For me it’s an honor and a pleasure to collaborate with Campana, an editorial born from LART and that, like LART, is a pioneer in promoting and disseminating art and culture aimed at the latino world in the U.S., a world in which Spanish and English co-exist and are in dialogue in multiple ways and in multiple social spaces. The innovative thing about LART and its daughter, Campana, is its co-operative, anti-hierarchical and integral organizational structure, that includes on an equal footing both adult and children’s audiences, renowned writers and talented but less know authors, Spanish in all of its regional varieties and English, Asturian and all languages that in future are interested in being included in the flexible and open “latina/o” identity that all the institution’s members embrace.

The three books being launched today by the Campana publishing house are an excellent sample of this unity in diversity. The writing of these three women authors reveals different social, cultural and linguistic worlds as well as having come into being because of diverse historical and political circumstances. Nevertheless, the three writers coincide in a common ethical, aesthetic and political-gender purpose that, above and beyond their personal relations and their idiosyncratic styles, brings them together in a polyphonic collective. All three challenge different forms of the establishment and entrench their being in their own language (whether this be Cuban Spanish, Argentinean Spanish or Asturian) with the daring, tenacity and fearless exposure shown by those who, urged on by the need to survive, venture into unknown territory. These three writers are migrants in the literal sense in which many of us here are, but more importantly for their artistic work, they are also migrants (perhaps perpetual nomads) within their own language and culture.

Sonia Rivera-Valdés’ second book, that now appears in English under the title Stories of Little Women and Grown-Up Girls is, in certain aspects a prolongation of the already famous book The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda (Las Historias prohibidas de Marta Veneranda) but at the same time is also a demonstration of the creative vitality and capacity for renewal of the author.

As in The Forbidden Stories, there are veins of communication between the majority of the stories, through interconnected characters who reappear in several tales. The novelty of the book is its more intense procedure in the first part, resulting in four stories being presented with the overall title “Ana in four times" can be read as chapters, somewhat distanced over time, of a nouvelle inspired in childhood and the tragic death of the great Cuban American sculptor Ana Mendieta.

The voice that tells Ana’s story represents a new turn in narrative style compared to the previous book that is so markedly oral in style with frequent sparkles of humor. This new voice is a softly sophisticated instrument at the service of a child’s vision of the world, ingenuous and ingenious at the same time. The whole process the operation ironically called ‘Peter Pan’, that uprooted children from their homes in Havana to save them from the “Russian monster” and turn them temporarily or permanently into false orphans, is relived here with such deep sensitivity and lyricism that, I must confess without shame, they brought out my tears.

The rest of the book alternates between tears with an ironic smile and elegiac intonations with the delicious touch of a jester so familiar from Sonia’s previous book. We cry with the prisoner of “Like in jail” and we laugh satisfyingly (especially as women) with the exemplary lesson that the cello professor in “the eighth fold” gives to her accommodating lover.
The “shameful” or “forbidden” themes that characterize the first book are also including here. In spite of this similarity, the voice of the fictitious narrator of most of the stories, Martirio Fuentes, articulates the sometimes painful, sometimes ridiculous experiences of his female characters with a melancholic tone and reflexive depth completely absent in the discourse of the interlocutors in Marta Veneranda.

Sonia Rivera Valdés’ second book corroborates what my students and I already knew after enjoying and being shaken by The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda. Once more Sonia’s narrative achieves to a certain extent the ideal that Cortázar hoped to accomplish with A Manual for Manuel: to build a linguistic omnibus apt for all passengers and then, once with no discrimination everyone is on board (because everyone can understand what the book talks about), step on the gas and accelerate to maximum speed in order to talk about so many things that normally are not talked about...
Those who decide to get on the bus (something we highly recommend) should prepare themselves for the full acceleration of this woman driver and for a route that will force them to confront the darkest and least rational of their own fears and sense of shame. They will return to the most feared and disturbing secrets of their own childhood, the most buried taboos, the most painful and carefully guarded truths, the least communicable of their sexual fantasies, symbolic or real crimes within their couple relationship and with their closest family. They will cry, be frightened and laugh like rollercoaster riders in an amusement park. And after such a challenging journey they will feel liberated from a huge weight, just as Aristotle wanted the spectator to feel after witnessing a tragedy and the ritual of the worst crimes committed within the family.

With Paquita Suárez Coalla we will travel to the heart of oral history with a voice as close and primal as that which is inscribed on ancient monuments. In her brief texts an oral discourse as if made of stone or tree-trunks can be heard, a voice stripped of all adornment, like the nakedness of a newly born child or the unmade-up face of one of those wonderful Asturian rural women who unfold their oldest memories like jewels so that the pretty girl with the tape recorder can pick them up and they are not lost in the oblivion beyond memory. Paquita, like Sonia, challenges all forms of censorship and self-censorship. In the Asturian women’s testimonies as well as her own stories (in which powerful testimonial and autobiographical details are also included) themes considered unmentionable outside of confidential discourse are addressed with no holds barred. Nevertheless, I think that her greatest audacity is to ignore the tyrannical dictates of her old professors of literature and implicitly denounce the castrating role played by academics, intellectuals and creators that belong to the dominant elites who consider themselves to be the king pins of good taste and the guardians of “high” literature.

Paquita cultivates a very convincing mimesis of oral culture but doesn’t try to turn this characteristic of her writing into an aesthetic norm above and beyond all others. Like Sonia Rivera-Valdés, Paquita Suárez Coalla does not struggle against the anxiety of influence but for the right to create her texts without worrying about their inclusion in any consecrated literary genealogy. It could be said that these three writers favor unrestricted freedom of expression, but they also demonstrate total coherence with their libertarian ideals in not attempting to impose themselves on anyone.

I lent my copy of So I Won't Forget to a young friend from Granada who was visiting here while in the process of preparing her thesis on Argentinean poets from the period of the dirty war. I did so, thinking that this author, unknown to her, might interest her, and I was not wrong. Her quick, enthusiastic response by email the next day demonstrated to me how the most modest, particular and local focus can acquire universal grandeur when it is a product of authentic human and artistic commitment to the reality behind the text. I think it’s worth transcribing my young friend’s opinion here: “I was fascinated to read it. It was a brutal, tender and somewhat painful journey towards my grandmothers. The voices are very well achieved and I loved how they wove together at the end. I’d like to get a copy in Asturian, because I have two very dear friends from there who will enjoy it very much.” I will certainly make sure we get a copy to her in Asturian.

I lent my copy of Memory Tracks by Margarita Drago to the same friend precisely because she was studying poetry produced by women in the most sinister period of recent Argentinean history, and we’ve made a date to meet in the next few days to examine together the many different values of the book and to relate Margarita’s testimony to the diverse poetic creations developed as part of this collective trauma.

It has been pointed out on reiterated occasions that the time of silence of the dictatorship from 1976-83 was also a period in which allusive and allegorical strategies dominated in Argentinean literature. The interpretation of this phenomenon varies depending on the author. Some see this trait as a more or less direct consequence of the desire to avoid censorship. Others, like Piglia, tend to see it as a product of personal and artistic needs and a relatively independent historical and literary development. I’m personally inclined to think that there’s quite a lot more than mere coincidence intervening here, between the external imposition of terror and the literary practice of allegory and the tendency to develop metonymic and symbolic displacement. The causal connection is perhaps not the fear of punishment but the impossibility of naming experiences that go beyond the limit of what is emotionally tolerable.

After many years of putting to test her ability to remember and articulate the intolerable in a literary form, Margarita Drago has triumphed in an extraordinarily difficult endeavor. Her writing constantly makes evident her commitment to truth and her pact with the reader in being honest and sincere, elements that are particular to testimony as a textual genre that has given voice to victims of repression and terror. At the same time, Margarita has managed to combine the most atrocious truth with the lyricism and imaginary flight characteristic of poetic discourse. In her struggle for the freedom to express the least expressible about herself and many other women who shared her fate in prison, Margarita Drago has managed to overcome all kinds of barriers, including a distrust in her own creative capacities.

Free now of the internal ties produced by the trauma of prison and the inhibitions and fear derived from her years of academic formation within a rigid and pretentious environment, this brave woman invites us to read an honest and beautiful book, both ground-shaking and comforting, in which ideological firmness, solidarity and faith in a better future triumph over all forms of terror:
Like Sonia Rivera-Valdés and Paquita Suárez-Coalla, Margarita Drago questions in an implicit but very clear way, all of the discourses of power and denounces the damage produced by an older, less visible and more persistent system than transitory tyrannies: a system that accepts authoritarianism, intolerance and violence as a natural order, emanating from a paternal right not subject to being questioned.

LART and the Campana publishers, fortunately for us, represent the reversal of this abominable system. Both are spaces for dialogue and joint work in which creativity, flexibility and a spirit of cooperation flourish and are capable of moving mountains.