Hermann Bellinghausen: Dreaming Solentiname

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I once dreamed of malice. I think it was in Solentiname, an unexpected archipelago at the end of Lake Nicaragua, not far from Costa Rica. I dreamed strange things, just like Julio Cortázar had with his camera. What am I saying, camera? With the film he shot on the bright, cheerful islands, and developed upon his return to Paris, as many professional photographers did. His were homemade.

In the mid-1970s, transparencies were still in use—those color photos developed on the 35-millimeter film roll itself. They were framed frame by frame on cardboard and arranged inside a carousel that rotated in a projector, making them visible and large against a shiny white canvas screen that was stored by rolling it up. Before videos, people would gather to watch the trip transparencies with a jaibol in hand. This routine served Cortázar well for the almost chronic, so real, story Apocalipsis de Solentiname (Someone Who Walks Around, 1977). Any reader of Cortazar's work remembers it. Dreaming it robbed us of sleep many times in the years to come.

The children he portrayed, smiling and playing, appeared in the projection, devastated by war, a bullet in their heads. In his nightmare, Cortázar saw his people being kidnapped (or rather, disappeared) on street corners in Buenos Aires, Roque Dalton in his death trap. He glimpsed the horror in Guatemala. Before the war in Nicaragua itself, there was a premonition of the Somoza attack on the archipelago where Ernesto Cardenal was forging a contemplative Catholic utopia. As a side effect of the young revolutionary Sandinista movement that triumphed in 1979, the beautiful naive art of Solentiname became famous worldwide. Wood and canvases illustrated marvelous, tropical, limpid acrylic scenes. In his nightmare, Cortázar saw them filled with blood and death.

Manu Chao also faced that terrifying vision at the end of Mano Negra, when he realized Cortazar's tale and also saw his America bleeding. It was 1994, and the Zapatista indigenous uprising in southern Mexico had just begun. Hopes and nightmares intertwined ( Dream of Solentiname , Casa Babylon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEUtIsYURbI ). Zapatista naive painting would also undergo its internationalization at the end of the century.

Some people talk about time loops. I don't know if it's science or science fiction, I suppose it's both, but at this hour we are traversed by loops in a lethal time that spreads across the planet. What good memory can we hold onto? What clean photograph can we take refuge in? What lyrical image? We are now experiencing the reverse of the joyful dream on a horrifying scale. Gaza and the West Bank are not Solentiname, of course, but old and unpunished concentration camps the size of a country: Palestine. But there too, people dreamed and played. That deadly underside also nests in Lebanon, in Yemen, and it spreads. We are virtual witnesses to the crime of the century.

One day you see the children of the village or neighborhood, even the displaced persons camp, smiling, kicking a ball and hugging dolls. Another day you see that little girl looking up at the sky, serious, because planes drop bombs and you have to be aware of their trajectory. And on another day, possibly the same one, you can witness the rivers of her blood, see her on a stretcher or in someone's arms, lifeless.

For the invader, these children are guilty and must be exterminated. They were born with the wrong father, the wrong name, the wrong country, the wrong language. Criminal racism has infected the canonical victims of Western racism. Israel has evolved into a human aberration. A small but lethal cancer. Its massacres erase children. They also erase those who survive. They irrevocably wound their memories. The mutilation they suffer remains inside them like a phantom limb. It may not be physical, but they will never be children again.

We've seen it in every form of violence unleashed. The struggles between gangs, between neighbors, in the crossfire of police and robbers, between armies. But the worst war is the one that directs its lethal power against the smiles of girls, the acrobatics of boys, the birdlike murmurings in classrooms, the games on the ground. Fathers, mothers, and uncles are also bombed and shot at. But children.

If with art and life we ​​could conjure away the hells of the white man, dreaming the original Solentiname would act as an antidote. Remember that the poet Ernesto Cardenal founded a community inspired by Thomas Merton and liberation theology in the years before the Sandinista revolution. Poetry, meditation, painting, and emancipation breathed in unison, not far from the jungle retreat of another great poet, José Coronel Urtecho, on the San Juan River. Cortázar ends up there before traveling to the archipelago of his short story.

On the back of rubble, hunger, and shattered bodies, remember the lake breeze. The simple inspiration of the fisherman in the sweet sea. His collective painting.