges and questions that our time imposes on us, in search of possible future scenarios. I am reminded, in this sense, of the Urgent words manifesto of the Peruvian literary movement Hora Zero, which, in the 1970s, advocated for the idea of poetry immersed in the sociocultural context of the Andean country, intimately connected to it. Thus, its proponents urged writers not to look the other way but rather, through writing, to encourage the birth of social change. Hora zero also wrote this provocative statement: “we were handed a catastrophe in order to poetize it”; half a century later this message is more terribly relevant and urgent than ever. We are in the age of the Anthropocene, wars, the extinction of biodiversity, feminicides, pandemics, shattering of human relationships: we are confronted with great challenges on a global and individual scale, and Literature – the kind that is not born to churn out bestsellers or entertain – is already unveiling all this.
Our time demands a different intellectual approach, one that is humble, capable of listening and putting the ego and ethnocentrism aside, as well as grasping that this historical moment requires a tremendous effort and more “collective mind”, because there are so many mental and social structures that need to be overcome as well as entire bodies of knowledge that risks disappearing. Instead, by our action, we could help to resist and preserve the diversity of various worlds coexisting on this World.
Perhaps it is no accident that today Literature and particularly its noblest creature, Poetry, is at risk. Little is read or at any rate reading is no longer accorded the centrality it deserves for our spiritual and social development. Traditional places of cultural production such as schools, for example, are often emptied of the passion that Federico García Lorca said should lead us to be lovers and not just readers of Poetry. Moreover, as the Italo-Brazilian writer Julio Monteiro Martins pointed out long ago in “Toward a different idea of success” (Sagarana Magazine, n°44), it is disconcerting when Literature itself bends to the dynamics of the cultural industry and is evaluated by factors such as sales or the popularity of the writer of the day rather than by the intrinsic worth of the work itself. We are facing a series of paradoxes that require great effort on many sides to bring about a serious reversal. However, all of this should not lead us to nihilism and nostalgia, but to conscious action and long-term resistance. Festivals, reading groups, formal as well as informal meetings with young people and in schools, online and print magazines can make a difference, as well as our deeper and stronger connection with society and nature, although sometimes the effects seem to have an impact more at the micro rather than the macro level. There are many actions that can be taken, starting with choosing what we read, what we pay attention and devote time to, and finally, as result, what we should write. Japanese artist Ayumi Shibata’s meticulous and painstaking paper world teaches us the way to do so: with a lot of effort and work, sharing with a community, with a firm artistic and ethical vision and, why not, with a touch of healthy utopia.