Litro154 teaser

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Cuba ISSUE 154

FREE Featuring

Karla Suarez Coco Fusco Aida Bahr Ahmed Dickinson Cárdenas Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo Dazra Novak Omar Pérez Leila Segal

Cover art

by Tonel

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ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7

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Training for writing drama across different media contexts > MA/MFA Writing for Stage and Broadcast Media

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table of contents | #154 Cuba | 2016 July 05

Contributors

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Guest editor's letter

Fiction

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Havana Hemicrania by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo (Reykjavik)

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Losing twice by Aida Bahr (Santiago de Cuba)

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Ravings by Karla Suarez (Lisbon)

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Luca's trip to Havana by Leila Segal (UK)

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Someone's stolen the Cockatiels by Dazra Novak (Havana)

Flash Fiction

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Last wish by Ihoeldis M. Rodriguez (Miami)

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How to play by Ihoeldis M. Rodriguez (Miami)

Essays

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Off the Page by Omar Pérez, poet (Havana)

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Taste as a Political Matter by Coco Fusco, artist (New York)

Interview

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/ Ahmed Dickinson Cárdenas Cuban Guitarist (London)

Photography

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The Cuban-Americans by Geandy Pavon (New York)

EDITORIAL STAFF

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E d i t o r- i n - C h i e f E r i c A ko t o | O n l i n e E d i t o r online@litro.co.uk | Arts Editor Daniel Janes, ar ts@litro.co.uk | Assis t ant Fiction Edit or/ St or y Sunday Bar ney Walsh, stor ysunday@ litro.co.uk | lunchbreakfic Belinda Campbell, l u n c h b re a k f i c @ l i t ro . c o . u k | Tu e s d a y Ta l e s Hayley Camis, tuesdaytales@litro.co.uk Es sa y s S a m ue l D o ds o n , e s sa ys@ lit ro . co .u k Contr ibuting Edit or at Large Sophie Lewis, Rio, Brazil | Lead Designer Laura Hannum Design Intern Elina Nikkinen | Of fice admin Intern Mélody Enjoubault | Adver tising Manager +44(0) 203 371 9971 sales@litro. co.uk | Guest Editor Leila Segal Litro Magazine believes that literary magazines should not just be targeted at writers or literary types, but at general readers wherever they are—commuting, browsing in bookshops, meeting friends in bars or cafés.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Karla Suarez was born in Havana and

lives in Lisbon. She has written novels, short story collections and travel books.

She won the Carbet de la Caraïbe Prize (France) for her novel La Habana, año cero, and the Lengua de Trapo Prize (Spain) for Silencios.

Aida Bahr is a writer and critic from

Holguín, Cuba. She has published four short story collections and two novels. For Ofelias she won the Alejo Carpentier Short Story Prize (2006), and the Premio de la Crítica Literaria (2007).

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo is a writer

and photographer from Havana. He lives in Reykjavik. He blogs at Lunes de Post-Revolución and edits The Revolution Evening Post.

He is editor of the Cuban narrative anthology Cuba in Splinters and author of the digital photobook Abandoned Havana.

Ihoeldis M. Rodriguez from Jatibonico,

Cuba, is a sociologist, journalist, and flashfiction writer. An independent researcher on Cuban microfiction and former producer of the National Contest for Microfiction Mancuspia+53 in Cuba, he lives in Miami.

Dazra Novak is a writer and historian

from Havana. She won the Premio UNEAC de Novela Cirilo Villaverde (2011) for her book Making of. Novak blogs about daily life in Havana at Habana por dentro.

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8 Geandy Pavon from Havana, is a painter and photographer. He has lived in New York since 1996. Pavon’s work has been featured in individual and collective exhibitions such as Caribbean: crossroads of the world, at the Harlem Studio Museum, and the X Files Biennale, at El Museo del Barrio in New York.

Omar Pérez from Havana, is a prize-

winning poet, essayist, and Zen Buddhist monk. He received Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén Prize for Poetry for Crítica de la Razón Puta (2009), and its National Critics’ Prize for his essay collection La perseverancia de un hombre oscuro (2000).

Coco Fusco is a Cuban-American inter-

disciplinary artist and writer. Fusco has performed and curated throughout the US and internationally. Fusco’s work explores the relationship between women and society, war, politics and race.

Leila Segal was born in London. She is a

writer, and the director of anti-slavery project Voice of Freedom. Her debut collection Breathe: Stories from Cuba originates in the time she spent in Havana and the Pinar del Río province of Cuba between 2000 and 2006.

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Editor's letter Fiction can comfortably contain ambiguity; its flesh and blood creations can make no sense, contradict themselves, and in being fully human, represent experience to us in ways that opinion or analysis can not.

In the West, Cuba has become a state of mind more than a real place, a canvas onto which people paint their ideologies and dreams. How to commission an issue of Litro that speaks of Cuba, without choosing a point of view? How to contain the multiple voices that claim her? In editing Litro Cuba I have been fortunate to work with some of today’s finest Cuban writers of fiction—both on and off the island—whose work placed side by side offers a mosaic of experience, a truer representation of reality than any single point of view could do.

These are all Cuban voices, to which I have added an outsider’s perspective— one story from my own collection, Breathe, published this year in London by flipped eye, which I wrote while living in Cuba between 2000 and 2006.

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo’s Havana Hemiocrania was written during the never-ending nights of his first, exiled, winter in Reykjavik. He was missing the excess of light in Cuba. He was missing the excess

of language. He was missing the violence of the Revolution as the measure of all things, including love and the loss of love. Detained in Cuba three times for his political activism, Luis Pardo was now free, yet held in time, memory and nightmare. Exile’s lacerating pain—the further he is from Cuba the more he feels her—is expressed in his story’s scream.

In Losing Twice, leading Cuban short story writer Aida Bahr takes us to Santiago, in Cuba’s East, where she makes her home. We are in the ‘80s, Cuba’s golden age, before the loss of Soviet subsidies, economic collapse and the Special Period of the following decade. Food is cheap, mostly ration-free; people take holidays and buy consumer goods. Bahr’s is a confident Cuba, her narrator an emancipated, revolutionary woman, looking to rekindle old love.

Portugal-based Karla Suarez was a leading figure in the Cuban arts scene before her departure in the late 1990s. Ravings is a voice from the Special Period itself—the ‘90s, when economic crisis disrupted and re-formed Cuban society. The dollar began to circulate alongside the Cuban peso, and the country was divided into those who had dollars, and those who did not. Suarez’s fevered voice is that of an

10 older generation, revolutionaries who had worked to build a society that the ‘90s shattered. Set at the end of that decade, the story is a sneak-preview of what was to come.

In Someone’s Stolen the Cockatiels, Havana resident Dazra Novak, one of Cuba’s strongest young voices, shows us the Cuba of today. Novak’s Cuba is a place of harsh economic necessity where people concern themselves most with practical things. Material problems weigh heavily and people dream less. Within this difficulty, though, Novak’s characters can find happiness for no reason.

Luca’s Trip to Havana, my own story, brings us to the early 2000s; the power of the dollar is all too apparent and tourism, an economic necessity accepted with reluctance by the state, has exacted a high price. Luca, a European businessman, lusts after a young Cuban employee at his Havana hotel—the power differential between visitor and Cuban creates complex dynamics and the potential for mutual exploitation.

Ihoeldis M. Rodriguez’s two flash fiction pieces, How to Play and Last Wish, were conceived in Cuba and written in Miami, where he has lived for the last year. Both describe characters caught in an absurd situation, which ultimately condemns them.

But with neither piece located in any geographical or literary place, Rodriguez leaves us guessing: is it life in Cuba, or in ‘La Yuma’ (the U.S.) that is absurd.

Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco explores the intersection between art and activism in her essay Taste as a Political Matter, while Havana poet Omar Pérez discusses improvisation in Off the Page.

Geandy Pavon contributes a series of photographs on displacement and longing, The Cuban-Americans; and our Q&A is with Cuban classical guitarist Ahmed Dickinson Cárdenas, on bridging cultures. (Full disclosure: Ahmed has performed at some of my book readings around London.)

Litro Cuba comes at a moment when interest in Cuba high, as the world watches the drama of change unfolding there. Cuba stubbornly holds onto the hearts of those who have left her, but for those who remain, the struggle is most of all to make sense of an uncertain, rapidly changing landscape. I hope that the following pages will allow you to join them on their journey.

Leila Segal Guest Editor

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HAVANA HEMICRANIA

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FICTION

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Translated by Lawrence Schimel

The light was killing me. The light and a dream that was the same dream every night. A sort of labyrinth, where we ran like mad through the streets of the neighborhood, blind beneath a murderous sun, shouting pinga and cojones, shouting libertad, shouting viva and Down with the Cuban Revolution! while police bullets shattered the skulls of my friends and girlfriends.

Reality cutting to the bone.

But I always saved myself. And it is so terrible to remain alive all alone. Outliving is outdying.

I woke full of sadness. With tears, without breath. Unable to even swallow. With a heavy weight breaking my ribs on the side where the heart lies.

That’s all that I have left now of Havana. Light that kills, blindingly. Light and a meaningless dream. Light and lousy words, shitty words. Evil deaths, passed through the dreamlike blender of savagery. Intermittent shouting, neighborhood vulgarity. And a Cuban rage that (one can’t be certain) is either a consequence or a cause of the Revolution.

In any event, a residual rage. Like the echo of a big-bang which now no longer scandalizes anyone.

I woke with my head wanting to crack from the pain, to split in two from the pain. My brains sliding out of my ears on their own. Through osmosis or gravity, or through some quantum effect of the proletariat.

And I leapt from my bed to open the nineteenth-century windows of my apartment. To open a breach. And then the oppression became sea, became clouds, became parades of planes. I saw the smoke from the chimneys, and I saw another year acting brutally toward Cuba. Two thousand something, two thousand nothing. Counting the minutes, can't-ing the minutes.

The silence of suicides. Hemicrania, a migraine of half the skull. Desperation.

Only later, after a while, did peace return at last. A damned exile at home once again. Wearing my own pajamas against social despotism. A floozy who doesn't belong to anyone or any place, but who can't ever manage to get far from home. Oh, Havana. My Hava-not...

The breeze from the Malecón is a relief against my thoughts and the plague. There down below it must already be ten something in the morning. From up here the fatherland suddenly looks like a parking lot. One without parking meters, of course, or civilians. In Socialism we are all sovereignly soldiers. Military Paraparadise.

LOSING TWICE

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FICTION

Aida Bahr

Translated by Dick Cluster

I hate losing. And losing twice makes me madder still. So I should have known as soon as I saw you, but no, the rum went right to my head, because you’d come alone, so I left Enrique in mid-sentence and made a beeline for you, almost crashing into you in my eagerness to get started with the blah-blah of “Wow, it’s been so long” and “Man, where have you been hiding?” and planting an innocent kiss close enough to your mouth but far enough away too. It’s funny, because I can hear it now—what I said, I mean, because I don’t even know what you answered, I just know that it only took one second for me to get all ga-ga again, so while you were talking all I did was pay attention to your lips, your teeth, and I’d already decided that I was spending the night with you, why not, I’d been holding onto that desire since college, when you dropped me for Gabriela. We were only together three or four times, but you left your imprint and I never could get rid of it. Every time I saw you go by with Gaby at your side, I could feel something eating away at me. You didn’t tell her you wanted to avoid commitments, you didn’t have time for a serious relationship, the way you told me. Not her, no, instead you bought her a ring and even presented it on Valentine’s Day, like how trite could you be? I wasn’t about to slit my wrists—why should I? —but it did hurt, it was like a knife in my heart to see you sitting on a bench with her or to cross paths in the dining hall. And Gaby never took you out, never paid for anything, while I even paid for you to get drunk in El Rancho, and I’m not sorry, because it was one of the best nights, though in the end I practically had to carry you back to the dorm, and shush you when you tried to shout insults at the boys in the reform school, and then when we got to the dorm you started putting the moves on me again and if I didn’t go along it was only because you were drunk and it’s no fun that way. That’s why, today, I was very careful not to drink too much and to keep you from drinking either. I monopolized you, I didn’t care who saw it, all that mattered was not to let the opportunity slip. When you told me Gaby was out of town, bells went off in my head. I spent a while considering how to arrange the thing, because a hotel room on Saturday night, no way, and then when you told me you’d been given an apartment, that was too good to be true. Your place was at the far end of the housing project, but still, an apartment plus Gaby being away, problem solved. Right away I could tell it wouldn’t be hard to convince you, because you were as ready as I was, and I have to admit I was moved by that. The first bucket of cold water came on our way up the stairs, when the noise from the second floor made you

LAST WISH

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FLASH FICTION

Ihoeldis M.Rodriguez

Translated by Lawrence Schimel

"That they not kill me!" the condemned man hurried to reply.

The chief of the firing squad, a captain who was neither young nor old, smiled in confusion.

A breeze came from the nearby lake, bringing the sounds of water, of birds. When the captain spoke, incredulity still danced in his mouth.

"Such a digression," he said at last, "has only one way of justifying itself: let it be so, but you can't wish for anything more in the rest of your life. This was your last wish, and we have fulfilled it for you."

And returning to the soldiers, he said, "Men, withdraw."

The man who had saved his life watched them draw away along the path that bordered the lake.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

THE CUBANAMERICANS

When I left Cuba with my family, the only thing we brought with us was a photo album; everything else was left behind.

For many people in exile Cuba has become a photograph, a memory they protect and long for. I have the feeling that this strong connection to the past has made us forget our present, in some ways it is like everything that really matters has a direct connection to the island, meanwhile we forget about the memories we generate somewhere else. To me, photography has become a way to document everyday life of the Cuban Diaspora. I have realized that this is

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Geandy Pavon

a story that has not been told yet, at least from a photographic perspective.

My ongoing series The Cuban-Americans is an attempt to tell a story of Cuba outside Cuba. The series takes off from a concept put forth by Cuban-American writer Gustavo Pérez Firmat: a hyphen that both binds and sets apart—nominally and culturally— the Cuban and North American identities.

This in-between realm, almost a no man’s land, creates a sort of atemporal existence and, hence, a strangeness, a complex, undefinable and anachronistic space, the key element of my work.

/ To me, photography has become a way to document everyday life of the Cuban Diaspora /

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INTERVIEW

AHMED DICKINSON CÁRDENAS

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Leila Segal

Described as “a true pioneer” (Classic FM Magazine), award-winning Cuban guitarist, Ahmed Dickinson Cárdenas, is one of today’s finest performers of the Cuban classical guitar school. Ten years ago he came to London from Havana to study at the Royal College of Music, and has made his home here ever since. Leila Segal met him, to talk music, Cuba—and navigating two cultures.

LS: It’s great to have this opportunity to see London through the eyes of a Cuban artist—can you start by telling us how easy or otherwise it’s been to make the transition to life in the UK? AD: The most difficult element has been for me to express myself, because I have a huge vocabulary in Spanish—and I can be very eloquent when I express myself in Spanish but when I first arrived I couldn’t communicate with people the way I wanted to. I knew there were things missing when they were talking to me and I knew that there was a big desert. I really like to tap into people’s minds and see what can I learn, what can they learn from me—that’s what interaction is about. I hate small talk, so when I wanted to speak to people about anything, I felt I didn’t have the words.

How does your musical life here compare with that of Havana?

Here, it’s overwhelming because I feel that the opportunities are way more than what I could achieve in a lifetime—the people I meet, projects I can set up, the opportunity to travel further. I’ve played and taught all over Europe, and just launched my new album, The Bridge, in Spain. It’s incredible— you begin to see how big the world is. You also learn that there is space for everybody, creatively speaking.

You didn’t feel that when you lived in Cuba?

Not really, because it is a small island—it’s as big as Britain but the society is created in a very narrow-minded way. There are no spaces for grey colours. Here, there are spaces for everybody—you just need to realize what makes you different from the rest of the crowd and amplify it.

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FICTION

RAVINGS

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Karla Suarez

Translated by Daniel Hahn

There's a place, mother, in the world that is called Paris César Vallejo Each time he scratched his head he asked again whether there was anything to eat. “Idiot,” I thought, looking at him out the corner of my eye, and I went on with my accounts. Eating: baguette, 4.20 F; paté, 7.90 F; beer, 8 F; total: 20.10 francs. With 20 francs and 10 centimes we’d be able to eat. I needed to do the accounts while he just muttered between his teeth.

He did it to annoy me, I know that, so I just gripped the pencil stub and went on counting.

“There isn’t another blanket around, is there? This cold’s seeping into my bones, and so hungry like I am, I can’t take it.”

He keeps talking rubbish like this. We ought to count ourselves lucky we still have even these old coats. A coat, 200 F; though you can find them for 100 F at a street market. Total: 120 francs and 10 centimes. The last blanket I managed to get my hands on cost me a bruise on my left eye. We were already living alone by then and I was the one who had to take care of these things. Before then, the girl used to deal with everything, and she never let me help with the accounts. Just as well I taught myself. That day there were four of us rummaging in the same garbage can, and I came across the blanket, but one of them wanted to snatch it from me and the whole row kicked off. The other two took advantage of it to join in the quarrel.

When the guy hit me in the face, I fell, but with one hand I managed to reach a bit of broken toilet and I threw it at him. Blood started coming out and the others got scared. I took the blanket back and ran off. The bruise lasted weeks and now this guy starts with his whole There isn’t another blanket around, is there, because I’m cold, well I’m cold too, idiot, we’re all cold here. Winter is tough and with an empty stomach things are harder to bear. I should do a count: how many winters have we been here? I don’t know, a whole life. (Make a note of this as an outstanding account.)

“One day I’ll go up to the top floor of the tower and I’ll build myself an apartment there, the city must be a beautiful thing seen from up there, and not feeling cold, that’d be even better.”

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ESSAY

OFF THE PAGE It is an almost universally accepted cliché that a poet´s career is a solitary one; Dylan Thomas would talk about a “sullen art”, even if he was an energetic communicator of his own verse in public readings. It is precisely when reading or saying verse before an audience that the poet has one of those precious occasions to question the craft, a craft which is normally attached to the written page and embedded in the literary tradition.

Actually poetry antecedes literature, the letter and, obviously, the printed book.

Sometimes we forget this when we’ve devoted more time to the page. For thousands of years poetry was closer to dance and music than it is today. The instruments and functions of the poet underwent a progressive reduction until poetry became, practically speaking, a matter of words fixed to a sheet of paper or a computer screen.

That could account for the fact that improvisation is not one of the most frequently used tools of the craft. As a matter of fact, outside of jazz and happenings or a few theatrical exercises, improvisation does not have such a good reputation in an art and literary world which is still overseen by academic and utilitarian perceptions of creativity. Slowly, slowly, who knows throughout how many centuries and cultural operations, improvisation has become almost a synonym of sloppiness, lack of preparation or concept, in other words a deficiency in craft.

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Omar Pérez

We look around at the other sister arts and wonder how specialization and premeditation become naturally necessary for the creative process. How much improvising do we need at the point zero of creativity?

While avoiding a general overview of that which, again, Dylan Thomas called “the history of the death of the ear”, I would to try to understand how the theater, music and dance can become a common area for a renewal of the perception of poetry and, eventually, the writing of poetry.

Perhaps it all begins when you feel a certain discomfort in the notion of poetry as a literary genre; how is it that an open source of knowledge, able to inform our perception and production of sounds, colors, feelings, movements, not to mention ideas, can be enclosed in only one type of mental structure or discourse? You can say, of course, that such is precisely the magic, flexible condition of the poem: to contain worlds within a few letters. And that would be right, yet a poem knows that there are other worlds before and after its completion. If poetry is not only a literary genre, then what is it or what more can it be before and beyond the page?

It is crucial to notice that other artists also feel the same discomfort within their respective limits of specific arts or genres.

Watching a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, say Mirror, or reading Artaud as he describes the actor as “an athlete of the heart”, or listening

@alainmenox

HOW TO PLAY

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FLASH FICTION

Ihoeldis M.Rodriguez

Translated by Lawrence Schimel

The escalator, located in the room's center, carries the little man up to the edge and then he appears again at the bottom. The transition takes place with a buzz like the sound a photocopier makes. The little man rises up to the top and BUZZ returns to the bottom. Risetop, buzz, return-bottom. Risereturn, topbottom, buzz, etc. The game consists of pressing the off button right when half of the little man has risen to the top and half has returned to the bottom. One must take into account the inertia of the mechanism on being stopped, the inertia of the body in motion when the ground beneath its feet stops. The velocity of the transmission of the signal from the off button to the stopping mechanism. When the little man is not split exactly in half, a ceiling of blood and guts (so much blood and guts it has no proportion with the body of the little man) is dumped upon the player, dumped upon the room, on the escalator itself, etc. The game restarts with the escalator measuring one fourth less than its previous size. When the little man is split exactly in half, two whirring sounds are heard (just like the noise of a photocopier), and another little man appears, identical to the first, in the very center of the escalator, which grows by one fourth of its previous size. It is necessary to make at least one attempt to split the little man in two out of every three times he rises up the escalator. Otherwise, a ceiling full of blood and guts falls down, etc. The game ends when the player, drowned in blood and guts, loses control of the off button, or when there is no longer space on the escalator for a new little man.

The next level adds a non-uniform acceleration of the escalator, varying physical dimensions between one little man and the next, sudden currents of blood and guts across the floor of the room, etc.

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FICTION

LUCA'S TRIP TO HAVANA

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Leila Segal

The shrill insistence of the hotel phone dragged Luca Sasso from a heavy sleep. He reached out and took a slug from last night’s whiskey, which sat crystallising in a glass beside the bed.

The phone fell silent.

This was his third visit here on business and each time he took the same suite at the hotel. He stared up at the ceiling, tracing patterns in the pale blue paint that seemed always to smell toxic, no matter how long ago they had put it on. At night a sulphurous smell invaded from a nearby factory, or you kept the windows shut and froze to the rattling of an ancient air-conditioner that circulated viruses and stale air.

His trousers and new Canali shirt lay where he had dropped them the night before, a mess of twisted clothes in the middle of the floor. Here and there were papers; his crocodile-skin briefcase sat open on a chair beside the desk.

The phone began to ring again. Let it ring, he thought, but he found his hand reaching out, and lifted the receiver to his ear.

“Why is your mobile off?” a voice at the other end said loudly, so that he had to hold the receiver slightly away. It was his wife, Ilene. “I’ve been sick with worry. For all I knew, you could have been dead.”

“My dear, I was only sleeping.”

Luca tried to pay attention to what his wife was saying but her voice faded out as the image rose in his mind of a rounded mulatta arse that he had admired the night before as he sat with his Cuban associate Leosbel in the hotel bar.

“Are you listening to me?” said Ilene.

“Of course, cara.” He brought to mind the owner of the arse, a good-looking Cuban woman—with muchas nalgas, as they said here. He had seen her once before—where was it? That daffodil-yellow top... It was the morning he had arrived: she was in the lobby with a group of tourists—a guide or something like that. She had returned Luca’s gaze for just a second too long, then looked away.

“Luca?” Some moments seemed to have passed without the input required of him, but Ilene was still there. “It’s not too much to ask, is it? A call, a message to let us know you’re all right. If you can’t manage it for me ... I may be uninteresting to you now, but ... the mother of your child ... only...” The words were fading in and out. “Your daughter, at least, for her.

Think of Paola.”

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ESSAY

TASTE AS A POLITICAL MATTER Coco Fusco

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1985 was the year I decided that I didn’t want to end up teaching Moby Dick in Kansas and said bye-bye to grad school. I was 24 years old and every kind of social convention felt onerous. I returned to New York and let it be my laboratory. Wandering took my mind off a boring day job and tuned me in to political dramas that were unfolding—battles between homeless and the police, between poor but tenacious tenants and encroaching developers, between strident bohemians and cultural elites. From what I could tell, few below 14th Street paid attention to noise ordinances—parties were loud and street life was wild. I met a guy on the subway who wrote about art and music for Condé Nast, and I followed him into downtown Manhattan’s nocturnal underworld, leaving the day job behind. We boogied next to cokedup stockbrokers at Area, sipped cocktails at the Milk Bar across from a dazed but still beautiful Jean-Michel Basquiat, and chowed down with fabulous drag queens at Florent. On one memorable evening, we slipped past the bouncers at the Palladium, which was Mecca for night crawlers of the time.

In my memory of that cavernous club, everything glowed—the crimson walls, the light-studded stairways, the spiked-up hairdos and the overblown eye shadow. Hundreds of trendies were chattering, smoking, snorting, giggling, lounging, and teetering on high heels, while rockers and artistes feted above and below us in their private sanc-

tums. In the middle of the whirling bodies and blaring music there were ten women ironing clothes with gusto under spotlights in one area of the lounge. Several other women in gorilla masks were also milling around.

The crowd around them had parted, creating the effect of a stage. I read their dramatic statement as a well-aimed zinger and was intrigued. Of all the strange encounters I had in 1980s pleasure dens, this is one of the only ones that I vividly recall, even though I knew nothing at the time about the political back-story or the performers.

The ironing performance, devised

by Jerri Allyn, was part of an exhibition in the club curated by the Guerrilla Girls. The show also featured provocative artworks hung on walls of the bathrooms, stairways, and halls by the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, and Hannah Wilke, together with numerous works by Guerrilla Girl members. Inserting agitprop feminist art into a downtown pleasure dome was the Guerrilla Girls’ way of skewering the Palladium for owning a collection of art produced exclusively by men. It was my first encounter with a full-on feminist art intervention, and I was tickled and inspired. This was an activist approach that I could connect with, as it spoke truth to power playfully, with wit and style. The Guerrilla Girls’ ironic and datapacked posters detailing the ways that seemingly liberal art dealers and high-minded museums reinforced sexism by limiting the

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FICTION

SOMEONE'S STOLEN THE COCKATIELS Dazra Novak

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Translated by Daniel Hahn To Susana A. Borges, to her family.

I'd known from the start that it was going to end well and badly at the same time, because there was something about her that reminded me of my mother, though the weird thing is they hardly look alike at all, but that’s something I’m not going to try to explain. Not any more. The whole thing took just a few seconds, while I made my entrance and settled in the armchair. At first there were people coming in and out, there were the children, too, her children, or rather, the boy and the young woman, as the girl’s already big now and she has these caramel-coloured honey eyes that anybody with any taste would gobble up in a single bite.

The boy was at just that moment coming back from a swim and, like a little automaton, he went straight over to the TV set and got hold of the wireless remote control, one of those bloody modern technology things that reminds you so rudely that time has already passed.

One of the daughter’s friends, a chubby girl with a friendly face, sat down beside the boy and picked up the other control.

“Robertico,” she said to him, “pause it and say hello to her.”

The boy gave me a kiss practically without looking at me, as focused as he was, and returned to his game. On the table there was an open packet of sweets and I took one. I hadn’t eaten all day, so I put it in my mouth with some desperation, I started to fold up the wrapper, to scrumple it up, I made an accordion, then a little boat, a ball. I got so caught up in the noise of the wrapper that I almost lost track of where I was. Maybe it’s that I still feel a bit reserved when it comes to the children of psychiatrists. I don’t know. The telephone rang and I, instinctively, took advantage of the distraction to look at her, see how she reacted, what she said with her body and the inflection of her voice. I tried to imagine what they were saying on the other end. She paused briefly to tell the girl to deal with me. To look after me.

“You want water or something?” said the girl, breezy as anything.

“No, I’m good,” I answered, trying to seem as natural as possible. But I didn’t lean back onto the backrest, oh no, I kept sitting on the edge of the armchair, ready to run out if necessary.

It was one of those houses where people wander in and out as they please. There were clothes on the sofa, a flip-flop in one corner of the living room. The least of it was that each of the people was getting on with their own life. That was the least of it. You didn’t need to be too bright to realise that the people there were happy, for fuck’s sake, and that made me nervous.

They were too white. Too healthy. They moved about with that privileged kind of freedom of people who know something and aren’t telling.

59 Ten days of theatre re-imagined 22 June - 02 July 2016 Tickets from £5 #RADAFest rada.ac.uk/festival Supported by The Shaw Fund Named after our benefactor George Bernard Shaw this fund supports new writing within RADA’s world-renowned training and offers a platform to showcase work by emerging artists.

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