First Publication: Yarın Dergisi, 2005
“The taste of the cigarette I smoke on an empty stomach in the mornings,
death sent me its solitude before itself…”
Nazım HİKMET
Dear Octavio PAZ,
Unfortunately, I read the book you wrote in 1961 only in the 1990s. Personally, I regretted deeply how I could have missed this book for so long. I wish I had met you much earlier.
“Viva Mexico, hijos de La Chingada”
“Long live the Mexicans, damn it… the sons of a violated mother.”
I was frightened and startled, Seigneur Paz… This slogan, which you say Mexicans shout at football matches or bullfights, truly struck me deeply. So, it turns out that at the root of the solitude and silence that the Mexican soul carries as a mask lies the inability to forget how the “great white man” violated your ancestors and your land. You say; “The Mexican’s solitude is an irreversible solitude, one that cannot be postponed into the future nor resolved, born of the unhappy union of the Aztec mother La Malinche (La Chingada) and the Spanish Conqueror father Cortés. Mexican history is the story of the ‘human being’ searching for the mother and father, lineage and roots that he has lost. This human being, who at different periods of his adventure falls under the influence of France, Spain, the United States, and his own tyrannical leaders, wanders across the stage of history like a comet, occasionally flashing dazzling lightning. What is he pursuing along that uncertain orbit? I think he wants to return to a deadly catastrophe he experienced long ago. In the bosom of the life from which he was forcibly expelled, he wants to be reborn like the sun. The roots of our solitude merge with religious feelings. A kind of orphanhood, a vague pain arising from the awareness of having been torn from a ‘whole,’ an impassioned search: a flight and a return. Like the re-establishment of the bonds that will unite us with the universe…”
Dear Paz; I know that as a thinker, critic, diplomat, and poet, you are one of the great literary masters of Latin America, alongside E. Galeano, G. Márquez, P. Neruda, L. Borges, Asturias, Vasconcelos, and P. Coelho. Perhaps because you are a Mestizo (halfbreed) carrying both Spanish and indigenous ancestry, and because you stand close to indigenous Mexican blood, this wise letter of yours felt very familiar to “us.”
Another Mexican poet expresses the labyrinth of solitude created by the Spanish Conqueror Cortés’s invasion of Mexico centuries ago and his forcible possession of the Aztec La Malinche (La Chingada) by saying: “From the solitude that scars the Mexican heart / she becomes an inseparable captive.” This deep dependency on solitude, as you put it, means that “the Mexican has been driven to search for himself. Yet he neither wants to be himself, nor has the courage to become himself… The Mexican lives his solitude not with the hope of escaping it, but with the fear of escaping it… Indifference and carelessness are deathly masks that conceal life. The Mexican has closed himself off from both life and death. The Mexican’s life is, in fact, a life that has been lost, yet the Mexican hopes to rediscover the form it once had. That is why it is only during the fiesta – the boisterous and exuberant festivals when they collectively commemorate their deceased saints – that a Mexican forgets his solitude, drops his masks, and reveals himself as he truly is… The fiesta is the sole extravagance of his life.”
Mr. Paz,
Long before the collapse of “us”—that is, the Ottomans—the brutal annihilation of the Maya, Inca, and Aztec civilizations, which led your region to be defined as “Meso-America” in reference to Mesopotamia as the cradle of civilizations, marks the beginning of your modern history. Frankly, from that point onward, there are so many themes in Mexico’s painful history that resemble “us”; the tragic process of Catholicization you experienced, the influence of the French Revolution, the independence gained after uprisings that each time began with banners bearing dark-skinned images of Mary, the transformation of the newly founded republic into an oligarchy, corruption, the devastation wrought by Westernism and positivism, and recurring searches for a return to spirituality… Mexico, with its magnificent fatigue formed after the destruction of its civilization, its La Chingada psychology, its deep solitude hidden behind masks, and its fiesta, is like the Türkiye of the other side of the Atlantic.
We, too, live that magnificent fatigue, Seigneur Paz! We, too, have a kind of La Chingada (La Malinche) trauma. Except our religion and our Anatolia, we also have lost many things. We too are “silent and sorrowful…” After Western thugs, we have never lacked domestic tyrants either. Here as well, the ruling elites are marked by admiration for Europe and contempt for what is local. Our intellectuals never liked “us” either, Mr. Octavio; unlike you, our labyrinth of solitude was built on a foundation of loss of trust and forgetfulness. In Borges’s words, knowing full well that “forgetting is forgiving,” we were condemned to a history-lessness that does not remember its own trauma. We, too, put on masks; we keep making masks out of our religiosity, our sexuality, our ideologies, our status, our money, and our poverty. Our La Chingada (La Malinche) did not take shape as a sense of violation. Because we were never colonized, but trauma settled in us as a “loss of trust.” Distrust in ourselves, in one another, in our beliefs, in our country, in our land… in the state, in God… in everything. Our bourgeoisie, too, was born of the state and now seeks to seize the state. I do not know if this explanation is sufficient, Mr. Paz, but here it is: Mexico and we lie on the same latitude. And after all these adventures, you became a member of NAFTA, and we stand at the door of the European Union.
Fortunately, we did not close ourselves off to life and death. We are still living and dying a great deal. We love both life and death. This, I think, explains why our labyrinth of solitude is not dialectical but paradoxical. We are neither completely shutting down nor completely opening up. We do not have collectively celebrated holidays, as your fiesta. We are a society of fragmented, plural, and contradictory togethernesses. We have a pole star that simultaneously contains joy, pain, sorrow, love, and hatred. We are both hardworking and lazy, both sorrowful and joyful, both rich and poor…
You say, “The Mexican feels the need to hide himself while explaining himself.” We both explain ourselves and hide ourselves. Because we lost our empire without being defeated, Mr. Paz. We collapsed without fully and definitively surrendering. The trauma we experienced is because we lost the empire but not the idea of empire, because we won battles but lost the war, because we lost confidence but not hope so all these created schizophrenic consequences in us unlike yours. Our biopolitics and our social genetics are filled with the traces of the devastation we have lived through. We can make every problem our companion and build a new order out of every pain, Seigneur Paz. At times we “go to death as if going to a wedding”; at other times we arrive at “eternal state” through fratricide. We “like, but cannot unite, so it becomes love,” Mr. Paz, and we carry this “love in our chests like a bullet”… We feel no curiosity for seas or stars. Because what we are most curious about is one another; “each other” blinds and deafens us. Our mathematics is good, and so is our intrigue. We love our homeland deeply, even as we spit on its streets. We rest most under poplars and cypresses. Forgetting is our national trait, did you know? It is as if we have taken the greatest wound into our memory. Forgetting is a conscious method we resort to in order to soothe our “timeless and endless” solitude. We silently abandon the past and behave as if it never happened. We scarcely even think about our collapse. We skillfully cover it over with false histories and move on. Our masks also help us to forget. Ours is a kind of escape… We flee not only from our reality but even from our future. We dislike mirrors and hate everything that holds a mirror up to us. Perhaps that is why our most populous group consists of the colorless, odorless, and thoughtless. And in order to forget, we take refuge in speech and do not like writing. We treat our bodies harshly. We turn our feet into heads, and our heads into feet. We produce easily and consume quickly. Our soul rejoices with pain and grows sorrowful with exuberance. We are trapped between a yearning to return to the time before our downfall—to paradise—a time we wish we could never remember, and the necessity of walking towards an uncertain future, a future born of a sense of orphanhood. Like the Orphic belief that emerged in Ancient Greece after the collapse of Achaean civilization, of the kind you mention, we too long for a homeland that will enable our magnificent return from our solitude and ruins, and we dream of paradise. You know; Orpheus means both orphan/fatherless and empty/nothing. We were expelled from the center of the world and have not abandoned the desire to reach that center again. In all the chambers of our labyrinth of solitude there are lost hopes, missing souls, destroyed dreams. In the poet’s words, ours is “a solitude as lonely as cigarette ash.”
That is how it is, Seigneur!… We are a country that experiences paradox, complexity, collapse, and the pains of birth all at once—now!
You arrived, over the past five hundred years, from ‘land and freedom’ uprisings to NAFTA membership, and to Zapatista romanticism in the Chiapas forests in opposition to NAFTA.
We are still living through the collapse of the last two hundred years. We simultaneously sense the naive and timid stirrings of attempts to rise again through the restoration of collapse. As you put it, the “divisive dynamic of disagreements born of similarities, powerful enough to undermine reconciliation” leaves its mark on everything we do…
Seigneur Paz, I must state that I fully agree with your observations on the politics of Mexico and all of Latin America. Both on behalf of your countries, as far as we know them even from afar, and on our own behalf within the context of the similar dialectic of the same conditions, your assessments are justified and realistic. You say that “…Independence put an end to Spanish rule. But it was replaced by dictators and oligarchies. In Spanish America, independence, freedom, democracy, and the industrial revolution served only the self-interested remnants of the colonial order. The ideology of liberal democracy neither reflected the concrete reality of our historical conditions (exploitation) nor did it do anything other than conceal it; political falsehood (the practice of politics) was developed as an institution and anchored in constitutional guarantees. The negative effects of this contradiction on social morality were immeasurably deep and shook our national existence to its foundations. Within this system of lies and deceit, we behave as if we are extremely disturbed by it. Yet for centuries, we have suffered immensely from a government that, while serving feudal oligarchies on the one hand, spoke of freedom on the other. As the first measure for a serious and genuine renewal, we must wage a merciless struggle against legalized falsehood. Our aim should be to rescue our countries from being picturesque ruins that tourists and demagogues find charming, and to make them truly modern societies. The new rulers above us have integrated with external powers of a very different nature from Spanish colonialism and work for the interests of international capitalism.”
You speak correctly and painfully, Mr. Paz. These are our shame and our disgrace. We are the people whose honor cannot even tolerate defeat in war. But the problem is that we simply cannot cope with these endless, warfare-less defeats inflicted on us by a new kind of enemy that alien to us and using new methods and tools, whose very essence we cannot fully comprehend. To defend ourselves, we either take sides in fights we are destined to lose, or we occupy ourselves with empty heroic demagoguery. If we could read the ‘game’ correctly and try to think as ourselves, focusing more on the future than on the past, perhaps we might find a way out. It seems we will begin by making a clear and unambiguous definition of ‘us,’ and by raising new generations who resolutely embrace principles built on unwavering values, such as morality, justice, freedom, and law. And of course, in order to defeat that death called solitude, we will never ever abandon sharing, trust, hope, and honor.
No matter what happens, ‘We,’ Mr. Paz, will always exist, and one day we will mingle with the seas that cling to the moonlight. As our poet Cemal Süreya writes, “the flower blooming on the cliff has said: / you are my homeland, O cliff.”
Many greetings to Pancho Villa, Zapata, ‘Sugar Orange’ Vasconcelos, and—to Subcomandante Marcos (even though I cannot quite grasp the French connection and I am not sure he is not a second Régis Debray)—and to all the Zapatistas, Seigneur.
Adios!…
*Yalnızlık Dolambacı, Octavio Paz, Cem Yayınları, İstanbul, 1990.
Source: Açık Mektuplar, Ahmet Özcan, Yarın Yayınları, 2016
