This folio features the work of six women writers from El Salvador across three generations, writing from the period of the Salvadoran Civil War to the present. They reveal a continuity of themes that have resonated in the work of women writers in the Central American nation since the early twentieth century: the Nawat poet and social activist Prudencia Ayala, for instance, talked back to the critics who called her “la loca” (the crazy one) and claimed the term “sybil” for herself in a positive light. To be a sybil is to be a feminine prophetic voice who society deems mad in contemporary times, but whose poetic truth will reverberate beyond the immediacy of the present. Curated from the selections of three Salvadoran American translators, these poems unsettle and refuse the ascribed place of women in society––even when such women are taken as mad for doing so. In contemporary El Salvador as gender oppression persists across all facets of the social fabric, these poets carry on a feminist legacy of protest and desire for a different world in their transfigurative language.

Lourdes Ferrufino (b. 1992) and Ana María Rivas (b. 1995), the youngest writers in this folio, are both translated by Nestor Gomez. The folio title comes from Ferrufino’s poem “Celebration,” in which the speaker stares back at “the eye of the beast” to insist upon her indestructibility in spite of everything that has tried to kill her. This endurance stands as a monument after her poem “I Was Lucky,” which marks the performance of womanhood as a conscripted act to be undone. Rivas’s protest poem “A Woman” narrates the abjection and survival of a chorus of generations who have survived “the men, legitimate sons of God,” while her poem “Madre” ruminates on the monstrous inheritance of the maternal body. 

“The Devil Knows My Name” is a short story by Jacinta Escudos (b. 1961), one of El Salvador’s foremost contemporary writers of fiction. Translated by Yvette Siegert from a 2008 collection of the same title, the story stages scenes of intimacy between a feminine narrator and the devil who visits her over the course of years. In this dynamic, the allegorical tale engages with temptation, morality and power. The selected poems from Nueva Cosecha by Krisma Mancia (b. 1980) also deal with intimacy in contained space. In both poems, the prison apparatus tests love’s capacity under state control: whereas “XXIV” narrates love’s malleability under the material conditions of the conjugal visit, “Elegy for Oblivion'' explores the unincarcerated lover’s psyche at the threshold of forgetting.

Also translated by Alexandra Lytton Regalado, the poems by Lauri García Dueñas (b. 1980) from Beyond the Brown and Nubile Aureole reckon with the antagonisms of a patriarchal, anti-maternal world. “Retornados”––a word to describe “Salvadorans who return from the North after so many years”–– gives an account of the ambivalent return to one’s homeland, while “The chocolatey texture of wicker of those days” also returns to the memory of a past relationship to mend hope “after defeat.” The title poem, “Beyond the brown and nubile aureole,” takes on a prophetic voice that calls for a reckoning for future justice. 

We end this folio with Siegert’s translations of poems by Amada Libertad, the nom de guerre of Salvadoran civil war revolutionary Leyla Patricia Quintana Marxelly (1970-1991). In Libertad’s poems, words and radical acts are inseparable: poetry is a communiqué that helps bring a different world into being, but not without “a hand / to take its message to the people” or “two feet to coax them / toward an adnegated peace.” As scholar Juana M. Ramos writes, the people’s language of “indignation and suffering”––what Libertad calls “the speech of my people” in her poem “Dictionary”’––must be spoken through “a new discourse that transgresses the normativity of official discourse.” Libertad knew that the struggles of the pueblo did not just mean fighting in the present, but also stepping into the future as much as one could. Written during combat, her short poems are talismans that help push through a time of duress, with no interest in returning to how things once were. We end this folio with Libertad’s poems to bring her oracular voice into the present, so that her words “keep arising / in the sharpened will of us all.” 

Óscar Moisés Díaz and Maryam Ivette Parhizkar of Tierra Narrative, Summer 2024

A note on the cover image: artist Myra Barraza (San Salvador, b. 1966) has generously provided use of her work “El sueño de la razón” as the feature image for this folio, as well as her piece “Planta” as the accompanying image for Lourdes Ferrufino’s poems. These pieces are from República de la Muerte (2006-2009), an extended meditation on femicide in El Salvador. Barraza has described this work as having “overtones of a philosophical nature, representing the body as instinct and sexuality, and the mind as reason and doubt. The dialogue between the two from a fragmented body leaves us with a complex fluctuation of possibilities.” For more about this series, see the catalog for her 2010 exhibition República de la Muerte at the Spanish Cultural Center in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.