essayists

"Las revoluciones vienen de arriba y se operan desde abajo. Iluminados por la luz de la superficie, los oprimidos del fondo ven la justicia y se lanzan a conquistarla, sin detenerse en los medios ni arredrarse con los resultados. Mientras los moderados y los teóricos se imaginan evoluciones geométricas o se enredan en menudencias y detalles de forma, la multitud simplifica las cuestiones, las baja de las alturas nebulosas y las confina en terreno práctico. Sigue el ejemplo de Alejandro: no desata el nudo, le corta de un sablazo."

"Quien escribe hoi i desea vivir mañana, debe pertenecer al día, a la hora, al momento en que maneja la pluma. Si un autor sale de su tiempo, ha de ser par'adivinar las cosas futuras, no para desenterrar ideas i palabras muertas."

"No arguyan con obstáculos insuperables: el hombre de talento sólido, como el César de buena raza, atraviesa el Rubicón."

"Para Manuel González Prada, esta emoción bravía y selecta, una de las que, con más entusiasmo, me ha aplaudido el gran maestro."

"Si las naciones d'Europa figuran como los grandes paquidermos del reino intelectual, no representemos en el Perú a los microbios de la literatura."

"Si hay placer en conquistar con la espada, no falta dulzura en iluminar con l'antorcha. Gloria por gloria, vale más dejar chispas de luz que regueros de sangre."

"La intelijencia no tiene por qué abdicar ante la fuerza; por el contrario, la voz del hombre razonable i culto debe ser un correctivo a la obra perniciosa de cerebros rudimentarios."

"En oposición a los políticos que nos cubrieron de vergüenza y oprobio se levantan los literatos que prometen lustre y nombradía. Después de los bárbaros que hirieron con la espada vienen los hombres cultos que desean civilizar con la pluma."

"la forma da el mérito; n'olvidemos que sólo por la forma, el carbono se llama unas veces carbón i otras veces diamante"

"nuestro poder estriba en la unión: todos los rayos del Sol, difundidos en la superficie de la Tierra, no bastan a inflamar un solo grano de pólvora, mientras unos cuantos haces de luz solar, reunidos en un espejo ustorio, prenden la mina que hace volar al monte de granito."

"Dada la inclinación general de los hombres al abuso del poder, todo gobierno es malo y toda autoridad quiere decir tiranía"

"El hombre no disfruta de los derechos que otros le conceden por la razón, sino de los que él mismo se conquista por la fuerza. Toda libertad nació bañada en sangre, y el advenimiento de la justicia debe compararse con un alumbramiento desgarrador y tempestuoso, no con una germinación tranquila y silenciosa. No aguardamos a que de arriba nos otorguen derechos ni libertades. Del que manda, nunca vino cosa buena ni gratuita, y las naciones que se adormecen confiadas en que la Autoridad se acerque a despertarlas con el don de la independencia son como los insensatos que en el desierto edificaran una ciudad, aguardando que un río viniese a cruzarla por el medio."

"Imitar equivale a moverse i fatigarse en el wagón de un ferrocarril: nos imajinamos realizar mucho i no hacemos más que seguir el impulso del motor."

"El hombre anda con pasos cortos en la infancia i en la vejez."

"Lo que poco cuesta, poco dura. Los libros que admiran i deleitan a la Humanidad, fueron pensados i escritos en largas horas de soledad i recojimiento, costaron a sus autores el hierro de la sangre i el fósforo del cerebro."

"La Ciencia tiene flores inmortales de donde pueden las abejas estraer miel de poesía."

"A true romantic, Zeyadah's literary style is characterized by fusing emotion with fantasy and romanticism with objectivity...More than anything else, she left behind a legacy of women liberators who believed that with knowledge and art, women can finally inhale the ions of emancipation."

"In an opening speech of one of her lectures, May Ziyadeh described poverty as 'illness, indolence and enslavement' and she continued as follows: "No society can enjoy good health when its members are ill... and no nation can enjoy independence if its citizens are enslaved. An attribute of the rich is a virtue but for the poor it is a flaw. ... Women can be a cause for poverty but can also be a cause for prosperity"...In her speech at one of her conferences, May Ziyadeh emphasized the role of women in a civilized society to stand in opposition to the traditional culture in the following statement: "We should free the woman, so that her children won't grow up to become slaves. And we should remove the veil of illusions from her eyes, so that by looking into them, her husband, brother and son will discover that there is a great meaning to life"...May Ziyadeh criticizes male-dominated society and addresses men that "if you are the material, the women are the soul, if you are the fiction, the women are the prose""

"I really like subtle ideas and communication with refined people who take you beyond daily chores and small sad events."

""We should free the woman, so that her children won't grow up to become slaves. And we should remove the veil of illusions from her eyes, so that by looking into them, her husband, brother and son will discover that there is a great meaning to life." These spellbinding words are the saying of a renowned feminist, who was among the first Arab literary figures to embellish feminine intellectuality."

"the gifted writer"

"To sum up, it can be said that not only May Ziyadeh's poetry but also her stories, plays and articles reflect the wrong attitudes of people in her society by revealing the actual history of her time. Her fictional works allow the reader to conceptualize the "woman question" in Arabic history and culture, and the poet's sufferings as a well-educated, westernized person who is trying to change the cultural norms and establish an egalitarian society without gender discrimination. Like, Þüküfe Nihal, the Turkish poetess, May Zeyadeh, the renowned poetess of Lebanese origin, because of her progressive ideas in women's rights and education and freedom, has been misunderstood by her contemporaries and nearest circle."

"It cannot be hard for you to understand how the war has destroyed in our glowing souls beliefs we thought eternal and how it has injured whatever hopes we had, the greatest and most splendid hopes. Tell me: if we despair of progress, we who have dedicated to it all our thoughts and spiritual energy, what can we hope for? And where can we search for a base on which to build the palaces of hope?"

"You ask how we are these days. What do you think is the condition of small nations? What could be the seal set upon them in present circumstances, but humiliation and more humiliation? I know very little about politics and I admit that I would be imposing if I were to tackle the history of nations and their fate. But the little I know from what I have studied tells me that sincerity between nations is scarce and that honesty in people's souls is a poetic illusion with which leaders seek to influence the minds and affections of others, in order to make them pay with their blood and their lives. Why? For economic gain. That is all! Particularly during a war, to someone with a critical eye, "freedom" seems a rhetorical wine to intoxicate the people's hearts. Freedom has beautiful and precious meaning, but everything sweet and dear is impossible. Had the people tasted real freedom even for a second, they would have been gods. Indeed divinity is absolute freedom."

"I love France and England not with a political love, because I don't know anything about politics, but an esthetic one: I love their literatures, poetry, and some individuals."

"Women’s education was rare, if non-existent...When she joined this literary circle, she was highly cultured, not just from what she learned at school but also from the books she read. That’s why educating women was an obsession for her, as she herself was very cultured. That was a first sign of her rebellion against ignorance and her demands to educate girls at an early age."

"For many years I have said, following the tradition of Nicolás Guillén, Fernando Ortiz and Alejo Carpentier, that whoever wants to understand Cuba cannot ignore its mestizo condition in which the Hispanic and African components cannot be divided because they have created a cosmovisión that is authentically original."

"The first person to name that movement "Magical Realism," to give a label to that, was Alejo Carpentier. He was living with the surrealists in France and the surrealists were inventing this wonderful new thing of printing together on a dissecting table, a sewing machine and an umbrella, and that was surrealism. And Alejo Carpentier realized that this was an intellectual process that had its roots, and he could see the umbrella and the sewing machine on this dissecting table in Latin America because it was part of our culture. Kafka would have been a realist if he would have lived in Mexico. So Alejo Carpentier realized that, and he abandoned the surrealists and searched in our roots, in our history, in our legends, in our folklore. He was the first one to label it. And it was wonderful because it was like giving permission to other writers to finally use their own voices. Because before that our writers were always trying to imitate Europeans, or North Americans, and were denying all our Indian background, our African influence, our own languages, and legends, and myths. This was just an open door for all that. I think that was the beginning of the Boom. That really gave a lot of people permission to do anything. But it's not a literary device, it's part of our life. The magic is still there."

"Alejo Carpentier was absolutely wonderful. The Kingdom of the Earth is an exquisite little novel-it's brilliant."

"Zoom and other outlets deform our images, making us lose our actual bodies, and with the possibility of contacting each other this way—we become holograms, or ghosts like Justine from Bioy Casares’s great novel, The Invention of Morel."

"Along with a funny and enchanting memoir of her Jewish family's migration to Mexico, Margo Glantz has given us in The Family Tree an exploration of what it means to belong to two worlds and how it can enrich our own identity if both of these worlds intertwine."

"It doesn't matter much whether you're a Jew or not, what matters is whether you're willing to fight against the herd instinct. (13)"

"Is the pleasure of remembering somehow debilitating? Maybe memory gets weakened by being handled and stretched so much. Memories return so often and we stay hooked onto some event or other... (37)"

"Perhaps what attracts me about my Jewish past and present is an awareness of its vividness, its colour and its grotesqueness, the same awareness that makes real Jews a minor race with a major sense of humour, with their ordinary cruelty, their unfortunate tenderness and their occasional shamelessness. (Prologue)"

"All of us, no matter whether noble or not, have our own family trees. (Prologue)"

"Living with someone probably means losing part of your own identity. Living with someone contaminates (36)"

"There is no such thing as a race without its own cooking. Or even without its daily bread. (43)"

"A dearth in published literature exists despite the multitude of noteworthy female authors who share the Latin American Jewish identity; writers like Angelina Muñiz, Clarice Lispector, and Margo Glantz. The long-time omission of these authors from anthologies likely reflects how they have historically been afforded less recognition and renown than their male counterparts."

"my brother-in-law says I don't seem Jewish, because Jews, like our first cousins the Arabs, hate images. So everything is mine and yet it isn't, and I look Jewish and I don't and that is why I am writing this- my family history, the story of my own family tree. (Prologue)"

"One of the first things that occurs in totalitarian regimes, as we saw with research, such as Hitler and Stalin et al., is the act of abhorring culture, of banning and burning books."

"In Y por mirarlo todo, nada veía, I tried to show how the meaningless proliferation of news and the almost endemic impossibility of ranking and practicing irony contaminate and disable us in our efforts to keep a healthy mental distance."

"Time is a space marked out and filled with the ceaseless chanting of prayers by which a devout Jew measures his life."

"The disappearance or decrease in prayer formulas of classical terms indicating the supernatural and the meaning of Christian revelation, first of all that of grace, has favored both the secularization of the rite and of Catholic mentality. Hence few today believe that the liturgical texts serve the priest to talk to God; they evoke a script of which the priest is the director or leading actor, the vogue word of "modern" liturgists."

"The U.S. -Mexico borderland saw mexicanas fighting for the revolution, often with the PLM, and also to win justice for tejanos. They included Sara Estela Ramírez, who lived in Laredo and became known to thousands of tejanos as a labor organizer, human rights activist and poet. She launched a revolutionary feminist newspaper, Aurora, in 1904. She died in 1910 at the age of 29 but her unique, visionary poetry rings true today."

"At the turn of the century, Sara Estela Ramírez, the Villarreal sisters, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, Jovita Idar and the staff members of La Voz de la Mujer and Pluma Roja were organic intellectuals of their times who revealed different discursive positionings of women within their societies, positionings informed by the master narratives of nationalism, religion and anarchism. Until now these women's work as publishers and their written contributions have remained virtually unrecognized. Either because of political affiliations or gender discrimination, their work has not been recognized in Mexico. In the United States, these factors, as well as linguistic biases, have relegated their work to oblivion. These women's stories and their publishing efforts, nonetheless, capture the realities of a people, the significance of whose daily existence transcends the limitations imposed by political and national borders."

"Tejana socialist labor leader and political activist Sara Estela Ramirez would not live to participate in El Primer Congreso Mexicanista held the following year. Ramirez's ideas, however, would resonate in the words of her compañeras. Composed of South Texas residents, this Congreso was the first civil rights assembly among Spanish-speaking people in the United States. With delegates representing community organizations and interests from both sides of the border, its platform addressed discrimination, land loss, and lynching. Women delegates, such as Jovita Idar, Soldedad Peña, and Hortensia Moncaya, spoke to the concerns of Tejanos and Mexicanos."

"The worker is the arm, the heart of the world."

"Mutualism needs the vigor of struggle and the firmness of conviction to advance in its unionizing effort; it needs to shake away the apathy of the masses, and enchain with links of abnegation the passions that rip apart its innermost being; it needs hearts that say: I am for you, as I want you to be for me; mutualism has need of us workers, the humble, the small gladiators of the idea, it needs for us to salvage from our egotisms something immense, something divine, that can make us a society ,that can make us nobly human. And the worker should not think of his humbleness, nr of his insignificance, he should not reason that he is unimportant and so remove himself discouraged from the social concert. What does it matter that he is but an atom, what does it matter? The atoms invisible for their smallness are the only elements of the universe."

"it is to him, untiring and tenacious struggler, that the future of humanity belongs. May you, beloved workers, integral part of human progress, yet celebrate, uncounted anniversaries, and with your example may you show societies how to love each other so that they may be mutualists and to unite so that they may be strong."

"Twenty-four years of noble struggle against so many morbid germs that would annihilate the collective effort, that terribly and vilely devote themselves to devouring mutualism"