Esteban Daniel García López, from Las Tunas, known by the pseudonym Edan Galo, recently won the Décima Joven de Cuba Prize for his work Necrófagos, a result announced in the context of the 38th-anniversary celebrations of the Hermanos Saíz Association (AHS in Spanish).
Las Tunas, Cuba.- “This is a collection of poems in décimas, which can be said to function as a book system in the mirror variant, divided into two sections. The first section, entitled Pacto de Hambre (Hunger Pact), works from a general point of view on the metaphorical figure of necrophages, in the technical sense of the word; that is, beings that feed on corpses,” explains the winner in a dialogue with 26.
“The fundamental theme is necrophagy itself and the scavenging beasts that we humans tend to be’, he summarized. However, he takes this topic further; he dares ‘to investigate various types of death as an endless line or a kind of food chain, which projects from the material to the spiritual plane. The second section is the Necrophagus Sector and brings together personalities who are examples of this.”
Eating the meat when we are dead...
Sucking every bone over dinner
is part of the tremulous promise
of spirits that wander uncovered.
To prick with a fork the dead faces,
signing new contracts without a stamp.
The other deaths cause no scratches
or marks.
This death is an example
that the body is served as a temple
and then devoured fist by fist.
(Poem Dining after the last supper, from Necrophages).
“IMPOSSIBLE TO LIVE WITHOUT ART”
This was just a brief glimpse of Edan Galo's most recent laurels. However, recently, the young man has climbed several rungs in other of the most important literary competitions organized from Las Tunas. These are the national competitions Principito 2023, Canto alrededor del punto (of gloss), and Portus Patris, in which he has won first mentions for his works El niño en el espejo, Herencia regresiva and Testamento del hijo, respectively.
“I find it impossible to separate art from my life, because it contains an identity capable of sustaining itself, without depending on the author. And that is why I want to embrace as many artistic manifestations as possible, without forcing anything, but without fear of trying,” confessed the boy who, on 23 February (his birthday), received the news that he had passed -with excellent results- the aptitude test to study for a degree in Audiovisual Media Art at the University of the Arts (ISA).
He is only 18 years old and is currently doing his military service. However, he does not hide his eagerness to start University. He has always been like that, because since a child he has had “too many interests.” He said: “I always wrote things down. I played many sports and I was even accepted to enter the Sports Initiation School (EIDE) in baseball, athletics, and badminton. Also in primary school, I passed the Art School exams in second grade for music and in fourth grade for dance, but then I didn't follow that path. But I did actively live the plastic arts. I attended a workshop where I learned basic painting techniques and even won some provincial competitions. Then, literature was a sporadic thing, but I wrote...”
So, after a period of existential discoveries in his adolescence and the arrival of the pandemic, a certain need became more latent. “And that's when I started to write on my own, I wrote a lot,” he said. But he had yet to take the craft seriously. “I thought that literature was like an ornament, I didn't even teach my father, who wanted to go to a literary workshop. Writing was an exercise in contamination, as Junior Fernández says. It was something that trapped me and, at the same time, increased my thoughts, fears, and doubts.”
Unsuspected routes nourished Esteban. “I attended an evangelical church, studied theology, learned to play bass guitar, and even joined a band in the congregation. I also entered the Vocational Pre-University Institute on Exact Sciences (IPVCE) and still had a special interest in art. But it was the guitar that finally got me, but I didn't have the money to buy one. So, I borrowed one, looked for advice, read music books, analyzed videos, and started to learn...
“When I entered the IPVCE, I took the tests to get into the contest classroom and that's how I got into the Mathematics team. I learned a lot there. In tenth grade, I won provincial silver and national bronze. At the same time, I started composing and playing my first songs. And it was a very nice experience because the kids there learned the songs and sang them with me. Then, in 2022, I started going to literary cafés and the Entre Música festival. At the end of that event, I made a song that was different from the ones I had done (more complex in lyrics and music), and I said to myself: I want to be a troubadour.”
One fine day, he says, he attended the gathering Cumbre de Luz, where the writer Armando López Carralero heard him read a poem and invited him to another called Hojas Sueltas (Loose Leaves). Thus, he made his debut as a poet at the Casa del Joven Creador in Las Tunas. It was January 2023.
“That was crucial. At the end of that month, I started going to a literary workshop and, at the beginning of the following month, I took part in the debate meeting of these groups here, receiving a mention in various genres. So, I began to get more and more involved. Then came a prize in the narrative in the provincial Escaramujo. And, although it sounds crazy, I left the IPVCE to have more time to write, but I continued studying at the IPU Francisco Muñoz and competing, this time in Geography, but also with good results. Then came a prize in poetry and mentions in décima and narrative in the Tomasa Varona competition. And so on, up to the ones you already know. That was my arrival in literature,” he said.
The reader might think there are many twists and turns for such a young age, but listening to Edan Galo's texts explains it all. His story, lived at full throttle, but in depth, has earned him a maturity that can already be appreciated between the lines.
“At the end of last year, I started to build my first books. In March 2024 I joined the AHS, which was already supporting me. Being a member of the literary workshop El Cucalambé has also helped me a lot, especially, because of the group dynamics. I consider myself a literary moth, I read several books at a time. In addition, I study as much as I can about cinema which gives me a lot,” he said.
He thanked people who have supported him, such as the singer-songwriter Jesús Pérez Cecilia, the teacher Roger Gómez Ocano, and, of course, his father, Yury García Fatela, his “great support.” He confessed that most of the time he writes in solitude, but sometimes he needs the interaction with other colleagues and that, except for theatre, he has experimented so far with different genres: free verse, poetic prose, sonnets, décima, short stories, novels...
“I see literature as a means of establishing a kind of sensory communication through art. Some people tell me to concentrate on one thing, but I'm not interested in being this or that, everything is ephemeral in life. Besides, it's not something I chose, because it's inevitable for me. I even think that many young writers err on the side of arrogance and, at the same time, fear. In my case, I don't try to turn my texts into manuals of techniques, but to be honest with myself and, in a way, it makes me happy if they connect with people. My goal is to live and I can't live without art,” he concluded.
... And so Edan Galo, or -simply- Esteban, returned to the blank page, to the challenge of pouring that fountain that is himself into a province, where there are already many other literary sources, but tied to the challenge that its water be limpid and never, for anything in the world, fall into the swamp of triumphalism.
