Lemebel A Last Supper of Queer Apostles

Selected Essays
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78227-825-2
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Searingly political, extravagantly stylish non-fiction from a queer Latin American literary icon, in English for the first time'I speak from my difference' wrote Pedro Lemebel, the Chilean writer who became an icon of resistance and queer transgression across Latin America. His innovative essays-known as crónicas-combine memoir, reportage, history and fiction to bring visibility and dignity to the lives of sexual minorities, the poor and the powerless.In a baroque, freewheeling style that fused political urgency with playfulness, resistance with camp, Lemebel shone a light on lives and events that many wanted to suppress: the glitzy literary salon held above a torture chamber, the queer sex and community that bloomed in Santiago's hidden corners and the last days of trans sex workers dying of AIDS, each cast in the starring role of her own private tragedy.As Chile emerged from Pinochet's brutal dictatorship into a flawed democracy, Lemebel re-wrote the country's history from the margins, and today his subversive voice echoes around the world.

Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015) is considered one of the most important queer writers of twentieth-century Latin America and was also an activist and a performance artist. Born in Santiago, Chile, he became a renowned voice of Latin American counterculture during the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath. He received Chile's José Donoso Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is best known for his crónicas and one novel, My Tender Matador, which has been translated into more than a dozen languages and was adapted in 2020 into a critically acclaimed film by Chilean director Rodrigo Sepúlveda.Gwendolyn Harper won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Work in Progress grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation for A Last Supper of Queer Apostles. She holds an MFA from Brown University.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lemebel, Pedro

Weitere Mitwirkende

Harper, Gwendolyn

Leseproben

Introduction

I could write almost telegraphically for the whole world and for the symmetrical ratification of all languages kowtowed to English. I’ll never write in English; with any luck I say, Go home.

—Pedro Lemebel, “In Lieu of a Synopsis”

It’s hard to know whether Pedro Lemebel, one of the most important queer writers of twentieth-century Latin America, wants to be translated into English at all after a couple of sentences like that. A protean figure, he was a performance artist, radio host, and newspaper columnist, a tireless activist whose life spanned some of Chile’s most dramatic decades. But above all he was known for his furious, dazzling crónicas—short prose pieces that blend loose reportage with fictional and essayistic modes. Many of them depict Chile’s AIDS crisis, which in 1984 began to spread through Santiago’s sexual underground, overlapping with the final years of the Pinochet dictatorship. In a prose style that grabs its readers by the collar, Lemebel recounts the lives of individual locas—a derogatory Chilean term for a travesti, trans woman, or even an effeminate gay man—while also prompting questions about the relationship between the words we use and the way we see the world.

Throughout his work, Lemebel remains unabashedly political. He hated the word gay, a term he associates with the moneyed, white, and hypermasculine homosexual culture that has steamrolled homespun Latin American homosexualities, which to his mind are poor, Indigenous, and feminine. But, beyond his militant stance, what perhaps most risks getting lost in translation is Lemebel’s simultaneous acridity and tenderness, a generosity toward language and the world even amid steely resistance to its conditions. His dissatisfaction with the available vocabulary is coextensive with his love for language, as his capricious conjunctions of syllables and sly wordplay become the very nodes of his resistance.

Lemebel was born in 1952, as Pedro Mardones, on the poorer outskirts of Santiago. In the crónica “Zanjón upon the Water,” named for the neighborhood where he grew up, he describes his early years with irony, nostalgia, and a bit of fairy-tale dust, braiding his childhood memories of poverty with early subversive experiences of gender: after sipping, as a toddler, on the sewage that runs in the stream behind the family’s home, he becomes “pregnant” with what’s assumed to be a stomach virus but later turns out to be a tadpole. Even memories of his mother’s physical affection feel inextricable from economic realities: his mother’s hands—an image he will return to in “Manifesto” and “Street Corners of My Heart”—are “gashed by bleach.”

Lemebel came of age in the seventies, studying carpentry and metallurgy at a technical school before enrolling as an art student at the University of Chile. The late 1960s had brought a blossoming of Chilean art and music, particularly the political folk music genre known as Nueva Canción (New Song)—a movement that included figures like Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara, two singer-composers that Lemebel particularly admired and whom he references in various crónicas. The Socialist leader Salvador Allende was elected president in 1970, inaugurating a period of remarkable—even utopian—political energy and hope. Allende moved to significantly increase government services, building public hospitals and housing, raising the minimum wage, creating literary and education programs, and guaranteeing free access to milk for women with children. In moves that greatly upset the wealthy Chilean establishment, he nationalized the banks and copper industry, and expanded a land seizure and redistribution program that had begun under Eduardo Frei, his Christian Democrat predecessor; by the beginning of 1973, the majority of the enormous agricultural estates had been reduced to two hundred acres.

But what began as a bright new decade turned into a tumultuous and ultimately bloody one for the country. Class tensions ran high as Allende began to enact his reforms. Following the March 1973 congressional elections, the streets were filled almost daily with marches from every side of the political spectrum—from conservative wives who protested the government’s food rationing, to groups further to the left than Allende such as the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement), which wanted civilian armed resistance to counter the military’s increasing distance from the presidency. The country’s difficulties, which included inflation and a shrinking economy, were intensified by and in some cases created through secret US involvement—the food shortage, for example, was caused by a months-long strike by the truck drivers union, where the drivers were paid wages by the CIA in order to remain on strike indefinitely.

In June, the right-wing paramilitary group Frente Nacionalista Patria y Libertad (Fatherland and Liberty Nationalist Front) staged a failed coup; by August, the police and military commanders who supported Allende had either been forced to resign or been assassinated. And on September 11, 1973, the military, backed by the United States, staged a successful coup, bombing the presidential palace with Allende inside. During the weeks and years that followed, thousands would be detained and killed—collectively known as “the disappeared,” as most of the bodies were never recovered, nor their deaths confirmed. The state was now run by a military junta—a group of four generals, with General Augusto Pinochet as head of state. The new regime implemented a nightly curfew that it maintained until 1987, shortly before Pinochet stepped down from power.

It is onto this grim stage, in the eighties, that Lemebel first steps. Not as a writer—though he has, importantly, begun attending workshops with writers Diamela Eltit and Pía Barros. Like many Allende supporters, he spent the second half of the seventies keeping a low profile. But during the final years of the dictatorship, having been fired from his job as an art teacher for his homosexuality, he began making, together with the artist Francisco Casas, what are now considered key early pieces of Latin American performance art.

There wasn’t really a word, at least not in Chile, for what they were doing back then: putting their bodies on the line in sometimes playful, at other times profoundly dangerous, situations. Calling themselves Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (“The Mares of the Apocalypse”), the pair often appeared in drag, and their performances—equal parts brilliant and disruptive—confronted not only the dictatorship’s atrocities, but also the Left’s homophobia and its blindness to the rapidly developing AIDS crisis. As one of their first acts, at the ceremony where Raúl Zurita accepted the 1988 Pablo Neruda Award for Poetry, the pair climbed onstage and crowned the poet with thorns—a wink at Zurita’s public gestures of self-sacrifice. In another instance, the two of them rode naked on a white horse into the campus of the University of Chile. Perhaps their most famous piece is The Conquest of America (1989), a bloody homosexual pas de deux in which, bare-chested and barefoot, they performed the cueca, a traditional (and often politicized) dance in Chile, over a map of South America made of glass shards from Coke bottles. This was in front of the Chilean Commission on Human Rights, the committee responsible for calculating the number of people who were killed or tortured by the Chilean military between 1973 and 1989.

Lemebel recounts some of these art actions in the crónicas. In “The Death of Madonna,” he describes how, in November 1989, coinciding with one of the resistance’s citywide blackouts, the Yeguas drew glowing stars on the ground, creating a Hollywood-style walk of fame and setting up a faux film premiere, which included spotlights and press coverage, so the locas in the surrounding neighborhood could pretend to be movie stars. But the action’s title, Gone with AIDS—a twist on Gone with the Wind—suggests that most of those who participated would be subject to a very different fate. Lemebel’s first book of crónicas, La esquina es mi corazón (Street corners of my heart), was published in 1995—a chapbook of short stories, Incontables (Uncountables) was published earlier, in 1986—and with it, Lemebel sprang into the literary world fully formed as a writer. His second book, Loco afán (Wild desire, 1996), brought him international attention. For it is in Loco afán that Lemebel places the AIDS crisis and the locas front and center, memorializing his friends who have “disappeared” in what feels to him like political déjà vu.

If we were to take Lemebel’s flamboyantly baroque crónicas literally, AIDS arrived with the blond, macho gay tourist, who sank his...