Award Honorary Doctor Title to Miguel Barnet

January 22, 2020

The novelist, poet, essayist and ethnologist Miguel Barnet received this Tuesday in Havana the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of the Arts, for a body of work that has explored and contributed to revealing valuable areas of Cubanness, with a recognized ethical and social vocation.

Upon reading the resolution by which the ISA confers on Barnet the title of doctor honoris causa in Art, the rector of the institution, Alexis Seijo García, highlighted that the degree has been awarded to him for "his extensive work in defense of our cultural values and for being a reference point for several generations of Cubans."

Seijo and the Minister of Culture, Alpidio Alonso, presented the title to the renowned Cuban intellectual, who has also received the Félix Varela Order of the First Grade and the Juan Marinello Order, the Alejo Carpentier Medal and the National Prize for Literature in 1994, among other recognitions.

During the ceremony, the founder and president of the Fernando Ortiz Foundation also received the plastic work Chinese Presence in the Caribbean from the hands of its creator, Flora Fong.

In words of praise, poet and essayist Nancy Morejón noted that Barnet's production "is copious and in its aspects has reached an extraordinary dimension."

Two perspectives define his vision, "that of the anthropologist, with exploratory step and multiple craft, who delves into that mysterious Cubanness shown to the world, among others, by Alejandro de Humboldt, Renée Méndez Capote and Fernando Ortiz," and "that of the poet whose worldview was nourished by fieldwork and an entire practice resulting from his ethnological investigations" alongside the craft of narrating stories, "creating, in turn, emblematic characters of what has been, and is, our character."

"Mirror and consequence" of a tradition that begins with Columbus and passes through Alejandro de Humboldt to Fernando Ortiz, "all of Miguel Barnet's work has contributed to situating, clarifying and reflecting, with the gaze of the second half of the twentieth century, the Black cultures of the Island, whose principles were revealed and described by the three 'discoverers' mentioned above."

The National Prize for Literature winner in 2001 and honorary member of the National Council of the Uneac added that "orality is a spring that transpires throughout Barnet's style, because it becomes there a value as untransferable as it is renewing, since its pillars are grounded in fieldwork, in that sort of community laboratory.

"Fixing characteristics, describing habits, pointing out debts, contradictions and clashes of cultures, turn that work into an irreplaceable source of veracity, inquiry and perspicacity."

Morejón considered that the writing of Biography of a Runaway Slave (1966) – which has reached more than 70 editions in all modern languages – "was an unparalleled, nourishing experience, from which all the modes and styles of Miguel Barnet's literature came afterward (…) In the early seventies, he conceived a text where he embodied what he would later define as testimonial novel. It was his way of regrouping the books that had continued the saga begun in 1966."

A year after Biography of a Runaway Slave was published, Alejo Carpentier wrote that "Miguel Barnet offers a unique case in our literature, that of a monologue that escapes all mechanism of literary creation and is inscribed in literature by its poetic projections."

For Morejón – who also referred to Barnet's facet as a translator from English to Spanish, including the praised translation of In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote – the writer "found the balance of genres, entering and leaving poetry for narrative and vice versa until finding discourse that is always beautiful, effective, island-like, faithful to the history of the voiceless."

"I was young and I am young"

Barnet (Havana, January 28, 1940), who has several honorary doctorates from Cuban and foreign universities, told Cubadebate that "this means a lot to me, because it is my country and it is from the University of the Arts, a university where the aesthetic vanguard is always being defended and also the vanguard in the social and ethical.

"It is a place where many young people with talent are nurtured. I believe that this honoris causa is due to my work and, above all, to my concern for Cuban artists, musicians, theater people, visual artists, writers… which is in my book Cuban Autographs, a collection of more than 100 articles on contemporary figures and others from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries…

"I am very grateful, I feel very happy. I did not expect it, but on the eve of my 80th birthday it is a very precious gift."

At the Uneac congress last year, Barnet stated that "we have the duty to help, from creation and thought, the materialization of the aspirations of the Cuban people," and emphasized the importance of the contribution that artists and writers can give, at this historical moment, "to the continuous improvement and implementation of our cultural policy and those areas that interrelate inseparably with culture, such as education, the social sciences and the media."

This Tuesday, after receiving the title of doctor honoris causa from the ISA, he commented to Cubadebate that "every social being is a political being, and the true, authentic writer cannot be removed from the concerns and feelings of his country, his people. People tell me: 'You are in politics'… Well, I am not in politics, I am drinking from the nourishing sources of a revolution that I love.

"I was young and I am young. The only advice to young people is never to feel old, always be young; otherwise what else are they going to be? And young people always have the truth, and truth is always revolutionary."

Barnet: "I believe that our peoples still have much to tell with their own language, not with a language invented for them to distort them." Photo: @AlpidioAlonsoG.

"I aspire to be a resonator of the collective memory of my country"

"I have done nothing else in my already long life but break schemes, violate genres and always place myself on the front line of long-distance runners," said Barnet to those present while thanking the ISA for the recognition, and he referred to the "principles that I have followed to the letter and that are the recipe of this son of the neighborhood."

The first – he continued – "is that I have dedicated a large part of my life to the rescue of the so-called people without history. This seems like a truism but it is not. Behind the light is the shadow; as the Japanese say, in the shadow there is also light, and that hidden, concealed, relegated light is what illuminates all my work. It is the light of those who had no voice, and whose history, nevertheless, has marked a milestone in the development of Cuban society. That is what I have dedicated some texts to that I called testimonial novels, such as Biography of a Runaway Slave, Rachel's Song, Real Life, Gallego, Angel's Trade…

"What have I tried to reveal? Very simply. The flow of lives that, in silence, with stoicism and modesty, but with deep sap and deep roots, have contributed to the definition of national identity and the idiosyncrasy of a people, the Cuban people.

"Memory, as part of imagination, has been the touchstone of my books (…) I aspire to be a resonator of the collective memory of my country. For that I go to oral discourse, to myths and to the anthropomorphic fauna of Cuba.

"I no longer believe in genres just as the people never believed in them. The people who sang in ten-line and four-line verses, who told stories in theatrical and novelistic forms, who subordinated everything to the effectiveness of the message, who never became entrenched. I believe that our peoples still have much to tell with their own language, not with a language invented for them to distort them.

"More than creating and inventing, what I have done in my prose has been to recreate, even reinvent, a tradition that was going to die; to act as a resonator of those voices, as a reflector that illuminates those inner folds, those dark zones, making appear with their own luminosity figures that had been drowned in opacity. That is the only merit of the testimonial novel that I have helped to create with my own tools."

After highlighting the contribution that social anthropology and the Cuban ideology of ethical and social projection made to his vision in the search to "understand the secret keys of my country," he recalled that "deep Cuba became an obsession for me, then began the work of probing and searching in the interstices of the social fabric that I had before my eyes and could not see clearly. With the conviction that all lives are important, even the most hidden and apparently extinguished ones, I found my characters."

Along the way, the writer sought "above all, in the mysterious weave of language, not as caricature, but as living nature. I am not a pure writer (…) I do not aspire to categorical definitions nor do I offer social solutions, which are the business of politicians. All I desire is to show the heart that beats strongly in the human body, defying tedium and old age."

"If I set out to do anything it is that all of us, like one great vigorous family, can achieve the happiness of calling ourselves Cubans, Latin Americans, or simply inhabitants of this convulsive planet that each day loses more its necessary balance. Thus, from here, from this hallucinating and visceral island, we will be able to push a country, this small country, toward a destiny of greater happiness." (Miguel Barnet at the ISA, January 21, 2019)