ENGLISH VERSION

Alterity: A conversation with Maurizio Medo on Malincuor, his latest book

Translation by Rebeca Sanz

Memory, language, and identity—dismantled and reassembled under a new, flickering, uncomfortable, and often ironic light. This is Malincuor, Maurizio Medo’s latest book, in which the Europe train functions as the central metaphor for uprootedness: a mobile institution that never reaches its destination, whose passengers—the “narrator” and his ancestors alike—have seen their certainties shatter as they cross real and imaginary borders. Within its carriages, language itself becomes contested territory, an archive of fractured voices that the poet gathers and recombines in a deeply personal—yes, even tender—key.

Maurizio’s welcome to our conversation is just as tender.

We begin from the premise that art, to be art, must interrogate concepts and institutions through a specific expressive path—a particular technical play—which implies a precise choice: the right vehicle for a singular, confrontational assertion. Thus, with the author, we find ourselves under the urgent necessity to avoid explanations. The aim is rather, through dialogue, to cast alternate lights upon the text—enabling each reader’s personal engagement without falling into relativism; fostering a more elevated discussion about the institutional framework, and, of course, when appropriate, arriving at a posteriori agreement regarding its value.

Maurizio smiles at certain observations. Perhaps, yes—but that’s for you all to decide, he seems to say—and then confirms it in his own words, his gaze drifting toward the garden…

I mention the whole identity thing, that much-touted “self-discovery”…

So much is sold these days under the banner of exotic identity that I’m almost tempted to ask someone to translate me for those who genuinely believe I don’t speak Spanish. No, I can’t hold a rational view on this matter. Everyone defines themselves through confrontation. But I, in truth, don’t see conflict—not now, at least. Especially not after my recent trips to Europe. It’s a process.

In Malincuor, the father smashes the keys of the Remington; the mother vanishes into the forests of Loano; the baka speaks in a nearly incomprehensible tongue—all figures embodying a fractured legacy. The Remington, that typewriter once fabricating presents, becomes the symbol of interrupted communication, of an inheritance that cannot be transmitted whole. The “I” states this with painful clarity: “Language is useless if what one seeks is truth; it barely allows a desperate approximation…” This distrust of institutionalized language—the language of family, of history—leads you to seek your own expression, stitched together from fragments, echoes, overlapping tongues. It’s no coincidence that the text is sprinkled with Ligurian, Serbo-Croatian, Italian words, or that it quotes everyone from Bob Dylan to Wittgenstein… There’s a certain mockery of coherence.

Spanish is my language. Forgotten is the whole genealogy—though at home, the first language I learned was Italian—I always knew that was the language of the house… the obscene one. Outside the house, in Peru—which was, for me then, the real world—one had to speak Spanish. One had to approach reality, act within it.

On the other hand, you know I’ve always loved listening… Without inner conflict. Arguing is another matter, but even then one wonders: to what end? There’s so much noise…

I believe I’m among the few surviving believers in alterity and dialogue. Above all, that. And my tool is language. Languages, plural—how could it be otherwise?

Your book plays with boundaries; it’s a hybrid where verse coexists with prose, erudite quotation with street rumor, confession with artifice. This formal flexibility aligns with your vision of the world: if rigid institutions have failed, literature must seek new forms—more permeable, better able to contain reality’s complexity. The rhythm of your writing—sometimes close to orality, other times dense and reflective—mirrors this constant movement between memory and the present, between displacement and the search for an imaginary home.

The idea is to stretch languages until we see the precise moment they break. If we speak of clashes, in Malincuor what collide are cultures more than languages—though languages inevitably, necessarily, tense under the strain. Perhaps that’s where the main confusion lies, easily resolved by invoking cosmopolitanism or exoticism.

It must become clearer… “especially after the latest trips…”

Faced with identity, I grew weary of defining myself through negation. So I took up a term from Agamben: qualunque (“whatever”). This notion—apart even from marginalized minorities—now guides my path.

If Malincuor had an Italian synonym, it would be something like magone—that suffocating ache from missing something too deeply… With my travels to Europe, yes, several in recent years, each return brought with it… a malencuor: I realized—we had to come to Peru to survive. But why here, of all places?

Thus, this sorrow—my malincuor, that is—Malincuor is born in Peru… so troubled now, especially institutionally and politically, its ideological void unmistakable, its cultural institutions gnawed away, though every so often astonishing people—no flattery intended—rise to positions of authority.

The unease is enormous, real. Real. Deeply tied to identity, as you see… It hurts me.

A kind of shipwreck in Peru… Life in La Cantuta, with its neighborhood association, its absurd rules, and its uncollected garbage, becomes a microcosm of bureaucracy and miscommunication. As you write in the book: “Reality is a suspended zone.” Yet humor shines through… Indeed, the contrast between the book’s first and second parts could hardly be more brutal; it’s thanks to humor that the arc holds together—and later allows one to grasp the full emotional reach of familial bonds…

We were speaking of the lack of alterity… It’s difficult for many people to truly recognize what the other is trying—and explicitly stating—to say. One can no longer survive like Menippus the Cynic in Hades, until the damned demand his expulsion… And yet, I believe today’s Peru resembles that Hades more than a little—except laughter is forbidden. Because it’s offensive. Or constitutes an invasion of a safe zone…

Or a fragile one…

How alienation has reached the point where people demand, for instance, that someone be expelled from an institution because—allegedly, magically—they’ve ceased to belong to a certain race.

Malincuor articulates a sorrow, certainly—but also its confrontation. We were saying earlier: a train passes, the rails tremble—but one might say Maurizio chose not merely to watch it pass or reflect from the sidelines, but to cross it entirely.

What we have now, above all, is ideological advertising everywhere. I mean we live in a kind of parody of ideology, at the level of advertising. Not even ideology as a rational construct that reaffirms itself by negating the other and critiques everything except its own foundations—the work of good philosophy. It’s all hollow…

And what is real, here and now?

The absence of a political project—and of awareness of any political project. A landscape where everything revolves around celebrity figures.

While marches filled the streets one after another, with banners in hand, you chose—partly for health reasons—to join another march: the one within, aboard the Europe train, on the road to La Cantuta.

Because many of those marches are nothing but political banalizations or atypical forms of cardiovascular exercise to compensate for being glued to one’s phone all day.

There are reckonings one can no longer postpone or replace with symbols. Much less with selfies.

It is, ultimately, a reckoning. That “I,” you point out—almost assumed as a signature, the one who left my things behind, what was truly mine—led me at a certain moment to ask: How do I now share what’s genuine without losing myself in the process? I told myself: By transforming time into space. And so the train was born, to begin with.

And yet, the categorical is systematically refused in your book. Each time a verse or a sentence seems poised to deliver a definitive statement, humor resurfaces. Still, it’s clear that within the skepticism this humor reveals, a distinct vision is reaffirmed.

Yes… It’s a full affirmation—not an identitarian one, but perhaps I could say… a life. As lyrical as that may sound. A mythology is also built this way, from more complex explanations woven around my reckoning, meanings one insists on finding—even if the primal sense is more direct. I’m always making fun.

And that’s precisely what allows me to admit, frankly: it’s a tender book. It springs, for better or worse, from deep within. As its very name betrays…

So what remains?

I believe in the disappearance of Medo—the Medo of the past, of the train, who has gone. The one from La Cantuta dissolves toward the end. In that depersonalization Joyce spoke of…

But I don’t take myself that seriously. The book is legitimate insofar as it emerges from the gut—but not from the “I.”

Without sentimentality. In Malincuor, indeed, it’s acknowledged that memory is, at best, a “falsified authenticity,” as the father says in the text itself. In this sense, your poetry doesn’t seek to reconstruct the past, but to dwell honestly among its ruins.

One says what must be said. Once it’s all been said, why go on?

We are approaching, then, the end of the poetic task, so to speak.

One must make decisions. Ask oneself very seriously what one wants from now on. Where to travel, for instance—and travel a great deal.

Right now, I’m more concerned about the hydrangea at the back of my garden…