William González Guevara has just won the Espasa Poetry Prize for the collection of poems “Cara de Crime” that had been “lurking” in his head for years. This story wasn’t born in a notebook or on a recent trip through Central America—although he also spoke with gang members and hitmen to kill them. … He understands certain gestures, certain phrases that appear in the collection of poems – but in a fixed image that has accompanied him since he was five years old. “I was born in Nicaragua,” he begins, sitting upright, as if each sentence demands precision. “my paternal family, gonzalez, He founded one of the most feared gangs in Managua, Sumi. He grew up among cousins who distributed crack around the neighborhood and two-story houses where pizza would arrive whenever a kid asked for it. There was PlayStation, there was plenty, and there were also shootings, extortion and murder. This was the fate that those around him took for granted: “And it was said among my household: “William will be another Sumi.”
But his mother built him a shelter made of books. “It was heaven and hell,” the poet says. In his mother’s house there were yellow selections of… Rubén Darío, Claribel Alegría, Ernesto Cardinale. There his first poem appeared, which he wrote when he was seven years old: The Fall of an Angel, inspired by a scene whose name he did not yet know. It was this scene, in particular, that years later would become the seed for the movie “Crime Face”: The murder he saw through a half-open door – A concrete block hits a man’s head on the ground, his lifeless body, his cousin covers his eyes, too late -. “That changed everything for me,” he recalls. “I saw the cruelty. “I saw that we were dying, and that there were people who killed other people.” After immigrating to Spain at the age of eleven, that image returned in dreams. Literature, he says, is the only way to get off that edge: “The fear diminishes if you write what hurts you.”
“I wanted people to be hurt by the book.”
Remember that in Nicaragua poetry is considered a national sport; The Sandinista Revolution used it to teach reading and writing and build society. Perhaps this is the reason why he speaks so categorically about the craft: “Poetry is a very demanding genre. “It’s not writing a memoir: you have to respect tradition.” He says the “face of crime” must be painful. “I wanted people to walk away from the book.” This literary desire has real consequences: his previous poetry collections have been circulated in Nicaragua on charges of smuggling and he is banned there. “It hurts, it’s my country,” he admits.
Write about boundaries
Some Sumi live in New York today. “They are killers” They walk the streets of New York with seemingly ordinary lives while carrying a past that almost no one knows about, he says without embellishment, aware of the irony. His relationship with the place where he was born fluctuates: “One day I wake up and I love Nicaragua very much, but the Nicaragua that I left in 2011 no longer exists.” Distance is not only geographical. “It’s a very big cultural desert.” He says. However, within the country – in secret, under the dictatorships – he writes for a generation that considers him the true nucleus of Nicaraguan literature. “Those who risk their lives with pseudonyms are the Nicaraguan writers, not me in exile.” In his own way, he says, he only provides vision, just like figures like Sergio Ramírez or Gioconda Belli, who have also become voices from the outside.
His interest in “nobodies” is what underpins the collection of poems. Gonzalez sat in front of a hitman who placed a gun on the table and turned it so that it was pointed at his chest. Describe the scene without the drama. “If I pull the trigger, who’s going to get me out of here?” He says that courage is born of necessity and “that attraction to marginalization,” which for him is an essential poetic element. “Poetry is emotion and commitment.”repeats. It was his commitment to return to the jungles of Central America to tell what he knew from the inside. For him, poetry is life itself: the beauty of a Greek island for some, the violence of Central America for others. “I I strongly advocate poetic commitment. How can I not commit to freedom of expression if it is difficult for my books to reach my country? “Someone carrying this book could end up in prison.”
“I was going to spit in his face for being a son of a bitch.”
For years he traveled across Central America following a trail of stories, interviewing gang members, murderers and women who had spent two decades in prison. “I have to win this award three times to recover the money I invested” He comments with a mixture of sarcasm and weariness. All of that material – the violence, the silence, the testimonies contained in just two lines within the book – she conceived as a private archive. “It was for my book,” he insists. It won’t be investigative journalism, and it won’t be a journalistic show. “The Face of Crime” is your only entry door.
The Nicaraguan poet depicts his difficult childhood surrounded by gangs and murders in a shocking work of poetry
Some of the gang members he met spoke with hatred: one of them, when asked what he would say to God if he were before him, replied that I was going to spit in his face “because he’s a son of a bitch.” La Kika, a gang member since she was 11, had her faith born in prison; She tattooed a cherub, and spoke to William about her “merciful little God” and forgiveness, even as the driving force that kept her alive was revenge for her father’s murder. He spent four or five years reading reports, Investigate why someone would kill for $45. “I was sick in the head because of that book,” he admits. In this work, he relived his childhood from the perspective of a man in his twenties. He understood in a different way why a Honduran child could feel that a gang was his only horizon. “I left everything there.”
The most difficult part of his work was previously: the interviews he conducted for years with gang members, hitmen and drug dealers, voices that today appear in the book only as two-line flashes. Reaching these people requires time, contacts, and intermediaries who come from the academic world and the social study of violence. It also requires a special attitude: not to show fear. “There is nothing more dangerous than someone who has nothing to lose.”He explains. He learned it firsthand. He recalls that one of the interviewees, a professional killer, told him without raising his voice: “I will shoot you twice and you will lie here and no one will notice.” He points out that the only thing that protected him in those circumstances was to remain calm, and to show with his body that he understood where he was.
In “The Face of Crime,” that vertigo turns into poems that do not attempt to explain Middle America, but rather interrogate it. And in doing so, also ask the boy who once wanted to leave there. Speaking of the book, William is not looking for heroism, or even redemption. Rather, what he seeks is accuracy: to fix the memory, to show fear in his face, and to give him a language that contains it. Although, as he says, he had to be a little “affected” in his attempt.