With words I will buy time 

With words I will buy death 

With words I will buy words 

With words I will paint the day white

Poet and novelist Homero Aridjis has fended off death threats and blacklisting of his works

By Minerva Canto

The Orange County Register 

March 3, 2002

Homero Aridjis found his life's calling in the same verdant hills that provided shelter for the multihued monarch butterflies that winter in his native Michoacan.
It was there that he found himself one day at age 10, shotgun in hand. One minute he was pointing it at the birds in the sky. The next, he had accidentally shot himself. As he wrote later:

Suddenly, my belly is riddled.
I am the centre of all the beauty.
I've written my first poem.

He'd picked up the shotgun, like many others in the small village of Contepec, to go hunting in the surrounding hills. But when it came down to it, he simply couldn't hunt. Already he'd become enchanted by the wonder of nature, watching the sky light up each winter with the fiery colors of monarch butterflies. So on that day, he let the gun slide from his hands, the butt slamming on the ground, shooting a bullet into him.
"He feels it was a defining experience, which determined his attitude toward life and a wonder at being alive," says Betty Ferber, who's been married to him for nearly 37 years.
Aridjis spent 19 days in the hospital discovering the joys of reading. A year later he began writing poetry, then prose. Since then, writing and a deep love for the environment have formed the landscape of his life. He can't envision life without either, even though his activism has resulted in death threats and blacklisting in Mexico, a country where cultural posts often have gone to those in line with government politics.
"I knew my activism came at a price, but I felt I had no choice," says Aridjis, a guest professor at the University of California, Irvine, this quarter. "I've always bonded with all things having to do with nature. It inspires my writing, and I feel a responsibility as a human being to protect it.”

A poet and novelist with 30 published books, Aridjis is one of Mexico's most-respected authors and its best-known environmentalist. In 1985 he brought together some of Latin America's most prominent artists and intellectuals, such as the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to form the Group of 100. Led by Aridjis, the group has taken on battles to save gray whales from a Mitsubishi project, monarch butterflies endangered by loggers, and overworked dolphins from "swim with the dolphins" tourist attractions. 

Aridjis, whose writing is described as lyrical and evocative, has received Guggenheim fellowships twice and won numerous other prizes worldwide for his writings. Last year he was re-elected to a second three-year term as president of the London- based International PEN, a worldwide association of writers. It's an influential post that's taken him around the world advocating freedom of expression. It's also a tough job for someone working in a country that maintains a spot on the list of dangerous countries for journalists. 

"He's just an incredible human being," says Dick Russell, a Los Angeles-based environmental author and activist who's lived and worked in Mexico. "I've called him the conscience of Mexico, because he's someone who's unafraid to put himself out there. In Mexico, all politics is personal, and there have been many attempts to buy Homero off." 

"The old man counts his friends before falling asleep
and often awakes in the night afraid thinking that one is missing
and some mornings one really is missing"

It was an offer from UCI that brought Aridjis, 61, to Orange County to teach literature and lecture about the connection between writing and the environment.
On a recent day Aridjis spoke with a group of graduate students in a windowless conference room lined with tomes of Spanish and Portuguese literature. But Aridjis' thoughts were elsewhere. With a broad smile he reflected on a different era, when the landmark Avenida Reforma in Mexico City was safe to walk at 2 a.m. Those were the 1960s, when he used to take to the streets in the middle of the night while taking breaks from writing "Persephone," one of his first books.
Aridjis tells the class he's often asked when he'll write another book like "Watching Her Sleep," published in 1964.
"I say never. Never because I'll never again be that age. Sometimes it is difficult to compare oneself to the past," Aridjis says. "I mean when I was writing `Persephone,' I was discovering women, love, life for the first time. You can't force yourself to go through that again."
His circle of friends and contemporaries then included prominent Latin American writers such as Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo. A student asked how much Paz, who died in 1998, influenced his work.

"Almost none," Aridjis replied, listing poet Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges and Federico Garcia Lorca as bigger influences. "I was reading everything from the `Divine Comedy' to Quevedo. My reading list was very eclectic."
The wide-ranging discussion, lasting nearly two hours, touched on everything from feminism to chess.
Maria Cristina Leon, a UCI graduate student studying literature of the 1950s, says she feels fortunate that Aridjis is in Irvine.
"He's an eyewitness of this part of history," Leon says. "You know there's not many of them left."

"... I want to set these few words on your watery grave:
`Grey whale,
Show us the way to another fate.' "

Serge Dedina credits Aridjis with playing a critical part in the campaign to save the whale sanctuary and migratory- bird refuge at San Ygnacio Lagoon in southern Baja California from a Mitsubishi salt plant.
"Without Homero's initial involvement, the San Ygnacio Lagoon would be an industrial park," says Dedina, author of the book "Saving the Gray Whale" and director of the coastal-protection organization Wildcoast in Imperial Beach. 

Dedina had gotten permission to access some of Aridjis' archives while working on his Ph.D. in 1965 on the history of gray whale conservation in Mexico. While doing research in Todos Santos, southern Baja California, he discovered that the Exportadora de Sal, a company jointly owned by Mitsubishi and the Mexican government, wanted to build a salt plant next to the lagoon. 

"I was a starving graduate student in a tiny village in Baja California. He could've easily ignored the call, but he didn't," Dedina says.
Using his connections, Aridjis helped bring international pressure against the project, which eventually caught the attention of nine Nobel laureate scientists, actors, artists and thousands of letter writers worldwide. In 2000, the Mexican government announced that it was abandoning the project. 

Some critics, Dedina says, find fault that Aridjis has not formally studied science. Dedina, however, believes that Aridjis' research is meticulous, a testament to his dedication.
Russell, the environmentalist and author of "Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia," says people in Mexico sometimes stop Aridjis in the street because he's so well-known. 

"We were in the (monarch butterfly) sanctuary he helped the government create," Russell says. "A boy, about 10 years old, pointed him out and called him `el presidente de los escritores (president of the writers).' “

"laugh with eyes with hands
laugh all over 

what counts is this being
the body who laughs"

Betty Ferber instantly fell in love when, as a young woman, she met Aridjis in Mexico City. A native New Yorker, she had studied Spanish in high school but it wasn't enough to communicate freely, so they spoke to each other in French.
Ferber was preparing to enter Columbia University's graduate school, but, captivated by Aridjis, she was back in Mexico City five weeks later. Shortly after, the two married. Her parents approved.
"My father told me that if he'd been a woman, he would have married Homero himself," Betty says, laughing.
She calls it the "perennial love story" because their connection was instant and lasting. The next few years were spent traveling, courtesy of Aridjis' first Guggenheim grant. Soon he was named ambassador to Switzerland, then to the Netherlands. In all, Aridjis and his wife spent 14 years abroad.
Those were the years before Aridjis began finding fault with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. Once Aridjis began taking up environmental causes, his open accusations earned him enemies in the government, and he discovered the harsh price of being true to one's beliefs. He recalled being offered another ambassadorship, an offer that implied he would have to quiet down.
He recalls a journalist friend asking him, "Are you going to choose animals and trees over a position?"
Aridjis never thought twice about his decision. It was after turning down the position in 1997 that he received his first death threat. The first telephone call came after he spoke out against attacks on Mexican journalists, criticizing the government for not investigating them. At first he dismissed it, but the calls intensified. A lifelong wordsmith, he examined the language of the threat and concluded that his phones were tapped and that the Mexican government had to be responsible for the threats. Still he found no other choice but to take the three bodyguards the government offered him in response to international pressure. He recalls feeling like a virtual captive that year, frightened by the threats against him and his family, yet not cowering under it.
"A sense of paranoia invaded me. I'd be out in the street with the bodyguards, and they'd be looking at everyone suspiciously. I began to think that way, too, to consider everyone a would-be assassin," Aridjis says. "Also, I began to feel like I was being watched. I saw that the bodyguards were taking a close look at what I read, who I spoke to. And this made me very angry. I did not want to live like that."
Aridjis decided to go public with the threats. He convened a select group of journalists outside the presence of the bodyguards. After the stories were published, the bodyguards announced that they had gotten a new assignment and disappeared.
Betty sees her husband as writer first, environmentalist second, even if her husband refuses to put one before the other. Whichever is his first love, at heart Aridjis is a thinking man, constantly pondering the mysteries of life, not least of all his own mortality.

"i walk among words toward silence
writing until the ink stops
now that I know
that my song will stop
at night with my body”