Sergio Ramírez has just obtained the Ortega y Gasset Prizein a special edition to mark the 50th anniversary of the newspaper’s founding The Countrynext to some of the best journalists in the worldlike the Belarusian Svetlana Alexiévich, Nobel Prize in Literature, and Martin Baron, former director of Washington Post and The Boston Globe.
For Central America, the Nicaraguan is not just a writer. It is the most important intellectual in the region since the second half of the 20th century and, without a doubt, the last of its kind. It is impossible to understand our culture without his imprint as a narrator, essayist, literary critic, chronicler, opinion columnist, editor, creator of public policy, cultural manager and a countless number of jobs that could be summarized in an expression now out of use: “man of letters.”
Without him, the great university reform of the 1960s and 1970s would not have been possible; the Central American University Press (Educa), from which what we now read as our literary tradition emerges, and a vast regional cultural platform interrupted by the Managua earthquake in 1972 and the subsequent political-military crisis, which lasted two decades.
While the Central American Common Market emerged, Sergio dreamed and launched a sense of shared culture. Since 2013 organizes the Central America Account festival, which in a few years became one of the most important literary meetings in Latin America.
Current Latin American writers are fundamentally that: writers. They don’t pretend to be anything else. They are, to return to Machiavelli’s phrase, “unarmed prophets.” The horrors of the 20th century, skepticism and globalization taught them the limitations of written culture. And revolutions are an anachronism, both political and aesthetic. 65 years ago, when Sergio Ramírez began writing, everything was different. Latin America seemed to be a material malleable to ideas and ideals.
From the beginning of his career, more than 50 books agohe set out to reinvent reality with his words and actions. As time goes by, He himself has been suspicious of those youthful pretensions of wanting to “change the world.”which was a generational mandate. It must be remembered that Sergio, as a student in León, acquired his moral conscience as survivor of the 1959 student massacrewhich made him anti-Somoza for life.
Perhaps the great lesson of the 20th century was that “the dreams of reason breed monsters,” but the first decades of the 21st century teach us something worse, that irrationality is much more dangerous and can lead to extinction as a species.
During his life itinerary, Sergio has been confronted with those two forces that can crush a man, and from that colossal confrontation emerged not only a great narrator, but also an exceptional interpreter of his time and, as a result of a long process of existential purification, a passionate defender of freedom as an inalienable condition of human dignity.
According to Günter Grass, a public writer should not be required to be right, but that has reasons. Sergio began his journey convinced that literature is a reason to live, but also a reason to think about the world, an intellectual perspective from which it is possible to understand the complex intricacies of the human soul. He carved out a destiny as the only way to remain true to himself.and has persisted in that mandate throughout his life.
Sergio was the protagonist and exceptional witness of the last great political revolution of the last century, with which Latin America closed the turbulent era initiated by the Mexican Revolution. From the ashes of Sandinism arose the platypus between dynastic dictatorship, populism, machinery of terror and kleptocracy that today crushes Nicaragua under the two-faced Ortega-Murillo abomination.
Of the tons of printed paper that the Sandinista Revolution produced, almost everything was forgotten, but we will continue reading forever divine punishmenta novel written by Sergio in the few free mornings that the vice presidency of Nicaragua left him; The inhabited woman, by Gioconda Belli; the memoirs of Ernesto Cardenal and little else.
I don’t know how he did it, but Sergio has always followed his own path. In a country of poets, he was a storyteller. In the midst of an insurrection, he was intellectual. In the war, he was a politician.
Was persecuted by Somoza and pseudo-Sandinism; was marginalized by the right and by the “progressives”and was later accepted, reluctantly, by some who do not forgive him for his revolutionary past or his critical present. And he always remained faithful to himself, anchored to that freedom that is so his.to that tiny and free space where a writer knows how to put the universe, to that indefinable thing that could be called destiny, inner strength or the will to resist.
Sergio’s stories and novels are an endearing investigation of Nicaraguan popular culture and, at the same time, a complex study of the transition from patriarchal dictatorship to postmodern chaos. His articles and chronicles are a mixture of reading erudition with autobiographical fragments and an incorruptible platform of freedom and literature as the extreme redoubt of what makes us human.
A few months after he went into exile, threatened by the arbitrary arrest order given by the dictatorship, in a judicial show, I visited him in his apartment on Ronda de Atocha street, in Madrid. The walls were bare and the atmosphere was taciturn, and We talked about a Central America already sunk in the shadows.
From one of the almost empty rooms, a desk stood out with a few books and a computer on. That light of moral conscience emanated from the screen that has been revealed by the failure of the Ortega y Gasset Prize.. Sergio, then 80 years old, was plotting one of his new novels, his monthly article for The Country or one of the many texts with which He remains one of the most living writers on the planet. Writer until death, as he once said in an interview.
*This article was originally published in The Nationfrom Costa Rica.
