They have always wanted to pigeonhole me in the subte, in social discourse, and I am more than that, I am more than a marginal. – Domingo de Ramos[1]
Domingo de Ramos’s chapbook Arquitectura del Espanto appeared in 1988, published by the small press Asalto al Cielo, which was run by Róger Santiváñez and José Antonio Mazzotti. The poems were written in 1982 while various versions of these same works appeared in fanzines, journals and anthologies of the period. The chapbook is structured as follows: I. Soledad Lopez, II. Arquitectura del Espanto, and III. N.N. These sections trace the exploratory route of a subject threatened by isolation moving through the city in spatial experimentation and ending up in corporeal reflection and observation on the biopolitical procedures and social consequences of the Peruvian internal war.
When de Ramos began to write these poems, he was a member of Kloaka[2], a grouping of young poets from the Católica and San Marcos universities. Its effective leader, Santiváñez, remembers de Ramos’s entrance into the collective in this way: “Some years later, Mariela Dreyfus spoke to me about a student in Sociology who was writing poems. It was Domingo. We in Kloaka were just then looking for someone who came from the marginal neighborhoods and he came from the conos: he was the voice of the proletariat.”[3] (italics mine, Yrigoyen and Rotondo, 218).
De Ramos came to complete, in that manner, a literary equation affixed to the biographical and the social, which, though it began with his companions in the poetry collective, was quickly displaced to literary and cultural criticism on his work, influencing his reception since the 1980s. In this sense, I am interested in how the poetry and the author at once assume and reject autobiography: he is identified as marginal at the same time that he contradicts and questions that position.
Kloaka used shock as a discursive method in their manifestos and group communiques. The poetry collective took it as a communal mandate to constitute a mirror of their social circumstances: “Our role is to write, to create texts that can express that what is happening in Peru is a cloacal situation. Peru is a cloaca.” (Zevallos MK 96). Poverty, racism, migration and growing violence due to the internal war (1980-2000) were the conditions which the collective was denouncing. Taking from this epochally located perspective as well as from autobiographical fact, de Ramos is read as someone who migrated as a boy to the sand hills of San Juan de Miraflores. While the pueblos jovenes are understood as urban overflow[4] and periphery, this topological marginality of one of the members is assumed to cohere with the marginal position those in Kloaka looked to take up and which they occupied within the literary field.[5] De Ramos is, then, converted into a passport for what de Certeau calls the “massive marginal.”
If we divide Lima into two zones, the first corresponding to the growing districts of barriadas and popular urbanization, like San Martin de Porras, Comas, Carabayllo, Independencia, Villa Maria del Triunfo, San Juan de Miraflores, Carmen de la Legua, San Juan de Lurigancho and El Agustino and the second which would include the traditional and modern districts, constituted fundamentally by formal urbanization, we are able to perceive changing urban tendencies. In the 1972 census the first zone housed 24.4% of the Lima’s population and the second 75.6%. In 1981, according to the census, the first grew to 32.5% while the second declined to 67.5%. According to the studies and work done by the Institute of Peruvian Studies at the end of 1983, the first zone reached 36.4% and the second 63.6%, which signifies a substantial increase, in 14 years, from 12% for the districts which grew by popular incursion and urbanization and a decline in equal proportion for the districts constituted by traditional and legal urbanization. The demographic and spatial overflow of the considerable low-income sector of the population emerges as the most important phenomenon of the present decade. (Matos Mar 75-76)
To have a member living in the pueblos jovenes was used as a recurring means of legitimation. It would be in that manner that Kloaka would faithfully represent Peruvian reality. For his part, de Ramos’s resistance to being pinned down as marginal contravenes the myth of the popular, not because his poetry is disenchanted, crude, critical (Zevalls, Vich), but because he has absolute confidence in poetry as discourse and because it is set in what is an improper setting for it. De Ramos’s publications corroborate this confidence: Poemas 1986), Arquitectura del espanto (1988), Pastor de Perros (1993), Luna Cerrada (1995), Osmosis (1996), Las Cenizas de Altamira (1999), Erotika de Klase (2004), Pastor de Perros (anthlogy, 2006), Dorada Apocalipsis (2008), Demolido Fuego (2010), Cartas desde la azotea (2011) and Lima Pop (2012). Within his project, the poet locates the space of the pueblo joven [6]as poetic material situating the proper in the improper. My analysis does not echo the quota that Santivañez describes, which is to say, I do not study de Ramos’s as the voice or representative of the pueblos jovenes; rather, I investigate in de Ramos’s poetry the way he completes that mandate to articulate both a migrant experience and, likewise, the subtle though blunt mechanisms of rejection of marginal assignation that come from the multiple discourses attached to that of the migrant. As the epigraph signals, de Ramos exceeds that external demand, inscribing and writing from beyond marginality. In that sense, migration is a theme that goes beyond the circumstances of the era:
Because no one has taken seriously my animal
Solitude corned by the fire
My obstinate permanence in life
Craftsman of the hours / of the time that passes irredeemably
Without pain and without glory on my neighborhood corner
With my friends and enemies
With sun and moon pursuing me
Like a fucking pain
I’m telling you
That tonight I feel far off from the guys
Inexplicably different
And I want so badly to be alone
Like a post at midnight
Walking in the silence
Of the smooth sand like an oilslick tapestry
Pensive
Enclosed in my own images
Murmuring a song
Sweating
In the shadows of the
Invertebrate buildings
That arch like a labyrinth of light
(from “Escrito en soledad”)
To this philosophical reflection on solitude and the estrangement that social life produces (tonight I feel far off from the guys / inexplicably different) which is in itself a poetic trope as old as the idea of society itself, it is also fitting to see it as an image that contravenes the recurrent ideas of overcrowding, proximity and solidarity in the imaginary concerning the pueblos jovenes and Andean migrants. Solidarity is seen as political potential by the social scientists of the era that work on migration (Matos Mar, Degregori, Blondet, Lynch, Golte, Montoya). The poetry interrupts the mandate to represent solidarity so as to approach the images of the pueblo joven on their own - the smooth sands like a greasy film that do not appear as urban scenography, but which compose the singularity of the poetic voice: I want so badly to be alone / like a post at midnight. The subject transmutes into objects on the street and in space. The space of the pueblo joven is composed jointly with an emotional register that is neither privative nor alien to him, proposing an aesthetic rearrangement in his poetry. For Ranciere this type of process: “is not a matter of the 'reception' of works of art. Rather, it concerns the sensible fabric of experience within which they are produced. These are entirely material conditions - peformance and exhibition spaces, forms of circulation and reproduction-, but and regimes of emotion, categories that identify them, thought patterns that categorize and interpret them. (Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art X) Before de Ramos’s intervention in Peruvian poetry, the Limeñan sand of the pueblos jovenes is unthinkable as a poetic space. With him a possibility of the migrant experience gels interior to poetry. Invertebrate buildings find their substance in the poetic; they are imaginable as spaces of representation within poetry. Mazzotti and César Ángeles note that de Ramos’s poetry is syncretic because it mixes rural elements of experience prior to Lima and the images of the pueblo joven with those of the city: “It is in this way that this process of syncretism between specific elements of the agrarian world and that of the suburb and other images of a grotesque variety bestow on Arquitectura del Espanto its expressionist sort of newness within Peruvian poetry.” (Mazzotti 142).[7] “This is to say that they [poets among whom Ramos is one] occupy not only the abandoned desert parcels of the Peruvian coast, but also their dominant culture, their language, as it occurs in syncretic exchange” (Ángeles 1). The critics detect two types of syncretism in de Ramos’s poetry: Mazzotti’s, which brings together the rural with the pueblo joven and Ángeles’s that mixes the pueblo joven with the urban, the desert versus culture and language. On the other hand, for Cornejo Polar syncretism is the always unbalanced and conflictual mix, although it attempts to be harmonious, that the mestizo performs for western culture. In Cornejo Polar’s formulation mestizo and migrant are largely mutually exclusive terms (“Condición migrante”, Escribir en el Aire) as the mestizo uses syncretism and transculturation to insert himself into western tradition in the manner than Inca Garcilaso, the migrant, with a “shifting syntax” (“Condición” 108) works the fragmentary and seems to not want to, or perhaps, put better, not to be able to integrate himself into. The representative figure in the latter case being Guamán Poma. On the other hand, in all of these critiques there is a shared understanding of the radical opposition between pueblo joven and “formal” city. Against this, I propose that in de Ramos’s poetry the pueblo joven and the “formal” city do not appear as exclusive worlds but as fields differentiated by the same social experience in Lima of the era that are integrated into the same poetic flow through an authorship that likewise has full confidence in poetry as a medium of expression and a literary institution. In this sense, syncretism as a process that employs contraries, and that Mazzotti and Ángeles hardly explicate, amounts to being inadequate in thinking a poetry that does not attend to elements as radically opposed and which likewise do not work toward conciliation; rather, these are part of the same urban experience that we see in the poem “Night Band”.
The uses of syncretism that occur in the critical literature emphasize the importance retained in this biographical fact and the profoundly ideologized belief that the provinces and the pueblos jovenes are another world, a space of other orders and with other rules, a foreign language in which it is vital to be original if one wants to know and give account of it. It is symptomatic of almost every one of the articles and reviews on de Ramos to encounter the biographical as an aid to the argumentation around his poetry or his performance as a poet:
- What occurred – occurs – with him is what happens with other young writers and artists of popular extraction. While their talent and capacity of analysis are shown, as in his case, they are treated by literary critics as diamonds in the rough. (italics mine, Ángeles 1)
- Domingo de Ramos, takes advantage of his existing internal knowledge from the marginal sectors and produces a fine book that manifests, on a textual level, the contradictions of the extratextual world. The author of Arquitectura Del Espanto is the son of migrants and lives in a marginal neighborhood of Lima. (italics mine, Zevallos 1992, 167)
- Domingo de Ramos’s publications (Ica, 1960) represent a survival in creative development of socially marginalized subjects within the scope of “cultured” poetry. And I am not only employing biographical criteria. Although the provincial and suburban origins of the poet are known, as is his condition as a child of Andean migrants who installed themselves as settlers in the sands of San Juan de Miraflores in the 1960s (italics mine, Mazzotti 139)
- It is then that memory appeals to the girl’s song: a song of the so-called chicha music proper to the migrant subjects that live in the sands and barrios populares that ring the capital, and from which Domingo de Ramos comes from (italics mine de Lima 282)
For Ángeles, a person with talent and capacity for analysis is recognized and picked out by critics from that natural wasteland which is the pueblo joven, the marginal neighborhood. De Ramos is also a symbol of the survival of creativity, the same creativity that the migrants show, for example, in developing occupations and work in an economy in crisis. De Ramos manifests his creativity in poetry, coming into being, to the eyes of the critic, as a species of poetic folklorism or rarity. The creativity of the migrants was a slogan broadcast by the social scientists and employed in all spheres, from the mass media to state propaganda. Matos Mar explains it thus: “[the informal businessperson is a multiplied man who day to day has to, against all odds, show his ingenuity and creativity. (italics mine 56). “This Andean presence in the urban environment constitutes part of the new face not only of the Limeño metropolis but also the country on the whole. The inorganicity in which it expands, the spontaneity, creativity and accommodation of the serrano, are imposed as the dominant signs of a massive attempt of the popular sectors to conquer a social space, more in accordance with authentic values that until now they could not imprint on the tonality of Peruvian identity” (italics mine 86).
The criticism incorporates de Ramos from the newness and difference echoing the discourse of the social sciences concerning the pueblos jovenes, although recognizing the mythification that this discourse produces. While de Ramos is not seen as a conquering figure, he is seen within the circle of critics and poets as a spokesperson for the social phenomenon of migration[8], as a migrant who selectively appropriates “from the attributes which are foreign to him” (Cornejo, Condición, 101). The astonishment toward his poetry emerges from the perception in which literature is not an occupation commonly exercised by Limeños from the pueblos jovenes from whom it is expected that they should be vendors, merchants, criminals. What’s more, Limeños from the pueblos jovenes are rarely thought of as Limeños. De Ramos knows that those environments and objects of the pueblo joven that accompany his experience in the city are recognized and valued by the critics through difference. He knows the comparative exceptionality of his experience and the interest that it raises in the lettered Limeño environment. With this I am not insinuating that the idea of these references are to serve as bait, but that there is a generalized consciousnesses of the importance of the pueblos jovenes for the lettered class, the progressive intelligentsia and Left parties. The books of Matos Mar and Hernando de Soto are the most visible manifestations of that interest, but not the only ones. The archives from the era corroborate this and there is likewise a series of magazines of the period – El Zorro de Abajo, Quehacer, Caretas – that affected the political parties’ ability, including the Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA, to capitalize on the pueblos jovenes as spaces of militancy and a place from which de Ramos is likewise read as being exemplary, having militated in the communist party when he was an adolescent. The political militancy in the pueblo joven doubly reinforces the symbolic capital from marginalization and from militancy as a sign of aesthetic radicality within poetry.
In what I have looked at thus far, I see in de Ramos’s work and in his public performance a playing with propriety and the elaboration of an aesthetic of the im/proper. Propriety is understood in relation to the subject. It implies a way to think places, positions, modes of consumption and artistic forms that place individual subjects and groups within what is assumed to be natural, citing de Lima: “Chicha music typical of [and belonging to] the migrant subjects” or Cornejo Polar “attributes that are alien to him.” The proper and the improper refer to a notable partition, to a way of being in the world. They also signal the circulation of bodies. De Certeau links these concepts to a procedure typically associated with war as it predetermines the use of strategies and tactics and, simultaneously, positions them within production as “ways of doing”: “I call ‘a strategy’ the calculation (or manipulation) or power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated.” It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed. As in management, every “strategic” rationalization seeks first of all to distinguish its “own” place, that is, the place of its own power and will, from an “environment.” (XLIX-L) Strategy is possible, then, only if there is a panoramic vision, distance. To carry it out it a relationship of belonging must occur, one must be its owner to carry it out on the ground: “this is my place and from here I do”. While a tactic is “a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the other.” The tactical and the improper are shifting territories per what de Certeau mentions as for those who use the tactical “Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into "opportunities." The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them.” (L)
Before establishing a dichotomous play between the proper and the improper, I am interested in investigating the oscillation in the distinct relationships with propriety that can be established in de Ramos’s poetry. As such and above all at the beginning of his literary career, poetry and literature are that which is alien to the poet: within that lack, the pueblo joven is the proper. The treatment of this urban space is strategic while his actions within the poetry are tactical results, reinscribed from the difference and the curiosity that his reading presupposes, which is situated outside of the pueblo joven. Biography legitimates that approach to writing the pueblo joven over which de Ramos exercises dominion. In contrast to his Limeño colleagues, he is authorized by this same criticism to speak from his environment, that which, in spite of being part of the city, is understood as totally other. It is not a zone in the same city. It is before all social phenomena, something which has to be explained by scientists before it is experimented with.
De Ramos subverts this mandate of authenticity in the way in which he proposes a movement in the city that departs from the pueblo joven, not remaining in its place, and it is from that movement that it is seen as syncretic. In the poem “Banda Nocturna” from the section “Arquitectura del Espanto” he writes:
Oh the blinding glare of horror! It will be better to leave
this city where we have never belonged
I no longer have a banner or people
I am lost
among the buildings
among the streets
and street corners
among the big hills and dumps
wandering with your image filling my mind
(“Banda nocturna”)
The speaker pays attention to a circulation that occurs similarly among buildings, streets, intersections, hills, garbage dumps. He does not hierarchize his wandering among the more “urban” areas compared to those which are thought of as peripheral. In the same poem he mentions street corners, plazas, highways, river bank, sea, neighborhoods. These images do not enter solely into the repertoire of the pueblo joven, but are part of official Lima as well: “this city to which we never belonged”. The same sentiment of unbelonging exists with respect to the official city and the “informal”.[9] Both are part of an urban experience constrained by uprooting that abounds in modern poetic discourse.[10] It is not enough to say that the pueblo joven’s role is as a poetic strategy. To this we must add a tactic of dis-possession so as to place it within the same status of the “urban” city, so that the migrant may exit and not remain within the progressive’s illusory oasis of poverty. To be a poetic subject within the counterculture implies having a critical view on his own class and detaching himself from his environment. In the Anglo countercultures (Roszak 51) and among the members of Kloaka this critical view and detachment occurs contra the urban bourgeoise; in the case of de Ramos that which is criticized is the pueblo joven. In this sense, before seeing this criticism as a form of dismantling the discourse of the social sciences and thus agreeing with Vich’s reading (Voces 219) that the migrant is no longer a guarantor of modernity, I think of de Ramos’s disbelieving gesture as a poetic operation typified in countercultural practices. With this I am not trying to depoliticize his poetry, but rather locating it within aesthetic and political thought that places de Ramos’s poetic discourse in the local and international countercultural literary experience before confining it to the production of the social sciences concerning the pueblos jovenes.
Thus, against a poetry that does not see these spaces as promises of alternative modernity and social progressivism, the underground scene appears here as a communitarian possibility[11].
Under the transparent nocturnal sky
the sidewalks are burning
streetlights win over the dirty
blue jeans of teenagers lost between street corners
and chiaroscuro parks and black jackets
between phosphorescent mists and the whitest craniums
white teeth and white fingers candied over by the herb.
Their gazes glitter like belt buckles made of silver
drums fill the plazas bathed in oil
and plush police.
(“Banda nocturna”)
Here we have echoes of Dick Hebdige’s idea of “humble objects” or those which from their precarity or abjection are capable of resignifying a delegitimated cultural and social experience: “ “such commodities are indeed open to a double inflection: to ‘illegitimate’ as well as ‘legitimate’ uses. These ‘humble objects’ can be magically appropriated; ‘stolen’ by subordinate groups and made to carry ‘secret’ meanings: meanings which express, in code, a form of resistance to the order which guarantees their continued subordination”[12](18). In de Ramos cocaine paste[13], weed, and dirty blue jeans serve that function. The humble objects of the subculture alternate with the creation of urban space. De Ramos is composing a youthful routine in which the subte unfolds uncontrolled into public space, but that taking of space isn’t through partying, but is, rather, enclosed by constant allusions to the internal war: “They who did not survive this unfinished war tell me the Law is cruel / this war where my band of lumberjacks tried / to demolish the thick columns of justice”, “and the panic of the beasts of burden/come closer // street by street/zone by zone covered with young people/bodies from my gang that have tasted the calamity//before the sun erases the traces and the debris // to which we were subjected”
The speaker utopically describes a subte gang of leñadores (lumberjacks) that, through violence, demolish social conventions. This is about a generation that has to live through a conflict that is not their own, and to which we were submitted. The double meaning of band as a criminal association and a musical group plays with the subcultural possibilities of the scene. The same occurs with the image of the demolition that makes reference to the violent deployment of the stain, the band, and likewise refers to the song “Demoler” (Demolition) by Los Saicos[14]. Thus, we recognize in the poem the objects, the musical coordinates and the attitude of the scene, the obscene language and the marginality.
The exploratory vein of the subte is made more visible in de Ramos’s poetry in his publication Pastor de Perros. Ángeles cites an interview from 1993 in which the poet states that the persona of his poetry: “more than marginal is underground [subterraneo]. One is marginal before the group that marginalizes. But a subte has options, he has decided to live in the cloacas.” (3). Thus, the subte is converted into an occasion in de Certeau’s terms, a tactic to face reality, a decision of belonging that, if it is expressed negatively, is made through volition and is independent of external rejection. This romantic view of the underground as an accursed (malditista) option is within the scene but is not the only way of characterizing the subte. There are projects which the subte takes on as a critic that, although they are not produced from a central cultural space, are not produced in the cloaca either. This declaration makes plain the presence of Kloaka for de Ramos even after the collective’s dissolution in 1984. The underground is, in this sentence, an alternate mode of being within the marginalizing city. Nonetheless, in “Banda Nocturna” the subte utopia yields to the reality of the violence:
“On the streets like a squadron preparing me for an ambush // in the middle of day with transit police and paper // helicopters They arrest me /they throw me out/and I get organized//and wander through plazas and neighborhoods demolishing the / thick columns of Justice while my band moves away // on land // as smoke // as dust// as shadows// as nothing.” Despite the subcultural appearance, the poetic voice is again isolated. The subte band disappears phantasmagorically in this poem by De Ramos, which conveys the insufficiency of the community of youths against police repression. We are met, then, with a poetry that is thought within the scene while at the same time not making it over into utopia. It uses it as a tactic, without idealization, in a city that is not his own.
The poem is found in a section whose principal metaphor is also that of the entire chapbook:
Architecture of terror. This architecture refers to the city of Lima and pertains equally to the traditional neighborhoods and those that are the results of the migration. De Ramos’s poetry disperses images of poverty (ramshackle houses, hovels, matting, sand) with others associated with the middle or upper classes (glass buildings, asphalt, sea, Oil Company). It brings together dissimilar terms to make clear that the situation is the same throughout the city. The architecture of terror permeates everything. But the architecture is, generally, associated with the upper and middle classes and with state structures. The pueblo joven is, rightly, the opposite of architecture. It is invasion, improvisation, in the best of cases genius and creativity. In the references of the era, these neighborhoods are never thought within the architectonic. On the contrary, what takes primacy are considerations of the sand dunes, the desert, nature. They are, above all, landscape. Ellio Martuccelli, progressive architect, ex-Los Bestias[15], makes an eloquent description of what the oxymoronic architecture of the pubelos jovenes would be: “But in no way can one forget that beside the work of these or other architectures a city continues to be made by the work of its inhabitants and that entire neighborhoods that appeared in the latest phase, in the present one would be consolidated. Finally, in their first phase, these self-built houses resolve their most pressing need: the house made of mats, wood, cardboard, which is later translated into brick without tarrage and iron that juts out announcing future extensions.” (italics mine 207)
The construction of the pueblos jovenes is that which occurs while, in the rest of the city, they make architecture. We have, then, a city in which 80% of its inhabitants go without architecture according to Matos Mar’s statistics cited in the first pages above. This is a city that builds itself outside of both institutional recognition and the architectural discipline. While the Lima of the architects is built with concrete, that of the pueblos jovenes is, instead, built with earth – again, nature: “The unfinished houses mix their color with that of the earth: the metaphors of a city to arm and disarm have never been more evident than in Lima: in this undefined air of popular Limeño architecture there is a strange mix of abandonment and hope” (italics mine Martucelli 200). Almost as poetic as de Ramos, the architect describes an indefinite popular space against the rational arrangement that architecture supposes. What, then, does the architecture of terror propose for the city of Lima in its totality?
By making this a total architecture, de Ramos contradicts the traditional discourses and suggests that including that unplanned area is a product of an historical tendency. Which is to say, he echoes Lefebvre’s idea that “capitalism is incapable of making a spatial plan” (Production of space 220). Again he locates in the terrain of the improper , to the extent that architecture does not belong to these social sectors either and it is through poetry that this play is possible. The change of scene that is produced is that of bringing together spaces, elements and concepts that are not read nor thought together, that interrupt the inertia generated from the discourses of the social sciences, which are at the end of the day, ideas reproduced by the lettered middle classes of the left or thereabouts. Poetry permits de Ramos to make architecture but not the popular architecture that Martucelli mentions. Two principal products of high culture, poetry and architecture, are changed into the means and ends of his improper tactic. I propose seeing de Ramos as the architect, the producer of this poetic and urban space. In contrast to Maruccelli’s discourse, in the poet’s understanding there is no hierarchy between the sands and the terrals of the pueblos jovenes and the cement city: everything composes an architecture of terror. It is not a matter of an architecture that rationalizes, accommodates, and makes possible circulation and production. Entirely on the contrary it is an architecture that traps, loses, confounds. Nor is the pueblo joven the utopic space of the economically emergent that that is painted with good intentions, nor is the Lima of the middle classes the space of formality. For Lefebvre the problem of capitalist production had happened to be that of a production of space before a production in space. Which is to say, what is produced is the social space in its conjuncture, not only the objects or goods. From his perspective dominant spaces, the formal Lima, produce dominated spaces, the pueblos jovenes. This interpretation is shared with the Limeño social scientists who attribute migration as a mass phenomenon to the lack of employment, violence, and poverty in the rural areas. But while in Lefebvre the dominant space displays its pragmatics, its efficacy in creating fantasies of order, of consumption of goods and spatial consumption, the space that de Ramos produces is the architecture in which if the relationship between dominant and dominated remains it is not without being complexified, every performance of rationalist architectonic solvency is made impossible.
Lima la Horrible (1964) by Sebastián Salazar Bondy also paints a collapsed city and it could be through that Arquitectura del Espanto takes up this tradition. Still, in contrast to Bondy who sees in modernity and the new the promise of progress and the commitment of all intellectual intervention, de Ramos, quite in agreement with his own time, finds solace in fleeting solutions: sexual pleasure, drugs. Nevertheless, his literary labor traces in poetry and language a durable exit. Although this poetry produces a desolate space, with characters who find their ends in misery and war, it is a poetry that trusts in the expressive power of language. In the poem “I don’t have anything to say” (“No Tengo nada que decir”) the speaker takes the emphatic form of lament:
I don’t have history / I have been dispossessed of affect the constant fasts the blows and the insatiable thirst exhumed until I feel alienated from this ineffable body / It is possible that I have been made to the measure of my fellows as so many others certainly nebulous grainy dry like a Lima bean cut in stone My soul has been tossed into the sea and I don’t know how to escape from its current from the long claws of the government of these beings that follow me tend close to me to see you not now not never / All this repulses me your workers dressed in green overalls from the Oil Company that buy beers and get drunk with prostitutes and managers in the solitary brothels where you worked mounted on the sweaty oily bodies with the asphyxiating stench from the dampness of the rooms cracked by the sun or on the beaches blurred by the breeze from the old seals that the hallucinating mariners bring up and bent by their intimate sadness of moribund animals with reliquary faces perhaps looking out at the golden waters that draw back as in an earlier time and see the aspect of a woman shining like an antique doubloon
“Every lament is always a lament for language, just as al praise is principally praise of the name. These are the extreme that define the domain and the scope of human language, its way of referring to things. Laments arises when nature feels betrayed by meaning; when the name perfectly says the thing, language culminates in the song of praise, in the sanctification of the name.” (58) says Agamben in The Community to Come. De Ramos’s poetry is at the extreme of the unspeakable of that ontotheological pathos. It is a poetry that tirelessly repeats the laments and with it the impossibility of speaking, the incapacity of meaning to refer to the thing.
Agamben tells us that this movement, still based in its contrary, contains the possibility of sanctifying the name to feed its own referential power. For his part, for Domingo de Ramos that is a poetry assembled from the impossibility of naming and in the repetition of this impossibility there is a criticism of the impropriety of language. Domingo de Ramos’s pseudonym is not that which is “between name and nickname” (Agamben, The Coming community). On the contrary, it is the uncomfortable, ironic, and bitter pseudonym that speaks from the impossibility of redemption, from the impotence of not being able to sanctify the name, and from this, all attempts at community are non-viable.
The internal war reenforces this impossibility and adds its share of death and meaninglessness to reality and to language. In the poem “His Body Is An Island of Rubble”, found in the final section of the book, “NN”, the figure of the chronicler Guamán Poma de Ayala appears so as to bring together the continuity between the inequality and the injustice of the colonial period and the decade of the 1980s:
Coming to us from
1500 or 1600 Huamán Poma de Ayala
tells us of his love affairs
of his viscera recently stuffed for our museum
in our history books
Huamán Poma de Ayala with his ancient dress
represents a breed of tourist items
and the social races and the economies of the earth
now trod and his drawings and chronicle
can be read in the newscasts and advertising
Coca Cola in a leftist journal
Huamán Poma speaks Quechua
sells newspapers
and potatoes
works on a construction site like
Macchu Picchu
I do not agree with Vitelia Cisneros’s reading that finds in this poem, though without any direct references, a connection with the myth of the Inkarri. Rather, I see the incorporation of the dismembered figure of Huamán Poma as the impossibility of registering history from that present of the internal war. In this poem de Ramos explores the historical personage from contemporary references that speak to a fetishization of the indigenous for the market and culture (tourism, newscasts, Coca Cola, leftwing journalism, historical texts, museums). But Guamán Poma is also a migrant and makes things “proper” to his class. He is an ambulante, a builder, a subversive, a drunk, a chicha dancer, and for this, he ends up murdered.
The Sun asking after his whereabouts
learned that they captured him near the palace
bound his chains to the columns
illuminated its darkened vaults
where an octopus strangled its prey and devoured it
but Huamán Poma was tortured dumped in the sea
deposited in a pit and finally
his body is an island among rubble.
Here he makes reference to the island of El Frontón in which there was located a prison for where in 1986 political prisoners were extrajudicially killed in the 1986 prison massacres. In earlier verses he mentions :
“a cortamontes from which they hung / the heads of those that died in 1986 approximately / when the empire fell to the Viceroy of Lurgancho”.
Lurigancho was one of the detained who was shot during this event. This reference, then, suggests that the stereotype of the migrant is the target of suspicion. As with the leñadores (lumberjacks) of “Banda Nocturna”, the migrants are deemed suspect by the police, susceptible to being detained, imprisoned and killed extrajudicially. The superposition of the figure of Guamán Poma reinforces the lament, the impropriety of the language and the impossibility of all chronicle or denouncement. It is not only about, as Agamben writes, the “the petty-bourgeois distrust of language” (The Coming Community 59), but of a suspicion that intersects with the colonial, according to Silvia Rivera Ciusicanqui:
In colonialism there is a quite peculiar function for words: words do not name, but conceal, and this is particularly evident in the Republican phase, when egalitarian ideologies began to be taken up and at the same time citizen rights of the majority of the population are taken away. In this manner, words shift into a fictional register, plagued by euphemisms that veil reality in place of describing it. Public discourse is changed into forms of not saying. And this universe of meanings and unsaid notions, of beliefs in racial hierarchy and in the inherent inequality of human beings, is incubated in the common sense, and breaks out once in a while, in a manner both cathartic and irrational (1-2).
On another level, the reference to Guamán Poma ties this Architecture of Terror to a genealogy that not only implicates Lima, but also the entirety of the country. De Ramos strategically uses an author who’s huge cultural weight and hegemony in the field, a gesture that evades marginality in that which it wants to typecast. And it is that this is before anything else, critical category. From the urban de Ramos dismisses marginality with an aesthetic of the im-proper that combines places and produces a space that, although marked by contradictions, is part of the same social experience. This with a poetic discourse that distrusts language at the same time that it appropriates poetry. Neither is de Ramos’s a marginality understood as an accessory of secondary or little importance. Through a use of thematics and authors central to the history of national poetry and literature de Ramos points out the centrality of his own poetic elaboration and its authorship, completely opposed to the values of solidarity and spontaneity associated with the pueblos jovenes. In the same manner, he does not attempt a marginal circulation either. The poet’s blog functions more as a personal diary or binnacle than an as an electronic page dedicated to the criticism on his work, the events he participates in and his books. In addition to his solo publications, his anthologies and congresses, a brief memoir figures into his biography on his travels: “His last trip was at the end of 2008, beginning an international tour, in which he attended the Encuentro Internacional de Escritores in Monterrey, México and then to the city of Boston, reading at the Tufts, Harvard, Nueva York universities, and at DePaul University in Chicago, Temple in Philadelphia and finally at the Festival Latinale in Berlin, Germany organized by the Instituto Cervantes of that city and of Bremen”. This list functions as an affirmation of the centrality of his poetry and draws a map of participation in countries with important cultural industries and traditions. It is not a show of cosmopolitanism, but it is without a doubt a negation of marginality or at the least a coexistence of the marginal with the central and institutional. Among the ex-Kloaka who continue writing and publishing poetry, de Ramos did not attempt – nor did Dalmacia Ruiz Rosas—, an academic career in the United States. On the other hand, those who have - Mariella Dreyfus, Róger Santiváñez and José Antonio Mazzotti— are not read as on the margins of the group. That is, Kloaka, in the latter’s literary careers, is read as a youthful extravagance: “We were consuming everything quickly, as though life was going to end the next day, with a sense of urgency, a vitalism that also had its “the architect’s profound lapses”, as Vallejo says, because it was quite difficult to be a young and to be content in Lima at that moment (Dreyfus in Yrigoyen and Torres Rotondo 224). De Ramos is, then, the only one who must rid himself of that assignation of marginality coming as he does from the pueblos jovenes. For that reason, he developed strategies within and beyond the poetic.
De Ramos’s poetic discourse zigzags, although not, for this reason, inconstantly, tracing a linguistic aesthetic of the im-proper, that which cannot be called the propriety and belonging to the world of things, that language that is incapable of reproducing its referential power. This is a move that his books and his literary career reactivate, installing a persistent disbelief in the faithful field of poetry. This tried operation is carried out through a de-hierarchizing of the distribution among spaces, subjects and occupations in the city. Incorporating the pueblo joven into the rest of the urban territory the poet does not bring together dissimilar places but gives an account of the amalgamated and confused nature of the same place. It seizes on a field that is the improper, alien and that which is received as strange. He satisfies a demand for the popular at the same time that he questions its idealized image.
Beginning with Domingo de Ramos and the concept of marginality as a demand from outside and a tactic within the culture as well as scrutiny of the concepts associated with the aesthetic and apparition of the underground scene as a social phenomenon, from its subcultural aspect, and as a countercultural manifestation in the cultural field of the moment is justified. The degrees of proximity and recognition of the scene’s members embedded in these concepts express their duration, their rearrangements and their historical necessities. On multiple levels de Ramos’s im/proper aesthetic elaborates the relationships between language, referents, cultural practices and social spaces. It brings alien visions and emotions into the poetry redistributing the sensible and the measurable, making it so that another sort of poetic voice, from that scene and subject, are converted into material for the poetic. This, then, is how his final commitment to poetry and language should be understood as an abandonment of marginality and the subte, as part of that aesthetic affirmation within poetry.
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[1] Interview conducted by the poet Cecilia Podestá appearing in the weekly magazine Siete
[2] Kloaka was founded by the poets Mariela Dreyfus and Roger Santiváñez in September 1982. It counted in its ranks Guillermo Gutièrrez, Edián Novoa (narrative), Julio Heredia, Domingo de Ramos, Mary Soto, José Alberto Velarde and Enrique Polanco (painting). Dalmacia Ruiz Rosas and José Antonio Mazzotti were later given the appellation “principal allies” in the second period that began in the early months of ’84 after the separation and exp;usion of four members (Dreyfus, Soto, Hidalgo, Gutiérrez).
[3] Proletariatized perhaps some poetic license from de Ramos. The social scientists of the time among the most notable Degregori, Blondet, Lynch, and Golte state that less than a third of the inhabitants of the pueblos jovenes were workers. Of course, the economy that is produced after migration is the so-called informal one, characterized by commerce, for the most part ambulatory, and by the constitution of businesses and services that act outside of regulation: they don’t pay taxes or health insurance to their workers, they don’t obtain permits, etc.
[4] There are two larege migrations to Lima by Peruvians from the provinces in the 20th century. The first is at the beginning of the 1940s and the second begins in the 1970s becoming more evident in the following decade (Degregori Conquistadores 25). The internal war heightened the internal migration and the migratns were located at the center of an urban phenomenon that was studied by the social sciences. The Ayacuchan anthropologist Matos Mar gave rise to the phrase “popular overflow” to characterize these migrations that were perceived as natural phenomena that overflowed the limits of a well contained city.
[5] Mazzotti and Zevallos repeatedly mention this marginality in the field that must be, according to them for various reasons: bad faith of critics and poetics that tendentiously identified the political radicality of those in Kloaka with a pertinence or sympathy toward the Sendero Luminoso (Mazzotti 137, Zevallos 2002 29), and the disqualification and indifference on the part of the academy (Mazzotti 131, Zevallos 2002 14).
[6] The pueblo joven is the Limeño equivalent of the villa miseria in Buenos Aires, the poplación in Chile, the rancho in Venezuela. They denote neighborhoods in which migrants settle, first in a quite precarious form and which, with the passage of years and thanks for collective organizing, are converted into areas constructed with durable materials, and supplied with basic water, sewage and electrical services which they lacked at first.
[7] Here is the full quote: “Still, we insist that the hatred due to the deformations of a the life of a third world society participats, after all, from a popular perspective. This is made obvious if we remember that many of the elaborate metaphors within this continuous lanent for a world lacking in plentitude contains elements of that same universe. For example, in the poem ‘Fall of an adolescent’, one of the best of thecollection, he states that “[our bones] were as dry as corn stalks after the harvest” (Arquitectura 33), an imagine that will result in being quite dubvious within the cultural universe of the most revered poets to which I referred in Chapter 3 of this book [Eduardo Chirinos and Raúl Mendizábal]” (italics mine 141-142)
[8] Two canonical publications on the them of migration work in the metaphor of the conquest: Conquistadores de un nuevo nundo. From Invaders to Citizens by Carlos Iván Degregori, Cecilia Blondet and Nicolás Lynch and The Trojan Horses of the Invadors. Campesina Strategies in the Conquest of Greater Lima by Jürgen Golte and Norma Adams. Both books make a primary demarcation with respect to the discourse with which the elites perceive the migration as a phenomenon of social deterioration, of disfigurement of the city and the loss of Limeño customs. Both imagine the migration as a messianic phenomenon that equates the order imposed by the conquest and maintained in the republic. The Indians, campesinos, provincials will come to reclaim and take a city that belongs to them. This relation although well-intentioned while it highlights agency and social mobility does not stop being situated in the elite position and equates distinct phenomena: “to conquer” rights is fundamentally different from conquering a people and installing a colonial system.
[9] Within the debate on migration, formal/informal was one of the dichotomies that permeated all the spheres and became so ubiquitious as to overabound. As Matos Mar explains, the migrants occupied the space of the informal in the zone that they lived through the zoen in which they lived, the quality of their lodgings, their condition of not being Limeños, their commercial practices that hopscotched through the illegal (de Soto) and, even though many of these phenomena worked as an economic, social, or organizational promise, they continued to be colored by lack. For its part, the formal is a way of doing things, a performance that denotes punctuality, seriousness, ceremony, composure, “a manner of executing with necessary exactidude a public act” (rae.com). In fact, the provincial elites from haciendas and the elites from businesses in Lima transgressed the laws as much as or more than the migrants, but always within formal terms, which is to say, within the corruption of the state itself. As such, the informality that was blamed on the migrant produced an echo of the lack of correspondence between that particular subject and their transgression. Their transgressions were informal because they were alien to them, they were not proper to their class nor their race.
[10] Benjamin’s writing on Baudelaire pays attention to this. In the figure of the flaneur passing through isolation and self-estrangement of the artist, Benjamin locates these urban photographs as a part of the Bohemian experience that is situated among the fine arts, the massive, and the political conspiracy.
[11] The underground scene is a youth and urban phenomenon that concentrates poetry, music, and visual arts collectives formed by young people, high school students, university students, the unemployed etc. The rock and punk bands are the spearpoint of the scene. That which defines and give it form, that prefigure a “way of carrying oneslf” and a “way of being” both affective and performative. The songs concentrate in their two or three minutes the affects of the scene: ire, discontent, rebellion, confusion. These are seen as being justified and exalted by the political and economic conditions of the country. The violence, the lack of opportunities, the discrimination are the object of critique of this youth culture that matters to the youth of the lower class and working class neighborhoods as well as with those of the privileged sectors. The underground is a youth culture that does not definite itself solely through the specific rituals of the subcultures: ways f dressing, forms of association, collective consumptions of culture goods and others like alcohol and drugs. These characteristics of the subculture itself is juxtaposed with a countercultural project includes the non-professionalization, artistic and musical amateurism, but which also includes agents with a greater stability within the culture field of the moment.
[12] Hebdige reads Genet’s tube of Vaseline (The Thief’s Journal) as a paradigmatic object that betrays his homosexuality and is for that reason abject for his contemporaries. This abjection is resignified as an object of resistance: “Genet finds consolation in the tube of Vaseline. It becomes a symbol of his ‘triumph’” (3)
[13] In that same poem the speaker mentions: “and you Sarita are like a rockanrol in my chest / smeling like paste that my band consumes thinking of you”.
[14] This group was part of the scene in the 1960s and, although disconnected from the subte, han’t stopped being an important influence and presence. In a report from February 1985 Leusemia and Zcuela Crrada comment: “As opposed to the sixties, they were well behaved [in contrast to the rock of the 70s], but they were first: Los Saicos-everyone throws up an approving exclamation- and a bit lower down Los Yorks and El Polen. They started the wave off well and then came the others to fuck it up with their music in English”. (Malca “La Voz es el Rock Maldito”)
[15] Los Bestias (1984-1987) is a collective of architecture students, who’s proposal is based in the idea of exploiting the political potential of the precarious constructions by the Andean immigrants within the discipline and the exercise of architecture in Lima during that period. Among those involved were Elio Martucelli, Enrique Wong, Alex Ángeles, among others.