Intellectual Goods Are Not Like Shoes: Dolores Dorantes & Ben Ehrenreich in Conversation
"I still believe that the infinite good that is our work can open doors by itself, without us having to denigrate ourselves or serve as circus animals that the institution can take out for a walk." That's Dolores Dorantes in conversation with Ben Ehrenreich at Culture Strike, a network of artists and writers that "seeks to support the national and global arts movement around immigration." We wrote recently of Dorantes in exile in El Paso between Southern California and El Paso, where she relishes the silence of the desert that lets her write."
Culture Strikes also points to her writing here at Harriet, translated by Jen Hofer: "In Dorantes’s poem, 'A/A,' she touches on the vitality, as well as the lethality, of life in exile when she observes, 'I don’t know any other way to live except to be lost.' In conversation with Ehrenreich, the two explore the meaning of loss, as a path toward discovering a different sense of the truth. The dialogue was conducted via email over a period of days, in a blend of English and Spanish, and it appears here translated into both." An excerpt:
[Dolores Dorantes:] ...I don’t believe in the existence of a literary world, which may be why I was never part of one (nor will I be). Writers exist, like shoemakers do. In Mexico, extraordinarily enough, there is a budget of millions to guarantee the existence of art, and that budget must be spent; we know that with enough money it’s possible to invent a ‘world,’ right? This “world” is one invented in order to justify funding and not a motor that generates art on its own. To impose some order, artists serve as “experts in the field” who decide who will or will not receive a little money in exchange for a commitment to produce art within the institutional reality of the Mexican state. In this way they get the wheel rolling, as Vargas Lllosa would say, “through bribes,” to subtly, force intellectuals to conform. I am an incurable lover of freedom and for that reason decided to be a prisoner to other trades rather than consenting to commit my talents to a system created by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the institutional party, which is hypocritical to its marrow, not to mention macho, sexist, classist, racist, arrogant.
But intellectual goods are not like shoes. How do you think we should treat them when they are precisely the “material” of our work? How can we give them value?
[Ben Ehrenreich]: The more I do this, the more I write and the more I think about why I write, the more I am convinced that the only relevant material is love. I don’t mean that in any goopy romantic sense, and I’m not talking about something that is necessarily gentle or even kind. I am quite sure that love does not need us to lend it value, only that we open ourselves to it. Which I suppose is one of the things that I loved (forgive me) about “No Sirvo,” that you, as you say, turned a posture of humiliation into one of love. You got on your knees on the stage and kissed Román’s feet, and Juan Manuel’s. You knelt in the aisle and kissed my feet, and Anthony McCann’s. It was a supremely uncomfortable gesture, almost unbearably—one that took its power from the discomfort it evoked. Because love somehow broke through, and your defiance was suddenly transformed, and transformative.
But you are not on your knees most of the time, Lola, and we’re supposed to be talking about immigration. The other literary world referenced by “No Sirvo” is the one you encountered here in the US—also not a “world” so much as a series of relationships which, depending which side of them you’re on, are either obstacles or allegiances. The pertinent institutions here are mainly private, or semi-private, and in poetry are mainly lashed in one way or another to academia. And this being the US, the boundaries are primarily defined by race...
Read on at Culture Strike.