... write as a woman, and because I am deeply conscious woman of the ways in which power can be abused ...
MR
Margaret Randall radically broke ties with the world. Arguably, born again and became one: Who would a little girl dressed in lace and ribbon, born into a traditional Jewish family in the middle class in New York, brought essentially to marry and raise children, end traveling the world aboard a motorcycle, getting involved in various Latin American rebellions of the seventies and eighties, love of Andean culture and proclaimed lesbian in midlife? Of course, it took many things and many years on that little girl with long braids, as revealed in his painful poem, "The second picture, the camera faces demand for answers, while his maternal grandmother" (...) around my Rear decked as for a party, / your fingers in a rare position, like making a secret sign "(This happens when a woman's heart is broken (Poems 1985-1995), translation, foreword and notes by Victor Rodríguez Núñez, bilingual edition, Poetry Hyperion, 1999, p. 55).
systematically raped from early childhood by her maternal grandfather, sheltered by the grandmother of Margaret, the poet stopped for the simple reason that he remembered nothing. He never knew what to call that which broke inside and forced to live picking up pieces restored as a masterpiece. Like any girl her married status, and with her new husband, who procrearía his first son, Gregory, launched their first motorcycle trip to North Africa and Europe, just graduated from high school in 1954. Would stop in Seville for a year, using as a maid, assimilating the language of which was to fall in love: Castilian. And while it proved the absolute freedom and loved, for some unspecified reason end up back in New York, the city where he was born on December 6, 1936 (although it would raise New Mexico), and where he met the father of Gregory, a son, says Margaret at all times, very desirable. During this trance awaken their political consciousness, 1961, to the extent of it to turn 360 degrees, with all of your baby for ten months and two books of poetry published for Mexico. There he discovered another vein: poetry, the ideal way to express their pains and longings. In Mexico, says Margaret, became a feminist and began using the voice of others. Also published his first book on feminism: Women. Documentary Anthology (Siglo XXI, 1970). Through poetry emerges finally what had happened in earliest childhood and was able to name it: incest. Margaret was reunited at last with Margaret: "When Margaret wrote his name / Margaret is a poem / readers should stop and consider such evidence (...)" ("First footnote, p. 23). Finally, the former girl raped rapist faces Grandpa, Grandma accomplice, the stunned parents he never knew: "In this poem hold your eyes and cry, / please, Mom, stop telling / the words I think we want to hear. Tell us from your own fear. / (...) Look, I now I gather my children grouped their heights / kill the saint to thirty years after his death / played his rotting flesh in the moonlight / I see the pillars fall. / ( ...) Pick up the pieces. "(" To kill the holy ", p. 59). Also face the dictators, especially his fellow countrymen who consider themselves heirs of God: "Under my skin / all deaths crowd / next to that one death: / somewhere in El Salvador, / May, 1975: / Roque , revolutionary, poet, friend, / torture and then murdered / by members of deserters from their own organization. / One of their abuse of unequal war, / impossible to erase. "(" Dead "In another time: reflections of the Grand Canyon Saddlebag, CONACULTA, FONCA, Translation Maria Vazquez, 2006).
in Mexico is related intimately with fellow poet Juan Bañuelos, Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal. With Sergio Mondragón founded in 1962, the bilingual magazine The plumed horn (the horn feathered), which reached and published 32 issues, in addition, more than twenty U.S. and Latin American poets. Procrearía also with him two daughters: Sarah (1963) and Ximena (1964), divorced shortly after the birth. From his editorial work began to have problems with power by the simple act of publishing Cuban poets, and her motherhood of two Mexican girls (Anne was by birth) did not soften the repressive attitude of the government of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz on the U.S., involved with all his soul in the student movement of 1968 and assuming a critical stance against the oppressors through its magazine, a fact that the force, first, to live in hiding (like so many Mexican participants in the movement), but shortly after birth Anne, her third daughter fruit of their union with the poet Robert Cohen, came illegally country that had not ever wanted to leave, bound for Havana, where he lived happily until 1980, unable to restore American citizenship through his marriage with Cohen that it would be nine races in 1986 after comprobársele it was "communist" for writing a poem Che Guevara. He also questioned subjects as absurd as painting nudes in an art class and working as a waitress in a gay bar. His concepts, rather than their experiences (as a means of expression, again, is the poetry) are reflected in three sociological essays published by the editorial Siglo XXI: The hippies, expression of a crisis; Women, The spirit of a people: the Vietnam Women, Women in the revolution, and a beautiful co-authored with chronic Cuban poet Angel Antonio Moreno, on a street artist wanted Matanzas, Che Carballo: Dreams and Realities of Guajiricantor (1979), as well as its material journalism, scattered in major Latin American journals. In the eighties
would move to Nicaragua to live from within the struggle of the Sandinista Front, which would result in the book We are all awake, detailing the very active participation of women against General Somoza terrible. Published in his native country under the title of Sandino 's Daughters, was destined to be his landmark book on the date received love letters from his readers: "Many believed that, despite the important contributions of the FSLN, its inability to deal with feminism (as well as racism and the widespread abuse of power) contributed to his defeat. The Sandinista leadership, mostly male, continues talking about his commitment to equality for women, but where are the actions that support the words? "Through Sandino's Daughters, a story open, exposes the lies about movement internationally circulated, manipulated from the United States: "Many Americans did not even know where Nicaragua was - would the author- or even what language was spoken there because of the ignorance that keeps the American people is an abysmal ignorance ... "To tell the author Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli:" Margaret Randall has the quality of these stunning birds are to be recorded in one eyes when walking on the sidewalks of Bombacho (...) A tuft of long white hair still damp at the edges, blue eyes full of melancholy and a voice that ranges from the wailing and singing ... "
The awakening of consciousness feminist, particularly during Nicaraguan experience, made the poet and journalist to notice the fact that, as a poet, had come to work with own pain, that was his, that was it. It was not, however, to abolish this learning more cultural than spiritual, but of honor, naming it, a poet. And it has to do with a masochistic glee, much less self-pitying lament, because the pain of a woman can be transformed into aesthetic enjoyment of others, like Margaret gives to his poetry: "... in women has been an enormous capacity to resist, but fuck you get up and follow ... "The pain of being a woman, once to aware, internalized thought, becomes a value in the possibility of mutual learning, in a lesson that needs to be shared, transmitted until it became legend: "Where is the mirror clean enough / to say about us?" ("Mirrors", p. 83). Once assimilated this lesson, channeling pain through art and protest against injustice, and Margaret Margaret rebuilt just as hoarse screams until she is Margaret, cried in the end his love for women. Mother of four, grandmother of ten grandchildren, had the luxury of starting a new life in Albuquerque, next to his partner, Barbara Byers painter who spends his work anthology, This happens when a woman's heart is broken. His delightful poem, "Our Anniversary", included in his latest poetry collection, Inside the other time: reflections of the Grand Canyon, illustrated, by the way, Barbara, raised by loving commitment between two women, an exchange of rings, in this case, acquires a sublime touch of subversion, "a moveable feast. First date, first touch, a night until morning / last eighteen years. The decision to be together all the time / that we have. Then we confess that we wanted rings. / And that's when my first dream was born: a map / to look for ourselves. "(P. 29).
This relentless track in his consciousness, in his memory and identity, made through therapy, but prefacing the emotional metaphors the poetry, made him see that it was necessary to land in this world if you really wanted to contribute to change, hence any hint of guilt, if any, was diluted in a fierce anti-imperialism and radical rejection of Zionism. This does not mean expressing an everlasting bliss for the landscape that currently surrounds it. His most recent book of poems, in fact, is a hymn to the landscape and nature of America that petrified the extent of leaving the notebook moves brought expressly to capture that environment millennium: "Every time I had to choose / between writing or sitting quietly / inhale this place, / let him into my pores, I was myself, / inviting place to go. Did you know then / you could access the memories later? / I did not even question. "(" The Notebook ", p. 103, 104)
Margaret thus was never idly by, in fact, and as Rodríguez Núñez says, it is likely that no other writer has worked so hard and involved in their own work and political activities. His poetry reflects the many facets of transformation and of their struggle and the richness of his thought drew on the most diverse schools. The lack of power in women, said in a decisive manner is not, as has been led to believe, a private phenomenon, because the personal and political are two sides of the same coin: "The system needs to keep women subordinate and well controlled, so paint the life of rebellion as a miserable life. But if a woman went wrong in a relationship and have to try again, have to see if she is less happy than one that says, "Well, I agree with what I have, I will not move the water and stay where I am ... "said in an interview with the website of The Bulletin.
Although his poetry was written in English, perhaps because the language of childhood, the pain, the renegade, Margaret is heavily influenced by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, César Vallejo, Roque Dalton, Violeta Parra and Carlos Maria Gutierrez although acknowledges the influence of Whitman, Hart Crane and also a lesbian poet Adrienne Rich. However, Rodriguez said Nunez, the true place of Margaret is with black writers, Indian and Hispanic as June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Sandra Cisneros, Michelle Cliff, Janice Gould, Sonia Sanchez, and Luci Tapahanso Gloria Anzaldua. José Vicente Anaya puts it, quite rightly, with other poets of his generation that transformed the home environment to a new poetry, as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Diane di Prima. One of his greatest affection is Frida Kahlo art, about whom he writes: "I always go back to the Butterflies amazed how your body broken / still in its glass case / under the canopy of your last bed. / (...) I also love people-women, / but there are times when people, including women / me tired. "Frida is exemplary about the way a woman can tame the pain, even more so, submit it. It is not necessary to have suffered physical pain remained prostrate for the Mexican painter, as a woman, to understand ... especially when, as Margaret has lived collected the pieces themselves. The pain makes women a being in perpetual construction, constantly mutating skin and, in extreme cases like those of Frida and Margaret's own, become masterpieces themselves: "For me, politics and life are the same thing "Franklin says Margaret Fernandez. But do not talk about close or partisan politics, but politics in the sense of trying to make life healthier, safer and more creative for everyone ... but to assume political office ... ever! "Currently working on his memoirs, which promises to be a monumental work.
Fatema Mernissi 
