Author Archives: katherine

Madwomen

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I was excited to read from this week’s author considering I had heard much about her but never got around to reading her work. I once went to a Spanish school named after Gabriel Mistral with only had a vague idea of her celebrated legacy as a Chilean poet. To be honest, I’ve always been intimidated by poetry and usually find it the hardest of the literary genres to interpret. While I did struggle to grasp meaning from several of the poems collected in this anthology, I did enjoy the lyricism and artistry of most of them.

Many of the poems featured in this anthology are titled using the template “The ____”, with the blank usually being substituted by a woman characterized by her occupation, mood, or verb- hence the title of the anthology, Madwomen. These chapters and the title plainly suggest that these women are “mad”, which I truly doubt as a generalization. At least in my interpretation, many of these poems are written from the perspective of speakers facing miserable circumstances in not extremely ab-normal ways. One of my favourites is “The Ballerina”, which depicts a woman literally shaking off her woes through liberating dance. Another fascinating one is “The Storyteller”, from a woman who is burdened with revealing unsavoury truths to others. These are complex, tortured women- not “mad” women. I think the lecture makes an important note on this- that is, these women are confined by a patriarchal structure that exalts order.

Above all, the Nobel Prize recognizes high-calibre literature that has a formidable impact on global culture. Clearly, Gabriel Mistral has achieved that with her life’s work. I am not an expert on Mistral nor the Nobel’s criteria, but I can gather from just my short review of one of her works that Mistral has a special talent for lyrical and emotional poetry. Obviously, representation of one of the world’s most populous areas is tantamount for an award that claims to capture the best of global literature. However, Mistral stands out regardless of this regional lens. I believe in recognizing the context of art- its impact, origins, and significance- this step adds another enriching layer to reading Mistral’s work. Despite this, as someone not from Latin America I cannot speak to whether it encapsulates the whole region. Overall, Madwomen has universal appeal because of its honest depiction of the compromising aspects of life.

My question for the week: Do you think any of the speakers in this anthology are truly “mad”? Would you say they respond reasonably to their circumstances?

 

Cartucho

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Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho provides invaluable insight into both the Mexican Revolution and the cruelties of armed conflict in general. The format is quite unique, consisting of three parts broken down into sections based on different personalities the narrator comes across as a girl caught in the crossfire of deadly civil war.

The first part recounts short (approximately 1-4 page(s)-long) profiles of men involved in the Mexican Revolution who are known personally by the town of Parral, the novel’s setting and narrator’s hometown. In my notes, I was able to briefly describe each “character” with a singular verb: e.g. Cartucho sung, Elías screamed, El Kirilí loved, General Bustillos fought. It seems reductive to compact a complex person- it also somehow feels wrong to call these people “characters” based on how Cartucho might be based partly on reality and the author’s own experiences- but I think that is precisely what Campobello attempts to do by condensing whole histories in such limited chapters. Thus the reader is compelled to become more interested in the individuals whose lives are summarized in such an abbreviated and simplistic way; the chapters feel incomplete and the characters undeveloped. I think this adds a great deal of authenticity to the novel as it reflects the reality that sometimes people lost to war are not afforded the posthumous story they deserve. Their legacy might be reduced to legend or unjustly glorified with time.

The second part is graphic and tragic, expanding on the many executions that occurred in Parral during the Mexican Revolution. The third part relates most closely to Pancho Villa and his ideology villismo which played a notable role in the Revolution. I think the most striking aspect of Cartucho is its perspective: this is a recount of a war not from a soldier, general, or politician- but a little girl. This is reminiscent of last week’s reading, Mama Blanca’s Memoirs, which also retold history from a child’s perspective, albeit in a much more peaceful setting. The immediate violence and tragedy Cartucho‘s narrator experiences underpins the relentless cruelty of war and its many indirect casualties. As mentioned in the lecture, the lack of control associated with childhood can be aggravating, yet also liberating in its provision of a third-person perspective unaware of why this war is occurring in the first place. Detaching the reasoning behind a war shifts its focus exclusively on its effects: cruelty, misery, death. This is only what a child sees.

I am curious to see if my peers agree with my interpretation of the relative shortness of the chapters. So, my question this week is: why do you think Cartucho‘s chapters are so short? What effect does this brevity have on the reader?

Mama Blanca’s Memoirs

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I appreciate the significance of Mama Blanca’s Memoirs, as history is not often recollected from the perspective of women, much less pieced together from memories of girlhood. The written iteration of Blanca’s oral reflections on her childhood provides a uniquely personal look into 19th-century Latin America. I found the book quite dense and granular in its detail, which is somewhat to be expected of a book of this genre and subject. There are, however, interesting themes here, namely the inherence of privilege and classist attitudes exhibited by Blanca’s family.

The lecture compels us to think about why we should look backwards to an era that seems long forgone. Much of this book seems quite dated, such as its quaint obsession over freshly-produced milk and how it depicts explicitly colonial hierarchies. What is overall striking about Mama Blanca’s Memoirs is its applicability to the 21st century even in societies outside of Venezuela as classism, colonialism, and racism are obviously still prevalent today. History demonstrates how humans have changed- or, more importantly in this context- how little we have changed despite seemingly significant developments. The relentless teasing and fighting between Blanca’s sisters in Chapter 4, for example, vaguely resembles my experience with relatives in Canada more than a century later. Blanca’s obliviousness of the treatment of Piedra Azul’s servants parallels the cliché of today’s tone-deaf elite. There is hence enormous value in having a historical piece like a memoir to capture a snapshot of the dynamics of a certain time period for comparative reasons. I can then understand some justification behind the young girl’s decision to publish the memoir against Blanca’s wishes. However, this is a clear violation of privacy but also calls into question exactly why Blanca would wish to hide the contents of her memoirs in the first place.

Childhood nostalgia is the driving force of this novel. Blanca feels some longing for her life pre-Caracas, as farm life might be considered simpler and less abrasive than a bustling city. Cousin Juancho, a “cool” relative who seems to know everything, is somewhat idolized despite any outsider being able to interpret Juancho’s confidence as a conflation of annoying know-it-all behaviour. Even milk, “the pleasantest of all [treats]” (90), is portrayed as a comforting means of revisiting Blanca’s childhood. As modern readers, we may not harbour much admiration or nostalgia towards the traditional ways of the late 19th century- the opposite may be true of the initial readers of Mama Blanca’s Memoirs in the 1920s who perhaps lived through this era as children.

Blanca was able to condense her childhood into <150 pages. My question for the class is: if you were to write a memoir of your childhood, which memories or significant events would you include? What makes these memories significant? Would you wish for this memoir to be publicly published or would you, like Mama Blanca, be firmly against these personal recollections being shared with the world?

 

Week 1: Introduction

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Hi everyone! My name is Katherine and I’m a first-year student in International Economics. I chose this course to read more Latin American literature but also to enforce my reading habits- last semester, I barely read any non-academic literature at all! Taking this course is a great way to achieve both of these aims. As someone who enjoys reading recreationally, I find it difficult to figure out what to read. While I love going to the library, the rows upon rows of shelves can occasionally be overwhelming. Having a list of texts available for the course provides necessary direction while also allowing the flexibility of choosing between works: this is what drew me to SPAN312.

A little about me: I am originally from Edmonton, Alberta but I lived in Spain for a bit so I do speak Spanish. I’m passionate about politics, history, and reality tv. I have already read some of the works featured in this course and am excited to discuss them in class! I would love to hear some takeaways on the fascinating themes addressed by these texts from different perspectives.

At first, I was a bit confused as to how “hopscotch” would fit into this course. I now see from our discussions in class and the lecture video that hopscotch is a fitting metaphor for the “skips” or jumps between various authors, countries, contexts, and languages. I also think there is a worthwhile connection between the naiveté of childhood and the role of a reader of fiction. As a reader, you are positioning yourself in a world with which you are fundamentally unfamiliar- you don’t know who the characters are, the subtle social dynamics of your surroundings, nor the dynamic world in which you have limited agency. It’s difficult to fully understand the context of a novel set in a country you’ve never been, for example. You must thereby need to learn in order to situate yourself, just like how a child must recover from missing a step in a game of hopscotch.

The lecture video asks for perceptions of Latin American literature and the readings ahead. Unfortunately, I have only read from a limited number of Latin American authors- even if I did read plenty it would be, as pointed out in the lecture, reductive to cast broad assumptions on other Latin American texts. As such, I am trying to dispel any predisposed notions I might have about a text before I begin to read it. I can gather some general idea based on a novel’s blurb or other extraneous information I find, but sometimes these impressions bear no mark on the actual content of a text.

My question for this week is simple: how do you think these texts would differ if they were not translated? Would our class discussions differ if SPAN312 were not held in English? How does translation impact interpretations of literature?