Give me more Putinas, por favor: A Conversation with Giannina Braschi

The last time I saw Giannina Braschi was a year ago at the 92NY in New York City. The auditorium was packed—800-plus New Yorkers convening to celebrate the launch of my monumental Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Latine Women. Braschi, one of the 140 brilliant writers featured in the anthology, read an excerpt of her new book, Putinoika (FlowerSong Press, 2024), and introduced the world to Putinas. She brought the house down. Multiple mic-drops. The audience was clamoring to know more about Putinas. Who are they? What world do they inhabit? And, who does their hair?

Braschi’s book comes right on time, two months before the US presidential election in which voters have a chance to retire Trump forever, and here the Puerto Rican poet is at her brilliant peak, bringing us a mind-bending and form-shattering literary experience. The book is rife with invented words that perfectly describe the grubby Trump-Putin love affair and the detritus it causes(ed). It also elevates us to higher realms asking us to dig deeper and find the virtues we possess to create a world where lovers, philosophers, and poets reign.

Putinoika is a Puerto Rican limpieza. And to quote Braschi specifically: it’s the spiritual cleansing of our time.

Sandra Guzmán: What does Putinoika mean? If you open Webster’s dictionary, what is the definition of Putinoika?

Giannina Braschi: The frenzy and plague of the Trump and Putin era of collusion, pollution, and delusion. I was thinking how similar this moment is to the Reagan and Gorbachev era of Perestroika, which also had its plague with AIDS. I love titles that are names that encapsulate a myth or an era. Satyricon. Don Quixote. Faust. Moby Dick. Ubu Roi. Putinoika. I took the “oika” and added it to Putin. Teiresias says to Pendejo in my Bacchae, “You think you are walking straight, but you are spinning your ass in Putin’s chair. The Russian way of collusion. You condense seven years in one moment—and live in one moment—the delusion of a whole era: Putinoika.”

Guzmán: What is it about the ancient Greeks that inspires you?

Braschi: They say it’s all about storytelling, but I say it’s about geometry and architecture. The Greeks give us a structure to deal with all this madness. Think of me as an ancient being walking around this world and seeing all that is happening to humanity. Like a runner, sometimes you have to take a few steps backward in order to gain speed and leap into the future.

They say it’s all about storytelling, but I say it’s about geometry and architecture.

Guzmán: Tell us about the three-part structure of the book.

Braschi: Putinoika opens with Palinode, which is un arrepentimiento—an ode of recantation. You see the mistakes of the past shining through the moment in un arrepentimiento. But it’s not about taking us back to the past. It’s not “Make America Great Again.” It’s about resolving what is tragic in the past and dissolving what is toxic now. It’s about a spiritual cleansing of our time.

Guzmán: Then comes a modern Bacchae as part 2.

Braschi: Yes, here Dionysus takes human form in order to make a god of the multitudes. Bacchus asks, If the father became a god, and the son became a god, why can’t I make a god of the masses? He is looking for the divinity of the masses. Pendejo is based on Pentheus, but instead of being a young tyrannical king, Pendejo is an old tyrant. Instead of the mother killing her son in a Bacchic frenzy, we have the daughter killing her father.

Guzmán: The final section is also called Putinoika.

Braschi: Yes, there I chronicle the Covid pandemic.

Guzmán: Toni Morrison says that literature serves as a bridge to confront and understand complex human experiences; James Baldwin says it serves as a witness to confront uncomfortable truths. What do you think the role of literature is in today’s world?

Braschi: We don’t need storytellers. We need soothsayers. I never said I am a storyteller. I said I am a soothsayer. I say the sooth.

We don’t need storytellers. We need soothsayers.

Guzmán: In this book, hope wins, and you elevate us to higher realms with several different literary forms. But first, tell us about hope.

Braschi: Hope kills delusion. There’s a stinky little sardine that I buried in my prior book, United States of Banana. The sardine comes back from the dead in Putinoika with its nose high in the air, the Nose of Gogol, walking up Madison Avenue in a red jumpsuit—with an air of pretension—as if it didn’t stink of dead sardine. It doesn’t know it stinks of death because it lost its sense of taste and smell from Covid. It’s a delusion. It’s Make America Great Again. It’s the agenda of a dead body coming back to life. Whenever you have the past, what is dead, presenting itself as an agenda to fix the present moment by taking us back—to the dead—you have contagion, pest, collusion, pollution, delusion—not illusion. Illusion is a hope. Delusion is a past illusion presenting itself as hope.

Guzmán: How long did it take you to write the book?

Braschi: Seven years.

Guzmán: The character names are delightful and hilarious. Can you tell me about Pendejo and the Putinas? Who are they?

Braschi: The muses of Bacchus, the agents of Pendejo, the Putinas of Putin. They all work together in this age of denial. What is denied, usually, is the truth. That truth is what comes to the surface here. When you hear Pendejo say, with such vehemence, that there was no collusion, you know the denial of that truth is the truth. I thought it was a fascinating topic to create a modern legend—like the legend of Faust who sold his soul to the devil for money. In this case, Pendejo sells his country for money because he has no soul.

Guzmán: You fearlessly take on subjects that feel existential: pollution, collusion, delusion. What draws you to these subjects? I heard that you are at your poetic best when there is a crisis. Why is that?

Braschi: I’m a specialist in crises. When there is a crisis, what rises is being. It doesn’t matter what your title is. What you earn. What you do. It’s who you are that emerges in a crisis. It’s being that shows itself in moments of crises. I am dedicated to being. To be or not to be is not the question. Being should never be put as a question mark. Being is. Here I listen to people tell me: “What I do is not who I am.” And my question to them is: “Why do you do what you are not? Or when is your being going to do what you are?” This is what happens in this book: people are doing what they always wanted to do with their beings. The repressed collectivity comes out to the surface and expresses its most intimate being.

Guzmán: Puerto Rico -- where you were born and raised -- shows up in the book, and you paint a portrait of a nation that is also experiencing a Greek tragedy or multiple Greek tragedies. Gabriel García Márquez once said that he didn’t write about Puerto Rico because it superseded fiction. Today, American billionaires and millionaires are moving to the archipelago to avoid paying taxes. And people are being displaced and forced from their lands. Public beaches are being closed off for the uber wealthy. And you managed to capture the outrageousness of the moment in Putinoika. Why was it important to weave what’s happening there now?

The disintegration of the colony is a microcosm of the disintegration of the empire.

Braschi: What’s happening there is a microcosm of what happens here. The disintegration of the colony is a microcosm of the disintegration of the empire. What comes to Puerto Rico is the worst of the United States. We would love to receive poets, philosophers, lovers. But what we get are the tax evaders, the Trumpitos who build walls between themselves and the natives—the firstlings. The evaders avoid taxes like they avoid the people. In reality, they hate being there. And we know this. And it will explode someday. They bar the firstlings from our own places and call us locals. Since when are we locals? We were minorities until the minorities became majorities. Now they call us locals—to underline our underprivileged status of being less in our own land—localization of the discrimination and segregation of the majorities into a localized place as if locals were less than tourists and foreigners invading the native.

Guzmán: You have said that your humor is Puerto Rican.

Braschi: Yes, and my thinking is Puerto Rican. I think with my whole being. I am not what I do but who I am. I am a poet.

Guzmán: Any books or works of art that served as an inspiration while writing Putinoika? You mentioned one of them was Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.

Braschi: Also Satyricon and Bacchae.

Guzmán: There are so many literary forms deployed in this new work. It cannot be categorized in any genre. You employ all your skills beautifully—including humor. Carmen Boullosa asks if “this powerful, funny, profound, wise, crazed book” of yours is “a bomb, a poem, a novel, a play, fiction, essay, comedy, drama, or all of the above?” What do you say that this is?

Braschi: All of the above.

Guzmán: What is your process?

Braschi: I do not write every day like journalists and novelists who can write everyday even when they are bored. I cannot write bored. I believe in inspiration. It’s as real as love. When you’re in love you have a charisma that draws other people to you. They want what you have. They know it’s there. Inspiration brings a charisma and a glow like being in love. It always comes unexpectedly, untimely. I am writing an experience that is untimely. A month doesn’t produce what a day can give. A nanosecond can be more productive than all the technology of an hour.

Guzmán: This book comes right on time. Americans have an epic choice in the upcoming presidential election. Why was it important to have this book come out before the election?

Our collective power to create something good for humanity has to be greater than our government’s power to destroy.

Braschi: Culture has to be at the same level of politics. It should be ahead of politics. But culture has become a beaten wife in this society. When Yoko Ono and John Lennon said, “Make love not war,” that was a moment when culture and politics were at the same level. They made love right there on television to answer the news, to answer war. A woman from the East and a man from the West—two artists making love on the news. That was culture answering politics. That’s what we must do. We cannot allow politics to continue walking like a chicken with its head cut off. The head is culture. And it should lead the body politic with ideas and ideals. Our collective power to create something good for humanity has to be greater than our government’s power to destroy.

Guzmán: What do you want people to get from reading Putinoika?

Braschi: The experience of discovering a virtue within themselves.

New York City