Utterly ingenious and fearlessly written, Giannina Braschi’s PUTINOIKA (Brown Ink, 2024) takes us on a wild literary journey through a reimagination of history, memory, and art in conjunction with the chaos of contemporary political realities.
Moving from dialogue to prose, from speech to poetry, from anecdote to reflection, Braschi’s genre-defying approach blends elements of tragedy with humor, highbrow and lowbrow culture, and history and creative practice that brings together a constellation of different voices and perspectives. The book is written in English but saturated with Spanglish neologisms that draw attention to the bilingualism at play here.
Divided into three sections, PUTINOIKA begins with “Palinode,” an ode of recantation, with the voices of ancient Greeks. Yet, it is beyond a mere recount of history and mythology. Braschi playfully brings together a collective of characters from ancient Greek literature and myth—as well as contemporary figures like Maria Callas, Carmen, and Greta Thunberg—granting them a modern voice to speak into the complex issues of debt—sovereign, historical, ethical, and personal—accountability, regret, patriarchal oppression, climate change, and epidemiological crisis.
Braschi likewise includes someone named “Giannina”—a stand in, most likely for the author—as an interlocutor who plays multiple roles throughout the book: a daring observer, satirist, questioner, and, at times, artist/director in the midst of overseeing the creative process. I appreciated Braschi’s focus on women’s points of view, which often remain obscured and fragmented in narratives of ancient Greek mythology and global history. It is striking to hear, for instance, Antigone’s fervent desire to become a heroine who is not overdetermined by her past and unwilling to pay a debt she doesn’t owe. “No debt, this time,” as Antigone asserts, “not paying what is not mine.”
As we watch the return of president-elect Trump to office in 2025, nothing is more apropos than Braschi’s satirical portrait of the infamous alleged Trump-Putin ties in the section “Bacchae.” Mimicking the ancient Greek chorus, we hear a series of collective voices—the agents of Pendejo and the Putinas of Putin—working together to provide an unsettling account of the political landscapes of Trump’s administration which thrives on corruption, deception, greed, fear, and white supremacy. “We are the heart of materialism,” Ivana the Putina declares, “there is no one greedier than us. And we are communist to the core. No one is equal. Not everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The Putinas’s voices, mainly comprised of Ivana, Ivanka, and Melania, brilliantly parallel with the Maenads—whose existence is determined by their devotion to Bacchus. Yet it is not Bacchus but the Putin’s Russian regime that is the Putinas’s subject of devotion in this case. As Melania the Putina reaffirms, “We’re more flesh than inspiration. We’re not moody. We don’t change our minds. We stick to the regime—to the mandate of the state—the Russian state.” What further bolsters the satirical portrait is the graphic interludes Braschi inserts throughout this section. One particular image that makes palpable the Trump-Putin entanglements is a portrayal of Trump—seen on stage as manipulating another bureaucratic puppet—as a puppet of Putin, lurking behind the scene.
The final eponymous section of PUTINOIKA centers around the haunting consequences of COVID-19. With a kaleidoscope of poetry prose comprised of anecdotes, literary references, and philosophical reflections, Braschi not only reminds us of the toll the global pandemic has inflicted on lives and our planet but also how the response of Trump’s administration has troubling implications for many aspects, from race to immigration, of our lives in these difficult times.
The figure of sardines plays a weighty role in motioning forward the narratives surrounding the pandemic. Here, the sardines appear to return from dead as the Nose of Gogol, “a fake dimension,” and “an illusion that will become a delusion.” What seems to be a continuous running thread from “Bacchae” is the idea of pretension and delusion.
What seems most compelling to me is Braschi’s relationship with language and the act of writing. Throughout the book, she makes numerous references to the idea of architecture. For Braschi, it is a structuring concept that involves asking questions at several levels— historically, ideologically, institutionally, and artistically. Braschi reanimates the lives of literary and historical figures, instilling them with the freedom of imagination and expression. Nevertheless, she simultaneously questions the architecture—or the “vessel” of language (33)—in which art and thoughts unfold. To what extent can we freely express our subjectivity when we take the architectural formative structures, such as genres and forms, as our baggage?
With PUTINOIKA, Giannina Braschi demonstrates why she continues to be a leading force in experimental and genre bending literature. Like her previous works, Empire of Dreams, Yo-Yo Boing!, United States of Banana, and United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel, Braschi explores themes of American immigration, economy, colonialism, fascism, empire through a hybrid of poetry, fiction, theater, philosophy, manifesto and more that uses not just language but also form to make interventions about western disciplines and their disciplining of communities. Despite its horrifying political portrait, PUTINOIKA, with its genre, language, aesthetics, and poetics, instantiates freedom. As one of her characters says in PUTINOIKA:
When you create a genre—which is not a movement—because it has no past—and if it has a past—its past is pregnant with a future bigger than its past—its past is its post-cre-ation—only a point of departure—it created modes of thinking. A genre has in itself movements, generations—and after all these concepts expire in time—the genre—that is an artifact—that is a fact made shift—it doesn’t belong to a date—it is not dated—it includes all the expirations that expire in its belly—and it is still pregnant with new beginnings. It allows transformations, revolutions but in itself it is a discovery, an invention—like the stars Galileo discovered and dedicated to Cosmo de Medici.
PUTINOIKA writes against any definitions and forms while acknowledging the possibility of creating the unexpected and escaping forms of servitude inscribed in our lives. In this sense, PUTINOIKA sows the seeds of hope. Instead of approaching narratives as storytellers, we need to be “soothsayers” who see the past and present as pregnant with futurity, which allows the act of imagining the otherwise possible.
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