100 Refutations | Panama | Poetry | Spanish
June, 2018Lil Marie Herrera is an award-winning journalist and poet. Her poetry collections include Metaldevoz (2006); Niño, mango, guayacán (2006); Todo en regla (2009); Di versos, poemas traviesos (2011); Tenaz Pepita Nador (2011); Juegos Mentales (2015); and Chifladuras (cada loco con su verso) (2015). Her many awards include the Esther María Osses Ministry of Labor Poetry Prize (2006); the Amelia Denis Icaza Municipal Poetry Prize (2006); the León A. Soto Municipal Poetry Prize (2006, 2014); the Women’s Poetry Prize: Voices, Images, and Testimonies (2009); The Hersilia Ramos de Argote National Prize for Children’s Poetry (2011, 2014, 2015); and the Esther María Osses National Prize for Child and Youth Poetry (2015). For more information, see the Panamanian poetry blog Afinidades Electivas.
The poem featured here appears in Juegos Mentales (2015).
100 Refutations | Panama | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Demetrio Korsi (1899-1957) studied both law and medicine but was unable to complete his studies for health-related reasons. In 1916, some of his poems were included in the seminal anthology, Parnaso Panameño, which instigated his renewed dedication to poetry.
100 Refutations | Panama | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Gaspar Octavio Hernández (1893-1918) was born in Panama City and worked as a journalist while writing poetry until the age of twenty-five, when, according to Antologia de la Poesia Hispanoamericana, he died “painfully during a fit of Hemoptysis […] while editing the ‘Star of Panama.’” He was a dedicated editor, an ambitious poet, and a prolific writer, best known for “Canto a la Bandera,” “Melodías del Pasado,” “Cristo y la mujer de Sichar,” “La copa de amatista,” and “Iconografías.”
Panama | Short Fiction | Spanish
July, 2015In Melanie Taylor Herrera’s short story “Journey,” a girl is abandoned, reclaimed, and again reclaimed. Mothering occurs as a plurality, the matriarchs, like the view from the streetcar, automobile, bus, horse, hip, whisking past, blurring countryside and city, nostalgic past and modernist present, refocusing even as eyesight worsens. Who is abandoned in the making of a nation, and for whom is it truly a nation? Which traces now recognized? Which lines can be transversed, by whom, and for how long? Or is the sound that is made collectively or the images that are combined the only true celebrations? A voice from the depths of the sofa. A call and need for a different mothering in the midst of. A woman like a country ages exponentially even as “progression” occurs at its pace. At which point the intersection?
The reader is in each place asked to exist and accommodate, as in grow comfortable, though in each place the female body is faced with danger, betrayal, quieting. How does this act as a metaphor for the country, Panama, now, as it celebrates anniversaries of construction, canal, nation; for conflicted memories of invasion; for a woman’s relation to power; and for globalization? Who has been considered a citizen? Who now is so easily adapted? Before whom does the law bend or turn its back? What knowledge in the wrinkled eye lost?
And as for home in instability and the contrast of enclosure and open air. The females who advocate for open windows, walks outside. Threats to security. Who should have been saved? Is not getting saved? Is saving? Is it a postcard? A ghostly trace of tracks stepped over. There are numerous hauntings, possessions. To be a devil or a ghost because memory remains and is desired to be shared. In the very center of the city hidden away or very far in the countryside open to the air. What is aging us prematurely?
Melanie Taylor Herrera included this story in her book Camino a Mariato. Each story offers a route into an interior slice. In “Journey,” our protagonist has been taken into the core of a nation and there enclosed. Female territory and mythmaking and agency. The book and the story offer up new possibility.
- Christina Vega-Westhoff
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