The Spanish version of this essay appears in Materia Frágil: Poéticas Para el Siglo XXI en América Latina y España (Iberoamericana, Vervuert, 2020)
When one speaks of poetry written by women in Peru during the 20th century, the names Blanca Varela (1926-2009) and Carmen Ollé (1947) immediately come up. During her lifetime Varela was the recipient of important distinctions such as the Octavio Paz Prize (2001), the Federico García Lorca prize (2006) and the Reina Sofia prize in poetry (2007), and her writing has been widely praised by critics. Octavio Paz was first to highlight her poetry in his prologue to Ese Puerto Existe (1959). Blanca was a woman writing poetry in a world of men, including important intellectuals like Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Fernando Szyszlo, and Javier Sologuren. For contemporary women writers in Peru this seemed tranquilizing to a certain extent: at least there was one of us at the top and she was recognized by her male counterparts. With time, however, a certain agitation and estrangement welled up in us: where were the others? Or was it that only one of us could enter that paradise?
In Peru, it is evident that women writers have had their access to the means of written production restructured while, at the same time, their writing has historically been censored: toward the end of the 19th century an important group of women came together in the so-called Veladas Literarias (Literary Evenings), whose aim was also political. To name just one of these writers, Clorinda Matto de Turner (1854-1909) was forefully attacked for her anticlerical writings and for supporting the education of women and indigenous people. After the publication of Aves Sin Nido ([1889], 2006) her printed work was burned and she lived in exile, in Buenos Aires, until her death. It would take almost another century until another group of poets would break through during the 1980s: Patricia Alba, Rossella Di Paolo, Rocío Silva-Santisteban, Mariela Dreyfus, and Magdalena Chocano being some of the key voices of that decade. María Emilia Cornejo (1949-1972) had already paved the way before them. Although known by few readers, her overwhelming poems importantly placed a female subject at their center. Her complete poems were published posthumously in La Mitad del Camino Recorrido (1989).
Still, the most important book of the 1980s was, without question, Noches de Adrelina (1981) by Carmen Ollé. This book was a radical, questioning, uncomfortable poemario that instantiated a new aesthetic, ethical and political project in Peruvian poetry for essentially two reasons: (a) because it introduced a feminine subject with her body set close to her desire -in the largest sense of the term- and, in this manner, is faced with patriarchal censure and pre-existing canonized aesthetics and (b) because it placed at the center a migrant subject that is depicted as being subject to the oppression of capital: as cheap wage labor and as homemaker in the reproduction of domestic labor. Since the publication of Noches de Adrelina, Peruvian poets have written either guided by or against that project, but they have been unable, given the force of the writing, to remain indifferent to it.
In the 90s, voices like those of Monserrat Álvarez, Roxana Crisólogo and Ana Varela emerged, which consciously distanced themselves from what, in being termed “poetry of the body”, had come to represent an attempt at pigeonholing the poets of the 1980s. The latter was, it seems, a mode of writing about desire that had come to a certain point of exhaustion. At the same time, it was also that Ollé’s poetry was too strong relative to this theme to allow for much modification to the poetics. In the following decades, then, we have seen writers like Romy Sordómez, Tilsa Otta, Cecilia Podestá, Andrea Cabel, Alessandra Tenorio and Becky Urbina. My impression is that it was thought indisputable that poetry written by women already had its place well secured, and that contestation of this truism after the brutal depolitization of the cultural field during the Fujimorato (1990-2000) was, for that reason, set aside. That is to say that the political subject lagged with respect to its place in the literary field as we have continued to be “less” valued in a canon composed of men who maintain a single manner of thinking about literature.
What is curious is that, in recent years, younger women writers have begun to speak about the constant struggle to get a foothold in the literary field while affirming the “right” to speak in their own voices and from their particular experiences. Obviously, these assertions go hand in hand with the demands of a more diverse feminist activism, the high point of which has been the #NiUnaMenos marches that began in Argentina, that has expanded across all of Latin America, making evident that strength emerges from unity and that there are demands that women feel have not been satisfied over the last century despite the constant struggles of Latin American feminists. It is in that regard that the rediscovery of one of the most important voices of the Peruvian avant-garde, Magda Portal (1900-1989), has served as one of the more motivating recoveries for contemporary women writers.
Recently, a Peruvian woman poet of the generation of the 1980s who lives in the US told me, “what a thing it is to be to be writing now without shame about the body, desire, etc, when [Portal] and confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and others had already been doing so” (2018). Maybe she’s right. They put their bodies into their writing, but I do wonder whether they broke with tradition or if it was simply imposed on them, thus making clear the enormous necessity for the poets of today to denounce from the I, or in order to make a poetry that might be a critical and accusatory platform.
It is true that many of the poets mentioned at the beginning of this work already have a place in the panorama of Peruvian literature, but they still don’t have sufficiently influential voices to be able to intervene in the literary field (Bourdieu dixit); that is to say, their voices are not sufficiently powerful to lay new groundwork in the field itself. The politics of these poets in Peru is still to think in terms of quality, of “good” or “bad” poetry (terms that are, of course, rather subjective), and not in terms of tension and positionality in the cultural landscape. Nonetheless, it is evident that these current feminist movements have invigorated these writers, and, without a doubt, have placed the issue on the table.
As such, this essay aims to familiarize the reader with the positions of some recent Peruvian poets such as Valeria Román Marroquín, Myra Jara and Rosa Granda. Of course, they are not the only contemporary poets[1], but these three voices are representative enough of the different tendencies and ideas in writing by Peruvian women today, in addition to being some of the most interesting by comparison with their male counterparts. If we review a list of poetry collectives today, among which we find, for example, Poesía Sub25-close to the scene at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos- and Verbo Ser -close to the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú-, one can note that the number of male participants continues to be much larger than that of women. Still, many of these men are also beginning to question their writing and the construction of the parameters of their masculinity inherited from their elders, a development which has been, to a certain extent, encouraging.
I asked these three poets about their relationship to recent Peruvian poetry and if they felt that they identified with a specific type of activism. All three responded that they felt identified with feminism, given their condition as women. While this seems evident, it is more important and relevant because those poets who preceded them did not identify with feminism openly and, moreover, considered it something that they had to maintain a certain distance from, or which they needed to separate themselves from altogether. At the same time, these contemporary poets wnat to position themselves within an activism that they feel emerges from their writing, which is to say, that they attempt to bring together both worlds, although the manner of this reconciliation still remains uncertain.
They Speak
Recently published poemarios by these authors have included La Destrucción es blanca (2015) by Myra Jara; Torschlusspanik (2016) by Rosa Granda and Matrioska (2018 [José Wantabe Varas, 2017]) by Valeria Román who had already published a promising first book Feelback (2016) and, more recently, the pamphlet Angst (2018). These are the poets that, together with others, have come to mark a new writing with diverse poetics though each of them is conscious that there is still territory to win. As such, each, with their own personality and writing, explores their situation in a contemporary world that -undoubtedly – has attempted to silence us. All of them traffic in the language of the Father: Granda does so in an explicit manner through deconstruction and the use of theory that breaks with syntax and modifications of meaning; Jara is sufficiently daring to place the body as an object of desire, of debauchery, but also of cruelty in an insatiable world; and Valeria Román attempts, through her books, to push back on the condition of the feminine subject vis-à-vis power, participation and politics, thus attempting to find a correspondence between her activism and her writing.
Of the three poets, Myra Jara (1987) has not lived in Perú since she was 19 years old, although she does return to Lima as is the case of many middle-class writers. She lives in Rome. She is also a writer who frequently publishes poems on various online platforms, and explores her sexuality, fragility and sensuality in her texts. She herself accepts this situation because she says that she has “narcistic, exhibitionist, and egocentric” impulses (Guerrero 2018: 1). Her only published poemario La Destrucción es Blanca, provides a new look at the body and feminine desire in the contemporary city. In this poemario, fragility and sex are shown as a form of fleeting, though no less painful, love. In this, while the poetic subject wanders and looks for love in bars, the theme of travel and her experiences in a Europe as decadent as it is brilliant likewise pass before a tender and sordid eye. Additionally, she proposes an awareness of vulnerability that perhaps can perhaps only be otherwise identified in the work of María Emilia Cornjeo, but without the latter’s innocence, as, in Myra’s poetry, there is only the belief in the power of the imagination on its own. Yes, this means suicide and sickness but, at the same time, this implies something seductive, a smoothness with which she takes us to otherwise hidden places. Thus, while Carmen Ollé is upfront and masochistic in Paris, Myra Jara is tender in Rome, off balance and alienated without her writing feeling slick. For Jara: “feminism is power […]” and she notes about herself: “I am, at times, a fragile woman, but there is no contradiction. I give myself the luxury of living the sensations of power and the situation of weakness.” (Guerrero 2018a: 2).
On the other hand, in an interview with the writer Gabriela Wiener, Jara speaks directly about her mental illness, which is also material for her discourse concerning the imbalance and hyper-medicalization of bodies today:
I had never spoken so directly about my illness. Every illness causes suffering and one would like it to disappear one day. I, myself, encounter [mental illness] from time to time, and I see it come through in my poetry. I also see poetry appear in illness. It arrives suddenly and perches like a bird on the windowsill and does as it pleases with me. (Wiener 2018).
These statements are uncommon in Peruvian poetry. Few are willing to express their vulnerability in such a direct manner. Jara takes the symptoms of her illness and writes them, letting herself, to a certain extent, be drawn along. With that form she puts forward an aesthetic in perpetual crisis, full of disquieting images like that of the following poem:
After distracting myself with men I’m always left with an almost blurry sensation. Satiety, or sometimes nothing, sometimes a cathartic and touching void.
I have a metal tube that doles out violence. Do I seem violent to you? Well, I am, I am the master of the tube, the repetitions and the cycles will occur to me . I will always have to expel basic things from my body. To expel and obsess myself mechanically.
I sleep with two little ones: a boy that suffers and one that makes suffer. I leave them in the morning so that if they want they can be destroyed. I leave them no room, nor housing, no toilets, I don’t think there’s pain, there is, above all, digression (Jara 2015: 19).
With three books to her credit, Valeria Román, or Valeria R. Marroquín (Arequipa, 1999), as her name appears on her Facebook profile, is the most interesting poet of her generation. With an already notable pathway through poetry, she distinguished herself from the poets that surround her in her first book Feelback (2016). She is linked to the poets in the collective Poesía Sub25, with whom she happens to have, recently, engaged in an intense debate on social media concerning contemporary poetry in Perú.[3] This discussion brought together collectives or groups linked to Poesía Sub25 (Roberto Valdivia), Vallejo and Company (Mario Pera, Bruno Polack), and Anima Lisa (Santiago and Rodrigo Vera, Luis Alberto Castillo.) The last of these collectives later organized a discussion that was far more democratic and plural in an actual, non-virtual, space – indeed so real that the meeting place was their parents’ house, which is to say, the family house taken over whereby to begin to throw around and instantiate ideas. At the same time, this debate has generated open censures and ruptures among what were thought to be generational positions, as is the case for Valeria Román, who, afterward, placed some distance between herself and Poesia Sub25 and their ideas concerning the “sentimental” (sentimentalito) -a term developed by Roberto Valdivia-. She says that in her position as a woman, with respect to recent Peruvian poetry and the debate that was generated that:
The paltry participation of women in these debates is not accidental, and it is probably because to women, entering into that debate doesn’t interest us as it has ended up being irrelevant, because [the conversation] has centered on a collective and not around a series of writings that has appeared in these [last few] decades. And because it has ended up mentioning women in an accessorial form (like always). I don’t feel myself to be part of the landscape that the collectives that began this “polemic” threw out there; put better, I have felt used by this collective, which I belonged to at times, in order to promote an idea -the sentimalito- which I did not sign onto and from which, as my writing has changed, I have emphatically delinked myself from.
Román is one of the few women poets that participated on social media and later in the debates organized by Anima Lisa, a collective that she says she feels closer to, intellectually and affectively. I wonder, then, why do women continue to see themselves as subjects that do not have voices, as subjects relegated from their own craft? Is it that the environment continues to be adverse, with little trust in guaranteeing that their reflections will be listened to?
Valeria, in addition to being a poet, is a student leader at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, so politics is a theme that she reflects on in a ongoing manner. Bringing together her writing with contemporary activism and feminism is something that are on her mind, which she notes in the following:
I am definitely for the emancipation of women, and on various occasions I come together with my feminist comrades with respect to our struggles and claims as women. Still, before being a feminist, I call myself a Marxist. Not because I believe that the oppression of women is something secondary, but because I think that class is a material condition and a category that is at the center of the forms of oppression in capitalist society. […] I don’t think that literature and political militancy can be separated if one assumes politics as a total form of one’s life. In that sense, in a way that I am still trying to resolve in my own militancy, I do think that, for the moment, concrete political action weighs more heavily in confronting a material force (capitalism) (Guerrero 2018b: 2)
Since Feelback and Age of Consent (2016), a poemario published in Spain by Ediciones Liliputienses, Valeria has published Matrioshka (Premio Nacional de Poesía José Watanabe 2017), a poemario that deals with mother/daughter relationships, and the recognition of the ways the domestic, feminine desire and sentimental desire are made to weigh on women. And more recently she has published Angst, a poem that is part of a book in process.
“Angst”, ‘distress’ in Danish, has us read a contemporary world from our own neuroses and fears. The poem begins by presenting the crisis of the I:
this is my anguish:
4 am. waking to drink coffee
take pills
two by two.
inhaling / exhaling
Against the window
Toward the east.
To pee
To not even smoke
fighting the exhaustion.
testing the water. too cold.
five minutes the water’s still too cold.
still.
looking at the clock.
five more minutes. in front of the sink.
I scrub my arms. one more minute. cracked.
against the ceramic.
I’m cracked
subject to the search for the sublime
in search of emotion in the everyday
damp I hold on to
the rhythm of my days [2]
The poem continues with a rhythm that envelops the reader. Angst is divided into five parts: distress, hunger, illness, weaponry, and intimacy and, in each of them, a self-knowledge is expressed that is close to one that speaks and seeks. As Carlos Villacorta has highlighted, in this case the distress is loneliness (“loneliness is a scandal”), the hunger is totality (“everything is terror / everything is else”) the illness is living facing the sea (“counterpose and dislocating blind spots), the weaponry is negation (“I have no desire”) and the intimacy is language (“nothing saves me more than a language I don’t understand” [Villacorta 2018: 1]), but it is also- in the style of Blanca Varela in her famous poem “Casa de Cuervos” (House of Crows)[4]- “an abandoned house / a worn-out body”. Body and language do not dissociate from one another. Rather, they are reconstructed and survive through a foreign language that is made its own in her discourse.
Rosa Granda (Lima, 1983) is the oldest of the three and the one who has come to poetry least frequently. To put it in her own words: “unfortunately I have a craft that I don’t know well enough” (Guerrero 2018c:2). This is the case such that she doesn’t feel identified with a genealogy of poets from earlier generations, or with any specific tradition, and her literary references are certainly diverse. She has worked in fashion and, so, her place within the poetry landscape is relatively recent or, at the very least, she hasn’t moved in any consistent way within the field. She has published a single book, Torschlusspanik, literally “the fear of the door that is closing”.
Torschlusspanik -another difficult title that alerts us to what will later be encountered- already situates us on less familiar linguistic terrain in the imposition of German, a language that dislocates our understanding of the text. The book deals with the interaction of several written registers -the personal diary, dream writing, the epistolary, confession, essay, etc.-, which results in that the poemario – of texts in prose – is read through its opacities where anxiety sets in around incomprehension: “you do understand me, excuse me, you used to” (Granda 2016: 32). The love relation is an impossibility read from a certain irony at the bottom of the page as “the stupidity of the future”, “don’t play at living”. Working with the remains of language, orality, philosophy, and psychoanalysis likewise occupy their space in the text. One can even glimpse “bureaucratic language”, as the poet Santiago Vera (2014) has observed - a language that imitates that instantiation of power and which points at the same time to its referential quality. Thus, Granda’s is a poemario that makes a hard break with that Peruvian poetry which is more strongly linked to conversationalism, like that of hallmark figures of today such as Magdalena Chocano or Mario Montalbetti. In this sense, Granda’s poetry interrupts those rather more transparent poetics in order to follow a more interdisciplinary line (with diverse theoretical references) that is both more opaque and obscure, even if she does not see things that way:
This book functions more as a testimony. I like to imagine that the reader takes a path that is, in the first instance, visual before being analytical (but this is not a suggestion [in how to read].) It can seem to be a somewhat hermetic or obscure text, as you say, for its plurality of forms, perhaps, but it was not my intention to make it illegible or difficult to understand; the language plays with itself, most likely taking up seldom used tools, but not in a manner unknown to the reader. (Guerrero 2018c: 3)
I’ll cite the first poem in the book. From the beginning, the place of the masculine other is unwaveringly questioned.
I meet a man yawning in his room.
Seeds?
They’re mine.
I offer him the seeds and he takes them. Later he spits them out, but when I return to offer them to him again he turns to swallow them.
Why did you come, he asks. And you’re still asking (running with purpose is literally running).
In a recurring dream the same man sees branches sprouts from the most unexpected parts of his body, but only when the little leaves begin to fill his eyes does he open them. […] (Granda, 2016: 15)
She likewise comments on the relation she has to recent Peruvian poetry from her subject position:
Something they told me after the publication of my text was that it seemed to have been written by a man, and I really didn’t know how to take that. Limeña society is exceedingly machista and that does not exclude the literary scene, which is also driven by men in a space that they defend and which they likely will not cede so easily […] to the “women’s condition” which shouldn’t even [need to] be mentioned, but it’s done, as though we needed to pay a toll to make things [different]. A woman moving through the intelligentsia still awakens many reservations and prejudices. (Guerrero 2018c:1)
I close with a quote from Granda’s poem “Imago Dei”: “Dear night: If you let me sleep, you won’t make me kill my father – or anyone. I am not interested in becoming a serial killer” (Granda 2016: 34). Irony, and plenty of it.
In the preceding, I have attempted to present these three authors as part of a larger project concerning recent Peruvian poetry written by women to understand their approaches and their reflections on the condition of women in an environment that has been, at times, quite hostile to the representation of their writing. At the same time, the coexistence of spaces for activism and writing practice are seen reflected not only in their poetics but also in their reflection on how subjects that write from the neoliberal periphery resist through new poetics and with their defined personalities. In a time marked by precarity, inequality and the fleetingness of discourse, these poets rise to speak their word.
Bibliography:
Cornjeo, María Emilia (1989): La Mitad del Camino Recorrido. Lima: Flora Tristán
Granda, Rosa. (2016): Torschlusspanik. Lima: Perro de Ambiente.
Guerrero, Victoria. (2018a): Interview with Myra Jara. September-October. Lima. Unpublished.
- (2018b): Interview with Valeria Román. September-October. Lima. Unpublished.
- (2018c): Interview with Rosa Granda. September-October. Lima. Unpublished.
Jara, Myra. (2015): La Destrucción es Blanca. Lima: Lustra.
Ollé, Carmen. (1981): Noches de Adrenalina. Lima: Cuadernos del Hipocampo.
Román, Valeria. (2016): Feelback. Lima: Sub25.
- (2018a): Matrioska. Lima: Asociación Peruana Japonesa (APJ).
- (2018b): Angst. Lima: Underwood.
Varela, Blanca. (1993): “Casa de Cuervos”, en Ejercicios Materiales. Lima: Jaime Campodónico.
Vera, Santiago. (2014): Libro de las Opiniones. Lima: Paracaídas.
Villacorta, Carlos. (2018): “Nueva Literature para nuevos tiempos”, El Silencio de Ulises, Oct 12. https://elsilenciodeulises.wordpress.com/2018/10/12/nueva-literatura-peruana-para-nuevos-tiempos/#more-1507 (Accessed 12/02/2019)
Wiener, Gabriela. (2017): “Myra Jara: Aunque me da miedo o pudor me gusta ser polémica”, La República, March 25th. Lima.
NOTES:
[1] Other poets to be considered in a coming investigation are Ethel Barja (Huanchar, 1988), Ana Carolina Quiñonez Salprieto (Lima, 1988), Ana Carolina Zegarra (Arequipa, 1990), July Solis (Lima, 1988)
[2] Editor’s note: Valeria Román Marroquin’s “Angst” may be found in full elsewhere in this issue here.
[3] A discussion which I participated in as a part of the poetry community and as a woman who writes.
[4] I quote the final verses of the poem: “this meadow of black fire abandoning / once more this empty house / which is my body / to which you need not return”)
Victoria Guerrero Peirano is a poet, teacher, and feminist activist. Her recent publication Y la muerte no tendrá dominio (2019) won the 2020 National Literature Prize. She is the author of five poetry collections, including a compilation of her poetry, Documentos de Barbarie (poetry 2002–2012) (2013), which won ProART in 2015. She cares about her dog and cat. She survives by teaching at the university.