Mexican writer decries plight of women writers in Latin America
It was the eve of the 77
th birthday of Elena Poniatowska, the prolific Mexican woman of letters who writes fiction, journalism, essays and poetry with social and psychological awareness. So the audience of 250 attending her lecture May 18 at Rolfe Hall joined in to regale her with the Mexican birthday song "Las Mañanitas."
Poniatowska returned the gesture with a wide-ranging discussion about women writers of Latin America that was full of wit and literary allusion. But the lecture also carried a sobering message. Women writers, ignored and undervalued everywhere, have allied themselves with the poor and oppressed, particularly in Latin America, Poniatowska told her audience.
"All of us Latin American women writers come from poor countries, helpless," said Poniatowska, best known in the United States for her book on the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre.
The mass shooting of student demonstrators by military and armed men in the
Tlatelolco section of
Mexico City took place 10 days before the Summer Olympics was to begin there.
"Our poverty is not that of the indigent, the
clochard beneath the bridges of Paris, the
homeless of Los Angeles and now New York. No, the poverty in Latin American is that of indifference," she said.
Given in her native Spanish, the lecture, which concluded a spring
seminar on the contemporary Latin American narrative, was organized jointly by the Los Angeles branch of the Universidad de Guadalajara, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the UCLA Latin American Institute. The institute maintains ties of educational collaboration and exchange with the southwestern Mexican university.
Women writers have responded to this indifference of critics and to a pervasive insinuation that the roles of writer and woman are mutually incompatible in different ways. She recounted the suicides of accomplished writers and quoted their expressions of self-loathing as well as defiant self-affirmation.
To make her point, Poniatowska cited writings of the great 17th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Iñez de la Cruz and the writer's own late Mexican contemporary Rosario Castellanos, who, like Poniatowska, wrote poetry, fiction, essays and journalistic pieces.
"For Rosario Castellanos, the most complete of our writers, the conditions of life were not very different from those of Sor Juana—Sor Juana Iñez de la Cruz—who 300 years earlier had chosen the cloister in order to be able to practice her vocation," she said.
Sor Juana famously protested a world that took offense at her displays of talent and learning. She affirmed in one playful passage that "secrets of nature" were also to be found in the kitchen. Who could explain why eggs congeal in oil and break apart in syrup? "If Aristotle had cooked, so much more he would have written," Sor Juana concluded.
Among other trials, Castellanos had to contend with her parents' exclusive devotion to her brother, who died young. She was indignant at the treatment of indigenous Mayans on her family's own property in Chiapas.
"The theme of spinsterhood and of the shame of not catching a man recur over the course of all her work, as does that of a very hierarchical, stratified society in which Indians are always at the service of whites," Poniatowska said.
Place and gender equally make demands on the writing of Latin American women.
"We are our own landscapes," she said. "We write as we do because we're Latin American women."
In varying degrees these women have abandoned "confessional" literature, she said.
"For the Mexican woman writer, writing is a byproduct of her social situation. For the Chicana, to write means to overcome her social situation. For the Latin American woman, to write is to invent herself, to create a world for herself, to find meaning in life through characters, situations, ideas, fantasies that redeem it, because the basis of fiction is in many cases part daily reality."
