2. Pick ONE of the following options and respond in the comment section below. The deadline is 2/15 before the class. 200-words minimum.
OPTION ONE
Pick TWO women in the film and compare their understanding and embodiments of gender. How do they navigate, follow or challenge traditional expectations about womanhood?
OPTION TWO
Analyze how ONE of the following factors allows ONE the characters to cope with the constraints of normative (middle-class/ heterosexual) family dynamics.
.institutionalized religion
.alternative spiritual practices/divination
.drawing/artmaking
.mind altering substances
OPTION THREE
Contrast the two cities in the animated film Quito (Ecuador), and Cali, (Colombia). How do these different urban spaces open up or close down other life possibilities for the characters?
Liliana Colanzi was born in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, in 1981. She is a journalist and writer and is the author of the storybooks Permanent Vacations (2010), The Wave (2014), Our Dead World (2016) and You Shine in the dark (2022). She currently teaches Latin American literature and creative writing at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, and is also the editor and creator of the Dum Dum label, in Bolivia.
Fragmented Storytelling
“I wanted to experiment with other forms, another style of telling things. As you have well noticed, there are fragments that can be self-contained stories or independent stories, but when linked with the others they create a mosaic that says something more than each story individually or the sum of those particular stories.”
Unveiling Spaces
These are stories very anchored in an idea of place. They are all Latin American spaces but Latin American spaces that have not been narrated often in Latin American Literature as Goiânia, for example, El Alto, La Paz, or the Bolivian Amazon. All the stories would seem to emanate from a landscape with a very particular history. And that story is sometimes more or less on the surface, but in most cases, it is a buried story that suddenly, due to something that happens, emerges, appears, and is related to the characters. It somehow defines what is happening to the characters.
1. Read Liliana Colanzi’s “Story with Bird” (Blackboard)
2. Pick ONE of the following options and respond in the comment section down below. The deadline is 2/6 before the class. 200-words minimum.
OPTION ONE
Analyze the use of debt in Colanzy’s story as an ongoing colonial practice of enslavement. Expand on the plantation as a space that reproduces colonial hierarchies and oppression.
OPTION TWO
Elaborate on two of the narrators in “Story with Bird,” what aspects of the narrative do they illuminate? What aspects do they silence? Do you trust them? How do they complement each other, and how do they differentiate?
OPTION THREE
Discuss how Colanzi explores the possibilities (or lack) of accountability in the story regarding the crimes of the protagonists.
I. What ideas of this writer or filmmaker appeal to you the most? Why?
I’m particularly interested in how Roberto Bolaño uses autofiction (a fictional account with autobiographical elements; Bolaño a Lihn were indeed pen pals) to create a dream or rather a nightmare in which Bolaño, Enrique Lihn, and Victor Jara cohabitate the same city, Santiago. This encounter allows Bolaño to elaborate on the aftermath and even afterlives of the Pinochet coup and long regime in Chile (Sep 11, 1973 – Mar 11, 1990). Just like a dream uncovers repressed memories and latent meanings, for Bolaño, the fascist Pinochet era lingers in Santiago for lack of accountability. The dead and the circumstances of repression and violence reappear destabilizing everyday life.
Who are they?
Roberto Bolaño
Enrique Lihn was a Chilean poet, playwright, and novelist. Born in 1929 in Santiago, Chile, Lihn aspired to be a painter, but after a failed attempt during university, he abandoned that dream to pursue writing. His work revolved around his contempt for the contemporary dictatorship as Chile was governed by a military junta. Works layered with social, political, and religious commentary are common throughout Lihn’s canon.
Víctor Jara was a Chilean teacher, theater director, poet, singer-songwriter, and socialist political activist tortured and killed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The contrast between the themes of his songs—which focused on love, peace, and social justice—and the brutal way in which he was murdered transformed Jara into a potent symbol of the struggle for human rights and justice for those killed during the Pinochet regime.
. Analyze one specific section by your chosen author that best communicates what you identified in the question above.
After reading the last section of the story (199) and reflecting on the documentary Massacre at the Stadium, why do you think Bolaño talks about a city inhabited by the dead.
What is implied by the observations regarding facades of another time, “a terrible time that endured for no reason other than sheer inertia”? What is the political argument behind this phrase?
III. Discuss how the structure of the text and its linguistic choices (style) enhance the narrative goals of the author.
Infrarealist Poetics
Stylistically, Bolaño’s “Meting with Enrique Lihn” recuperates some of the tenets of the Infrarealist literary movement that Bolaño co-founded with other poets in Mexico during the mid-70s. The infrarealists thought of the poet as an adventurer, visionary, outsider, and intellectual provocateur.
They believe in poetry that could incorporate a mixture of languages and genres into the text as a way of representing the full integration of the poet into all areas of life, including the unconscious. For them, there are invisible levels of reality that need to be uncovered by the poet/writer.
“A new lyricism that’s beginning to grow in Latin America sustains itself in ways that never cease to amaze us. The entrance to the work is the entrance to adventure: the poem as a journey and the poet as a hero who reveals heroes.”
IV. Can you show any analogy/relationship between what the author is saying and your personal experience? If this is not the case, can you establish any connection to other works you have read/heard/seen (books, comics, plays, paintings, photographs, podcasts, music, movies, series, documentaries, etc.)?
Film Noir and Bolaño
1:20-3:15
How Bolaño constructs his dream as the journey of a Film Noir (anti) hero?
How Bolaño integrates Film Noir aesthetics and narrative tropes into his nightmarish representation of Lihn and Jara? 191-2; 196-7
2. Read Roberto Bolaño’s short story “Meeting with Enrique Lihn” and the poem “Six Solitudes” by Enrique Lihn.
3. Pick ONE of the following options and respond in the comment section down below. The deadline is 1/30 before the class. 200-words minimum.
OPTION ONE
According to the documentary, why singer-songwriter Victor Jara was considered an enemy of Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing military regime? Why do you think Bolaño brings a distorted Jara into his story? How this ghostly figure fits into Bolaño’s nightmarish narrative?
OPTION TWO
In “Meeting with Enrique Lihn” Roberto Bolaño says that Chile and its capital Santiago “once resemble hell, a resemblance that, in some subterranean layer of the real city and the imaginary city, will forever remain” (191). Explain this quote by bringing examples from the documentary Massacre at the Stadium.
OPTION THREE
After reading these two sections from “Six Solitudes” by Enrique Lihn discuss how Bolaño builds the dream atmosphere of his short story using Lihn’s poetic style and imagery.
The unending loneliness from which others drink
at happy hour
is not my cup, but my grave. I bring it to my lips
and flail within it till I slip from sight
into its morbid waves.
Loneliness for me is not a caged bird but a monster,
as if I were living with an insane asylum.
3.
Everyone’s waiting for war but me.
The housewife is waiting for war
with the invading rats.
Kids are waiting for the future,
for the war ahead.
Men walk the warpath
with banners and slogans.
All but me, who am waiting for what?
Waiting for poetry.
Waiting for nothing.
Were you born in the US, the Caribbean, or Latin America? Where? Did you migrate to New York? When? From where? Where is your ancestral land? Do you still have contact with it? Do you belong to a diasporic community here in NYC? Where is home for you?
Group Discussion: Debriefing on the Syllabus
What struck your attention? What interested you the most about it? What question(s) do you have? Do you recognize any of the authors and sources that we are going to discuss? Do you usually read fiction or watch films from Latin America and the Caribbean? If that is the case, what was the last thing you watched or read from the region?
Short Analytical Exercise
How does this short cinematic text challenge borders and national constructs?
Compare the protagonist and discuss their respective crisis. Elaborate on their survival mechanism and their ways of envisioning futures.
How the film narrates contrasting diasporic realities while creating spaces for self-reliance and hope.
