Between the smell of fresh tamales and al pastor tacos that fills Mexico City; between the noise of hundreds of cars that clog its wide streets and the rumble that the subway causes on some sidewalks; between the parks of deep shadows, where abandoned dogs rest and new loves always kiss; between the clocks of stones and sand and the passing of dozens of red trams, the Cuban writer Odette Alonso (Santiago de Cuba, 1964) prefers the light that filters through the windows of her small apartment, illuminating her bookshelves and her life. She says that it is the love nest that she shares with her wife, the poet Paulina Rojas, and that apartment is, above all, a space for creation. Together, Odette and Paulina coordinated the essential anthology Verses and various. Contemporary lesbian poetry exhibition (Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, 2020), and together they promote the work of friends and colleagues, teach workshops, coordinate reading spaces, and write new verses.
Alonso is one of those tireless writers, with more than twenty books published in four countries. Her work ranges from stories (with open mouth, Panic Hotel), even novel (Three-body mirror), passing through a very extensive poetic corpus that began in Havana in the eighties and that reaches up to The days without faith, Old Music Island, Last days of a country and What happenssome of his most recently published collections of poems in Mexico and the United States.
With her friendly smile, Odette is also a committed promoter of books and reading. That is why she says that, after her apartment, her second favorite place in Mexico City would be the old house in the Mixcoac neighborhood where the El Último Encuentro bookstore is located, where the author coordinates a literary gathering known as La Peña de Pau y Odette.
“This happens in a tree-lined courtyard, if it’s not raining, or in the rooms on the ground floor, with an atmosphere that reminds me of Santiago de Cuba (maybe it’s the spirit we impose on it), and upstairs is the bookstore, which is a magical place, good for gossip, beer and mezcal. But, in general, I like the city a lot. From the first days here, when I walked along Reforma or Insurgentes, Roma or Polanco, I felt that something indescribable, earthy, connected me to this land. On one occasion, a half-witch friend, in a half-spiritual session, told me: ‘You have more to do with Mexico than you imagine’… It seems that she was right.”
– What is your first memory of that Mexico City to which it turns out you were connected by an invisible umbilical cord?
– It was the first days of June 1992. I was coming from Bacalar, where I had met some young writers who had invited me to visit Mexico City. I arrived at the bus terminal known as TAPO and we got on the subway to go downtown. Imagine: line 1 at rush hour with a suitcase (which didn’t have wheels back then), change at Pino Suárez, long corridor to line 2, arrival at Zócalo. We left the station by the stairs next to the cathedral and it was raining. When I looked up, the powerful lights illuminated the baroque facade of the temple, but I could see it through the copious curtain of water. It’s an indelible image.
A few days later, I was invited to eat at one of those friends’ houses. The mother made a corn soup that seemed to me the most glorious thing I had ever tasted in my life. They laughed, surprised, and said to me: “But it’s a soup from a can…” In that house I heard Alice Cooper and King Crimson for the first time, which I had never heard mentioned in Cuba. I even thought they were ladies!
– That same year, 1992, you chose Mexico as your country, and you did it at all costs. Why Mexico, and how did you “become an emigrant”?
– At all costs, that’s right. In the early nineties, Cuban nationality was declared restricted by the Ministry of the Interior in the face of the avalanche of compatriots arriving, fleeing the Special Period. Immigration gave me an ultimatum: I had 15 days to leave Mexico. My cousins from Miami offered to come to the border for me and I preferred to stay undocumented. Deep down, I think I have always been afraid of the United States, although I have often wondered what would have become of my life if I had crossed at some point in these 32 years. But then I was fascinated by getting to know a country where sometimes I had only one peso in my wallet, where my first salary was 700 a month – which, even in those years, was a pittance – where I lived in fear of being deported and at night, in my dreams, I thought I heard military boots climbing the spiral staircase that led to the little room on the roof where I lived, but where I was also learning a new language, a new way of eating, living and relating. Because what Martí said about the [Río] Bravo to Patagonia, there is only one people, is an illusion without much foundation. I was starting a new life from scratch, and I think it has been worth all the pain and all the joy.
– After so many years and so many sorrows and joys, Mexican or Cuban writer?
– Cuban-Mexican, the correct ones would say. But the truth is that, when one leaves her place of origin, she will be a foreigner everywhere forever. In Cuba they call me Mexican and in Mexico, Cubanita. The vast majority of my work has been written and published here, but it moves between those two waters, as it happens to me. The story books have settings and characters from both shores and in poetry I invent a place—according to me, neutral—where everyone sees Cuba. A kind of Frankenstein made of pieces from both sides: that’s what I am.
– In your extensive list of publications it appears Word of the one who returns Like the last book you published in Havana, with Editora Abril, in 1996. Have you published again in Cuba since then? Have you had an intellectual or cultural life there?
– I have been included in some anthologies. I remember the Album of Cuban poetesses that Mirtha Yáñez compiled; either Submerged Cathedralcoordinated by Ileana Álvarez and Maylén Domínguez; and also Tea with Lemon, a story meeting prepared by Amir Valle; and The eternal dance, by Victor Fowler. But, apart from that, it is as if it did not exist for Cuban cultural institutions. And I don’t try very hard to get noticed either. A couple of years ago, taking advantage of the fact that she was in Havana visiting my family, a poet invited me to a private reading that she would organize with some friends. I was very excited because I would read again in Cuba after almost 30 years, but within an hour, she stopped… or so they told me. No way, it will be in another life.
– How do you see the future of Cuba from where you are, from your relationship with your native country?
– The present is fatal and the future is terrifying. A country sunk in the deepest misery and with no visible possibilities of getting out of there. A country from which young people flee en masse and only the old and the sick are left behind, helpless, dying of hunger and need, burned to the ground. A country that is literally falling apart, without anything or anyone being able to prop it up.
– You are a very prolific poet and storyteller. In addition, you have a constant presence in public spaces (clubs, presentations, literary meetings). Do you also consider yourself a cultural or reading promoter?
– Yes, it is a job that I love almost as much as writing. For 14 years—from 2007 to 2020—I organized a cycle called Latin American writers within the framework of the Palacio de Minería International Book Fair; More than 100 writers from 14 countries came, it was a reference. After the pandemic, we return to Mining with another cycle, Rainbow Boulevardwhich tries to make the literature of gender diversity visible; we have been doing this for two years. From the cultural project Rainbow Boulevardwhich is really Paulina and I, organized, with the support of friends from the El Último Encuentro bookstore, La Peña de Pau y Odette, a non-institutional space that in one year has held 11 readings with the participation of 38 writers and five musicians. Every day in the world I ask myself: “Come here, girl, why do I invent so much stuff that, on top of that, they don’t even leave me a penny?”, but at the end of each peña I’m already planning the next one.
– There is a tendency to repeat that this or that narrator or poet is addressing a topic for the first time, such as sexual dissidence, gender identity. However, the extensive Latin American tradition and your own work within that tradition show that, at all times, women have addressed the topics that are important to them, whatever they may be. What do you think of this way of always making us seem like “pioneers”?
– My friend Luis Aguilar would say, may he rest in peace, that the only thing that denotes is a lack of reading and general culture. I remember an incident with some very young girls who flatly stated an absence of lesbian references in Mexican literature. I told them: “But mijas, what about Sor Juana?”… And then I recited a list of works and authors, who have been there for a lifetime.
In the circles in which I was educated, there was an insatiable curiosity, a huge need for information, an aspiration to know and read everything (or, at least, as much as possible), but now I come across young people who deny the importance of the classics or the literary tradition and proclaim as classic what is just beginning to happen. They say that it was not Don Quixote who said things, but Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar.
– Would you say that there is such a thing as lesbian poetry and that it has a tradition?
– Of course it exists. It is poetry that has as its theme or tone the love relationships between women. Its authors may or may not be lesbians, but that’s the point. The shock and complaints when hearing that definition come from prejudices. I have never heard anyone worry or protest when talking about religious or social poetry, love poetry, philosophical poetry, anti-poetry or even erotic poetry… Ah, but don’t mention lesbian poetry, because then they will say: “Poetry is poetry, it doesn’t need adjectives.” “… Okay! (the emoji with the little eyes up would go here).
– You were born in Santiago de Cuba, in the far east of the island. How did this influence all of your visions of artistic creation?
– “Santiago de Cuba, polychrome Creole image that melts the sun,” Benny sang; “sovereign land,” said the sound of Matamoros. Cradle of you know what. I don’t know what it would have been like to grow up anywhere else, but that’s where my rebellion and stubbornness were founded. I lived in Santiago for my first 25 years; Those that followed my graduation from the Universidad de Oriente were the most intense: I was in a literary workshop with the best young writers in the city; In 1987 we organized a national poetry festival that is still talked about, we founded magazines and editorial collections, I had opinion columns in cultural supplements, I belonged to the editorial boards of some of them, I won some competitions, I published my first book of poems. They were epic times, we just didn’t know it then. Or maybe we sensed something in that we were going from a beer shot to a meeting of literary workshops, from the expensive coffee in the Chess Park to the stairs of the Carnival Museum or to the cultural nights on Heredia Street, from the carnival festivals to the night we signed a letter asking for clarification of the “Matanzas case.”
– The “Matanzas case”?
– That violent irruption of a police commando into the El Pensamiento bookstore, during a reading of young poets in December 1988. Too much life that, in a sigh, was left behind.
– With so much done and experienced, with so much seen, what’s next for you literary and professionally?
– I hope that retirement [laboral]; I look forward to it with a thousand projects. But I’ll give you a scoop: a personal anthology is about to come out of the presses of the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico: Of smoke and honey, 35 years of poetry (1989-2024)which celebrates the publication of my first two books, there in Cuba, and everything that has happened since. And in the meantime, I am writing two books: a collection of poems that has me crazy and exhausted and that is going to be a hit if one day I see the ball arrive home, and a long essay on Mexican lesbian literature, for which project I was awarded the scholarship from the National System of Art Creators. So I don’t get bored and I’m still here.
