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About Elizabeth Huergo

Elizabeth Huergo was born in Havana and immigrated to the United States at an early age as a political refugee. A published poet and story writer, she lives in Virginia. The Death of Fidel Perez is her first novel. You can learn more about Elizabeth on her website, and by following her on Twitter.

Recent Posts by this author:

  • Readings for Writers: ‘The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters’
  • Readings for Writers: Auden’s Mandate
  • Readings for Writers: Writing in Hope–and History
  • Readings for Writers: Between History and Myth
  • Readings for Writers: No Friend but the Pen
  • Consciously Framing the Story
  • On Mary Oliver and Flying Close to the Sun
  • What Used to Be Satire
  • Breaking the Story Open
  • Writing Daze
  • Woke Writing
  • ‘I Am Myself, You See’

    • Readings for Writers: ‘The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters’

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    “El sueño de la razón produce monstrous” is the title Francisco Goya (1746 to 1828) gave to a series of 80 etchings that were published in 1799. You’ve probably seen the 43rd plate in the series, which depicts the artist hunched over a worktable, asleep, haunted by a large cat, bats, and owls.

    Goya eventually re-titled the series, referring to it as “Los Caprichos.” In Spanish capricho means whim or fancy. Art historians concur that the series, which includes drawings of Goya himself, is a form of social commentary, a satire that points to the difference between how things are and how we represent them to ourselves–more accurately, how things are, how we refuse to look, and the difference between looking and seeing.

    Goya insists that we see. To make sure that we do, he sets aside formal constraints, aesthetic rules that define what the proper subject of a painting should be, where that subject should be positioned on the plane of the canvas, etcetera. His willingness to shatter convention in order to tell and help us see a greater truth is something that makes his work especially relevant to writers, for Goya tells a story about the search for balance in a mutilated world.

    The 80 etchings that form “Los Caprichos” are not the stylized paintings of dukes and duchesses that gained him recognition and a livelihood. Goya wrote to Bernardo de Iriarte, a Spanish diplomat and member of the Royal Spanish Academy who was also a good friend, explaining the difference between the more orthodox paintings he was commissioned to do and those that ignited his sense of capricho–of whim and fancy:

    “I devoted myself to painting a set of cabinet pictures in which I have succeeded in making observations for which there is normally no opportunity in commissioned works and in which ‘capricho’ and invention have no limits” (as qtd. by Frank I. Heckes).

    We can’t blame Goya for wanting to explain himself. The Spanish Inquisition, which began in 1478, was still, as we might say, “a thing,” and it would continue until 1834. The last heretic condemned by the Inquisition, Cayetano Ripoll, was a Spanish schoolmaster. He was also a Deist. He believed in God. Unfortunately, he had arrived at his belief through reason not revelation, and he said so, out loud. He was hanged in 1826. Imagine a McCarthy Era that lasts 348 years and wields the power to condemn its victims to death.

    Read the surface of that 43rd plate again. The owl, symbol of both enlightened wisdom and dark ignorance, stands perched behind the sleeping, unconscious artist in Goya’s etching, reminding us how easy it is to collapse into one extreme or the other, light or dark. Too much Reason becomes rigid orthodoxy, authoritarianism; too much Imagination becomes lunacy, anarchy. Where is the line between Reason and the Imagination, between the authority of the Church and heretical anarchy? Cayetano Ripoll never found it. [Read more…]

    Readings for Writers: Auden’s Mandate

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    When the Apocalypse comes, I will have a dirty bum, for the righteous will have bought every last square of toilet-paper. Standing in my third grocery store of the day, the thought makes me laugh, makes me release any assumption of what I should or should not expect to find on a store shelf, makes me remember the shelves in Havana the last time I was there, and the hard-scrabble life most people here, in this country, can’t quite imagine, much less associate with the US embargo. If you ask me … [Read more...]

    Readings for Writers: Writing in Hope–and History

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    In her essay “Three in a Bed: Fiction, Morals, and Politics,” Nadine Gordimer reflects on the role of the writer, a relevant reflection for us, especially now, at the beginning of a new year. Who hasn’t asked what is the purpose of my story? Why write? If you’ve never read Gordimer, you should know she took on a fight that wasn’t hers. She was white, Jewish, and South-African. She could have chosen a subject that circumvented controversy. Instead she wrote about apartheid without standing on … [Read more...]

    Readings for Writers: Between History and Myth

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    I never imagine Eduardo Galeano sitting at a desk writing. I imagine him wielding a sword, brutal in its discernment of the distance between how things are and how they could be. In an age of sound bites and “truthiness,” Galeano dares to connect past and present in order to tell the story of our time. As writers, we have several lessons to learn from him. His clear, unflinching voice; his struggle to forge a narrative form that can hold together side-by-side fragments of history and fragments … [Read more...]

    Readings for Writers: No Friend but the Pen

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    Writing is a solitary endeavor. When the solitude shifts and becomes self-doubt, I find solace in reading, especially stories that remind me of the hope that drives the will to tell a story and, through that telling, perhaps to make a difference. Writing is a gesture of hope based on the paradox that the unique story we tell is also the story we hold in common; that our solitude can become the basis of our shared humanity. Reading is as close as any of us will ever be to entering the … [Read more...]

    Consciously Framing the Story

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    When news broke of immigrant Latino children being held in cages on the southern border of the US, I remembered Wendell Berry’s poem, “Questionnaire,” and its especially resonant last stanza: State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security, for which you would kill a child. Name, please, the children whom you would be willing to kill. The poem presents itself “as if” it were a questionnaire, a bureaucrat’s dream of order, each of its four stanzas … [Read more...]

    On Mary Oliver and Flying Close to the Sun

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    I used to teach Mary Oliver’s poems--a slim volume, Dream Work, so many years ago now that I don’t remember the exact course. What I do remember are the poems and the students’ responses to them. Those memories came to mind recently with the news of Oliver’s death, as did the image of Brueghel’s “The Fall of Icarus.” Foolish Icarus does not listen to his father. His hubris pushes him to fly too close to the sun. His wings melt, and he plummets to his death. Or is the story of Icarus quite … [Read more...]

    What Used to Be Satire

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    Writing in 1946, at the end of the Second World War, George Orwell stands at the bloody intersection between language and politics and tells us what he sees. “In our time,” Orwell begins. At this point, near the end of “Politics and the English Language,” he arrives at the beginning of his jeremiad. Imperialism, purges, deportations, atom bombs--these are all defensible, he tells us, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed … [Read more...]

    Breaking the Story Open

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    Once upon a time, I listened as Noa Baum, an oral storyteller, told a story about her German-Jewish mother. Noa’s gestures and facial expressions, the details of culture and history, the characters she fleshed out with an accented turn of phrase--these all held my attention. Yet at some point early in the telling, Noa was describing my Cuban-Catholic mother--whom she had never met. The question of what drove the metamorphosis of one story into another fascinated me as a writer and, in addition … [Read more...]

    Writing Daze

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    For Steinbeck, the week of 13 June 1938 started “unpropitiously.” He was suffering from a hangover and a sense of foreboding, the latter no doubt a response to the pledge he had made to keep a daily journal, an instrument that he hoped would keep him on task. “All sorts of things might happen in the course of this book but I must not be weak,” he wrote. “This must be done. The failure of will even for one day has a devastating effect on the whole, far more important than the loss of time and … [Read more...]

    Woke Writing

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    In Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal takes on the task of stripping theatre to its roots, insisting that “all theater is necessarily political, because all the activities of man are political and theater is one of them.” For Boal, theatre at its most elemental was the “dithyrambic song”--a melody “created by and for the people.” The history of Western theatre reveals a careful, purposeful separation of that song from the landscape within which it was rooted. It was the privileged classes … [Read more...]

    ‘I Am Myself, You See’

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    Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe is a three-part series, a post-modern triptych by Yolanda López in which she casts herself, her mother, and her grand-mother as the iconic Mary. I return to the work repeatedly, each time tumbling through its surface and back like a latter-day Alice searching for the sides of a round mushroom, remembering the Caterpillar’s question and Alice’s response. “‘Who are you?’” he asks. “‘I can't explain myself,’” she tells him, “‘because I'm not … [Read more...]