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The Voice of Cristina Peri Rossi
If the reader is looking for a strong and singular voice in Latin American literature that has gone through time and is still active today, they will likely find Cristina Peri Rossi. Born in 1941 in Montevideo (Uruguay), Peri Rossi taught literature and began writing books in the 1960s. She received several prestigious awards in Uruguay and was an active member of the leftist coalition Frente Amplio (Broad Front) when she had to leave the country before the military coup of 1973. She settled in Spain in 1972 and was denied a passport during the dictatorship, but eventually obtained Spanish citizenship (she regained Uruguayan citizenship in 1985 at the end of the dictatorship). She currently resides in Barcelona, where she continues to publish books and write for newspapers. She was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 2021, the most prestigious literary award in Spanish-language literature.
With the help of Julio Cortázar, she emigrated in 1974 to Paris for some time where they shared a complicit friendship tinged with love. The exile of Cortázar from Argentina and that of Peri Rossi from Uruguay brought them together in the same creative, emotional, and cultural stimulus, which is reflected in a series of poems that Cortázar dedicated to her (“Five poems for Cris”, “Other five poems for Cris”, and “Five last poems for Cris”): “At times you have / the face of exile / the one that seeks a voice in your poems” (1984, p. 93). Peri Rossi published a book recalling their relationship (2014), forty years after arriving in Paris and thirty years after the death of Cortázar.
Her work, both her prose and poetry, reflects a woman’s quest for language, identity, the female body, and place, always questioning the symbolic order and power structures. Language is first in her attempt to recover the sensation of childhood discovery, “a wonderful dimension that we adults have lost” (1978, p. 141). In the short stories of The Children’s Rebellion (1988a), children symbolize resistance to the order established by adults: “The little child — I remind my brother — begins by inventing symbols, until the oppressors force him to accept a ready-made language” and “like every oppressed person, he had to accept the language of the victors” (p. 110, p. 111). The father represents the place of power in the traditional nuclear family governed by the patriarchal order, which is associated with a paternalistic authoritarian regime as interconnected structures (see Schmidt-Cruz 1998) that children destabilize through the subversion of language as a vehicle of oppression. However, Peri Rossi’s purpose in her poetry is not to create a new language but to reappropriate it, as shown in the poem “Condition of a Woman”: “Was eloquence going to be / an attribute of men? / I speak the language of the conquerors, / it is true, / although I say the opposite of what they say” (1994, p. 10-11).
In the poem “Against Identity”, the search for identity dates back to childhood: “The question that tormented me when I was six years old / ‘Why am I me and not anyone else?’ / remains unanswered / many years later” (2004, p. 22). The answer finds its way through the deconstruction of political, sexual, family, and gender stereotypes, the questioning of the language inherited from patriarchy leading to an interrogation of gender mandates: “A powerful grammatical law / forces us to pluralize in masculine / where the feminine gender predominates / but it is not the only absolute / Against this despotism / primary feeling of justice / justifies if I, when writing, / specify: male reader, / female reader” (1997, p. 12).
In continuity with the Rimbaldian adage “I is another”, Peri Rossi claims in Erotic Fantasies—referring to a lesbian couple in which one of them is dressed as a man—the right to “the fiction of being someone else, of choosing sex as one chooses the color of a piece of clothing” thus affirming “The triumph of art over nature, of imagination over reality” (1991b, p. 18). The traditional boundaries between masculine and feminine are blurred: “If you can distinguish bodies, you’ll see that we divide ourselves into men and women, a distinction that has no importance because we all die without exception and death is the most significant event in our lives” (1993b, p. 7). Therefore, her poetic aesthetics answers the question that the poetic self asks herself about her identity by turning towards the symbolic: “There are people who expect the word / of the poet to name them, / to record their identity. / They do not know that the poet does not speak of beings, / but of symbols” (1991a, p. 42).
Her first book of poems, Evohé (1971), was censored and prohibited. However, it became emblematic of a generation as it explores lesbian love while combining the profane and the sacred, as in the poem “Vía Crucis”: “When I enter / and you are dimly lit / like a church in darkness / You give me a candle to light / in the central nave” (p. 12). The search for identity is also carried out through a staging of lesbian eros (see Kaminsky 1993a) where, in both her narrative and poetry, the woman is the materialization of desire. A homoeroticism that takes the form, according to Ana Corbarán, of a “dialectic of desire and pleasure as a practice of subversive resistance against patriarchal tradition” (2008a, p. 3-4).
In her book of essays Erotic Fantasies, Peri Rossi reflects on on homosexuality as a transgression of the social norm, considering it “a search and discovery of a singular erotic object” adding that “the object of homosexual desire is so subjective, so erotic, that it transgresses the norm” (1991b, p. 52). Desire stems from fantasy and imagination, it is a search that needs to put aside the questioning of sexual identity considered as an obstacle to desire. “It seems a neurotic preoccupation” says a character in The Ship of Fools who wonders “why we waste our lives trying to convince others — and ourselves — that we have a sex, with its specific identity” (1988b, p. 131), when in reality “The being, says Peri Rossi, reveals itself more in what it wants to be than in what it is” (1991b, p. 18). It is the rejection of the gender identity assigned by society and the preference for an acquired identity through desire, thus making sexuality a free choice and not the imposition of biological sex (see Domínguez 2000).
Finally, exile infuses Peri Rossi’s work evoking a character’s question after being exiled from the moon in Ship of Fools: “Exile is hard to bear, isn’t it, my friend?” (1988b, p. 106). In the words of Margarita Saona, exile in the novel is like “a directionless journey of the marginalized, the undesirable, the individuals who do not conform to the general model of society” (Saona 1996, p. 49). It is not only a geographical and territorial uprooting but also an internal exile within the search for the place of origin without ever being able to find it, eternally adrift on a ship. Peri Rossi’s poetry exposes the open sore of her intimate exile. In State of Exile, the pain of the expatriated and amputated body is echoed: “I have a pain here, / on my homeland side”; “To depart / is always to split apart” (2008b, p. 3, p. 103). In the prologue, she links the pain of the exile with an identity amputated from her origin—“Exile calls into question, first and foremost, identity — inasmuch as one is disconnected from one’s origins” (xxiii)—and that generates an existential discomfort that haunts her and with which she has to learn to live: “For luggage / a suitcase full of papers / and anguish / the paper / to write the anguish / so I might live with it / companion friend” (p. 101). Her condition as her foreigner (“I am the foreigner, / the passing stranger”, p. 143) shapes her gaze of the world around her: “stranger a stranger what else the tree / if I just look differently” (p. 27). Exile prevents the establishment of a single identity, thus allowing the expression of a plurality of voices (“In art, reality acquires its most precious condition: ambiguity, plurality”, 1991b, p. 44), which Antonia Valera describes in these terms: “In Peri Rossi’s writing we are not talking about a single, fixed, immutable or permanent identity, but of several identities that come together in the same poetic subject.” (2018, p. 47).
The female boom in Latin American literature in the 80s took place after the Boom movement of the 60s and 70s which had been monopolized by men, with the same four always being mentioned (Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa) although there were already many women writers producing great literary works during those years. The Boom constituted a male nucleus whose implicit functioning is summarized by the Peruvian writer Iván Thays as follows: “the Boom was always a club where women were not admitted” elaborating an “absolutely masculine canon even though its authors did not necessarily despise female writers” (2012) (except for García Márquez who told María Pilar Donoso, according to her, that he “detested intellectual women”, 1987, p. 122). An example among many others of the phenomenon of invisibilization of women artists, here in literature, which in recent years has been uncovered, bringing to light the works of many Latin American women writers such as Blanca Varela, Elena Garro, Alejandra Pizarnik, Elena Poniatowska, Rosario Castellanos, Clarice Linspector, or Marvel Moreno.
Among them, Perri Rossi’s voice continues to be heard and is still in search.
References
Corbarán, Ana (2008a), “Cuestionando la tradición patriarcal: la narrativa breve de Cristina Peri Rossi”, Chasqui, 37 (2), Nov 2008, 3-14.
Cortázar, Julio (1984), Salvo el crepúsculo [But for the twilight], Madrid: Alfaguara.
Deredita, John F., (1978), “Desde la diáspora: con Cristina Peri Rossi”, Texto Crítico (Centro de Investigaciones Lingüístico-Literarias, Universidad Veracruzana, n° 9, january-april 1978, 131-142.
Domínguez, Carmen (2000), “Lesbianismo e identidad sexual en la obra poética de Cristina Peri Rossi”, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 6, (2), 145-156.
Kaminsky, Amy (1993a), “Cristina Peri Rossi and the Question of Lesbian Presence”, in Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 115-133.
Peri Rossi Cristina (1988a), La rebelión de los niños [The Rebellion of the Children], Barcelona: Seix Barral.
—(1988b) The Ship of fools, London, UK: W.H. Allen & Co., translated by Psiche Hugues. La nave de los locos, Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1984.
—(1991a) Babel bárbara [Barbarian Babel], Barcelona: Lumen.
—(1991b) Fantasías eróticas [Erotic Fantasies], Madrid: Temas de hoy,.
— (1993b) A forbidden passion, Pittsburgh, PA: Cleiss Press, translated by Mary Jan Treacy. Una pasión prohibida, Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1986.
—(1994) Otra vez Eros [Eros Again], Barcelona: Lumen.
—(1997) Inmovilidad de los barcos [Immobility of ships], Vitoria-Gasteiz: Bassarai.
—(2004) Estrategias del deseo [Strategies of desire], Barcelona: Lumen.
—(2008b) State of exile, San Francisco, CA: City Lights (Pocket poets series n° 58), translated by Marilyn Buck. Estado de exilio, Madrid: Visor Libros, 2003.
—(2014) Julio Cortázar y Cris [Julio Cortázar and Cris], Palencia : Cálamo, 2014.
—(2021) Poesía completa [The Complete poetry], Madrid: Visor Libros.
Saona, Margarita (1996), “La búsqueda de la identidad en La nave de los locos de Cristina Peri Rossi”, Romance Review, (6)1, 149-157.
Schmidt-Cruz, Cynthia (1998), “The Children’s Revolt against Structures of Repression in Cristina Peri Rossi’s La rebelión de los niños [The Rebellion of the Children]”, College Literature, Johns Hopkins University Press, 25(3), 145-162.
Thays, Iván, (2012), “Las mujeres del Boom”, Vano Oficio, 18/04/2012, El País, URL: https://blogs.elpais.com/vano-oficio/2012/04/las-mujeres-del-boom.html.
Valera, Antonio (2018), “El exilio en la poesía de Cristina Peri Rossi desde un enfoque de género”, El Genio Maligno, n° 22, March 2018, p. 42-48.
Interviews of Cristina Pedri Rossi in English:
“Cristina Peri Rossi by Carmen Boullosa”, Bomb, Winter 2009, 01/01/2009, URL: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2009/01/01/cristina-peri-rossi/.
“An Interview with Cristina Peri Rossi”, Nidia Hernández, Arrowsmith Press, vol. 18, 2022, URL: https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/interview-peri-rossi.
Diego Durazzo is finishing his Master’s degree in philosophy focusing on philosophy of science at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in French Language and Literature from the University Bordeaux Montaigne and serves as a translator for the APA Blog and its Spanish-language partner, Filosofía en la Red.
