Wendy Guerra—Documenting Life

by Constanza Jaramillo -- Críticas, 9/15/2006

Born in 1970, Wendy Guerra was already a respected poet before she won the 13 de marzo (March 13th) prize at 17. She also won the Pinos Nuevos poetry prize and has been included in several Cuban literature anthologies. Guerra contributes to different magazines, such as Encuentro, La gaceta de Cuba, and Nexos, as well as visual arts magazines.

Guerra’s first novel, Todos se van (They All Leave), won the first Bruguera prize in 2005. Her writing recreates the spontaneity of poetry and performance art, but grounds it in a personal journal form through which she candidly talks about Cuba from the inside. Her originality and privileged vantage point make her a writer to watch in the years to come.

The elusive and precise author spoke to Críticas about her writing process.

What are your aspirations as a writer?
I aim to delve deeply into the spirit of performance that is in literature, even though for years, the act of performance only pertained to visual arts. I wish to convert this literary gesture without harming the writing, by sublimating it, but exposing as well.

What do you consider to be a good text?
A good text is a well described state, where a feeling draws itself on its own, without revealing the techniques that have brought us to its emotion.

How did you get started as a writer?
With a diary that I wrote when I was eight years old. My mother had asked me to document what I felt and what happened around me.

Who has been important in your becoming a writer?
My mother, Albis Torres, the Cuban poet. Cuban song. French, English, and North American literature. García Márquez. Life itself. The Cubans who walk along my side. The poetry written on this island.

Tell us about when you wrote “Todos se van”.
Let me tell you that everybody had left, and I had remained. My parents had died, and I was restoring my loves, my new friends, my entire life.

How long did it take you to write the novel?
A little more than a year.

Do you remember the first day when you sat down to write it?
My cousin Olga, who also left in the nineties, had returned to Rome in order to help me reorganize my mother’s library—her aunt—we discovered her childhood diaries. Opening them started the writing process.

Where did you write it?
In my Miramar study, between Mount Barreto and the sea, trying to cover the powerful light that made my tears shine as bright neon lights.

Have you met any obstacles with this book? Is it out in Cuba? Where did it come out first?
It is not out in Cuba. Every book has its obstacles, but this one has been a privileged one since birth. It came out in Spain first, and then in Italy, and that is all for the moment.

What does Cuba have to offer as a stage and narrative source for an artist?
Life, changes, force and matter, sap, and as Benny Moré would say: Pain and forgiveness.

Tell us about writing a novel in the form of a journal.
I don’t comment about it, I write it daily while I answer you. It is almost a physiological exercise, an act of faith.

Do you have future plans that you’d like to tell us about?
I cannot separate my future from what I write because I am a writer of journals, so that is what is awaiting for me. Someone or something is waiting to be described by my hand.