Many questions came to mind when reading an article-essay by Severo Sarduy that is based on an anticipated and luminous idea: “the era of the voice is yet to come.” It was written in 1990, or at least it was published in June of that year in The Canary Islands Gazetteunder the title “I am an electronic, current Joan of Arc.”
Recently discovered by me thanks to a book published by Fondo de Cultura Económica and titled AnthologyI think that perhaps Sarduy had a visionary stroke, and that at that moment he already grasped what could happen after the apogee of the image, under whose dominion we live.
The writer wrote when there were no tablets, laptops or smartphones in every pedestrian’s hand moving through the city:
“…the abrupt and abusive emergence of the image in the contemporary world of our redundant communication has prevented the exploration of that continent, paradoxically abandoned before being conquered, which is that of the radio, that of the voice.”
Although the image lends itself to various interpretations, as he himself has done by bringing up the inner voices that moved Joan of Arc—voices that also moved him during the creative process—Sarduy was referring above all to the world of radio, to which he was connected as a journalist and scriptwriter at Radio France International.
The sound world was a place where Sarduy enjoyed pleasure, and it suited him like a glove because he said he wrote for “voices” that marked his writing in such a way that he came to affirm: “everything I write lends itself to dissemination, it is ‘essentially vocal’.”
“The text – and not just a radio text; all of them, even a poem – is never presented to me in the abstract, unleashed, if you can say that, reduced to its nakedness or its conceptuality.”
In each word that makes up his work, in each idea concatenated in it, “everything has already been said, from the beginning, there is no beginning other than listening,” he writes, and he underlines an idea: “even my novels benefit from being read aloud.”
Sarduy establishes a metaphor to explain his idea, and starting from an analogy with plastic arts, he assures that everything known to date “is comparable to the countries pompier and to bouquets of flowers than to the almanacs of those same firefighters, which is the comparison used in French to give an image of the stereotype in all its splendor, most rude and camp “Abstract radio hasn’t arrived yet.”
Although we are surrounded by screens, although they try to change our reality with a bombardment of images that often do not fully connect to our lives, the idea that the time would come where sound dominates, if perhaps both have not coexisted for some time, is fascinating.
Already in these years the writer’s prophecy seems to be fulfilled. Not only does the radio persist, coming to life in the cars of taxi drivers in cities like Buenos Aires or inside a gloomy Cuban house, even if there is power, but the medium itself has transmuted to adapt to the needs of today’s life.
The podcast is as popular as the old radio programs, and they even complement written articles that were previously simply that: word on paper, without the accompaniment of the voice. Its proliferation, the possibility of having sound in our ears when we want it, is similar to that moment dominated by “the freedom of abstraction” that Severo Sarduy spoke of.
Reading that article has also forced me to go beyond where mere surprise placed me regarding the intuited reinvention of a fabulous medium such as radio; It reminded me of the first person to tell me the story of this impressive writer called Severo Sarduy, and to explain to me the significance of his work in Cuban literature.
That person was a professor at the University of Havana and the event happened too long ago. But, as things are repeated and worsen on the island to a point that no longer has comparison, I remember it now in Buenos Aires. Who knows where you are reading it now, since the alternative seems to be leaving or waiting for violence to break out.
After rereading this countryman who was hidden for so long by those who still want to live from the story of the immaculate reality on the island, I once again assure that he leaves a tremendous desire to write: Severo Sarduy’s voice, his language, is like a stimulating spring for thought and writing.
