Pendejo's Agents - Giannina Braschi

Pendejo’s Agents and Putin’s Putinas in PUTINOIKA by Giannina Braschi.

Famous Writer's Routines — Laurent Elie Badessi’s portrait of Giannina Braschi, author of Putinoika

Giannina Braschi shares how Putinoika came together and what it was like creating a world full of real and imagined characters.

Written by FAMOUS WRITING ROUTINES

Giannina Braschi has never been one to stick to a single form. Known for blending poetry, fiction, theater, and political commentary, she’s written everything from the iconic Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing! to the satirical epic United States of Banana. Her latest book, Putinoika, continues in that spirit—mixing poetry, drama, philosophy, and humor into one dense, defiant work.

Written during the pandemic, Putinoika features a surreal mix of real and imagined characters—Trump, Melania, Bacchus, the Muses, and more—all thrown together in a collapsing world that feels a little too familiar. In this interview, Braschi talks about how the book came together, why movement helped unlock new ideas, and how she sees collaboration, symbolism, and political resistance as part of the creative process.

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.

Book cover showing Pendejo's Agents and Bacchus' Muses in the epic tragicomedy Putinoika — Muses of Bacchus and Agents of Pendejo

Agents of Pendejo

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.**********

PUTINOIKA Reviews: Pendejo’s Agents

Key words: Pendejo’s Agents, Trump’s Agents, Agents of Pendejo, Putinas of Putin, Putin’s patinas, Putinoika