El imperio de los sueños, Giannina Braschi

English / Puerto Rico, USA / 1988

notes on Giannina Braschi’s El imperio de los sueños:

on part 1, Asalto al tiempo —

• this is a set of prose poem meditations on love, (mis)communication, and distance. the speaker and his/their lover (the gendered endings suggest a male speaker) have been separated both physically and emotionally, but the speaker is unwilling or unable to leave their relationship behind. he returns endlessly to the empty spaces.
• a lot of language play here, with repetition, with tenses, with moods — unexpected subjunctives, shifts between person, the same verbs over and over. the effect is disorienting in a way that mirrors the speaker’s disorientation in his loss: “Hola. Como regresaste tarde olvidé que te había escrito una línea, y recordé que la línea del libro había recogido un papel que me mandaste para que le escribiera al libro un recuerdo. Otra vez te has olvidado de las comas. No, no me olvidé. [...]”
• both the speaker and various letters (of the alphabet) wander across the page imagined as an urban space (implicitly that of New York City, but only very vaguely): “Luego caminé hasta la octava avenida de la página tres y me encontré de pronto con el olvido.”
• I liked this part, but I do think it was clear that it was originally a standalone poetry collection retroactively incorporated into a larger whole (insofar as El imperio de los sueños is a larger whole at all).

He aquí la realidad. La mano toca la distancia. La toca, nada más. Es todo. Y basta.

on part 2, La comedia profana —

• also almost entirely prose poems, except the final section and the epilogue, in verse.
• the mood here is carnivalesque — very literally in the first section, “El libro de payasos y bufones”. the proem to part 2 (also originally published as a standalone collection) situates it as a public and popular performance (though it also acknowledges it may be read by “las élites y los pensadores y los filósofos”).
• the sense of urban space is much stronger: the poems are a performance, but the poems are also an expression of the disorientation of urban space — always watched, always watching, always among friends, always among strangers. to exist in the city is always to be performing.
  • indeed, the third section (“La pastoral, o La inquisición de los recuerdos”) begins with a poem that explicitly identifies itself as an advertisement: “Llámame Giannina. Mi número de teléfono es el 5-4-3-2-1. Mi dirección es Nueva York. Esto es un anuncio. Un anuncio hecho libro. Un libro hecho personaje. Como la quenepa. Y el níspero. Como el alma. Como el sueño.”
    • there is an anticipation here of the world of social media, the blurring of the line between self-expression and self-promotion. but there are also obvious ironies here. first, the book is obviously a self-conscious work of High Literature, one that typically signals to readers that it should be taken Seriously; the invocation of advertising, however, enjoins readers to do the opposite, to see the book as trivial or unserious, not worth paying attention to. it’s also, it seems to me, playing with the assumption that poetry — particularly by writers from marginalized communities — is autobiographical: Braschi says, “yes, this is autobiographical, and that’s why you should treat it with skepticism, because I am performing my life for you, for a purpose. I am writing this because I want something from you (money, attention, decolonization, ...?).”
  • that the advertisement is followed by a poem in the voice of Giannina ocomplaining about her name and phone number being used in the advertisement further unsettles any straightforwardly autobiographical reading of the text: there is Giannina and there is Giannina.
• a lot of play with repetition throughout — these poems echo.

Porque duermo, sueño, me despierto, lloro, te doy un beso en el cachete izquierdo, y voy andando, andando, despacio, rápido, dónde estás, te llamo, me escondo, te encuentro, te tiro al suelo, nos desvestimos, repetimos el camino, y la luna está gritándole a la tierra que no la deje de mirar.

on part 3, Diario íntimo de la soledad —

• this is altogether different in structure: a collection of prose metafiction, as — variously — the actress(?) Mariquita Samper (who may be fictional), the French professor Uriberto Eisensweig (who may be fictional), the actress(?) Berta Singerman (who is probably 30 years old and also probably fictional), the narrator (who may be Giannina Braschi), Anna Mayo (don’t worry about it), and Giannina Braschi (who may be the author) attempt to realize — in the sense of make-real — their version of Mariquita Samper’s life (which is also Uriberto Eisensweig’s, which is also Berta Singerman’s, etc.).
• the dizzying interplay of modalities here is probably the highlight of the book for me here, as characters interrupt or intrude into one another and the narration(?) moves freely between possible worlds or timelines.
• first explicit invocation of queerness is here (the word “lesbiana”), but more generally the playfulness of identity extends here to gender and sexuality, retroactively foregrounding the shifting of grammatical gender in La comedia profana and Braschi’s choice of a masculine speaker in Asalto al tiempo. is Mariquita a woman or a man? could be. is Uriberto a man or a woman? not like that. is Giannina (who may or may not be Braschi) a man or a woman? if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
• they’re in New York City, though, whether they’re real or fictional. but honestly this book as a whole — not just Diario íntimo de la soledad — is really freshing because while it’s definitely a book about New York City it’s not, you know, A Book About New York City. in fact, it explicitly pushes back against the exceptionalism that Books About New York City: “¡Las cosas que les pasan a los hombres en Nueva York! Esto está puesto en exclamación. Es, por supuesto, una exageración —dice el narrador. No es sólo en Nueva York donde les pasan a los hombres estas cosas. Les pasan en La Habana y en Berlín. Les pasan en Madrid y en Moscú. Y no sólo les pasan a los hombres. Les pasan también a las mujeres.” refreshing!
• this section overall is like a(n even) more unhinged but less self-consciously theoretical version of Macedonio Fernández’s Museo de la Novela de la Eterna, which is to say: pretty good.

Si acaso somos algo es obreros del imperio del poeta artista. Y en todo caso si con algo nos identificamos es con la revolucíon.

as a whole(?) —

• while I’m certainly willing to believe that for Braschi the process of writing Asalto al tiempo felt like it led inevitably to La comedia profana that in turn felt like it led inevitably to Diario íntimo de la soledad, I unfortunately did not feel it as a reader.
• there are, to be sure, shared formal characteristics and theoretical and aesthetic concerns extending across the three sections, but fundamentally this still feels like three separate collections (that happen to be by the same poet), rather than a single — even fragmentary and phantasmagoric or carnivalesque — text.
• Diario íntimo de la soledad does make an effort to more explicitly unite the first two sections, but it was too little too late.
• all of which is to say that I enjoyed each collection individually, especially Diario íntimo de la soledad, but the whole felt, to me, like pretty much exactly the sum of its parts, rather than like the three parts added up to something more.
• I would, however, still recommend this, especially if you’re interested in any of: prose poetry, experimental fiction, theory-fiction, books about New York City that aren’t insufferable about it.
• I am even more curious now to read Yo-Yo Boing!, because the language play just in Spanish here was definitely the highlight and I’m really curious to see what happens when English comes into the mix.

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