Esmee Wright

.
A Last Summer of Queer Apostles, Pedro Lemebel, (Pushkin Press, 2024), 272 pages, £12.99

.
.
‘I could write neat and clear, without so many nooks and crannies, so much useless pinwheeling… I could write with no tongue, like a newscaster on CNN, no accent and hold the salt. But my tongue is salted…’, Pedro Lemebel writes in ‘In Lieu of a Synopsis’, the opening crónica to A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, a recently published selection of essays by Lemebel.

Lemebel: writer, activist, performance artist and icon of the Chilean cultural scene. He is known in the anglophone world for his only novel, My Tender Matador, published in English in 2005. It is only now with the publication of A Last Supper, nearly a decade after Lemebel passed away, that the anglophone reader will encounter Lemebel in the literary genre he was best known for, the crónica. A genre popular with contemporary Latin American writers, it sits at the intersection of reportage, personal narrative and short story. In doing so, it gives Lemebel space to write of his memories of life, under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, in the shadow of the AIDS crisis, and in the galling post-90s period when Chile sought to forget rather than face up to its cruel past with a vibrancy and a variety not possible in long-form fiction.

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles is a literary explosion. Translator Gwendolyn Harper has organised the crónicas broadly into themes depending on which aspects she feels to be most prominent in each: Maricón, Coup, AIDS, Post-90, Finale. Yet just as even when he was being feted by Chilean academic society and conferences on his work were being held at Harvard and Stanford, Lemebel continued to wear distinctly unacademic outfits and facepaint, describing himself as a ‘maricón, pobre, indio y viejo’ [a poor, Indigenous, old fag], his stories too refuse to sit easily in one category, spilling out beyond the limits of any singular focus.

Lemebel kicked his way onto the political scene of Chile when he interrupted a meeting of left-wing opposition parties in 1986 to deliver a denigration of the left-wing movement’s homophobia. In a Molotov cocktail of a speech, he rejected the view that homosexuality didn’t ‘fit in’ with their revolutionary ideals. In fact, he declared, ‘don’t speak to me about the proletariat/ Because being poor and a fag is worse’. That speech cemented his reputation in Chile as a powerful, poetic political writer and is included in this collection as Manifesto (I speak from my difference). Throughout the crónicas in A Last Supper, Lemebel’s convictions stand clear: against the dictatorship which disappeared and killed its own people; against the culture of conservatism which saw the poverty and danger in which queer people lived, and printed headlines like ‘KILLED BY HIS OWN RULES’ when a transwoman is stabbed to death; against left-wing machismo which saw homosexuality as an undermining foreign weakness; and against American capitalist queer culture, with its worship of white muscular male bodies, the ‘Calvin Klein’ gay and the colonialist ideals it stood for.

Instead, Lemebel aligns himself with the other, the outcasts, the Indigenous, the feminine. He took his mother’s maiden name, and he identified as a loca, a gender-nonconforming figure. Traditionally a slur for women, feminine gay men and crossdressers, in Lemebel’s writing it becomes a badge of honour, a mark of community among those on the outskirts of society. Translator Gwendolyn Harper writes in her notes about the difficulty of translating Lemebel’s writing, which refuses academic language in favour of Chilean slang, full of endearments which in another mouth would be slurs. He refuses to ‘leave the rabble rousing to the rabble and dig through Hispanic etymology instead’. Harper’s decision to leave several words and phrases (travesti, loca) in their original testify to her skill at recognising when something is not meant to be translated. These concepts, though we might be able to paraphrase, could never mean the same thing in English as they do to Lemebel, separated as they would be from their particularly queer Chilean history — and nor would Lemebel want them to. English to him was the language used to keep those with an ‘Indigenous stammer’ out — of polite society, of political organising. It is appropriate that we as readers must bend our tongues to his language rather than have the experience entirely smoothed over for us.

In A Last Supper, Lemebel recalls a hectic, haphazard existence at a time when poverty, illness, and dictatorship tried to make life cheap. His skill is never losing sight of the people that he brings to life; instead, he is able to conjure up a myriad of characters without ever reducing them to a typecast, a journalistic shorthand or a fixed historical figure. A streetwalker misses out on a client because she can’t keep up with the younger and faster La Susi, an upper-class trans-girl loses her mother’s mink furs at a New Year’s party, a dying queen demands tangerine ice cream while she incubates the child of her lover in her anus. Where one crónica starts off musing on the myriad of ways the law tries to sedate the public realm into a children’s play park and the racialisation of manual labour in a colonised county, it wends its way in the end into the cycle of realisation, life and death faced by queer men whose dalliances are attended not just by voyeuristic participants, but by the deadly force of the police. ‘And,’ the crónicas begin, already breathless in their recounting; ‘and’, ‘and’, ‘and’, spreading expansively across time and topic. Throughout his writing, Lemebel shows how the issues he and the people around him face are all intertwined; poverty with workers’ rights, misogyny and homophobia, medical access and colonialism, all come together in a way that many left-wing writers were not ready to face up to.

Lemebel’s crónicas reject the viewpoint of what he once described in an interview as ‘the journalist judge, the journalist inquisitor’. Instead, Lemebel creates a ‘queer baroque’, a language of excess to describe lives typified by deprivation. Oral sex in a park is described as a ‘fiery kiss climbing to the tip of that selenite stem’ surrounded by nests with clutches of condoms in the meadows. As humorous and obscene as it is, Lemebel’s salted tongue is not all noise, to those willing to put the work in to detangle it. For instance, through the opaque imagery, we can link the mythical healing properties of selenite with the very real protective barriers of condoms in a world where sex could hold a death sentence in the form of AIDS. In creating this multi-layered, ever-evocative voice, Lemebel stakes his claim in a language which refuses the supremacy of cold fact, and instead allows a loca to declare ‘that sarcoma looks great on you girl’, not as a hopeless denial of reality, but as a high-camp homage to the sufferer.

When Lemebel died in 2015 he was given a lavish funeral by the government — you can still watch the street parade, the crowd around the coffin and the cacophonous, joyous dancing in the church on YouTube — not bad for a maricón, pobre, indio y viejo. Yet what would a loca whose final essay in A Last Supper tells the story of a boy Saint who returned to Chile after the dictatorship, struck by the Virgin Mary’s transsexual lightning bolt and hoping for a baby with her strapping young fiance have made of this literary sanctification? Probably for one last opportunity to shock them all again. Lemebel’s writing is beautiful and vicious, and Harper has done a brilliant job translating it, while keeping it clear that Lemebel was not interested in being translated into something palatable for the English-speaking ears. I hope that, with this collection, the anglophone world will continue to expand its interest in world literature; not just the foreign, but the queer, the poor, the almost untranslatable.
.
.
.
Image courtesy of Rodrigo Campusano / CNCA.

Esmee Wright is a graduate from the University of Cambridge, currently working at The National Gallery, London. She has previously been published in Russian Art + Culture and Polyester Zine. In her spare time, she divides her interests between modernist dance and medieval art.