Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) by Bolaño Roberto

Author:Bolaño, Roberto [Bolaño, Roberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2012-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

THE MANY MASKS OF

MAX MIREBALAIS

MAX MIREBALAIS, alias MAX KASIMIR, MAX VON HAUPTMAN, MAX LE GUEULE, JACQUES ARTIBONITO

Port-au-Prince, 1941–Les Cayes, 1998

His real name was probably Max Mirebalais, although we will never know for sure. His first steps in literature remain mysterious: one day he turned up in a newspaper editor’s office; the next, he was out on the streets, looking for stories, or more often running errands for the senior staff. In the course of his apprenticeship, he was subjected to all the miseries and servitudes of Haitian journalism. But thanks to his determination, after two years, he rose to the position of assistant social columnist for the Port-au-Prince Monitor, and in that capacity, awed and puzzled, he attended parties and soirées held in the capital’s grandest houses. There can be no doubt that as soon as he glimpsed that world, he wanted to belong to it. He soon realized that there were only two ways to achieve his aim: through violence, which was out of the question, since he was peaceable and timorous by nature, appalled by the mere sight of blood; or through literature, which is a surreptitious form of violence, a passport to respectability, and can, in certain young and sensitive nations, disguise the social climber’s origins.

He opted for literature and decided to spare himself the difficult years of apprenticeship. His first poems, published in the Monitor’s cultural supplement, were copied from Aimé Césaire, and met with a rather negative reception from certain intellectuals in Port-au-Prince, who openly mocked the young poet.

His next exercises in plagiarism demonstrated that he had learned his lesson: this time the poet imitated was René Depestre, and the result, if not unanimous acclaim, was the respect of a number of professors and critics, who predicted a brilliant future for the neophyte.

He could have continued with Depestre, but Max Mirebalais was no fool; he decided to multiply his sources. With patient craftsmanship, sacrificing hours of sleep, he plagiarized Anthony Phelps and Davertige, and created his first heteronym: Max Kasimir, the cousin of Max Mirebalais, to whom he attributed poems borrowed from those who had ridiculed his first ventures into print: Philoctète, Morisseau and Legagneur, founding members of the Haiti Littéraire group. The poets Lucien Lemoine and Jean Dieudonné Garçon came in for the same treatment.

With the passage of time he became expert in the art of breaking down the work of another poet in order to make it his own. Vanity soon got the better of him and he tried to conquer the world. French poetry provided a boundless hunting ground, but he decided to start closer to home. His plan, noted somewhere in his papers, was to exhaust the expressive repertoire of négritude.

So, after expressing and exhausting more than twenty authors, whose collections, although extremely hard to come by, were placed at his disposal free of charge by the Apollinaire French Bookshop, he decided to let Mirebalais take charge of Georges Desportes and Edouard Glissant from Martinique, while Max Kasimir assumed responsibility for Flavien Ranaivo from Madagascar and Leopold-Sedhar Senghor from Senegal.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.