With much of the world now weeks into lockdown, our writers bring you news of its continued impact upon both the publishing and bookselling industries, as well as on writers’ own responses. In Mexico, authors such as Olivia Teroba and Jazmina Barrera have continued to engage with audiences; in Argentina, bookshops have been embracing solidarity to overcome the current challenges; and in China, the lifting of the lockdown in Wuhan has brought fresh poetry broadcasts and publications along with it. Read on to find out more!
Andrew Adair, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico
Here in Mexico City, the lockdown has been largely optional, with much frustration over President López Obrador’s casual, relaxed approach before a global pandemic. Until a few weeks ago, there was no lockdown whatsoever, which left people to follow their own moral code when it came to deciding what to stop doing and when. Now, restrictions are in place and movement in the city has calmed down, though with such lackadaisical direction, many still continue to gather. Of course, many more have no choice but to work, as Mexico is the second-most impoverished country in Latin America (Brazil being the first) and many live, not week-to-week, but day-to-day.
And so, with that, we’ve moved online with the rest of the world, shifting many literary conversations to all manner of digital platforms: Zoom, Instagram, YouTube Live—surely you know the drill by now.
One particularly busy author is Olivia Teroba, a newcomer whose first publication of feminist-edged essays, Un lugar seguro (A Safe Place) arrived last year from Paraíso Perdido. Teroba has given workshops and talks through various institutions and bookstores, most notably her Zoom videoconference “New Genealogies” with Casa Tomada, an independent cultural space which has done an impressive job of moving online.
On April 24, la UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) celebrated International Book Day with a series of rousing talks from a wide range of authors as part of their new program #CulturaUNAMenCasa. Topics included, appropriately, “Reading poetry in digital environments,” “Books that save our lives,” and “Feminine Verse in Latin America”—a talk between Claudia Masin and Mexico City-based poet/translator Robin Myers.
Additionally, the UNAM’s monthly magazine has launched a special edition this month: “Pandemic Diary,” wherein a new author reports from the pandemic each day. A particularly captivating entry is that of Jazmina Barrera (her On Lighthouses is out May 12 from Two Lines Press, tr. Christina MacSweeney). Barrera’s contribution is an open letter to author Eula Biss reflecting on the social body of microbes composed by us all and her anxious, enlightening experience reading Biss’s On Immunity: An Inoculation, a frighteningly relevant, balanced take on vaccination, which Barrera happened to be reading on the eve of the pandemic’s arrival in the west.
Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina
Buenos Aires is one of the world’s bookshop capitals, but Argentina’s coronavirus shutdown is testing this once-thriving industry. The Argentine capital consistently ranks as one of the world cities with the highest number of bookstores per capita: there are approximately twenty-three bookstores for every one hundred thousand residents. In New York City, that number is about ten. There are several explanations for this abundance, some more plausible than others. Prolific immigration in the last century gave rise to a multiethnic metropolis where literary culture blossomed. Buenos Aires also boasts the most psychologists per capita: does a penchant for psychotherapy correlate with a fondness for reading? Regardless, the city’s residents rely on bookstores. Book delivery isn’t common, and Amazon doesn’t operate in Argentina. Electronic books have only just begun to gain traction. This spelled success for local bookshops—until now.
As literary events are put on hold here and around the world due to the coronavirus pandemic, bookstores in Argentina are scrambling to pivot to quarantine-friendly business models. Some have begun taking orders via Instagram, while others have started to ship books countrywide. Crowdfunding campaigns have provided one form of life support. Another is a monthly subscription program: for two hundred and fifty pesos per month, subscribers can support a network of local bookshops and redeem the value of their subscription in merchandise later. So far, twenty retailers are part of the program, called Mi librería. Publishing has also ground to a halt. At the end of March, the literary industry, from editors to booksellers, requested permission to continue work despite closing to the public. Their request was granted, but many new releases scheduled for this month remain in limbo.
In the face of these unprecedented challenges, bookshops have embraced solidarity. A lot of these initiatives depend on networks of mutual aid, and booksellers have continued to promote literature and community. The organization Cultura Viral Federal, which fosters artistic community in quarantine, has partnered with Leedor to host virtual “cuarencharlas” (“quarantalks”) on Zoom, with various artists invited to speak on a range of cultural themes. Amid the pandemic, bookshops remain a vital connection to reading—a solitary act of solidarity, a lifeline in a time of isolation.
Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting from China
In China, the poetic tradition has long been in the service of synthesis. From the communal composition of lyric, to the epistolary customs of verse exchange, to the rhythmic texts of revolutionary awakenings, poems have brought the disparate together, initiated the bondings of fierce intimacies, and fortified the ideologies that swept the nation. To this day, the poem still maintains its transformative rectitude—they are, in the best of cases, steadfast structures of knowledge and wisdom by which Chinese people organize the world.
On April 8, a poem paradigmatic of this anthemic character once again spread throughout China, through the premier edition of a live program titled 青春诗会 Youth Poetry Club, broadcast through CCTV and Tencent Video. An indisputable sensation with views exceeding one hundred million, the program coincided with the lifting of Wuhan’s lockdown, commemorating the relief in celebratory lyricism. Hosted in part by 彭敏 Peng Min, the editor of national poetry magazine 诗刊, Youth Poetry Club gathered thirteen celebrities, alongside other young citizens of Wuhan—students, healthcare staff, volunteers, essential workers—to recite poems both traditional and contemporary against the backdrop of a newly liberated city. The aforementioned rampant poem, written by 谢春枝 Xie Chunzhi and entitled “Wuhan, It’s Me, Spring,” established its flagrant sentiment by the end of the opening verse:
Wuhan, it’s me, spring
Waiting patiently for your return, spring
The rain has washed clean the cruel winter daze
We’ve finally arrived, seeing
The doors of the city, slowly rising
Read with appropriately emotive enthusiasm, washed through with sweet colour and sophistic optimism, accompanied by shots of bursting cherry blossom and pastel skies, the poem, alongside Wuhan’s landmarks and cityscape, were enwrapped in the typical apocryphal sheen that inevitably accompanies state-sponsored media. The glowing faces of the youth, reciting Xie’s dewy-eyed verse, seemed to me an open defiance of poetry’s singular power to at once act as a mirror and a medium—to tell a personal truth in the presence of a public truth.
There is, of course, a great joy in seeing the city reawaken, as if from a nightmare, and alongside that arrives the temptation to write it off as exactly that—a dream. But to be in the captivity of dreaming is to surrender inquiry for submission, and to placate an audience with hope is to extinguish their demand for change. To return to the immense history and heights of poetry, as Confucius said: “History tells us what happened; poetry tells us why it happened.”
In another call to spring (Chinese people really like spring), a collection of poems entitled 盼你春天归来 (Waiting for Your Return in Spring) was recently published by the Guizhou Publishing House, featuring over two hundred poems by one hundred and fifty poets who responded to the epidemic. In reading through the volume, these few simple lines by the Gelao poet 王富举 Wang Fuju occurred as more elegant and sagacious than all those alacritous verses I’d previously heard read chirpily in high definition:
I had resolutely believed,
that in the spring of 2020
to write poetry is unforgivable.
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