Editor’s note: This manifesto by the feminist writers collective Comando Plath is one of three that will be published in translation at A Perfect Vacuum. As the note and manifesto below make clear, the forms of violence and harassment that Comando Plath are responding to are both specific to the Peruvian case and quite close to denunciations and broader conversations in the US and elsewhere. The manifesto itself is dotted with references to writers in Peru, including Enriqueta Belevan, Mariela Dreyfus, María Emilia Cornejo and others as a means of calling in while likewise denouncing. More from CP here.
From Comando Plath:
We were born on August 29th 2017, sick of harassment and machismo in Peruvian literary circles. We are a Comando because we work behind the lines of machismo, combatting it. We are named after Sylvia Plath to vindicate here as, like many of us, she lived in the shadow of her husband, the writer Ted Hughes, and resisted him and his mistreatment of her.
Our first manifesto Cómo tira una poeta was constructed out of the insults that each of us has received in our lives, for being women, for being writers, for being lesbians, for being trans, for being mothers, for being submissive or for being rebels. We made it starting out from Este no es un poema feminista by our sister comando Berta García Faet.
They hacked us one, and we are sure that they will try to do it again. Not everyone likes to hear (read) the truth. These are times of resistance. And we won’t just shut up anymore.
Tr. Sara Rivera
The Poetic I grew tired of waiting, now she howls and barks.
The Poetic I is sick of filling arts event quotas.
The Poetic I wants: 1) A dialogue on Peruvian literature where only women are invited, where not a single man gets hysterical because an entire Congress of Literature could be written for them, for men. 2) The Poetic I proposes that we stop including a space for a man at every table for the sake of political correctness; they should be grateful for this act of justice.
The Poetic I is dialectic in that sense.
Though the Poetic I has had it up to here with other Poetic Is demanding coherence.
The Poetic I wants to write about everything it feels like writing about, and not have anyone ask: why don’t you speak of the body? Or why do you only speak of the body?
The Poetic I will bare her teeth the next time they call her “Poetess”.
The Poetic I got tired of reading the same names in encyclopedias. She’s decided to erase all the old dictionary words that played a role in making her invisible.
The Poetic I says: Daddy, you do not do anymore black shoe, like Silvia I have had to kill you with the impurities of my mother tongue.
The Poetic I believes that if you didn’t understand what she said, you didn’t understand; and if you don’t like what she says, you don’t like it; but enough with condescending responses about how “a little something” she said speaks to you.
The Poetic I has a right to be hysterical without getting her face scoured clean.
And so what if the Poetic I was the drop that overflowed the cup?
The Poetic I laughs when they try to insult her by crying “feminist!”.
The Poetic I contemplates Your porcelain mind.
The Poetic I remembers she has to buy milk while reading a poem on the Metropolitano.
The Poetic I wants to do what Poetic I’s do when they dominate situations.
The Poetic I doesn’t have to show you how good she is in the text or in bed.
The Poetic I is “fat / small / beardless / widowed / transparent / emaciated / coarse / haggard” so what.
But the Poetic I always has to demonstrate what she is not.
The Poetic I is tired of being told how to do things “well”.
The Poetic I ardently wants to know if she has to play the little fool in order to win the heart of a man, so that he a) doesn’t feel threatened and b) doesn’t make sex, love, and intelligence a zero sum game.
The Poetic I wants to keep her armpit and leg hair and not be asked about it.
The Poetic I has wrinkles, deep wrinkles, and wants to want them.
The Poetic I pisses and shits and isn’t a lady, ok?
The Poetic I is going to stop laughing NOW at your jokes / innuendos / flatteries / drooling, for educational purposes and because of secondhand embarrassment.
The Poetic I has had it up to the cunt with pretending to be beautiful and sexy and delicate.
The Poetic I is a chola and horny and brilliant and South American and, sometimes, sentimental, a little bougie.
The Poetic I finds her own pleasure and feels neither guilty nor ashamed.
The Poetic I delights in the immense joy of her body without intermediaries.
The Poetic I wants to go drinking without shady men from the other table fucking with her. She isn’t alone, she’s with herself.
The Poetic I has fun, sings early in the day, pisses unashamed, eats whatever she wants, soils things, draws chaotic lines and doesn’t let anyone tell her how to do it correctly.
The Poetic I thinks that any judgment of what she puts in her body can’t be good for her mental health, but widowhood can be.
The Poetic I paints ingenious phrases like “a beautiful baker ladybird”, exorcises the mother “a thousand times raped and still a virgin”, or writes while eating from the plate of lentils belonging to that wicked woman in the story— if she wants
The Poetic I denounces the Unpoetic I’s that they try to attribute to her.
The Poetic I is sick of hearing people say, “don’t leave class late”, “don’t go out alone”, “don’t volunteer”, “don’t denounce”, “stay quiet”.
The Poetic I is also a crazy piece of shit sometimes, which limits her caution.
The Poetic I is well-informed on matters of “noble aggressors” who grab her by the hair in streets and stairwells. She believes herself to be an expressionist poem, something like Munch’s Scream. 💖
The Poetic I regularly becomes us, and she tastes good.
The Poetic I is myopic but awake. She tells her allies and they rise and bark. The Poetic I rises and barks. Ekawa si I citeoP ehT. Krab, krab, krab!
The Poetic I gathers the rage of our grandmothers.
The Poetic I does NOT make herself available to wash dirty faces.
The Poetic I doesn’t “turn the other cheek, but displays her cunt, friend”, and her rage.
The Poetic I lost her hair on the sidewalk where everyone walks / a (closed)fistful of hairs she now collects / to weave her poem.
(For my noble aggressor): The Poetic I writes without fear: I leave home/I leave home/I leave home/Even if the State doesn’t respond/Even if the State doesn’t respond/Even if the State doesn’t respond/I will keep a hand on the door/I will keep a hand on the door/And I will leave home.
Because the Poetic I can decide to “leave with others” without signing her death sentence over to the hands of the good children of the patriarchy.
The Poetic I forgives neither the blind nor the dead.
The Poetic I fled the complicit State, “I was raped and you will not silence me, not with one, two, or a thousand soles…”🙁
The Poetic I organizes herself and spits out her jaw.
The Poetic I extends her claws and bellows.
The Poetic I dreams of Medusa’s utopia and fills her maw with fury, because she’s tired of barking and now cries out that we can be bad, we will be abominable.
The Poetic I spits out Power and demands the death of Patriarchy.
The Poetic I decides to break your teeth with a forehand drive, bury you in office documents, burn the initials of your name, leave you behind in a wasteland and tell you you deserve it.
The Poetic I survives in a country of rapists until they get to her too.
The Poetic I grew tired of waiting, now she howls and barks.
But the Poetic I menaces.
And “on the third day of suffering / when all is made perfect...she will return. And they’ll be powerless to kill her!”
COMANDO PLATH, Lima, October 24th, 2017.