Intimate diaries Mauricio Ramírez Gómez
The practice of literature, especially that of poetry, demands from the author honesty and the express will of wanting to take the risks that this profession implies. Literature is a mirror, for the author and for the readers. He reveals to each one his wishes and his fears, and at the same time he conjures them up. It is not a job for pretending, but for brave people who do not accept that their existence rips out their entrails every day, and they fight to make this fight a true cry of freedom, heard for many miles around. That has been the commitment of Yorlady Ruiz López. She is a woman, who above all enjoys being one. She is an artist who has explored and experimented with art forms such as performance and who has never opted for silence in the face of what she considers disgraceful. Her way of being an artist leads her to commit herself to her works. Proof of this is his book DIARIOS INTIMOS, volume 30 of the Collection of Pereiran Writers.
When I first read this book, I found something different about the poetry written by women that I had read before. In a patriarchal environment, in which writing is still, to a certain extent, a transgressive act for a woman, those who have risked it have ended up in an intimate combat with themselves, in which attempts to overcome the taboo of considering the body of the other as a source of lasting pleasure. Sex is not revealed as a joy in life, but as a question, an absence, an ideal, a pain, an escape, a combat. The body of the other, or the other, conditions, traps, hurts, because it lives, enjoys and exists, despite who wants or loves it.
INTIMATE DIARIES is the book of a woman who wants to be free and who says so. That is why he makes fun of clichés, behind which hides a desire punished by fear of judgment or public derision. Sexual pleasure and eroticism are synonymous with enjoyment, of fullness. The body of the other is not idealized, but is lived, enjoyed. There is no concern for the rules of courtship or courtesy. A wish and an assent are enough. Perhaps because there is the awareness that there is nothing more authentic than the desire for pleasure, since to paraphrase Octavio Paz, he who knows pleasure no longer wants anything else.
However, this book cannot be understood as an ode to the instrumentalization of the body or of pleasure. The other exists, he must demonstrate it, he must know how to seduce, make himself worthy of the degree of “prey” of that Diana the Huntress who does not hunt men but goes in search of her freedom.
The language used by Yorlady in INTIMATE DIARIES is as dizzying as that of his previous books. However, those who have read it before will notice that the vertigo of this book is less caused by the enumerations, and more by the images. In this book, words and images violate decorum, they say what women are silent: If human beings are ephemeral, the pleasure that their bodies provide is also ephemeral. We are more than six billion desiring bodies on the entire planet earth. How can you not want to always play in that “roulette of bodies” that Yorlady evokes in one of his poems?
The title of DIARIOS INTIMOS given to this book could not be more precise, since it is, in effect, poems written as intimate confessions. It is not a spontaneous book, but the result of a concern for what the act of secretly confessing encloses in pages that suddenly explode in our faces, making us see what we did not see before: the drama of those who wrote them and are no longer there. . This kind of nudity reaffirms the conviction that no one writes for himself. Writing is a social act. And in that sense, perhaps there is no more subversive text than an intimate diary. In them, as the author summarizes it:
Each painting is a diary, it is not black because an ink bathes it in black, it is black because it is full and also bathed in ink. Every day I fill my life with life to extinguish the limit of emptiness, of death.
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