Poetic Crossovers: The Paradoxical Spaces of Women’s Poetry

Abstract

The woman poet as a nomad, an exile, an outcast. Navigating in a fragile boat, exiled in a desolated island, sitting at the location of an imaginary South. The poetic voices of the works of Diana Bellessi, Luisa Futoransky, and María Negroni depict these virtual geographies; they invite the reader, as the opening quote makes evident, to envision a world of endless possibilities. As a series of reflections on place and location, this corpus of poetry reveals the creation of spatial margins and the “persistent presence of difference” in social spatialities (Blunt and Rose 16). Written both within and outside the boundaries of national traditions, the poetry collections analyzed here cross over different geographies, poetic styles, and aesthetic traditions to form poetic paradoxical spaces that, in tune with social and political developments in Argentina, entice reflection on memory and mourning, the intersections of local and global realities, and the postnational and postcolonial experiences by women writers. In Diana Bellessi’s Crucero ecuatorial [Ecuatorial Cruise] (1980), Tributo delmudo [The Tribute of the One Who Cannot Speak; trans. Le Guin] (1982), El jardín [The Garden] (1992), Sur [South] (1998), and Mate cocido [Mate Tea] (2002), images of nature, landscape, and travel are at the root of a proposed spatial decolonization of women’s and indigenous peoples’ social imaginaries. Luisa Futoransky’s Babel, Babel (1968), Partir, digo [To Leave, I Say] (1982), Prender de gajo [Transplant] (2006), Inclinaciones [Inclinations] (2006), and Seqüana barrosa [Muddy Sequana] (2007) employ nomadism as an aesthetic strategy to deterritorialize the politics of memory through a postmodern use of collage, humor, and artifice.

¿Por qué estás triste?—pregunta una mujer de ojos claros y me enseña algo. Es un globo terráqueo que puede deplegarse. Lo levanto y lo miro. Lo hago girar. Abro el mundo que empieza a transcurrir, a fluir sobre la gran pantalla de lo inexplicable. A deshacerse en mis manos como un canto inspirado, un archipiélago de silencios.

(María Negroni, El viaje de la noche 36)

[Why are you sad?” asks a clear-eye woman, pointing to something. It is a globe that unfurls. I pick it up and examine it. Set it spinning. I open the world that begins to take place, to flow over the large screen of the inexplicable. To come apart in my hands like an inspired song, an archipelago of silences.]¹ Unless otherwise noted, Cindy Schuster has been in charge of all translations.

María Negroni, “The Map of Time” (Night Journey, Twitty 37)