Rosario Castellanos. Woman who knows Latin … will fight for both genders
MEXICO CITY, March 7, 2021.- One year before her death, the great writer Rosario Castellanos, reconciled with man as a gender enemy. He did it at the end of his book Woman who knows Latin… 1973. An extraordinary case of intelligence and language management was that of this academic and ambassador, whose accurate feminist approaches were collected in the aforementioned book published among other editions by the Economic Culture Fund (FCE), in 2008. Despite the fact that they have 47 years after that writing, a book widely read by feminist groups, it is in recent times that their views on a conceptual radicalism of male domination that emerge today in the theses of patriarchy have been emphasized and endorsed. the Roman era was measured in that dimension focused on the ways of life, in the Roman law that still predominates in the civil codes, despite the subsequent reform of Napoleon. Undoubtedly, this text will be mentioned in the march on International Women’s Day, because Rosario, a PRI woman who was an ambassador with Luis Echeverría and an official of the National Indigenous Institute, shone in the letters, the academy and the columnism. In his position emphasized in the first essays of his book, he leaves no male puppet with a head. Her proposals, which also extend to the precarious role that women played in education, no longer reflect the new positions of women in those almost five decades, with a woman directing the SEP, an increase in female writers, teachers, journalists, scientists , etc., data that in some cases of the footnotes, are clarified by the FCE, to update the figures. Except for the fact that gender parity requires an equal number of female candidates for the state governments for this election.
ELEGANCE IN LANGUAGE AND ANALYTICAL DEPTH
Reading each essay, the majority dedicated to women writers, is an apprenticeship, not only of the commented works, but also in the style, the intention of the author, the clarity of an objective that is not understood from the start but opened by Castellanos, everything in an elegant, accurate and beautiful language. Besides being a writer and essayist, she was a poet. Five annotated autobiographies parade through the book, by Sor Juana, Virginia Wolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena Croce and Natalia Ginzburg. From there it goes on to the particular analysis of eighteen great writers, many from the time who have yielded fame, something that does not happen with Karen Bixen, Lillian Hellman, the Nobel laureate Doris Lesing, who shine in their analyzes. His criticism of Susan Sontang, whom he prefers, he says, as an essayist rather than a fiction writer, reminded me of the strange murder of the Chiapas medicine intern, in the novel Estuche de muerte, which has a similar theme, the Diddy type that murders someone and there is no concrete evidence to prove it, because the only person who was around was a blind person. Everything he addresses about these women is extraordinary, due to Castellanos’ own language and the highlighting of the talents of those writers, including only one Mexican, María Luisa Mendoza. Despite the great contribution of her criticism and analysis, one feels that the author extends too much in her concepts instead of the writers doing it themselves. Despite this, the finish is of good and elegant workmanship.
AT THE END, THE RECOGNITION OF MAN BY HER AND HER AUTHORS.
The first paragraph of Woman who knows Latin … is forceful: “Throughout history (history is the archive of the events carried out by man, and everything that remains outside of it belongs to the realm of conjecture, of fable, legend, lie) the woman has been, more than a phenomenon of nature, more than a component of society, more than a human creature, a myth ”. All the explanation that is being given on behalf of Castellanos and its authors, is changing little by little in the recognition that is made of the male contribution. They write, as was common before, about the activity of the man as a statement, including the woman herself in this nominative. At the end of the book after the insertion of several articles and essays, some that have other themes, one about the poet Claudel, Rosario is faced with a decision that makes her think: What to take on a hypothetical trip to a desert island ? In the anguish of choosing, he discards books and with a sense of humor he says that many like Proust, Mann and less Human Comedy, it would be impossible to carry them because of the weight, but finally he opts for Mexican literature. Sor Juana’s dream as the only woman, and the others, men and more men: Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, Gorostiza, Sabines, Rulfo, Bonifaz, Bañuelos, Pellicer and of course her own book Balún-Canán and the classics the Popol-Vu , Chilam-Balam and Xahil. The great Rosario Castellanos died on August 7, 1974 when she was ambassador to Israel. Her death was in Tel Aviv due to an absurd accident, when she was electrocuted while barefoot, she tried to place some tables that she had bought. His great intelligence did not warn him of this betrayal of fate. He was 49 years old.
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