Women Authors

"I would like my readers to levitate when they read the novel. I believe that there is too much violence and coarseness in the world, not just in books, but on television as well. People become degraded when they overuse these things. As I writer, I feel it is my challenge to come up with a phrase that can convey all the anguish a human being feels and to express it in a poetic way. Literature becomes simplistic when two out of every three words are vulgarisms. It requires no effort on the part of the creator or the reader."

"In life, reality and fantasy are blended, and I deliberately look for that connection in my work. It gives me pleasure to do so"

"Quite often I have used my poetry as a sword, and I have brandished it against my internal and external demons."

"Among my generation in Central America, women of the leisure class had the option of marrying or controlling their husband’s purse strings or of remaining chaste and virtuous, baking cakes for their nieces and nephews."

"I belong to this fantastic tribe, the Mayan, the Aztecs. I am proud of my Indian background. Chichen Itza in Mexico had one of the first observatories, how many years ago? Bud used to say, “Look, this is as good as the one we have in Mount Palomar.” The richness of this civilization is still not recognized, but I think it will be."

"Words are sensual. They seduce us and spark our imagination, but they also express intelligence and logic in constructing towers of ideals and culture."

"The poet celebrates humankind, the universe, and the creator of the universe. It is impossible for one to remain indifferent to the turbulence that our planet and its inhabitants suffer through: war, hunger, earthquakes, misery, racism, violence, xenophobia, deforestation, AIDS, and childhood affliction, among others. In the region from which I come, Central America, we love poetry, and at times we use it to denounce what is happening around us. There are many fine testimonial poems. The poet, especially where I’m from, cannot and should not remain in an ivory tower."

"I came before the boom. I consider them my friends, yes, but I am not part of the boom...Culturally speaking, I belong to that generation, the generation of Cortázar or Benedetti, or Vargas Llosa or Carlos Fuentes."

"In essence, all poets contribute to writing the great endless poem."

"poetry to me is something sacred. If you want to be a poet, it’s very difficult. You have to listen to that voice, follow that voice. Never put poetry to the service of anything. No! We are at the service of poetry, and you have to read a lot to feed off of other poets. You have to get fed by other poets, to write all the time, even if it’s one line a day. You have to be disciplined and humble."

"I am so grateful for poetry...Poetry sustains us."

"Before we are poets we are human beings, and we do have compromises as human beings. You get horrified at the injustices, at the violence, at all of the terrible things happening in all of the world. And that is reflected in your poetry, because it has touched you very deeply. But you are not putting your poetry in the service of politics."

"Like most great souls, Alicia didn’t take herself too seriously."

"it was in Buenos Aires, her native city, where Alicia was most at ease, most relaxed. I’ve had the privilege of wandering along the streets of that great city in her company, while Alicia pointed out the churches, cafés, and parks that occupy the pages of her books. There, the allusions that had previously been just verbal icons for me suddenly became sounds, smells, vital experiences. Of course every three or four blocks we had to stop for an espresso, that potent Argentine libation that seemed to fuel her unflagging energy and which she described in The Rainforest as “one of life’s great pleasures.” Alicia never distinguished between the minutia of everyday life – the aroma of coffee, a recipe for pastel de papas, the intimate language of eroticism and the erotic intimacy of language – and her constant preoccupation with the “big,” transcendental questions. Cecilia, for example, the protagonist of The Rainforest, compares the incessant comings and goings of ants with the human condition: “I don’t admire or torture [ants] anymore, as I did when I was a kid, but sometimes, since I have nothing else to do with my time, I get the urge. To pick up an ant and place it way back at the end of the line, ever so carefully. How would I feel if an enormous hand were to lift me up and deposit me at the end of the line at the bank or the post office?” That enormous hand belongs, of course, to the Deity in whom Alicia sometimes believed and sometimes didn’t. It’s the elusive figure whose presence, called for or not, can be felt behind all her existential speculation, linguistic games, frank humor, and anguished, hopeful characters. It’s the stentorian voice that addresses the protagonist of Call Me Magdalena, asking: “Would you like to see my enormous Countenance outlined in the sky?” and to which she candidly replies, “I’d be scared shitless, immense God.” Moments later, when, despite Magdalena’s fears, the image of the Divine Face appears before her, they engage in a pleasant dialogue about the destiny of the Jews in the Hereafter, concluding that, although it’s “not mandatory” for Jews to go to Heaven, if they choose to go they’ll find no anti-Semitism there. In fact, adds the Lord reassuringly, “We’ve all learned a little Yiddish.” This perfect confluence of irreverence and seriousness is what I believe best synthesizes the essence of Alicia Steimberg’s work and characterizes the irrepressible ebullience of the woman."

"The art and the reality is very difficult sometimes to reconcile, but also I don’t think that the poet have to be in an ivory tower just thinking beautiful thoughts, you know, when there are so much horrible in — ‘mid you, you know, outside you. And then I think you have to go and look at that and feel it and suffer with the others and make that suffering useful."

"It’s wonderful to read what we have now, fantastic, but don’t forget the classics. They have all the riches in the world, and they help us a lot."

"Times were both wonderful and terrible. You were fighting all the time, you were really thinking the country was going to have a fantastic revolution and that things were going to change for the poor. You were utopic, and so very deeply into that, that you didn’t have much time to look deeper into your psyche, or your culture."

"This year our classroom faces the street. The window’s very high, so from our desks we can’t manage to see the people passing by. You might say this is a kind of jail, and we can only guess at the faces of the free people walking around out there. But it’s not true. This isn’t my prison: it’s my freedom. In here, I’m not who I am, but who I want to be, or rather, I’m the most presentable part of myself. I’ve left at home the Jew, the sinner, the girl who replaces the missing fastener on her garter belt with a safety pin, the one who prepares her thermos of café con leche to face the icy mornings, the one who thinks about penises, vaginas, and coituses. To school I bring the nice, lively girl, the one who knows how to make the others split their sides laughing, the one who says she’s Catholic, although nobody believes her, the one who invents lies about her ancestors, but who, on the whole, is acceptable and even envied, because now that the clouds of her earliest years have parted, she understands everything and can even explain it. I’m sixteen years old, seventeen. I’m split in two pieces that are, nonetheless, irreconcilable, and for a long period of my life I’ll go on that way: split in two."

"they’ve forgotten me, just as you forget a fly that you’ve just shooed away a few seconds before."

"Steimberg was the first woman writer in Argentina to write with subversion and tenderness about the immigrant condition in Buenos Aires. Like Margo Glantz's Genealogías, Steimberg's is a fundamental autobiography in the Latin American canon."

"She would laugh until she choked, never noticing if anyone else shared her mirth."

"My mind is full of holes where knowledge ought to be."

"Alicia Steimberg...recovers the almost hidden magic of objects that appear and that are transformed in her stories of life as occurs in "Viennese Waltz" or "Segismundo's Better World.""

"I learned to distrust the smiles that abounded at those social events. As soon as Grandma returned home from the party and put on her housecoat, her true colors emerged. Her face reflected an existence full of suffering, yoked to the side of a silent husband and daughters who fought like wild beasts, feeding on their insatiable bitterness."

"She was a teacher to her marrow, as evinced by two recent publications of which she was very proud, Aprender a escribir (Learning to Write), Volumes I and II."

"I talked about what had happened in my country and the horrible assassination of Monsignor Romero. And soon after that, my cousin, Vides Casanova, then Minister of Defense, sent word that I should never come back to El Salvador, otherwise, he would not be responsible for what happened to me. That was a forced exile. I did not go back for 11 years."

"Hers was sometimes a blunt vision, as in “Documentary,” a poem about El Salvador that includes these lines: "Besides the coffee/They plant angels/In my country./A chorus of children/And women/With the small white coffin/Move politely aside/As the harvest passes by." “I wrote that poem a long time ago, and some people said it was a political poem,” she told Bill Moyers for his book “The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets” (1995). “I laughed. To me it was a love poem for my country, and I wanted everybody to come and see what I was seeing. I wanted them to see why it was such a desperate situation.”"

"She has been an indefatigable advocate for human rights throughout her life, and her work has made an impact around the world because she has unfailingly spoken up for justice and liberty . . . becoming a voice for the voiceless and the dispossessed."

"For me, Spanish is one of the greatest heritages the Spaniards gave us, I adore my Spanish language. It would not be honest if I were to start writing in Nahuatl. I was born with the Spanish language; I was fed by the Spanish language. I could not write in any other language, Spanish is my mother language—I think in Spanish. When I am mad, no matter where I am—I would express myself in Spanish. (laughter) I would really like to study Nahuatl and I haven’t, which is my fault; it’s a beautiful language, but I could not incorporate it; I would not write in Nahuatl. But I would like our children to learn from this other richness of ours and take advantage of it. We have always submerged the Indian."

"I hope we go back into our Indian roots in the next century, bring them to the surface, study them. There is only an elite that knows of the great richness and wisdom in the Popol Vuh (The Book of the Dawn of Life), we are going to get as much from this as we do from our Spanish heritage."

"I will tell you one anecdote that was shattering to me: Right after the peace agreements Bud and I went to El Salvador and I wanted to go to Guasapa—one of the guerilla strongholds. I met an old lady there who said to me with tears in her eyes, “So why all of these wars? I lost my husband, I lost two of my children, I lost my son-in-law, for what?” I cried with her. I didn’t know what to tell her. As you said, she was wounded. That’s why people don’t want to talk about it. But this refusal to speak about it is transitory. Sooner or later we have to face it. We have to reach inside ourselves, and inside our people, too. It’s a lot of work, but something great is going to come from it. Maybe I will not be alive to see it."

"I was a child, seven years old, when the 1932 massacre began. I carried it with me as a terrible wound. It wasn’t until years later that I decided to write Ashes of Izalcowith Bud in order to exercise myself from that time. Martinez won and he stayed in power until 1944 when our people ousted him. And then more dictators and more dictators until, we thought, This is it! We are going to be free. Look—we didn’t even win the revolution. Maybe I am stupid, because I am utopic, but I don’t think El Salvador will be the same even though our revolution didn’t win. The people aren’t going to be the same anymore. Something has happened. When I was writing Don’t Take Me Alive I interviewed many peasant women who told me they were never going to be as they were before. Now they know how to read and write, they know they are not inferior to men, they have done beautiful things right there with the guerrillas. It’s a step forward, and will help the other generations. I don’t think everything is lost. I don’t think El Salvador and Nicaragua are going to be what they were 20 years or 30 years ago."

"What do I hope for this next century? That the human race thinks deeply and puts aside hate, that we end all discrimination."

"many more people know more about El Quijote than about the Popol Vuh. Why? Because the Spaniards destroyed so much."

"I would love Central America to be one country. We are the same everywhere. We belong to this beautiful cosmic race and it is the cosmic race that is going to reign in this next century. It is the mixture of races that is so beautiful...We have to accept each other, if we mix fantastic. Why not? Not to make you marry someone that is not of your race; but if you want to, so what? I believe in the mixture. All of us have a gift to give. All of us."

"Perhaps Nancy Morejón’s most precious gift to both readers and listeners is her complex portrait of empowered black women."

"We Cuban artists have played a decisive role not only in the Cuban society of today but also in its greatest definition throughout our history. We Cuban artists have contributed to improving our values, to articulating our character, to stimulating the clearest cultural resistance, to understanding ourselves better, to creating a world where, as the poet José Martí demanded, the most important currency is the full dignity of man and woman. We have offered that contribution through our work and, in many cases, through our efforts to transform the country. Sometimes utopian, sometimes feasible, our art operates in the spirit of modernity, service and independence."

"My whole vision of the world, beyond the perspective of art, literature and specifically poetry, is affected by those three conditions, which cannot in any way be separated...I am not more of a black person than a woman; I am not more of a woman than a Cuban; I am not more of a black person than a Cuban. I am a brief combustion of those factors."

"In Cuba we must respect all those writers who have maintained their space and their dignity beyond the question of making a hit at book fairs or in the commercial world. I respect all of them even if all of them are not to my taste or don’t make me happy."

"In 1959, when the revolution triumphed, I was an adolescent. I had only lived 14 years in the other society. Today, with the passage of time, we see how different it was in 1959 to have the power of reasoning. I was a person whose sensibility, intelligence, and knowledge were in formation. Various members of my family-and I myself—were the objects of many racist demonstrations. In addition, I was a witness along with them to many others. Thus, the transformations that were starting to take place were obvious, unobjectionable. Notice that I use the word transformations but not changes. I do so because I think that when I’m speaking about transformations the reader must think of a process that moves forward in a progressive way; whereas if I speak about changes, one thinks of a magic leap toward some paradise. We have made extraordinary advances in this terrain. And yet it has been neither easy, nor by way of a magic wand. The social gains in this domain respond to a long-standing, well-defined awareness that supports the full dignity of all Cubans, whatever their class or ethnic origins or their sexual or religious preferences. Racial prejudices still exist, which these 40 years of efforts have not been able to eradicate completely. This is a reality. I can tell you that, in this sense, racial prejudice is defeated but not dead."

"My country will remain there where it is, washed by the Gulf Stream, the Caribbean Sea and by that desire to exist and remain and last with its windows open to the purest elements in human civilization without renouncing social justice. I would earnestly hope that there is a greater understanding between our cultures, in favor of civilization, against war, against terrorism, against every regressive atavism. Art is the magic that will take us by the hand along the most beautiful of paths."

"Morejón has been recognized as one of the most celebrated and revered writers and intellectuals of the Cuban revolutionary period and one of the most important Caribbean women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries...Her experiences and her fluency in the languages of the region have endowed her with a profound and rich voice that has helped shape our understanding of the Caribbean as a field of study."

"The purpose of any piece of writing is its existence before a reader’s eyes."

"one of its [society's] most sinister creatures: the practice of racial discrimination, a lever that always heightens racial prejudice. Both creatures make up racism."

"For me, writing a poem means enormous enjoyment that reaches its culmination when the poem appears in print."

"Very often people abroad see us talking about our free education as some sort of empty political slogan but in fact it is a reality and a priority."

"For my family it [the revolution] meant achieving a real, tangible position in the social and political life of Cuba, which Fidel’s bearded revolutionaries [los barbudos] made possible. Those transformations opened the doors of the university to me, something that would have been impossible, given the slender means of my parents."

"The working class districts of Havana shaped my outlook"

"The revolution opened doors for us and allowed an enormous social mobility. Many walls that blocked communication were demolished, and taboos were cast out."

"Bridgewater is "bearish on equities broadly, including the United States, including Europe,""