MEDIA PRACTICE AND PERFORMANCE ACROSS CULTURES
THE AYESHA PROJECT
a way to break through the constraints on literature created by the media
by Alejandro Margulis[1]
When I was a young man, I lived in a country that lived under terror. By night or by day, generally in silence but openly too, thousands of people were kidnapped and disappeared by the military government. There was a plan to frighten all the citizens. The government said that the enemy could be anywhere: in high schools or colleges, in factories or newspapers. “Marxist preaching” -to use a simplified expression of the day- was the enemy that everybody had to be prepared for. I remember those years clearly: we were taught that anything could be “subversive”, and we had to be constantly on guard against the leftist threat. During those years, Art and Culture came under especial observation.
People -particularly intellectuals and journalists- went into exile, many of them chose Mexico, Sweden, Canada, the United States and European countries as their place of refuge. I am going to tell you what it was like to grow up and start a literary career in those circumstances. I know that, perhaps, you were expecting something different from me. Perhaps you have come here to hear an academic conference only about the emergence of the internet “as a way to a break through the constraints created by media”, because really that’s what I said I was going to talk about. At the end, I will.
Haven`t you ever read that phrase about History ? History is like a giant with two faces, one facing backward, one facing forward: with the first, history sees what has happened; with the other, what’s coming. Listen to the sentence in Spanish: “POR LO QUE FUE, PREDICE LO QUE SERÀ”. My English teacher[2] suggests this translation: “What happened tells us what will happen”. Well, after long hours thinking about this, I have concluded that the best thing would be to begin speaking to you about the past. Later, I will speak about the literary sites on the internet as promised.
In 1976, I was fifteen years old. I was not very lucid. No one in my family was political. And all my friends were like me: we didn’t believe all of the horrible things that human rights organizations were reporting. On the contrary, all of us (well, maybe not “all”) believed, at least with a part of our conscience, there might be some truth to the military’s warning. The point is that those times in Argentina were very confusing. For many people, the truth was only the official version. In fact, I first became aware of what was happening in Argentina one night that was just like any other night.
Try to imagine this scene. The place: Barrio Norte, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. The time: four or five in the morning. Suddenly, a loud noise wakes up everyone in the building. The walls were shaking. What was happening? Was it an earthquake? Impossible. There are no earthquakes in Buenos Aires. So? Later in the morning, when I went to school, I saw the Bank of Boston at the corner of my house totally destroyed. I still remember the broken glass on my sidewalk. And a lot of onlookers like me were checking out the damage. No one in my family was there to explain to me what had happened. I heard voices talking about the catastrophe. Maybe it was a policeman who spoke. “A bomb”, someone said. A bomb, I repeated to myself. A bomb.
At that time, it was common for bombs to explode or for police sirens to be heard in the city. Three or four blocks from my house, there was a supermarket owned by Mr. Rockefeller. I remember its name -Minimax- but I don’t remembered when it was destroyed. It might have been before the military coup because I was still working at my grandfather’s drugstore, my first job. I was thirteen years old when I started to work, so the bomb might have been placed by terrorist in 1974. But I’ve never known if anyone died in that attack.
Now, perhaps you are asking yourselves if I was frightened by the terrorist acts. Not really: bombs and attacks, including kidnappings, were dangerous for other people. Although we lived in Barrio Norte, we were not really rich. Nobody would be interested in kidnapping us. Neither my brother nor I would be a valuable piece to exchange for money. On the sad morning of March 24, 1976, the day the military coup happened, my mother and I found ourselves with a neighbor in the lobby of our apartment building. The woman was excited and really happy. She said something not easy to translate. I`ll try to do it for you: “I knew something good was going to happen -she said-. I could feel it, my lucky finger was hurting a lot. Something good was happening!”. I didn’t understand why that woman was so pleased. My mother didn’t answer her and I didn’t ask why not. But she was not an exception. I’m sorry to say that in those dark days, at the beginning, a lot of Argentines were not worried about the military coup. Indeed, most of them were untroubled by the new situation.
Two years later, in 1978, I founded a literature magazine whose objectives were “the dissemination of unpublished writers”. Its name was Ayesha Literatura. Anybody could publish in our magazine. Anybody -we thought- could be a writer. We had made small posters to attract our first contributors. The posters said something like this: “Have they ever published your writing?”. And we walked down the street in Buenos Aires with the most bookstores gluing those signs to the walls. At that time, all political activities were forbidden by the military. A hidden repression had started. Many activists were persecuted and murdered in clandestine detention centers. We were not aware of the danger around us. In our naive, perhaps even stupid idealism, we only thought about the power of literature and art.
The Ayesha project lasted two years. During that time, we received several hundred short stories and poems. The first of them got to us through another magazine, called “El cuento”, that had closed. A nice woman sent me an envelope full of papers. It was a treasure. We read all the material and selected many texts. Then we published the best ones. One of them was written by a young author called Gloria Kehoe Wilson. Her story was a strange narration about a teenage girl fascinated by an epileptic man who lived in an ugly place. In Kehoe`s short story, everybody called that place “The house of doom”. Lucas Torres -that was the name of the sick man, and the title of the short story- worked at a funeral parlor and slept in the afternoon in the coffins there. Maybe that story used too many effects, but we loved it. It was published on page five of the first issue of Ayesha with a short biography of Gloria Kehoe Wilson. She was 21 years old at that time and had published a book of short stories and already received her first mentions and literary prizes. We were very proud of that publication.
I would like to read you the begining of “Lucas Torres” :
“Aquel nueve de julio, Guillermina y yo fuimos invitadas al cumpleaños de Lucas Torres. A pesar de no tener nada que hacer, dado el feriado escolar, nos opusimos de inmediato. Pero mamá, con su habitual insistencia, logró convencernos de ir a la Casa de las Desgracias. Eso sí, no pudo quitarnos el miedo; ese frío casi animal y repentino que nos sacaba el color de la cara cuando la puerta del dos mil trescientos ochenta y cuatro de Sucre se abría quejumbrosamente”.
Now, I am going to translate it for you:
“That July 9, Guillermina and I were invited to Lucas Torres´s birthday. Although we had nothing to do, because it was a holiday, we immediately refused. But Mom, with her natural persistence, managed to convince us to go to the house of doom. Still, she could not calm our fear, the almost animal and sudden chill that made our faces pale when the door at two thousand three hundred eighty four Sucre Street reluctantly creaked open”.
Except for the date of Lucas Torres´s birthday, July 9 (Argentina’s Independence Day), the story did not have any political content. But the story’s atmosphere was the same as that of that dark time. Besides, Gloria Kehoe Wilson lived on Sucre Street. Not at the same address where Lucas Torres lived, but really near (one block away). She had sent us her address along with the short story, and one day, after the publication, I went to her house to ask Gloria for more texts. Nobody answered the door and I thought: “They might have moved”. So, I forgot about her and her writing. Well, I found the name of Gloria five years later, when democracy returned to Argentina. The Human Rights Organizations had made a public list asking the community where the disappeared used to go to vote. It was the first list of disappeared people that I had ever seen. Gloria Kehoe Wilson was on it.
Now, I have to recognize that only a few of the texts that we received were any good. That was a problem because, at the beginning, we were absolutely convinced that art would always emerge if there was a space for it. An important woman writer whose name I’d prefer to forget, criticized magazines like ours very harshly. She called us “mailbox-magazines”. Her comments were scornful and, in my opinion, really unfair. But, curiously, that was the intellectual tone at that time too. Some of the intellectuals who had chosen to live in Argentina were in the midst of a battle with those who had decided to go into exile. Each group built a theory to invalidate the other’s. And most of them, I am sad to say, spent more time trying to protect the little bit of power that their points of view got them than taking care of the new generation, who were being slaughtered systematically. When Democracy arrived, that debate was left aside. Nobody really wanted to keep arguing about the responsibility of the right or of the left. The guilty consciences were assuaged by National Commission for Disappeared Persons (CONADEP) research into crimes and a trial of the Military Junta. But the guilt spread like a stain of blood that touched everybody, everywhere.
Magazines such as ours grow up in that reality. We were very openminded, but we had our prejudices too. And our feelings of guilt. Had Gloria died because we had published her story? I asked myself that question when I found her name on the Human Rights list. In truth, she had been kidnapped one year before, in 1977; so, we our minds were at rest about that. But, what role had we played? Fundamentally, I said to myself, we had contributed to cultural resistance to the state of fear and censorship. I am not saying that we were the only ones that participated in that; in fact, there were two or three hundred underground magazines like Ayesha. What I am saying is that we were an Alternative Press, that we formed a part of it.
What are the alternatives for literature in the new millenium? Not many, apparently. The Market determines which books will be accepted or refused. Literature has more constraints today than ever. Big publishing companies will not publish books that are not expected to sell several thousand copies. They impose their books on the public through big media companies, and so together they control what gets published. The same day that I were finishing this conference, Clarin, the biggest newspaper in Argentina, published an article about the literature on internet. The main source of income for the weekly Literary Supplement is advertising space sold to big publishing houses whose interests are diametrically oposed to the flourishing of non-traditional book publishing. Even though, some new internet`s writers were named there: Mark Amerika (in www.grammatron.com), Michael Joyce (www.eastgate.com), Natalie Bookchin (www.calarts.edu), Talan Memmot (www.memmot.org), Stuart Moulthrop (www.raven.ubalt.edu), M.D. Coverly (www.califa.hispeed.com), Jim Rosenberg (www.well.com) or Young-hae-Chang (www.yhchang.com). They are an example of what I am talking about.
However, critics and journalist, writers and editors, still find themselves constrained by the power of the media in Latin America. Only one percent of small publishers can expect to see their books in the cultural section of major newspapers. Thus, writers are forced to create so much identical work if they want to make a living. Everyday everywhere, creators are frustrated by this situation. Economics is the root of the problem. This is the structural problem in the “Book Industry”. With no more publishers who love literature, everyone becomes just a bookmaker. Until a few months ago, Argentine publishers had decided not to publish anything which could not guarantee at least three thousand in sales. These days, with the cultural market virtually non-existent (to say nothing of other markets), the situation is even worse: the production of books is practically at a stand still; fifty percent of publishing employees have been laid off at the biggest houses; the contracts with writers have not been respected... How will anyone be able publish his or her first book? How can an established writer produce experimental work? Where will it be published?
I have been thinking that the current situation is very similar to that of the 70`s. Now, economic groups exercise the same power in countries like ours as the military did in their era. Activists as well as their cultural expression were repressed. In the past, US military forces gave secret, ideological instruction to Latin America’s high officers (and this is a historic responsibility that your democratic government has yet to recognize publicly). Well, the point is that now, in the globalization culture, capital knows no borders. It does not need a military wing. But inequality has never been as rampant as today. How can we resist this global logic? What is it the way of the future?
I don’t pretend to know the answer to the problematic of globalization. I’m only a writer. My work is playing with words. My dreams are in books. That’s all. You know, some time ago something important happened to me. As a consequence, I began to think seriously that the internet might be a good way to break through the constraints on books created by the media and big publishing corporations. As I do every year, I showed my young students at Buenos Aires University (I teach first year writing there) several issues of Ayesha`s magazine. My idea was to show them that nothing is impossible if you want to write. If we had published seven issues of an alternative magazine under a military government, they could each write one project. Well, one of the students put parts of the old Ayesha magazine on the web (it is still there, on “gratisweb” /dat/ com /bar/ “ayeshaliteratura” ; you can see it if you want). I was surprised when, few months later, I received a mail saying : “Ayesha? Has the old Ayesha come back?”
That someone might remember Ayesha twenty five years later really shocked me. “Yes -I replied -. Ayesha is back!”. Two or three weeks later another mail surprised me. This time, it was a poet from those years who wrote; and then, a woman who was looking for a friend of hers who had worked at Ayesha wrote. The friend’s name was included in the staff listed on the free website. What was happening? What was this thing called “internet”? That’s when we started working. I wasn’t planning to re-start this magazine. It was just a student project. But now half the original staff is working together again, as a team, like old times. New faces and young people joined in the project. We decided to maintain the original objectives: the dissemination of unpublished writers, but using, now, all the tools that internet offered. That is how we got the idea of publishing electronic books. E-Books. Books written anywhere that anybody might read , wherever they might be. We did have -and we have now- a real platform from which to deliver unpublished works to the whole world. I invite you to visit it (the address is www.ayeshaliteratura.com). The wheel is rolling again.
In the past few years, a lot of cultural sites have sprung up on the internet. There is a real explosion around the world. At first, they were like islands. Slowly but surely, the sites has become connected. The links between them have created the biggest cultural net there has ever been. In 1995 a small group in Seattle created one of the most ambitious projects involving alternative press on the internet. Indymedia.org -that’s its name- is expanding and has spread information that mainstream media groups don’t transmit. They choose things that the dominant groups would never touch. Our job is on that same line. In our first month on the net, we received more than one thousand visits. No one knows what will happen tomorrow with this new literary experience. But, who can say that this is not where the next great writers will be found?
[1] Taller de Expresion Escrita, Buenos Aires University (UBA), professor assistent ; Periodismo de investigación on line: de la Teoría a la Práctica, El Salvador University (www.contenidos.com); writer (www.elaleph.com); free lance journalist (www.ayeshaliteratura.com).
E mail : alejandromargulis@hotmail.com
[2] Jane Brodie. She is an American citizen. Like me.