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Zona Franca: Selected Poetry

(I leave you, reader, in a duty-free piace. And to the one who will never see, I leave his white space: ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ) (Te dejo a ti, lector, en zona franca. Y al que nunca vera, su franja blanca: ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...) - Angel Escobar1 Leonardo Guevara Navarro's poems have two lives. One is lived on the page itself. Guevara writes and revises, rewrites and revises, considers how each piece will function in its printed incarnation. His poems take on second lives as performance scripts. Guevara puts the texts into motion, disrupts their patterns, improvises in their whitespace. For some readings he has collaborated with drummers, who create a dialogue with the poet's words and movement. Prior to coming to the United States from Cuba, Guevara was an active participant in diverse cultural scenes and projects. The poems included on paper here represent a range of his interests, showing his way of thinking about how history and race fold into related issues such as labor, economics and exile.2 Guevara's approach to text often reflects a spirit of collaboration: he writes through and across texts by other writers from around the world, such as Arthur Rimbaud, Jose Marti, and Joseph Brodsky. Another writer presently of interest to him is Krishnamurti. Sometimes Guevara's references to other writers point less to the "real" writers and more to perceptions, which can include the loss of writers, the misreading of their works, and the mental rewriting of their texts over time.3 Readers may also notice references to African diasporic history - some obvious, some more subtle - in many of Guevara's poems. His literary influences in matters of race, transnationalism and culture range from Aime Cesaire to Lydia Cabrera and Angel Escobar; he has also taken great interest in Albert Camus. Furthermore, while living in Cuba Guevara participated in the conversations and artistic practice of a group operating in poetry and performance networks in Havana and its suburb of Alamar: Zona Franca, a group weaving significant consciousness of race and Caribbean history among other threads of expression. In 1997 Guevara worked with Juan Carlos Flores and Amaury Pacheco to co-found Zona Franca as a collaborative project. They were all familiar with other writers' projects in Havana. Guevara himself read his work many times at "La azotea," the rooftop home of poet Reina Maria Rodriguez and an important site for alternative cultural expression; there he participated regularly in conversations with other writers and artists. He was also aware of the unofficial cultural magazine Diaspora[s], involving Carlos Aguilera, Pedro Marques de Armas, Rolando Sanchez Mejias and others. Guevara, Flores, and Pacheco decided to create a new organization working out of Alamar, with the specific mission of creating a space "where one poet would meet another with respect, and friendship would be paramount."4 Guevara remembers, "I said, well, that's a zona franca and so that's what the poetry group was called."-' Zona franca is often translated as a duty-free zone, a neutral space. At the same moment, Guevara explains, visual artists in their area were working out of a very similar collaborative philosophy. Sculptors and painters came together to form a group they called OMNI. Over the course of the years, the two groups have carried out many projects together. Guevara recalls: These groups were different but worked together, because we wanted to do something new, to break up genres and just make art. In the Rap festivals, we read poetry and die painters decorated the ampitheater and painted the bodies of the people who wanted to participate. After a while Juan Carlos Flores asked to spend some time working away from the group and I came to be the coordinator. At that time we started to give readings in the camelfos (large buses) in Havana. …