Viewing entries tagged
Central American
Vélez escribe sin ojo ni oreja, enfocándose en la angustia política y quizás en ganar lectores que simplemente sienten esa misma angustia. Solamente un poema (“Angeles”) me movio. Los demás no tienen suficientes imágenes o música para que sean memorables. Las traducciones de algún modo son peores que estos poemas. 1 out of 5.
Constante Hida / Manuel Tzoc / 2016
My friend brought me back Constante Huida by Manuel Tzoc back from Guatemala this past fall. I've been itching to read their work for years and was so grateful! Tzoc is a monumental queer Maya writer from Guatemala, one of the first voices you’ll have recommended to you when you ask. That said, I’m not sure if this is the collection by which to get to know Tzoc’s work. Most of the collection is a well-crafted irreverent queer ennui diatribe. While Tzoc sprinkles the collection with playful puns and eye-catching images here and there, there are one too many poems bemoaning the challenges of writing for me to understand where all the pomp was coming from. There are definitely glimpses of real pathos on the page, such as “por el día/por los días.” Either way, I’m glad to have read it and will be seeking out more of his work. 2 out 5
Seeing Indians: A Study of Race, Nation, and Power in El Salvador / Virginia Tilley / 2005
I’ve known about this book for years but didn’t read it, because I read a review that said something along the lines of “this white woman gets indigenous identity wrong.” I couldn’t disagree more whole-heartedly. What Seeing Indians sets out to do is explain how the racial politics of mestizaje and indigenous rights plays out in Central America, specifically El Salvador, and how global indigenous politics further marginalize El Salvador’s indigenous groups. Rather than advocating for a particular interpretation of indigenous identity, she simply gives a lay of the land, providing crucial clarity for folks trying to understand racism in El Salvador and IndoAmerica at large. Reading Seeing Indians enabled me to see clearly the apartheid in Guatemala and the racism of Guatemala and El Salvador, whereas before I would be somewhat confused and unsure if I just simply didn’t have more historical or social context for a dynamic or work of art or situation. Seeing Indians provides many leads for a young researcher to explore in their understanding of Latin America. I whole-heartedly recommend it especially for people outside of Latin America, trying to better understand the racial politics of mestizaje. 4 /5
Vamos Patria a Caminar / Otto Rene Castillo / 1965
I’ve been searching for a book by Otto Rene Castillo for years, so I was thrilled when I found a copy of Vamos Patria a Caminar en La Teca during my trip to Guate. This collection is full of love and heartbreak poems, as well as patriotic, revolutionary leftist poetry. The love here blends and blurs nationalism and romantic love, a tradition familiar to anyone who has read the kundimans of the Phillipines (via Patrick Rosal esp). There’s very many 10/10 poems in this collection. Occasionally, the collection lapses into the typical snares of masculinist love poetry. The patriotic nationalism and idealism hasn’t aged well either, as the revolutionary potential of postcolonial nation-states has slowly faded into a dystopia in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. Still, it’s easy to see why Otto was so beloved by the revolutionary left in Central America with these passionate, pulsating poems dreaming of a better future in Guate and TLC. 4/5
Revólver/ Josué Andrés Moz / 2024
Moz outdid himself here, his words cutting with broken hearted clarity into the political turmoil of Bukele’s Salvador. Written in a language just as rich and calculated as his early work, Moz’s articulation of his griefs and passions find subjects worthy of its dramatic flair. With criticisms to the political buffoonery of some of his peers, as well as heartfelt poems about unfulfilled desire, Moz butts his head against the worst of our era and gives it a deserving language. 4/5
Reimaging National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in Global Context / Robin Maria / 2014
A foundational text in Central American studies, RNB is an anthropologist’s take on postwar El Salvador that succinctly provides introductory political clarity. It captures the consequences of the ARENA’s years in power on education and national history, as well as the failures of justice and political accountability. I recommend this book to every undergrad and grad Salvadoran because DeLugan’s approach is the first idea many of my friends had when conceiving their research projects carried into fruition by a professional. It also provides clarity on how mestizaje has played out in a contemporary context. 4/5
Foremost among the writers whose work has showed me the most about intimacy and pace is Francisco Aragón. You cannot read a Francisco Aragón poem in a rush. As someone raised on slam, hip-hop, and the beats—you know, on a verse known to Howl—I needed a writer like Aragón to teach me how to slow down and really pay attention to a moment.
In After Rubén, Aragón braids his careful reflections with lo-fi remixes of Rubén Darío poems. I say, lo-fi, because Aragón’s English translations of Darío poems don’t try to preserve the rhyme and rhythm that make the poems magical in Spanish, but rather frequently breaks up stanzas and even lines to make you linger on each phrase. This gives the poems an intimate, relaxed lo-fi quality. Aragón’s “Symphony in Gray,” for example, begins:
Like glass
the color of mercury
it mirrors the sky’s
sheet of zinc, the pale gray
a burnish splotched
Whereas the original poem begins with the noun “el mar,” letting you know that Darío is describing the sea, here we do not get an explicit hint of the sea, until the fifth stanza, where “leaden waves crest / collapse—seeming / to groan near the docks.” In the translation, we are too close to the object to see the whole; note the short lines, really breaking each image down piece by piece. The effect is to create an almost hyper-real version of the original, which in this case compliments the intent of the original: to draw the reader through hypnotic shades of gray.
The collection generously includes the Spanish versions of Darío’s work in the back of the book, allowing word nerds to flip between the English and Spanish versions and savor the different nuances between form and diction, as well as a non-fiction essay discussing his relationship to Darío’s work. In the essay, Aragón explains how his mother and father had, despite their limited education, memorized Darío poems from their schooling in Central America, which they cherished and passed down to Aragón. This collection is Aragón’s way of preserving Darío’s work for another generation of Latinx writers and re-introducing him to the English canon. While I have known about Darío from my forays into Spanish literature, I deeply appreciate Aragón’s ability to take his dramatic, virtuosic voice and make it seem down-to-earth and plainspoken. Aragón has offered me a completely new window into his work.
Aragón’s own work doesn’t play second fiddle to Darío’s in this collection, either. Rather, Aragón carefully sets Darío up as a queer Central American elder and by the end of the collection, the relationship between them feels spiritual. Darío and Aragón strengthen one another in this collection. Whereas Aragón mines aspects of Darío’s life, line, and legend to speak to the present, he also uses his own openness about his queerness to open up this once silenced aspect of Darío’s life and work. In “Winter Hours”/”De Invierno,” Aragón transforms an image of Carolina into an image of Amado, and in “I Pursue a Shape”/”Yo Persigo Una Forma…”, Aragón transforms an image of Venus de Milo into an image of the David. Darío was closeted during his lifetime. As Aragón writes in an essay in Glow of Our Sweat, he himself was once shy about his sexual orientation, but has moved towards highlighting and being open about his queerness as a way of denouncing homophobia. These on-and-off-the-page moves on Aragón’s part are acts of inter-generational healing, creating a path for future queer artists of color to authentically present themselves to the world and define themselves on their own terms.
Lets put it another way: In my favorite poem in the collection, “Nicaragua in a Voice,” Aragón writes,
More than the poems
—the fruits that sang
their juices; dolls, feverish,
dreaming of nights,
city streets—for me it was
the idle chat between the poems:
cordial, intimate almost…
like a river’s murmur
as if a place—León,
Granada—could speak,
whistle inhabit
a timbre… as if, closing
my eyes, I had it again
once more within reach:
his voice—my father
unwell, won’t speak.
In After Rubén, Aragón finds a way to retrace many voices that were once crushed, once silenced, whether they belong to his father or one of the greatest Latin American poets in millennia. And that is a reward worth “more than the poems.”