The tragic loss came in 2016. Stop-motion images of death compete unnaturally with his poetics: his poems swivel, cycle, gesticulate, perform.
After death the poems hold their ground in an aesthetic awareness of home, one marked with specifics of life in Cuba, where Juan Carlos Flores lived in a public housing community that rose out of the ground in a way that could only have happened in certain decades following the 1959 Revolution.
But his poems still move. Readers of international poetry will recognize homes that Flores built in other sorts of space, the kinds of homes he shares with Pierre Reverdy, René Char, Paul Klee, John Cage, and an array of other writers, artists, and musicians who elicited his admiration.
Flores dedicated his major poetic trilogy to Alamar, his town on the eastern outskirts of Havana. Its first volume is titled Distintos modos de cavar un túnel (Different Ways to Dig a Tunnel) (2003), the second El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales) (The Counterpunch [and Other Horizontal Poems]) (2009). The third and final volume is unpublished and its fate is unclear, but parts were circulated by Flores before his death.
It was not his birthplace that mattered in the poetry so much as the community that became his childhood home—and years later the location of his now-storied death. On October 29, 1962, Flores was born in Mantilla, located south of Havana where the city met the country. His earliest memories were of living in a one-room house with his parents, two brothers, and a sister. When he was around nine years old, his father joined an amateur micro-brigade unit dedicated to the construction of a new “self-help” housing community in Alamar. Located in eastern Havana, Alamar gradually filled with identical apartment buildings. They provided housing for underprivileged and displaced peoples, including many impoverished Cubans, as well as refugees and migrants from other nations. After eleven months of construction work in Alamar, Flores’ s father earned an apartment for his family in Alamar’ s Zone 4, overlooking the ocean and the nearby town of Cojimar.
Over the course of his adulthood Flores survived periods of transience and addiction, anchoring himself anew during periods of stability. Two of the apartments most important to him as an adult and a mature poet were also located in Alamar. The first was the floor where he lived for years with his partner Mayra López, composing handwritten drafts of poetry in the company of their dog, Luna.
The other was his final home, an apartment in Alamar’ s Zone 6 where he lived alone. On September 14, 2016, he hanged himself in a bright blue shirt, in full view of the neighborhood, on his balcony. The imagery of his death is overpowering. Flores had barricaded the door, so it took hours for anyone to get inside to take his body down. As he hung above the community, his death was discussed and reported in graphic terms, which rapidly made their way onto the Internet. Onlookers took photographs on phones.
In the face of that event it is all the more important to say that, in Alamar and in cultural circles around Havana, Flores remains a subject of admiration for his brilliant poetic accomplishments in performance and on the page. He is remembered as an intense thinker. Testimonials from friends acknowledge his sometimes challenging personality; people who didn’ t really know him admit they sometimes found his intensity unsettling. Flores is also remembered as a survivor of family violence. One of his brothers killed their father in the family’s original Zone 4 apartment. After release from jail two decades later, that brother killed himself in the similarly ill-fated Zone 6 family apartment.
Flores is remembered as someone who suffered illness throughout his adult life, passing through better and worse periods, a part of his story now magnified due to the manner of his death. Flores had been diagnosed with schizophrenia many years earlier. But, more specifically, in his final months he alternated between his tremendous, characteristic lucidity and powerful hallucinations, which hounded him until he could no longer tolerate his fear. By then he was living in Zone 6 and told his friend and fellow poet, Amaury Pacheco, that his dead brother would come to him in the night and goad him to hang himself.
On the morning of his death, a Wednesday, Flores told a disbelieving neighbor that he was going to pick up some final cigarettes and then would hang himself after his morning smoke. That is exactly what he did.
In recent years Flores had shown poems from the manuscript intended to close his trilogy, Trapiche, to various people. Poet Reina María Rodríguez had hoped for its first publication with her little press, Torre de Letras. But as his symptoms worsened, he withdrew the book. By the time of his death, Flores had broken with his family and caused confusion by describing his invalid mother as already deceased. He distanced himself from all but two friends living nearby.
It now appears that Flores destroyed a great deal of his work, probably over the course of months. He also destroyed copies of his papers that López had collected and left with him in hopes of starting an archive of his work. However, people have expressed determination to recover what they can from the materials Flores gave them in better times, items saved in their own collections.
Looking at his books that did see publication, it is time to call attention to the quality of Flores’ s poetic legacy. I write this reflection having translated Flores’ s collection The Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems) into English. In some ways I selected Flores and this book, having heard testimonials for years that convinced me to work around the difficulties attending his truly marginalized existence. But I again highlight his lucidity, the deliberate way in which Flores made choices about his poetry. In this sense he picked me, and I cannot quite believe my luck, for there is no one writing poetry like Flores, swiveling between local and international touchpoints. I will never have the privilege to work with a writer “like” him again: iconoclastic, insistent to the point of becoming overbearing, and yet routinely warm and appreciative, too—a great collaborator for me during our work together. Flores was intuitive in the most human and aesthetic of ways. These qualities were palpable in the poetry he left behind.
As a writer, Flores emerged onto the national scene in Cuba after many years of dialogue and participation in the more informal aspects of the literary community. His first full book, Los pájaros escritos, won the 1990 David Prize, dedicated to emerging authors. Flores continued to develop his aesthetic, moving toward what he described as a form of minimalism, which comes to the fore in his Alamar trilogy. The first entry in the trilogy, Different Ways to Dig a Tunnel, won the 2002 Julián del Casals Prize. Both prizes are awarded by the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC), the very writers’ union that Flores disdained to join in his deliberate rejection of all things official, nationalist, and academic in literature.
The Counterpunch, second in the trilogy, includes the manifesto-poem “The Diver,” on the wiggling of creativity at the margins of the margins:
Whether The dumpster diver be occupation one exercises or horizontal real estate or foolish son of the homeland or child feeding from bottle (areas thick with grass, there are unused wastelands, where pedestrians from the neighborhood throw debris from their daily lives and among weeds, the first mushroom rises for a new civility, not yet included on maps of the counterculture)
Flores brings a carefully parsed sophistication to his apparent simplicity on the page. The poem’s “horizontal real estate” refers to the modular, uniform apartments reproduced throughout the hundreds of buildings constructed by the microbrigades who built Alamar during Flores’s lifetime.
Flores only traveled outside Cuba once in his life, on the occasion when excerpts from The Counterpunch first appeared in English translation. Travel was hard. It upset his daily routines, so essential to daily survival. Although the Americas Society wanted to host Flores in New York, it required not only an invitation for the US but some kind of Cuban professional status and funding tied into visa processing, which is usually enabled in Cuba by membership in UNEAC. After unsuccessful in-person appeals from Rodríguez, Julio Ortega of Brown University submitted a formal letter of invitation. Ortega had met Flores in Havana through Lizabel Mónica. Authorities eventually consented to support Flores, and he traveled to the northeastern US in 2011.
Flores visited Rhode Island, New Jersey, and finally New York, where I joined him for the launch of a special issue on Cuba by the Americas Society Review. Flores seemed continually surprised to be in the heart of the megalopolis. He figured out that he liked a daily breakfast of plain bagel, later followed by spaghetti with tomato sauce, translations of the meals López prepared for him at home. He strictly refused to jaywalk like the New Yorkers around us, pointing out police and worrying that as a Cuban he might be arrested. He retreated periodically to battle hallucinations from his hotel room, where I sat with him and he told me about hearing voices from a curled-up fetal position on the bed. Despite the extraordinary pressure on his psyche, Flores delivered a strong reading to close his New York visit, his nerves steeled by morning smokes.
His travel to the US ended early. López recalls: “His visit to the US marked the beginning of the final stage of our marriage and the end of the little drive for life he had left. I had planned for him to stay for three months. He had another invitation to visit the University of California, Riverside, […] and our friend, the poet and history professor Drew Elliot Smith, had invited him to stay in New Jersey for some time so that he could rest and visit places. He returned to Havana in two weeks. He never recovered from the realization of his inability to cope with the real world, and he entered a deep depression and apathy that lasted for the rest of the time we lived together—through 2013, although we had been separated since 2012.”
In the time remaining before he withdrew from the world, Flores sent me a selection of poems from his unfinished collection Trapiche to begin translating. Most are quite short and demonstrate his ability to compress image, repetition, and variation into a condensed space. I translated several and placed some in magazines before Flores retreated, at which point, like almost everyone else, I lost touch with him.
While Flores did not leave a large number of books behind, the work he published has been widely reprinted in anthologies representing the best poets of his time. Meanwhile his work in performance amplifies his legacy inside and outside the island. He had collaborated at times with an arts collective known as OMNI Zona Franca, based in Alamar. During his lifetime Alamar also became known for music, a field of no small interest for Flores, who integrates the repetition and styling of popular music into his work.
I conclude with a passage from “Child of Chernobyl,” one of the orphaned poems he left behind with me:
The children of Chernobyl aged prematurely, the children of Chernobyl, their stares, the sad stares of the elders, the children of Chernobyl, their heads, the dysfunctional heads of the elders, the children of Chernobyl, their bodies, the dysfunctional bodies of the elders, the children of Chernobyl, their skin, the scaly skins of the elders, when the children of Chernobyl speak, they display nervous tics of the elders.
(I who was born here in Havana and who lived always in Havana am also a child of Chernobyl and I aged prematurely)
His literary colleagues campaigned for special funeral laurels, a routine recognition of cultural importance from the state. Their request was denied. His ashes were scattered by the sea at a local beach that Flores had often visited, a place where he liked to write.
This In Memoriam was published in issue 60:3.