Giannina Braschi discusses the making of Putinoika, her cross-genre epic tragicomedy of the Trump-Putin era. Written during the pandemic, the book moves among poetry, theater, philosophy, and political satire as contemporary figures encounter characters from ancient tragedy, literary history, and Braschi’s imagination.
In this interview, Braschi reflects on the physical experience of writing, her instinctive shifts between literary forms, and her transformation of Trump into Pendejo, a contemporary counterpart to Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae. She also considers defiance and humor, the creative possibilities of collaboration, and the lasting presence of Charles Baudelaire in her memory and work.
What Putinoika Reveals About Political Satire
Putinoika draws politicians into the architecture of Greek tragedy and surrounds them with multiplying choruses and comic collectives: the Muses of Bacchus, the Agents of Pendejo, and the Putinas of Putin.
At the center of this transformation is Pendejo, Braschi’s satirical rendering of Trump. His name derives from Pentheus, the tyrant in Euripides’ Bacchae who attempts to suppress the disruptive power of Dionysus. By translating and transforming Pentheus into Pendejo, Braschi gives a contemporary political figure mythic and theatrical dimensions.
The interview explores a central challenge in writing political satire: how can characters drawn from the present survive the events that inspired them? Braschi’s answer lies in transformation. Public figures enter an ancient dramatic structure, acquire symbolic identities, and inhabit a world shaped by humor, catastrophe, poetry, and myth.
This interview was originally published by Famous Writing Routines under the title “When the Moment Comes, You Recognize the Shift and You Make It Work.” The questions and Giannina Braschi’s responses appear below without alteration.
Interview: Giannina Braschi on Writing Putinoika
Giannina, welcome back. In our previous interview, you said: “The habits, the habitation, the routines give me security, and I need that security to make big leaps.” What were those routines like while writing Putinoika?
I wrote Putinoika during the pandemic. I went to a park to exercise parts of my body that I hadn’t used in a long time, and with those parts of my body that were used suddenly, new fragments came from different parts of my brain—like windows opened to new ventilations in my imagination.
Putinoika spans poetry, theater, philosophy, and satire—all within a single work. How did you know when a section needed to shift form or voice?
Some things are longer than life. You bring them with you from another part of yourself that can’t be recognized as you. It’s an understanding, a depth that precedes you. How do I know how to sing. How do I know when to shift. When the moment comes, you recognize the shift and you make it work, in theater, in prose, in poetry, in drama, in life.
The book features characters like Trump, Melania, Ivanka, Bacchus, and the Putinas of Putin, the Agents of Pendejo, and the Muses of Bacchus—all inhabiting the same surreal world. How do you think about character when the figures are both symbolic and specific?
The specific characters are the ones we know from reality today, but this reality will also disappear, and they will become symbolic too. I named Trump Pendejo, based on the tyrant Pentheus in the Bacchae by Euripides. The character Pentheus was also based on someone who was historic, but he came to represent a tyrant. I translated Pentheus’s name into Spanish as Pendejo. When no one exists, they will all become symbolic. But some of them, would have been historic.
You’ve often written about political collapse, colonialism, and empire. With Putinoika, were you trying to create something more defiant, more playful—or both?
More defiance and humor. I was laughing and crying at the same time. In Putinoika, I write how in this age, people want to eliminate all negativity from their lives because they don’t know how to be happy and sad at the same time. They don’t know how to cry and laugh at the same time. And still, they know how to resist what they don’t like. And what they don’t like might be the only thing that saves them from becoming what they don’t like. I see too many faces that don’t like what they are doing—that don’t think what they are doing is what they should be doing—that think they should not be doing what they are doing—or what they are doing is what they should be doing but they have not risen to the level where they should be because they are not achieving their highest potentialities.
Your writing has inspired collaborations in music, dance, design, and visual art. Do you see those interpretations as part of the original work, or as something entirely separate?
I love collaboration. If others develop an intuition, tendency or concept that I have pointed to, and blow wind into it, making visible the influence, and creating a baby out of this book. Great! That’s what it’s all about. Putinoika is a midwife. It conjures babies to come out into the chaosmosis of the world.
You not only give credit to poets, philosophers, and dramatists who have influenced your writing, but you turn some of them into characters in Putinoika and have conversations with them. What role did the poet Charles Baudelaire play in your life that he should be such a prominent figure in Putinoika?
When I was 23 years old, I heard a recording by a pretentious French récitateur who exaggerated the diction—an affection made affliction—but made me aware of the pronunciation and the diction.
As I mention in the section “Return of the Eternal Sardine,” I learned it by heart—by memory—the way Baudelaire ought to be read—by heart—to be remembered like a relationship—a poem you recite when you go to bed and close your eyes—and the affection and affliction of the poem opens like an experience you may never have experimented, but you are experiencing it now—and since I learned it by heart—it became part of my affliction—my memory—and whenever it comes back to my lips—wet with wine—the poem appears as a mirage of happier moments that were never happy but that with distance became abundance.
I’m not nostalgic for the past. A madeleine doesn’t open my senses and transport me to another moment. Nothing substitutes the living moment I am living now—better and fuller than all the ones I lived before because it contains all the others—and even if it doesn’t contain any other—it contains my body. Every moment passes with me inside.
What Putinoika Reveals About Political Satire
Puerto Rican journalist and literary critic Carmen Dolores Hernández locates Putinoika within a tradition of tragic excess capable of confronting political horror:
“In this era of unthinkable horrors, where weapons of staggering reach can annihilate entire populations in a flash—where we are confronted daily by massacre and genocide—where politicians insult entire nations with impunity (to say nothing of the filth they spew), and voters laugh along—only a literature of excess can confront the pathology of our daily ills. Through archetypal tragedy, the Greeks built the stages that could bear the weight of the otherwise unbearable. They ventured down paths of extreme suffering—children against their fathers, mothers against their own children, fratricidal battles, unleashed furies, bloody vengeance, unbridled frenzy—seeking to represent the unpredictability of human destiny and our helplessness when facing it.”
—Carmen Dolores Hernández, El Nuevo Día.
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Editorial note: This interview was originally conducted and published by Famous Writing Routines. The introduction and concluding analysis were added by the Site Editors. The interview questions and Giannina Braschi’s responses have not been altered. Last reviewed and updated: August 21, 2026.