Claribel AlegriaCritiques

I have no idea how or where I got this book, but I was looking for something to read and it was on my bookshelf. I'm glad fate put it there, because I enjoyed the story. It's probably the type of book I'll completely forget about within a few months, but who cares.

The poems in this short collection were written after the death of Alegría's husband. Many of the poems are quite short, but they focus on grief, loneliness, loss, life alone as an older woman who knows she will join her husband relatively soon.

This is a bilingual edition, and it was fascinating to compare the Spanish and English versions. I do not know enough Spanish to read the Spanish edition, but I do know enough to see the changes in word order and obviously the splitting/joining of lines. This is what fascinates me about translated poetry--how much does the form matter? The cadence and syllables? These poems are, I think, all about the meaning and not the form/cadence.

This is a collection of three novellas first published in Spanish between 1977 and 1985. The 1990 Women's Press edition has an absolutely fabulous cover image by Susan Alcantarilla!

1. The first novella, The Talisman, is mostly set in a Los Angeles convent school, with memories of childhood in Key West. It's told via the experiences, memories, and imaginings, of a girl, through the framing device of encounters with the nun who is her spiritual advisor. The style is elliptical, and readers who dislike having multiple characters introduced by name and then alluded to repeatedly before their identities become clear will hate this, lol. I thought it worked well, and I wouldn't have known it was a translation (props to translator Amanda Hopkinson and the commissioning editor at The Women's Press). Warnings for child sex abuse, domestic abuse, and animal abuse (yes, the dog dies), although more of this is implied than graphic depictions.

There's a clever magical realist scene change from the girl protagonist at boarding school to herself as an older woman:

"Next day she said she was feeling ill and didn't go down to the dining room at breakfast time. She began furiously brushing her hair in front of the mirror above the washbasin. Then she took a comb, made a centre parting and pulled locks of hair down over her eyes.
Great, she said to herself, now I need to paint two rings around my eyes and add some crows' feet. She took a piece of charcoal and began drawing. Brilliant, now I only need the glasses and books to complete the image.
She helped herself to Susan's glasses, put three books under each arm and regarded herself triumphantly in the mirror."

2. The second novella, Family Album, is mostly set in Nicaragua and France, and is told through the memories of the daughter of a large extended wealthy Central American family. It uses family anecdotes, through both current experience and memories, to show Nicaraguan society divided into "market forces" driven "Conquistador" type people who take advantage of even their closest family members, and exploited "Indian" type people who care more about families and communities and society, in more conventional terms those who "take" and those who "give". The author also employs a traditional magical realist trope to make "the disappeared" literally disappear within the story. The present day here is 1978, although it was published with hindsight in 1982, i.e. after the tyrannicide of Somoza but before the USA-backed Contra terrorists were fully active and assassinating members of the legitimate FSLN government (also mild historical before Eden Pastora changed sides and was bombed by either the CIA or an FSLN faction depending on who you choose to believe).
Warnings for description of the torture of political prisoners (although the description is mild compared to reality).

A girl sneaks into her grandmother's bedroom:

"She knelt breathlessly at her bedside, and, taking the old lady's withered and yellow hand in her own, whispered, 'Mamita Rosa, you're a saint, and now you're about to die I want you to ask the Virgin to grant me three wishes.'
'What are they?'
'That I get away from here, that I love my husband very much, and that I become a writer.'
'I'll ask for the first two, but not for the last. I don't like the way poets live.' "

3. The third novella, Village of God and the Devil, is set on the Spanish island of Mallorca, and features a wide cast of locals and especially incomers as characters, including "Robert" implied to be author Robert Graves. There's an early reference to The White Goddess embedded in this series of vignettes about the lives of ex-pats, in which increasingly extreme supernatural explanations are appended to ordinary events. Each tale, and especially the build-up of tales, ought to be disturbing but because they're presented as an anthropological study of ex-pats they seem prosaic. Perhaps the contrast between Robert's poetic responses and the protagonist Marcia's prosaic responses is deliberate as Alegria was an accomplished poet who also wrote fiction and journalism. From the anecdotes one might get the impression that ex-pats are a bunch of drug-addled weirdos. Ahem. And then there's a plot twist or two, bringing whole new layers of weirdness, which at this point seems normal for this milieu. I understand this story as an examination, with anthropology used as a semi-satirical medium, of the reactions of a specific class of privileged people to the threat of an extinction event caused by humans, in this case an analogy of nuclear war (although a search and replace for climate change would also fit), but the magical realist ending didn't work for me, which is, of course, a subjective perspective.

Not necessarily the compliment one wants from a corpse dresser at a wake:

" 'Since I turned twenty I've been dressing the dead and now I'm over seventy. You can figure it out for yourself.'
'Would you like cup of coffee?'
'I wouldn't mind.'
Marcia got up to pour her one, then the two of them went to sit down in a corner of the dining room.
'Do you know something?' the dresser looked at Marcia with tenderness. 'Up until now I've only dressed Majorcans, but I've taken a liking to you, and I'm going to dress you too.' "½

Review published here: https://travellingtheword.com/book-4-the-ashes-of-el-salvador

Multiple voices that told a singular story. Of course, this is driven by the event of the prison escape, not a 'history' of the MRTA as such (in the way that Girls to the Front is a history of the Riot Grrrl movement). Lately, I think about prisons and what I learn about them in terms of my 'outsideness' and how that influences my own judgments about what is 'right' or 'wrong' as conditions of imprisonment. I just watched Hunger, and wondered all the way through: why would a hunger strike influence the administration to change anything? If prison staff would enforce unfair conditions, why would they care if the prisoners try to starve themselves?½