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Thus inquired Ulises Estrella in a beautiful poem. Not only did the Establishment
dare, but it actually built walls between the poets and their people. It
was thus
preventing them from joining their own people in the struggle to find - and
find
they did, in the search -their own voice, free, authentic, and total in a
society
also total and free.
The Literature of Men
The action of the Tzantzicos was to generate what Alejandro Moreano has called
parricidism, that is, the destroying of myths, dogmas, and taboos maintained
by the
Establishment, to assure a position of insurrection at all levels. And the
shrinking
of the heads of writers and poets (ornaments of the colonial salons) to their
true
proportions through the total rejection of their concept of art and literature.
Evaluating
the socially oriented literature of Ecuador, Alejandro Moreano says that
it displays
"the contradictions of a false bourgeoisie which refuses its role, that
is, to be
constructive and dynamic, and favors a defensive attitude." This kind
of literature
which "arises from the concept, in Rousseau's EMILE, of the imminent
and universal
purity of the human soul (. . .), exalts the conditions in which the rural
masses live and
their ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking about the world. DON GOYO, by
Aguilera
Malta, and CHUMBOTE, by Jose de la Cuadra, are classic examples of such
an attitude: a way of looking upon the exploited. However, if rural life
is so pure
and lovely in contrast with the degradation of the upper strata (. . .) would
it not be a
crime to bring about the revolution? (. . .) That is why the survivors of
such
generations, the majority at least, sold out to the dictator next in line
or to the
military government. They had looked upon literature as a bourgeois activity
for
getting into society or a political career. Hence our rebellion against their
mental
structures, against their forms of understanding the world."
Parricidism claims, then, the task of expressing what is most profound in
America,
of creating an atmosphere and lines of communication, directed not exclusively
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to the pseudo-cultured but also, and especially, to the great masses waiting
to be
liberated. A genuinely rooted literature of men for men who are equally in
need
of achieving their own genuineness.
That is to say, a permanent position of insurrection on all planes of fife.
Translated by Fred Ellison