New York – The impossible woman dares, she does not ask permission
The impossible woman knows that the price for freedom is high, but, still, she steps, barefoot
“I walk barefoot through the house I abandoned,” she says.
He shouts, and the echo shakes the broken lips of the men who fear him
The impossible woman confesses, but does not ask for forgiveness
The impossible woman recognizes herself, while the other sees her, “even if he cannot look at her.”
The impossible woman is possible in every caress
She is the one who prefers “the poem in the eyes of love” that keeps waiting
The impossible woman are the women who saw her pass and still do not know her; They are the ones who know her; They are the women who will know her
The impossible woman reveals herself and rebels in each verse because she has no other way to save herself.
The impossible woman is Mairym, she is her granddaughter Victoria
(Verses by Marielis Acevedo Irizarry in dialogue with some of “This way of flying in a balloon”)
With the endless desire of the impossible woman takes off in New York this coming Saturday “This way of flying in a balloon”, the 24th book by the Puerto Rican poet Mairym Cruz-Bernalwith a presentation at El Barrio’s Artspace in Manhattan.
The journey includes about five years of stories from the deepest part of the inner world of the editor, translator, columnist and essayist. The poet is not only a guide, she also does the homework. Several of the selected writings were created as part of the confessional poetry workshops offered by Cruz Bernalas revealed in an interview with El Diario.
“All that amalgam of poems were built during the pandemic and were written; He also had other poems from confessional workshops… which are narrative poems. They are not lyric poems; They are not poems that sing to the country in a way of birds and mountains; They are poems within the being that are built because something inside hurts a lot., in this case my story. And I wrote that, I worked on it,” she describes.
Why “This way of flying in a balloon”?
Under the publishing house Lúdika Proyecto, the 166-page collection of poems takes us to its most painful falls and voids in the hope that flight will rise. In that sense the title is the bet.
“It is not a title that is inside the book, because they are poems from deep within the being, very from one’s internal world, versus this title which is one of air. I liked it and fell in love with that contrast. It is not the intention to mislead the reader. However, I do intend that with the title we can fly a little; imagine the globe or the balloons as chiringas, because they are poems so hard and painful that I think I wrote them to finally leave them there to go on another balloon flight,” contrasts Cruz Bernal, former president of PEN-Puerto Rico.
In the second part titled “Hidden Maps”, the text dialogues or is complemented with epigraphs or verses from other essential poets.mainly from Latin America such as Rosario Castellanos, Mario Bennedetti, Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidrobo, to mention a few.
A manual for your granddaughter
For Cruz Bernal, “This way of flying in a balloon”, edited and diagrammed by the Colombian writer Carlos Castillo Quinterois also a kind of manual for her granddaughter on how to dare to be the woman she wants in a world still dominated by sexist codes and impositions, many camouflaged under false ideas of equality.
“I wrote this book for my granddaughter. So that when she grows up and maybe I’m gone, she can see what I experienced, and maybe that helps you get ahead a little. I wish I had had a book of suggestions from my great-grandmother or my grandmother,” highlights Cruz Bernal.
Although through the verses, the poet recognizes herself as an impossible woman, never “light,” she reaffirms her power again and again.
“The impossible woman is seen by others, although I am convinced that I am an impossible woman. I am a very complicated woman. Yesterday someone told me, ‘you have a lot of intensity and your feelings are very strong.’ I don’t know if they told me that in an aggressive tone or in a funny tone… I am not a ‘light’ woman… I have lived. “We don’t need a man to come solve any problem for us,” she insists.
“I defend the woman I decided to be before all men“, states the poet in one of the verses.
In this search towards female self-determination, for Cruz Bernal sexuality is the starting point and a way to resolve the conflict.
“Men always lose these 2,000 years of sexist tradition, even if it is at the entrance, in the middle or at the exit. And like the sensitive woman, she sees everything and she hears everything… That poem I start with (Manifesto del Belly) also has to do with sexuality, which is where machismo also comes from. It is an unsatisfied sexuality. I finish here with you, but there may be three or four there waiting for me at the door, because what is happening here does not satisfy me at all. Sexuality is for women… and men have to assume that; he has to surrender to her desire. And if this is not the case, the woman will be very dissatisfied,” says Cruz Bernal.
Through the book, the author also releases intimate family stories from their crucible.
The figure of his mother
The figure of the mother who led her to seek oxygen in poetry and then return to her arms It also excels in delivery.
“Me and my brothers come from a very broken home.. Mommy died already; my dad is alive. And my mom didn’t teach us routes to be happy. She did not have enough tools to handle the great pain that came inside her and she lived very sad; I don’t think my mother was happy at any time. I don’t remember her being happy. Maybe when her grandchildren were born she had some happiness. So we come from surviving mom and dad, and from surviving this nuclear war that was always inside. And poetry for me has always been my escape valve, my oxygen, through all these years, since 1995 when I published my first book,” says the writer who in 2016 published “Amanecida de dolors. Poems for my mother” (Puerto Rico: Lúdika / Isla Negra Editores 2016).
“This book itself deals with the figure of the mother, who is an important figure., which is in our veins. “You say I don’t want to be her, but start acting like her,” explains the interviewee about her most recent compilation.
For this reason, Cruz Bernal writes: “Every day I want to call my mother, ask her to join me for coffee, I can’t stand losing track of time.”
However, at the end of the day, his poetry is for everyone.
“I write without a face, because my face is everyone’s face,” he outlines in the book.
There is nothing that motivates her more than the possibility of any woman seeing herself reflected in what she writes.
“The truth is that When you sit down to write in the privacy of your own room, as Virginia Wolf said, you don’t think about anyone., you just pour out what you are feeling. When editing you clean up the text a little. And if someone reads you and identifies with that reading, and tells you so, you have achieved your goal. Octavio Paz said that the poem is a meeting place of the self with the self of the other and of the unconscious with the unconscious of the other,” he reflects.
“I write for that woman of the future who knows that we have to dare, and that maybe there is a price to pay that has to do with loneliness,” she points out.
Pain and the poem
“To what extent is pain necessary to be able to create art?” asks El Diario.
In the opinion of Cruz Bernal, who also chaired the Puertas Group: Artistic-literary movement at the end of the century, “art is a deep meditation on human pain”.
In that sense, for the writer, pain serves to take the poem towards its most transcendental manifestation.
“Look at ‘The Thinker’ by Rodin or the Gates of Hell, they are agonizing faces, they are faces that the thinker himself is there thinking, crushing his brain…For me the great expression of human art, of the most important art – look at ‘The Scream’ ‘ by Munch-, too, is pain. When we are easy, we are enjoying that happiness…I almost always write from pain; from the abandonments we experienced,” he analyzes.
The scope of confessional poetry
To make beauty out of that pain, Cruz Bernal uses confessional poetry popularized by poets such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowella genre that dates back to the 20th century and focuses on exposing the most intimate details of the poet’s life.
“This is my most confessional and raw book. It is a type of writing around ’59 and ’60 with three fundamental writers from the United States, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, the three suicides,” he explains.
“It is a type of writing of the subject in crisis, but writing must have an aesthetic balance and must create beauty, because a bad confessional poem is very bad. So this requires a lot of work, many hours,” she warns.
Cruz Bernal is convinced that overflowing without censorship is the only authentic way to make art.
“The writer who has censorship, especially his own censorship, should not write. You should go cook or sew or do something else, because the writer cannot have censorship because it shows… If you can’t feel free to write what you have to write, and you’re thinking, ‘my husband or my son can read this …’, that’s why don’t write. “I am quite severe about that,” she says.
“Is poetry then what saves?; Where is the hope?” we asked.
“Where is the hope?” she also asks herself. After looking towards a corner she answers: “In some crack within the poems, it has to be there.”
For Cruz Bernal, poetry saves her, although sometimes she asks for a break, and this is stated in the last verse of “This way of flying in a balloon”: “Poetry, leave me alone.”
Tomorrow’s Saturday event is sponsored by La Casa de la Herencia Cultural Puertorriqueña, in collaboration with the writers Myrna Nieves and Yarisa Colón Torres. Nieves will be the one who will present the book.
The book launch at the Black Box theater at El Barrio’s Artspace PS 109, will be from 6 pm to 8 pm The event is free. Barrio’s Artspace PS 109 is located at 215 East 99 Street, between Second and Third avenues in Manhattan. The New York City Council and its vice president Diana Ayala, as well as the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD) also collaborated to hold the event.
More about the poet
He studied a BA in Psychology at Loyola University, New Orleans (1983), and an MA in Creative Writing at Vermont College., Norwich University (1994). Other books published by Cruz Bernal are: On Her Face the Light of La Luna, (1997), I am two women in silence who look at you (1998), Army of Roses, an anthology of 57 living Puerto Rican poets (compiler, 2011) , Skybird Ours (2012), The Heretic Daughter (2019) and Little Monsters of the Underworld (2022). His work has been translated into several languages, including Macedonian, Arabic, English, German, Portuguese, Italian and French..
The interviewee was president of the International Meetings of Women Writers, a traveling movement between continents.. She is an honorary member of the Venezuelan Writers’ Circle, and maintains alliances with the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) and the Society of Writers of Chile (SECH). She is a Member of the Caribbean Poets Movement: United for Peace (Barranquilla, Colombia).
Cruz-Bernal also chaired the V International Meeting of Women Writers in Puerto Rico, an event held in 2003 where more than 300 writers signed a manifesto for peace, on May 3, 2003, when the United States Navy left the Vieques Island.
2024-04-05 23:13:57
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