In His Own Words: Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012)

The simple answer is that there were no other voices, especially as we had to deal with dictatorships, semi-feudal conditions, and illiteracy. It was incumbent on the writer to say what otherwise would not be said; it’s what would be left unsaid. Pablo Neruda once said, do you realise we are all carrying the bodies of our countries on our backs? It’s a great weight we have. He was right at that moment, but society has evolved. There is freedom of the press, political parties, unions, social organisations – others are taking on the solitary duty of the writer. Thank god! So now, more and more, we participate in the life of our countries as citizens. If you don’t do it, nobody is going to demonise you, because if a writer is already working seriously at the level of language and the imagination, he or she is already accomplishing a political mission.

- Open Democracy, 2006

I decided I had to write the novel of the Mexico I was living. The Mexican novel was locked into certain genres: there were Indian novels, novels of the Revolution, and proletarian novels. For me those were like medieval walls constraining the possibilities of Mexican fiction. The Mexico City I was living in belied those restraints because it was like a medieval city that had suddenly lost its walls and drawbridges and sprawled outside itself in a kind of carnival. You had European nobility stranded in Mexico because of the war, an up-and-coming bourgeoisie, unbelievable bordellos lit up in neon near the fish markets where the smell of the women and the smell of the fish mingled. The writer Salvador Elizondo would go there and slit the prostitutes’ armpits while he made love to them so he could make love in a gush of blood. Then mariachi music all night long. Mexico City found in the late forties and fifties its baroque essence, a breaking down of barriers, an overflow. I remember dancing the mambo in astounding cabarets and that was the origin of Where the Air Is Clear: Mexico City as the protagonist of postrevolutionary life in Mexico. I felt that nothing had been said about that in a novel.

- The Paris Review, 1981

I was very, very amazed that I would be denied a personal visa to enter the United States when one of my books was published in translation. In 1963, my publisher — Roger Strauss of Farrar Strauss — invited me, and I was promptly denied the visa. And I said, “The real bombs are my books, not me. I’m not going to put a bomb in a post office in the U.S.A. But my books may be more dangerous than I am. They maybe should ban the books, not the person.” It was logical.

- Academy Of Achievement, 2006

U.S. foreign policy is Manichaean. It’s like a Hollywood movie. You have to know who has the white hat and who has the black hat and then go against the black hat. It’s “Moby-Dick.” The genius of Melville is that he saw that this is a country that needs a monster. The delusion of one madman, Captain Ahab, meant that the white whale had to go. But as Katrina showed, there are great, great problems within the U.S. without it constantly having to create crusades against the rest of the world.

- The New York Times, 2006

With Gabriel García Márquez, 2008. Courtesy: Associated Press.

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