Sergio Ramírez Mercado (Masatepe, Nicaragua, 1942), writer, awarded the most important prizes for literature in Spanish, friend of all, by Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes or Julio Cortázar, has been living in exile from his homeland since 2021, He helped liberate when Sandinismo defeated the dictator Somoza. Incidentally, Somoza kept him in exile until 1979.
The dictator who later became Daniel Ortega exiled Ramírez and many others. Like other exiles, Sergio Ramírez is a citizen of Spain, Ecuador and Colombia. The dictatorship made him persona non grata until he finally He removed him from the list of citizens belonging to the country in which he was born.
Now it’s like I wasn’t born anywhere. Welcome in all but his homeland. He lives this situation with the same nobility with which he worked to liberate his country when it was still a dictatorship like the current one.
Sergio lives in Madrid, from where he travels the world, holds conferences, accepts awards, publishes books, generates opinions on events and, for example, writes regularly in newspapers such as The country. With the literature and the ideas he cultivates, he cultivates a dialogue that is welcome across the entire spectrum of Ibero-American culture. He is called from everywhere and takes part as a writer but also as a citizen a world in which he is only displaced by the country in which he was born.
Always a writer, he has published books related to the past of his Sandinista era (Goodbye, boys) and has been recognized for books of fiction or essays, making it one of the most awarded books of his generation. divine punishment, dark flowers, Masquerade ball, Catherine and Catherine, Margarita is beautiful in the sea (First prize Alfaguara novel) or The golden silence (his latest novel) are part of his long list of works. He never wrote to take revenge, but to understand the devil of the world in which we live.
The questionnaire I sent him contained these questions and found these answers.
—I just updated an interview with John Berger who talked about 2016, when the world turned upside down. We are not in a better situation now. What’s wrong, Sergio? What is the evil of the world?
–I’m very Pythagorean when it comes to history because I’m Borgian. I believe that everything repeats itself in cycles, starting with the organized forms of evil. I try to imagine myself in the interwar years of the 20th century, when the fear of the catastrophe of history drove Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zewig to suicide and lost all hope for them, like Dante at the gates of hell.
—During this time, people, personalities and countries were diluted. For example, nothing is said about your own country. What happens?
–No one pays attention to the tragedy of small countries that are not on the strategic map, and then the dictators take advantage of the silence to tighten the screw of the vile club on the necks of the people. And ahead of Nicaragua is Venezuela, which has the largest oil reserves in the world, and that is quite important.
—The first picture I have of you looked happy, smaller than Cortázar. It is a picture of a boy looking at a teacher. What was this boy, what was he?
– An old man who refuses to stand aside and tries to understand the world as it is now, or someone who looks into the past. It is not easy. The speed of the world is rapid and you have to catch the moving train. Imagination, curiosity, the ability to wonder, the desire to know, we must not lose these qualities.
—They live in exile in Madrid. What do these words mean to you: Madrid, exile?
– Given the curse of exile, Madrid is a blessing. It’s been almost five years and I don’t feel alien or strange; a villager who wants to immerse himself in the secrets and attractions of a big city and feels that the doors are not closed to him. I am a Nicaraguan from Madrid.
—Literature has enormous value for you. What did it bring you?
–A meaning for my life. Without literature I would be very miserable and live in the dull twilight of old age. Literature makes me feel young again every morning when I sit down at the keyboard and start writing with joy and enthusiasm. That’s why I’m alive.
—They are among the millions of people living in exile around the world. Spain welcomes you. What is this country that you came to when you began to run out of land?
– A country that I love very much and that I try to understand with my knowledge of Spanish and my mestizo roots. I understand it in its diversity and its contrasts, its passions and contradictions. Sometimes I see it reflected in the duel with clubs in Goya’s painting, one of the two Spains that must make one’s heart freeze; But there is also the other, which is not the yawning Spain, but the shining Spain of its poetry, from Rosalía de Castro to Machado and Lorca to Joan Margarit.
–And what would home be today?
–The poem “High Treason” by my beloved José Emilio Pacheco speaks for me:
The town I was born in, my childhood home, the volcano that guards that town, an afternoon of endless rain, the lonely beach where I could walk for miles without meeting anyone, my father closing the grocery store because my mother called for lunch, the friends who died young and never aged that much in my memory.
–– Does what is happening in your country, in the world, make you think or resent?
–It leads me to frustration. I cannot help but feel that I have failed to change the unfortunate fate of my country and that the dynastic dictatorship I fought against has been replaced by another, worse dynastic dictatorship.
—There are some countries that force the world, like today’s United States or Putin’s Russia. Disgust is possible, but if we enter the field of reflection, how would you judge this time today?
–We live in the time of the triumph of lies, the Orwellian world in which logic shrinks to make way for the official concept of alternative truth. They lie blatantly, everything is distorted from the loudspeakers of power and we see it more and more as normal. How long will it take to dismantle this racket?
—Venezuela is now a mystery. It is the land of many of Rómulo Gallegos. How can you lose a country?
–Venezuela is not the first nightmare we have experienced in Latin America, nor is it the first that Venezuela has experienced. Juan Vicente Gómez, Pérez Jiménez, Chávez, Maduro on one side and on the other side Rómulo Gallegos, who was president, Rómulo Betancourt, Carlos Andrés Pérez. Democratic Venezuela will prevail in the end,
—In the difficult moments of your story, you were able to write books that cover your life as a boy. How did you manage that?
– Out of conviction. To become a writer, you must be confident in your role from your own intimacy. You are a writer because you have to be, regardless of sales success or fame.
