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LITERATURE Letters from Latin America

Reviews of fiction by Argentinean Natalia Casali, poetry by Salvadoran-American Janel Pineda and Colombian Maria Paz Guerrero and an essay by Puerto Rican Nicole Cecilia Delgado

“THE WAR never happened but somehow you and I/still exist. Like obsidian,/we know only the memory of lava/and not the explosion that created/us.”

In these opening verses of Lineage of Rain  (Haymarket Books, £7.99), Salvadoran poet and educator Janel Pineda begins her mesmerising story, one of Salvadoran migration, diaspora and the US-sponsored civil war that fuses the personal with the communal and the political with everyday life.  

Each poem in this powerful pamphlet sings its own beautiful tune, taking the reader on a journey of discoveries and redemption, from El Salvador to Los Angeles and back. There are moving family narratives where women take centre stage, as in Rain, where the grandmother Tana passes down stories and memories to her granddaughter.

These female voices are weavers of stories, fighters against patriarchal authority and revolutionary in their own actions. Always survivors, they retell histories that look to the past, present and future.

And there are stories of violence in El Salvador, as in the prose poem When the Death Squad Comes, where the poet narrates a future encounter with a bloody squad in her house, wondering “which will come first. The coffee or the bullet. The sun bright on your cheekbones, coffee burning your tongue. What a shame, some will say. What a shame. The brightest mind with a bullet in the brain.”  

Pineda’s exquisite voice also explores themes of bilingualism, female empowerment and the limits of language. In the poem How English Came to Me, the acquired language “made its home/hovering/around my body/the first four years of my life.”

A stunning book by a new Latinx voice, this is mesmerising debut.

God Is a Bitch Too (Ugly Duckling Press, £8.50) by Colombian poet Maria Paz Guerrero, translated by Camilo Roldan, is a chapbook full of ironic and acerbic language.

Intense as it is witty, it imagines God in many iterations, from a menopausal woman and a God who dances to one who is is Latin American, a “sudaca,” the derogatory term used in Spain and elsewhere to refer to someone from the continent. God is by turns a cannibal, a vegan and someone who wants to be famous.

Guerrero rebels against the patriarchal voice of authority, subverting the untouchable Almighty and thus questioning his ability to reign and dictate from above:  “one day god opens up his Facebook and realises there are elections happening in his third-world country he’s speechless how long has it been since you read a newspaper, god? god needs to find a job that will pay him enough.”

The book includes shorter poems exploring the social, political, sexual and economic implications of being a Latin American living in the 21st century. But it is in the opening poem on God where the poet shines with confidence and brilliance.

A Mano/By Hand (Ugly Duckling Press, £10), an essay by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, is an engrossing read in which she writes plainly but meaningfully about her experiences as a book artist, poet and translator living in Mexico, Puerto Rico and New York.

Her honest accounts of the fragility and daily obstacles faced by book artists and poets, as well as her inspiring tales of artistic friendships and poetic collaborations, make this essay a wonderful read.

There couldn’t be a better start to this gem of a book than Delgado’s choice of epigraphs — “There is no such thing as art and life, there’s only life” by Ulises Carrion and “Poetry is not a project” by Dorothea Lasky — which reveal her ethos and her aims in life.

She becomes a worker in a network of processes and exchanges centring on the independent creation of books and those she makes by hand “are not properly commodities but rather points of encounter that adapt and circulate among communities under another more noble, more fluid logic.” 

Delgado comes across as someone committed to her craft and her artistic principles, always willing to collaborate, experiment and give something back.

It is no surprise that Argentinean Natalia Casali, author of Unintended Tales (Exiled Writers Ink, £5) is also a film director. Her pamphlet includes two short stories: Katyuska the Soothsayer, a tale of a mystical healer and clairvoyant living in the Chaco province of Argentina; and The Shadow, about the menacing shadow of workaholic lawyer Joanna, which is cinematic in its ambition and full of gripping passages.

The book has been translated by Spanish poet and novelist Isabel del Rio, who has managed to faithfully capture Casali’s filmic sensibilities and precision as a storyteller.

An absorbing pamphlet.

 

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