Author and filmmaker Sandra Guzmán interviews Giannina Braschi for World Literature Today. Here are excerpts:
The last time I saw Giannina Braschi was a year ago at the 92NY in New York City. The auditorium was packed—800-plus New Yorkers convening to celebrate the launch of my monumental Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Latine Women. Braschi, one of the 140 brilliant writers featured in the anthology, read an excerpt of her new book, Putinoika (FlowerSong Press, 2024), and introduced the world to Putinas. She brought the house down. Multiple mic-drops. The audience was clamoring to know more about Putinas. Who are they? What world do they inhabit? And, who does their hair?
Braschi’s book comes right on time, two months before the US presidential election in which voters have a chance to retire Trump forever, and here the Puerto Rican poet is at her brilliant peak, bringing us a mind-bending and form-shattering literary experience. The book is rife with invented words that perfectly describe the grubby Trump-Putin love affair and the detritus it causes(ed). It also elevates us to higher realms asking us to dig deeper and find the virtues we possess to create a world where lovers, philosophers, and poets reign.
Putinoika is a Puerto Rican limpieza. And to quote Braschi specifically: it’s the spiritual cleansing of our time.
Sandra Guzmán: What does Putinoika mean? If you open Webster’s dictionary, what is the definition of Putinoika?
Giannina Braschi: The frenzy and plague of the Trump and Putin era of collusion, pollution, and delusion. I was thinking how similar this moment is to the Reagan and Gorbachev era of Perestroika, which also had its plague with AIDS. I love titles that are names that encapsulate a myth or an era. Satyricon. Don Quixote. Faust. Moby Dick. Ubu Roi. Putinoika. I took the “oika” and added it to Putin. Teiresias says to Pendejo in my Bacchae, “You think you are walking straight, but you are spinning your ass in Putin’s chair. The Russian way of collusion. You condense seven years in one moment—and live in one moment—the delusion of a whole era: Putinoika.”
[. . .]
Guzmán: Tell us about the three-part structure of the book.
Braschi: Putinoika opens with Palinode, which is un arrepentimiento—an ode of recantation. You see the mistakes of the past shining through the moment in un arrepentimiento. But it’s not about taking us back to the past. It’s not “Make America Great Again.” It’s about resolving what is tragic in the past and dissolving what is toxic now. It’s about a spiritual cleansing of our time.
Guzmán: Then comes a modern Bacchae as part 2.
Braschi: Yes, here Dionysus takes human form in order to make a god of the multitudes. Bacchus asks, If the father became a god, and the son became a god, why can’t I make a god of the masses? He is looking for the divinity of the masses. Pendejo is based on Pentheus, but instead of being a young tyrannical king, Pendejo is an old tyrant. Instead of the mother killing her son in a Bacchic frenzy, we have the daughter killing her father.
Guzmán: The final section is also called Putinoika.
Braschi: Yes, there I chronicle the Covid pandemic.
Guzmán: Toni Morrison says that literature serves as a bridge to confront and understand complex human experiences; James Baldwin says it serves as a witness to confront uncomfortable truths. What do you think the role of literature is in today’s world?
Braschi: We don’t need storytellers. We need soothsayers. I never said I am a storyteller. I said I am a soothsayer. I say the sooth.
[. . .]
Guzmán: Puerto Rico — where you were born and raised — shows up in the book, and you paint a portrait of a nation that is also experiencing a Greek tragedy or multiple Greek tragedies. Gabriel García Márquez once said that he didn’t write about Puerto Rico because it superseded fiction. Today, American billionaires and millionaires are moving to the archipelago to avoid paying taxes. And people are being displaced and forced from their lands. Public beaches are being closed off for the uber wealthy. And you managed to capture the outrageousness of the moment in Putinoika. Why was it important to weave what’s happening there now?
Braschi: What’s happening there is a microcosm of what happens here. The disintegration of the colony is a microcosm of the disintegration of the empire. What comes to Puerto Rico is the worst of the United States. We would love to receive poets, philosophers, lovers. But what we get are the tax evaders, the Trumpitos who build walls between themselves and the natives—the firstlings. The evaders avoid taxes like they avoid the people. In reality, they hate being there. And we know this. And it will explode someday. They bar the firstlings from our own places and call us locals. Since when are we locals? We were minorities until the minorities became majorities. Now they call us locals—to underline our underprivileged status of being less in our own land—localization of the discrimination and segregation of the majorities into a localized place as if locals were less than tourists and foreigners invading the native.
Guzmán: You have said that your humor is Puerto Rican.
Braschi: Yes, and my thinking is Puerto Rican. I think with my whole being. I am not what I do but who I am. I am a poet. [. . .]
On Sandra Guzmán: A Caribbean-born, Afro Indigenous daughter of Boriké, Sandra Guzmán is an award-winning author, editor, documentary filmmaker, and anthologist whose work explores identity, land, memory, race, coloniality, spirituality, culture, and gender. She is the editor of the landmark anthology Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women (2023), featuring the texts of 140 women from fifty nations who write in more than two dozen languages (see WLT, Nov. 2023, 68). [. . .]
For full interview and more information, see https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/interviews/give-me-more-putinas-por-favor-conversation-giannina-braschi-sandra-guzman