words by Madeleine Sautié Reyes
Lina de Feria and Jesús Lara Sotelo just signed a new pact with art. Appearing in the same book showing his most recent literary proposals is an action that relates them forever, even though the mutual affinities had a chapter prior to the making of the book titled Lina de Feria y Jesús Lara Sotelo. A dos manos, which saw the light by Editorial Sur Collection publishing house and has just been presented in the Villena room of the Association of Cuban Artists and Writers (UNEAC, after its initials in Spanish).
The author of Casa que no existia was still excited by one of the works made by the renowned visual artist, who she had just watched on television, when she received an unexpected phone call. “I was struck by a painting of you the other day and today you are calling me”. Then, she knew once again that her intuition was in tune with the next events. The alliance was born and here is the book.
Prologue written by the poets and essayists Jesús David Curbelo and Alberto Marrero, with the respective texts From uncertain balance and other considerations and Aims and rebellions, the present delivery allows the occasional fusion of the work of two great creators: she is one of the most outstanding voices of the current Cuban lyric poetry and he is one of the bastions of plastic arts in the island, who has also been able to express himself through written poetry for a long time.
This is a poem about the knowledge of the world, says Curbelo, and about the beings that are those lyrical subjects that embody their authors. And it is, he points out, “about the anxiety of existing, of knowing the now, the ephemeral instant of copulation with the Being.” A book on growth seen through pain, through the hard learning that goes from childhood to old age and death, articulated from real experiences, experiments and many failures on all fronts.
Extrana rosa is the title under which Lina’s poems are grouped here. About her writing, Marrero warns that at age of 70, she still owns a fresh speech “with soul, flesh, bones, desolate landscapes, bitter reflections, bold metaphors and sometimes cheers of fleeting joy”.
In Lara Sotelo, who names his texts La noche del arbol quemado, Marrero acknowledges a broad thematic and idea-esthetic ecumenism, which brings him closer to the youngest present Cuban literature, and conceives him as a creator who seems to defy the limits of his own capacity at the same time that he stands in favor of what he considers paralyzing and dogmatic, a peculiarity thatplaces him outside of all etiquette, according to his opinion,.
Another of the book’s gains is the reciprocal dissertation each author has conceived regarding the other’s art: “Jesus Lara invents worlds, for the most profound observation of beauty”, writes Lina; on his part Lara Sotelo says: “In her, the raw reef ends up wearing algae as a symbol of resistance to the difficult, inclement nature endowing it with permanence and vitality”.
Later the poems speak. “There is something in me that is extraordinary / and I am forced to wish that something to exist at any price”, says Lara Sotelo.
Lina bets on humanism without fear to waste it: “I will extend my fingers/over the window of days/and I will want a more human world/as a personification/whose feeling/ does not allow the man to drug/because what he meditates/destroys the stupidity of emptiness.
Granma newspaper, Havana, year 52, edition 202, August 22, 2016. Page 6.
