Monday, November 3, 2008
Vamos!
Growing up as a Latin American girl in the United States, I grew up very much a part of two cultures simultaneously. I know that in South America, Central America and most Latin countries have very patriarchal societies. Women in these countries have made several advances but it's still surprising yet inspiring that Latin American and Spanish women are making a stir in literature. Even though I have grown up amidst both cultures and can read and write in Spanish, I have never read anything by a Latin American women author. As I read this article I tried to think of women authors that I had at least heard of and could think of only one. Having lived in a bilingual house for eighteen years I find that pretty disappointing. This article gives hopes though that not only will these women authors be known but also widely read.
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Oo! Check out Gloria Anzaldua. She grew up in south Texas and is a Mexican American, lesbian feminist author. We have a poem of hers (I think it's La Frontera? It's about the borderlands and how she not only grew up on the border of the US and Mexico, but on the border of being an American and a Mexican. It's a fabulous poem and I love her writing style.
Check out this poem by Julia Alvarez:
Bilingual Sestina
Some things I have to say ain’t getting said
in this snowy, blond, blue-eyed, gum-chewing English
dawn’s early light sifting through persianas closed
the night before by dark-skinned girls whose words
evoke cama, aposento, suenos in nombres
from that first world I can’t translate from Spanish.
Gladys, Rosario, Altagracia—the sounds of Spanish
wash over me like warm island waters as I say
your soothing names: a child again learning the nombres
of things you point to in the world before English
turned sol, tierra, cielo, luna to vocabulary words—
sun, earth, sky, moon. Language closed
like the touch-sensitive morivivi whose leaves closed
when we kids poked them, astonished. Even Spanish
failed us back then when we saw how frail a word is
when faced with the thing it names. How saying
its name won’t always summon up in Spanish or English
the full blown genie from the bottled nombre.
Gladys, I summon you back by saying your nombre.
Open up again the house of slatted windows closed
since childhood, where palabras left behind for English
stand dusty and awkward in neglected Spanish.
Rosario, muse of el patio, sing to me and through me say
that world again, begin first with those first words
you put in my mouth as you pointed to the world—
not Adam, not God, but a country girl numbering
the stars, the blades of grass, warming the sun by saying,
Que calor! As you opened up the morning closed
inside the night until you sang in Spanish,
estas son las mananitas, and listening in bed, no English
yet in my head to confuse me with translations, no English
doubling the world with synonyms, no dizzying array of words
--the world was simple and intact in Spanish—
luna, sol, casa, luz, flor, as if the nombres
were the outer skin of things, as if the words were so close
one left a mist of breath on things by saying
their names, an intimacy I now yearn for in English—
words so close to what I mean that I almost hear my Spanish
heart beating, beating inside what I say en ingles.
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