Photo by Angela Mejias
Eduardo Manet
published in Sites (Storrs, CT) 2:2 (Fall 1998), Linden Lane Magazine (Fort Worth, TX) XX:1 (Spring 2001)
Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1927, Eduardo Manet lived in Paris and Italy in the 1950s, and returned to Cuba in 1960 where he became director of the National Dramatic Ensemble at the National Theater. In Cuba he also directed four feature-length films and six shorts, and assisted Chris Marker in the filming of Cuba, Sí. In 1968 he left again for Paris, where he has lived ever since, after Castro sided with the Soviets in the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Manet has made his entire career as a writer in French: his many plays have premiered in prestigious French theaters and beyond; he has also published some eighteen novels, several winning important prizes. Though his work has been translated into more than twenty languages, relatively little of his writing has appeared in English since his most famous play, The Nuns (1969), and one novel published in Canada, Song of the Errant Heart (2001; D'amour et d'exil, 1999).
This interview was conducted in October 1996, when Manet was in New York for the American premiere of his play Lady Strass (1977), at the Ubu Repertory Theater.
In your play Lady Strass, there is a moment when Eliane's lover Kuala speaks of writing in the colonizer's language, as a question of adoption or betrayal. Why did you start writing in French?
It was a practical choice, and an angry choice. Because I left Cuba the first time after the Batista coup d'état. I was so angry with the Cuban situation, and I knew that it was impossible to be a writer in Cuba. Every writer must go out from Cuba, as Carpentier did, and Virgilio Piñera. So I went away and I didn't want to return to Cuba. I decided, one, to marry a French girl, and then, to begin to write---because I always wanted to be a writer---to write in another language. First, I made some bad little poems in English, then some bad poems in Portuguese, and then more seriously, in Perugia when I was a student in Italy---I studied language and literature---in Italian. I loved so many Italian writers, I profoundly admired Cesare Pavese. But before going to Italy with my very young wife and my very young boy, I studied theater in Paris for three years---with Roger Blin, and Jacques Lecoq, the great professor of mime. I was very close to Jacques, and he sent me a nice letter to Italy, saying he wanted to open a school, to prepare for a company, and he wanted me to be there. In Italy, I saw an announcement in the paper, from a French literary review, saying if you are a young writer, we have a new collection at Julliard---the director was Françoise Malet-Joris, a well-known novelist. I sent them a short story by mail, and she took it. So I said, I can write in French. I wrote my first novel, it was published by Julliard, but then Castro came to power, the Revolution won, and they invited me to Cuba. In Cuba I worked in theater, I made films, I didn't have time to write. Later in Cuba, I wrote The Nuns, in Spanish, but they didn't want to stage it. They told me they didn't have the wood to do the set, they didn't have the nails. I wrote a French version, and there was a friend, a French painter in Cuba, and I gave him the play in French. I didn't know he was a close friend of Roger Blin. He gave it to Roger Blin, Roger didn't know I was his pupil, he forgot it of course, but he said, "I want to do it." He wrote me a letter to Cuba and this was a very good thing, because I told my boss at the Institute of Cinema, I must go to Paris to see my play. So, thanks to Roger Blin, the play was a real hit. After that, I wrote a play and they did it. I wrote another, they published it. Anyhow, I wanted to write in Spanish, and I did some little short stories in Spanish and sent it to a very well known editor in Madrid, and they never wrote me to say we don't like it. And I understood, again. I said, Well, I'll keep writing in French. Now everybody says I'm a French writer and they forget I'm also a Cuban and a Latin American. But I hope my plays, my novels, will be translated by someone, perhaps by myself, into Spanish.
At what age did you learn French?
Very late, in my twenties. When I arrived in Paris, I didn't know how to speak French. But I have a musical ear. Even now, I work very hard to speak French.
Did you remain in contact with Latin American writers? Writing in French, were you viewed with suspicion?
I was good friends with all of them---Carlos Fuentes, Cortázar, García Márquez---but at the same time, "Why do you write in French?" I always say two things. I write in French because French editors and French directors wanted my novels and plays. Nobody ever asks me for them in Spain, Venezuela, Mexico, and of course never in Cuba. So, what shall I do? The second thing: One day I had the blues, because I saw some review talking about Latin American writers in Paris, and at that moment I was, modestly, very well known, but they never mentioned my name. So, I felt sad. I was walking in the Luxembourg Gardens and I came across Sam Beckett. We began to talk and I said, Sam, I have this problem, I'm a Cuban, I'm Spanish. "Oh, don't worry, Eduardo, don't worry. I wrote in French because I wanted to forget Joyce." The influence of Joyce. And I wanted to forget Lorca's influence on me, and Valle-Inclán. And he said to me, "Anyhow, writers are always exiles, and you write in the language that you're published. You are published in French, you are a Cuban-French writer. And I'm from Ireland. I feel even more guilty than you." So, he lifted me up.
Did politics affect your friendships with Latin Americans after you returned to Paris in 1968?
Well, for instance, I was a good friend of Julio Cortázar. At the beginning, in 1968, 1969, I used to talk with him, have lunch together, but then I saw he felt uncomfortable. I didn't want to be a militant against Castro, I wanted the Revolution in Cuba, after all. The problem is, Castro was taking the hard Communist way, and that's why I left Cuba. After 1970 it was a very hard line in Cuba, we had the Padilla case . . . So I began to defend Padilla, to protest. Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, myself, at that moment we left the Cuban movement, and Cortázar was a very close friend, and García Márquez, and we had this Latin American division. But you know Paris. You are invited to dine somewhere, and you find people, we talk to each other, very politely, but the old friendship was dead.
Coming to Paris at that point, and opposed to Castro, did you feel shut out of part of the French intellectual world?
Of course. Everybody said to me, "Are you crazy, coming to France where we have a dictatorship?" Dictatorship, my God, in France! But later, when I prepared a first meeting of writers and artists for Cuban exiles in Paris, I had the honor that the president of this meeting was Ionesco. But Arrabal was with me, Bernard Henri-Lévy, Philippe Sollers, Nathalie Sarraute. It was in 1979. It was very beautiful.
Given that most of your novels are about Cuba---and certainly the early work Un cri sur le rivage (1963), about the Cuban Revolution---the fact that they're written in French automatically means something different. You're writing for a French reading public first. So, there's already a certain distance, as if you're an intermediary.
Absolutely. I'm a sort of liaison, a dangerous liaison between Cuba and France. Because I think I know French people very well, and I think I know Cuban people very well, so I try to be a bridge between them.
When you write in French, is your experience to surround yourself with dictionaries?
No, I always work as a kamikaze. I'm spontaneous, I write. But then I rework. For instance, L'Ile du lézard vert (1992), I wrote two times entirely. Habanera (1994), I rewrote many times. But the real work is after the first draft. With the plays, it's the same. I write, I write, I write, and then I go back.
Even writing in French, after all these years it's a little surprising that you're still largely ignored in the realm of Latin American literature.
The problem is, I left Cuba very young and I began to write in French. So, a traitor. Then I returned to Cuba and I was part of the nomenklatura, a chief in theater and all that. Everybody came to see me, everybody was very nice to me. I'm talking about Latin Americans----because I gave work to them! But then I went away, and the history began again.
But I know that ultimately they can't deny me. Even the Cubans. I have a friend who is going to do a film in Cuba, and he wanted me to write the script. I said to him, Ask the Cuban embassy to see what they say. They said, We have nothing against Mr. Manet, he's a French writer. Of course! He can't be received as an important person officially, but if he wants to come to Cuba to work with you on this film as a French writer . . . That's new. So, after a lot of water under the bridge: be patient.
You discovered at 13 that you were a Sephardic Jew, on your mother's side. Did that have any particular influence on your thought in later years?
Oh yes. That was a key experience. That's why I wrote my novel La mauresque (1982). Because I knew my parents were Spanish, so I had the nostalgia for Spain without knowing Spain. And my mother said she was a gypsy woman---she was really very beautiful---or that she was a mauresque, a Moor. Then one day---because she received a letter from Spain, her uncle or something, and she was very sad---she explained it to me. I was so angry, I said, Why didn't you tell me? It was so important. That's why I have a problem with Jewish friends who . . . for instance, I have a good friend in New York and I told him about it. He said, "I'm Jewish, but I'm not a religious Jew." It was during Passover, so he kindly invited me to his family's seder. His parents were religious people. I was crying, and he was laughing, because he's a Jewish liberal, against religion. So I told him, What luck you had, I want to be in your place.
I can sympathize with your friend, though. When I had my bar-mitzvah, it was the height of my religious rebellion.
I have the nostalgia of my bar-mitzvah that I didn't have. You can understand it because you did it, now you can say what you want. But you have it. I haven't. And it's impossible for me to have it now. Anyhow, I'm very sensitive about it. And I couldn't be with any religion, I don't know why. I really would like to have the faith. But I don't want to be dishonest.
What was your experience working with Roger Blin?
You know, Roger Blin never talked to the writer. Neither to Sam Beckett, nor to Jean Genet, they told me. And with me, the same thing. He invited me to dinner, to La Coupole, he presented me to Simone de Beauvoir. He was so nice. And he talked about anything but the play. He came to see where I was living, but never asked me anything about the play. And when I saw the very first rehearsal of the play, I wept. It was wonderful. With Lady Strass, the same.
The Nuns takes place at a time of revolution. What provoked you to write the play when you did? It was years after the Cuban Revolution.
First, it was a real fact I read in the Cuban newspaper. About some people in disguise, as nuns and priests, who said to a group of rich people, We have a big boat to go to Miami. You can come, but you have to pay the boss of the boat. You must have jewels and dollars, not Cuban money. And seven or eight people came. The bandits took away the dollars and jewels, and then they made a mistake. They told the people to take off their clothes, to be naked, not to follow them. The bandits went away, but the people ended up at the police station. Those were the facts. I read it in a plane with my actor friend who wanted to direct. He had told me, "You must write something for us, your group." I wanted to do a neorealistic film. And he said, "I think it's better to do a play." We were very interested in kabuki and Chinese theater. "Why not? I always wanted to do a woman in a play." He was homosexual, very strong, an athlete. "But not a drag queen. It has to be kabuki." So we had three nuns, men doing the nuns, and one woman as the lady. And that's why, our first idea was as kabuki.
So there was no intention at travesty.
No. Essentially it was the Chinese theater and kabuki. That's what Blin understood quite well. We didn't want a travesty. He said to his actors, "You must be more macho than any macho. Don't use little voices, nothing." Because the lady is very naïve. She was in the convent, she doesn't know who is the woman, who is the man. That was Roger Blin's touch. The public understood it, and the critics from the left were with me. The critics from the right killed me.
How did memory play a part in your trilogy of novels on Cuba that cover the time from your childhood to early adulthood?
It's very strange, because I left Cuba for the first time when I was very young, then I returned, I left again and said I never want to return to that country, that island. And after that, I felt the necessity to talk about my mother, La mauresque, my Jewish problem, all that. It's like a kind of self-analysis, what I did with the novel. And then I said, that's Cuba during the '30s, why not do the '40s? I have so many funny memories about my adolescence in Cuba, and I wrote L'Ile du lézard vert. After that, I felt it could be put into writing what I felt---I left Cuba for almost ten years, I returned to Cuba, I was a Cuban, but at the same time I was a stranger. I saw the country very differently than before. So I wrote Habanera. I don't want to write about the Cuban Revolution because I was very identified with the Cuban Revolution for five years and then I began to have problems for three years. So I can't write about Cuba honestly, during that time. That's why I chose to write about Miami, about things I saw there that were very funny, and about this problem. Because, what is the Cuban rhapsody? Two people who love each other, who could be the most wonderful couple in the world, but she is very against Castro, militant, and he is a writer, a poet, he loves her and wants to be with her, and not with Castro everywhere. That's the problem! I had this problem once, I was in Miami with a girl who was very anti-Castro. At the end, I told her we are three people---you, Castro, and I! It was impossible to live like that. Now, I think I'm finished with Cuba, I want to do something else.
What does exile mean to you as a writer? Do you think of yourself as an exile?
Truthfully, I felt exile most when I was young in Cuba. Why? Perhaps because my father and mother were immigrants, they were always with immigrants. My godfather was Basque, communist, Catholic, and homosexual. I don't know how he did it. A great man, a poet in his time. I had very great luck indeed to have all these people around me, with no barriers, they were against Nazism, Franco. And sometimes I feel so French in France, and here, such a New Yorker . . . Two years ago I was at the Biarritz film festival. I was lucky, I was with Alvaro Mutis. The audience has always asked me, "Why do you write in French, and not in Spanish? You're Cuban." I was feeling bad and didn't want to answer, I felt guilty. I wanted to say, Go to hell. And Alvaro answered for me, he said, "Listen, all writers are exiles. I was born in Colombia, I've been living for many years in Mexico. That's not the problem. Eduardo writes in French. He can write in Chinese, but he will be a Cuban or a Latin American writer." And I cried.
Were you friendly over the years with other Cubans in Paris? For instance, Severo Sarduy, or Alejo Carpentier.
Absolutely. Carpentier was very funny, because I was not only a fellow traveler but I love Russian literature and I wanted to read Dostoyevsky in the original. I had a Russian professor at that moment, Alejo Carpentier's mother, Jewish from Russia. He was like a big brother for me, and when I left Cuba the best publicity for The Nuns came from Alejo. I saw him often in Paris, he never asked me, "Why did you leave Cuba?" Never. We talked as brothers, as friends, and he'd invite me to the Cuban embassy. So, that's for Alejo. Sarduy was another scene. He was like a little brother for me. He'd talk to me always about his homosexual problems, his lovers, he was so funny, so intelligent. And he was so brave. I didn't know he had AIDS. Because the last time I saw him, he was very well, and as always laughing, talking about projects. And then, I didn't see him anymore. At the time I was in an anti-Castro movement. Severo kept a low profile, because he had his mother in Cuba, and he wasn't a political man, he didn't like politics. So I thought he didn't want to see me, because of my involvement. I was sad, but I respected him. After his death, his friend---at this Biarritz festival---gave a soirée about Severo and he told me, "You know, Eduardo, that Severo loved you as a brother."
A question about music, finally. It's obviously very crucial in your work. You seem quite knowledgeable about many sorts of music. In Habanera, for instance, Mario passes through New York and Ruben is giving him a lecture about Chano Pozo. Where did your interest arise?
My mother always had the radio on when I was a child. Music for me is like water. The first thing I do when I wake up is put on the radio or a CD. I work with music. Always. I can't live without music, really. And I'm very open-minded, I love everything---Tristan und Isolde, Chano Pozo, jazz. And I love Billie Holiday. When I'm sad, I want to hear her; and when I feel good . . . Every day, I think, I listen to her. And I love Débussy . . . But to me it's impossible to live without music. I whistle a lot, in Paris, in the métro, all the time. Sometimes people look at me. But I think music is important to the written phrase. It's a kind of vitamin.
---New York, 5 October 1996