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Luis López Nieves 28/NOV/2006
History is a “Big Lie”

Puerto Rican writer, Luis López Nieves says that he does not believe history and that each country in the world invents its history from a conqueror’s perspective based on whatever best serves the country. In his work, he attempts to deconstruct that to which he refers as the “Big Lie.”

“We have been deceived for so many centuries by those who try to pass off fiction as history, that I am actually narrating history and calling it fiction,” stated the author.

López Nieves began this crusade with his 1984 work, Seva, in which he tells the story of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico in May of 1898, and he continued his crusade with El corazón de Voltaire (Norma Publishing).

Through dynamic prose, the author narrates how the foundation of French history shook when one asks if the heart in an urn at the National Library of Paris is that of philosopher and writer François-Marie Arouet Voltaire.

Winner of Puerto Rico’s National Prize for Literature in 2000, López Nieves said, “It is impossible for history to be objective” when only one side of the story is told.

In this context, he went on to mention The Discovery of America, which is “recounted as if it were one great heroic feat,” but when told from the perspective of the indigenous, the history is completely different.

He expressed a similar opinion with regards to the war in Iraq.

The entire world can agree that U.S. troops arrived in Iraq in 2003, but this is not history, this is a fact, and “what happened next depends on who is doing the talking: one group would say it was “the U.S. invasion,” and another group would say it was “the beginning of the liberation of Iraq.”

Through this lens, he proves his point that “history is pure literature and it has been deceiving people for centuries. All history is invented, and each country invents the history that it wants.”

López Nieves takes advantage of such “transformable history” and transforms historical facts that are “supposedly true” into a literary resource.

He uses this technique in El corazón de Voltaire, a novel which already has four editions.

The book came out in January of this year in the U.S., Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, and more recently in Mexico and Argentina. It will be published in Spain by March of 2007.

López Nieves also wrote La verdadera muerte de Juan Ponce de León, for which he was awarded Puerto Rico’s National Prize for Literature by the Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña. He is also the author of Escribir para Rafa and Te traigo un cuento.

López Nieves received his doctorate in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York. The writer founded the one and only Master’s degree in Creative Writing in the Caribbean, which he did in 2004 at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, located in San Juan, Puerto Rico.