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Claribel Alegría (1924-2018) |
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Salvadoran-Nicaraguan poet, novelist, essayist, and human-rights activist, noted for her testimonio, accounts of the Sandinista movement and the experience of Salvadoran revolutionaries. Much of her life, Claribel Alegría spent outside El Salvador in self-imposed exile, in the U.S., Europe, and Mexico, and other Latin American countries, but in the 1980s she took up residence in Nicaragua. Alegría's most acclaimed books include Cenizas de Izalco (1966, Ashes of Izalco), Sobrevivo (1978), and Saudade (1999, Sorrow). Come, be my camera. Claribel Alegría was born Clara Isabel Alegría Vides in
Estelí, Nicaragua, but she grew up in Santa Ana, El Salvador,
where her family had moved when she was still an infant. Daniel
Alegría, her father, was a medical doctor and supporter of Augusto
César Sandino. After opposing the the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua in
1924 he was forced into exile. He died in exile. Alegría's mother, Ana María Vides, was a Salvadorean, whose family belonged to the coffee planter elite. Her father had fought with Benjamin Zelandón's army as a boy. Later Alegría described her grandparent's house in Santa Ana in Luisa en el país de la realidad (1987, Luisa in Realityland), an experimental novel consisting of short stories, poems and vignettes. Alegría attended José Ingenieros school, founded by her uncle,
Ricardo Vides. After winning a scholarship, she spent a summer term at
the Loyola University, New Orleans. At the age of 19, she moved to the
U.S., where she studied at the George Washington University, Washington
DC., receiving in 1948 her B.A. degree in philosophy and letters. In 1947 Alegría married the U.S.-born journalist Darwin J. ("Bud") Flakoll; they had three daughters and one son. Flakoll co-authored some of her novels and translated much of her work into English. He died in 1995. Alegría's Sorrow, a collection of love poems, was written for her deceased husband. Alegría began her literary career under the influence of the Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jimenez, with whom he studied in Washington, DC. Also Emily Dickinson inspired her work, especially the award-winning collection Sobrevivo (1978, I Survive). The poems for Alegría's first book, Anillo de silencio (1948, Ring of Silence), were selected by Jiménez. According to some sources, she took the pen name of Claribel Alegría by the suggestion of José Vasconcelos, a Mexican philosopher and writer; he wrote the prologue. In 1951, Alegría moved to Mexico and to Santiago de Chile in 1953, where she and her husband worked on a anthology of Latin American Writers. In 1956 she returned to the United States. A turning point in Alegría's career was the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Her writing, which earlier had been introspective and meditative, took a more politically aware and radical turn. "I consider my poetry love poems to my people," he said. ('Claribel Alegría 1924' by Nuala Finnegan, in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, edited by Verity Smith, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 38-39) As a figure of resistance, Alegría was known all over Central America. However, Alegría emphasized that she never wanted to subordinate her literary work to political activism. For the first forty years of her life, Alegría mostly published poetry. Her style, in blank verse, is urgent and straightforward; female identity, love, death, and suffering are recurring motifs, but her focus is the Central American reality, of which she writes with commitment and passion: "My etcetera, etcetera, etcetera / my wounded country, / my child, / my tears, / my obsession." ('Documentary,' in Woman of the River, p. 29) In the poem 'Eramos tres' (Flores de volcán, 1982) Alegría called herself a "cementerio apátrida" (a cemetary without a country) – in her work, the memories and ideals of the dead live on. Cenizas de
Izalco, which Alegría wrote with Flakoll, was published in Barcelona by Seix Barral, it was a finalist in the
Biblioteca Breve competition sponsored by the publisher. The modernist novel broke the traditional literary discourse and
signaled the end of social realism in Latin American fiction. Alegría and Flakoll use
a diary as a narrative vehicle. Through its first-person point of view Cenizas re-creates the 1932 "Matanza"
(massacre) of over 30,000 Salvadoran peasants by government troops at
the behest of the dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. When the mass killings took place Alegría was eight; she witnessed the aftermath
scenes of the uprising. The "Matanza" haunted her for decades. One
day Carlos Fuentes asked, why she didn't write a historical novel about
it. "I resisted the idea, objecting that I was a poet who had never
written so much as a short story." (Gunshots at the fiesta: Literature and Politics in Latin America by Maarten van Delden and Yvon Grenier, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009 p. 216) A politically committed work, Cenizas de
Izalco was
first condemned in El Salvador by authorities and
publicly burned. However, from 1977, it was accepted as a textbook in secondary schools. Carmen, a central narrator, returns from the United States to El Salvador to bury her mother Isabel. Carmen discovers that she had a brief affair in the 1930s with an American named Frank. From his diary she learns that he was an accidental witness to a massacre in the town of Izalko. "The novella is . . . a visit to Graham Greeneland in which the usual roles of observer and observed have been exchanged. . . . What makes the result decidedly un-Greene-like is that the observing, interpreting, organizing intelligence is local and often female rather than foreign and male." ('Murder in a Remote Neighborhood: Ashes of Izalco' by Jack Miles, in The Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1989) Alegría
accompanied her husband on diplomatic posting to
Argentina and Uruguay. Disillusioned by the U.S.-supported Bay of Pigs
invasion of Cuba in 1962, Flakoll eventually resigned from his
job and
returned to journalism. In the 1960s they lived in Paris and on the
island of Mallorca, first in Palma Nova and later in Deiá. Their
acquaintances included such prominent writers as Julio Cortázar, Carlos
Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Reflecting on her commitment to the revolutionary cause and present circumstances, she said in the poem 'My Paradise in Mallorca': "my paradise in Mallorca / is a closed room / that each night is peopled with phantoms." (Halting Steps: Collected and New Poems, Evanston, Ill.: Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2013, pp. 105-106) The island was a source for Alegría's novella Pueblo de Dios y de Mandinga (1985, Village of God and the Devil). She also met in Mallorca the English writer Robert Graves, who lived in Deiá like they did. Alegría and Flakoll translated Graves's poetry into Spanish. Later, they divided their time between Nigaragua and the United States, with occasional trips back to Europe. Alegría marked the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in 1980 as a turning point in her own political awareness. He was shot in the back by a member of a death squad in a hospital chapel. Alegría herself was in Paris. A friend, the writer Roberto Armijo, phoned her about the assassination. After delivering a poetic eulogy at the Sorbonne in Paris, in which she condemned the assassination, she went into a self-imposed exile. During the civil war, leaflets were distributed with the message, "Haga patria, mate un cura" (be a patriot, kill a priest). In her historical/testimonial books Alegría fused the personal
and the political, the collective and the internal. "In Latin America a
writer can't live in an ivory tower," she once said in an interview.
"Reality marks you. You can't shut yourself away." (Claribel
Alegría, Central American poet who wrote of personal and political
anguish. died at 93' by Harrison Smith, The Washington Post, February 1,
2018) After the fall of Anastasio Somoza and the rise of the
Sandinistas to power in 1979, Alegría traveled with Flakoll to
Nicaragua to collect
material for Nicaragua: la revolución sandinista: una crónica
polítika, 1855-1979 (1982). Album Familiar (1982) was inspired by the Sandinista revolution. The magical tale Pueblo de Dios y de Mandinga (1985) takes place in a small town in Mallorca. Protesting the participation of U.S.military units with Honduran troops, she joined a peace vigil on the border of El Salvador and Honduras. With Flakoll she published No me agarran viva (1983, They Won’t Take Me Alive). The book, based on interviews, tells of the life and death of a young Salvadorian guerrilla and mother, Eugenia, who was a member of the FMLN (Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation). Somoza: expediente cerrado, la historia de un ajusticiamento (1993, Death of Somoza) reveals the story of the assassination of the deposed Nicaraguan President Somoza in Asunción, Paraguay. On the recommendation of the novelist Julio Cortázar, Alegría and Flakoll had a contact person, who helped them to meet and interview the survivors of the commando team, that carried out the "bringing to justice" of Somoza. Alegría was one of Central America's major poetical voices.
She recorded the experience of revolutionaries, the contributions of
women involved in the struggle for a new society, and the fate of
political prisoners, who have been silenced. In her interest in
recovering women's history and bringing women to the foreground, she
shared much in common with postcolonial writers from Africa, India, and
the Caribbean. The American poet Carolyn Forché translated many of the poems in Sobrevivo in Flowers of the Volcano (1982), published by University of Pittsburgh Press. "Had she realized her dream to become a painter, she would have applied her pigments with a palette knife, with the decisive strokes of a poet not afraid to speak plainly. Like Chagall, whom she loves, her canvases would have reflected a private reality, unique in its perceptions." (Carolyn Forché in 'Preface' to Flores del Volcan, Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1982, p. xiii) "I think, as does García Márquez, that the most important years for a writer, or almost anyone, are the first eleven to thirteen years," Alegrïa said in an interview in 1991, "and I find myself coming back to those years and to what happened to me then. I use my past as a stepping stone; these are the things that have happened to me. Anyone who wants to know my life story should just go to my books." ('Closing the Circle: An Interview with Claribel Alegría' by Marcia Phillips McGowan, in Claribel Alegría and Central American Literature: Critical Essays, edited by Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Marcia Phillips McGowan, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1994, p. 235) Alegría's prizes include the Cuban-sponsored Casa de las Américas Prize in 1978 for Sobrevivo, the 2006 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. The University of Eastern Connecticut awarded her a Doctorate Honoris Causa in 1998. Besides her poetry and prose writings, Alegría translated works by Robert Graves, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Salman Rushdie. With Flakoll she translated and published On the Front Line (1990), an anthology of Salvadoran guerrilla poetry. Alegría made in 2002 a reading tour with the poet Ernesto Cardenal in the northeastern United States. In the 2006 presidential election she supported the economist Edmundo Jarquin of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS). Claribel Alegria died on January 25, 2018, at her home in Managua. She was 93. For furter reading: 'Some Central American Writers of Liberation', in Culture, Human Rights and Peace in Central America, edited by George F. McLean (1987); Líneas para un boceto de Claribel Alegría by José Coronel Utrecho (1989); Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions by John Beverly and Marc Zimmerman (1990); Spanish American Woman Writers, edited by Diane E. Marting (1990); 'Claribel Alegría' by Ramón Luis Acevedo, in Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century, edited by Angel Flores (1992) Claribel Alegría and Central American Literature: Critical Essays by Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Marcia Phillips McGowan (1994); 'Claribel Alegría 1924' by Nuala Finnegan, in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, edited by Verity Smith (1997); Writing Women In Central America: Gender & Fictionalization Of History by Laura Barbas-Rhoden (2003); 'Claribel Alegría and Ricardo Piglia: Experimental Writing and Political Commitment,' in Gunshots at the fiesta: Literature and Politics in Latin America by Maarten van Delden and Yvon Grenier (2009); Centroamérica: literatura revolucionaria y revoluciones literarias by Mirela Butnaru (2022) Selected works:
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